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seedlinggames · 22 days

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i made a lot of eclipse art last night so i'll just start by uploading the first of them

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seedlinggames · 22 days

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if you can't see the eclipse totality in person, homemade is fine :)

tbh I'm kinda into how the test pull came out lol

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seedlinggames · 22 days

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Tumblr Tuesday: An Eclipse for The Ages

Well, wow. Who knew one thing moving in front of the other could elicit in us such childlike wonder? Turns out, pretty much everyone, actually. The untimely darkness! The crescent dapples! That bright corona! You've all enjoyed them immensely. Here's an eclipse collection for the annals.

@endcant

@quanajean:

@geopsych:

@ryucreates:

@xtahse:

@marlowe-art:

@camping-with-monsters:

@floweroflaurelin:

@thestrangeforest:

@animusrox:

@rosechata:

@bearlyfunctioning:

@rootlessly:

@flippantsmeagol:

@shagaf:

@marissasketch:

@aubstacle-of-course:

@brokenmusicboxwolfe:

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seedlinggames · 22 days

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I spent upwards of an hour punching holes in a sheet of paper to get this pic. this is the best idea I've ever had

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seedlinggames · 25 days

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no. Yourew not allowed to enjoy d&d. ifg you are out there and enojying a game of 5e my elite squad of pbta warriors will crash in yhtough yourt windows and get a mixed success on their roll, allowing them to flawlessly handcuff and arrest you but at the cost of describing to the GM one dream they will never achieve,

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seedlinggames · 25 days

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Weekend trawl through the archives, a handful of character sheets for Ironsworn classic, Starforged, and Sundered Isles.

Sheets like this are always a fun challenge, it's one thing to make an OSR character sheet that's got skulls all over it, or mutants or what have you, but making one that is useable and feels like an in world artifact is always a whole other level.

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seedlinggames · 25 days

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“Nobody’s going to want to sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours to get from New York City to LA.”

Me. I will sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours. I’ll sit on it for days. I’ll write and read and nap and eat and then do it all over again. I’ll stare out the windows and see America from ground level and not have to drive. I’ll see the Rockies and the deserts and cornfields and the Mississippi River and your house and yours and yours too. I’ll make up stories in my head about the small towns I see as we go along. I’ll see the states I’ve yet to see because driving or flying there is a fucking slog and expensive to boot. I’ll enjoy the ride as much as the destination. And then I’ll do it all over again to come the fuck home.

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seedlinggames · 2 months

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FYI GUYS:

Tumblr has added this option to their settings: “prevent third party sharing”

(Edit: left is desktop, right is mobile app)

Make sure to turn this on to prevent AI from scraping your blog (according to tumblr, anyway) 🩷

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seedlinggames · 2 months

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I've decided last minute to do Zine Month by which I mean I will have orders for a ttrpg zine up for a month and it will be printed on my printer at home and mailed to you in a letter sized envelope.

The PDF will remain free!

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seedlinggames · 3 months

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Hi

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seedlinggames · 3 months

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I've decided last minute to do Zine Month by which I mean I will have orders for a ttrpg zine up for a month and it will be printed on my printer at home and mailed to you in a letter sized envelope.

The PDF will remain free!

#seedlinggames #indie ttrpg #ttrpg #cairn rpg #zine month

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seedlinggames · 3 months

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What Do Ability Scores Represent?

Recently, Into The Odd and the players in my home game helped me realise something fundamental:

Ability scores represent how good you are at acting under pressure.

STR isn't strength, it's toughness;

DEX really means reflexes;

WIS is more accurately calm or willpower;

etc.

+++

It is convention in roleplaying games that your ability scores / attributes / six stats determine who your character is.

High DEX means your character is spry, capable of acrobatic flourish; a good Willpower generally means you can browbeat others / themselves / reality (if you are spellcaster) into doing what they want; etc.

There is pleasure in looking at a sheet and seeing: Oh! These are the things my character is good at.

But you do run into problems. Does my 18 DEX rogue know they are fleeter than the 17 DEX bard? What if my wizard thinks she is stronger than her 10 STR? What if I have a brilliant scheme but my barbarian only has 9 INT?

How well, in other words, does the map represent the territory?

+++

(Art by Vesha, who is an illustrator! source)

I've got three players in my home game:

Vesha plays the teenaged trader Khabar (and his buffalo friend / parent-figure, Paal);

Amanda plays the monkey warrior Boots-Ra, now going white-furred;

Aish plays Captain Phung.

Phung does not yet own a proper sea-going vessel. Perhaps he lost his previous ship? Perhaps he never had one. (He does have a magic five-person sampan, though!)

He is impulsive. He tends to make dodgy deals with hapless village-folk, pick up dangerous-looking objects, and flirt with dangerous-looking men.

+++

Mechanics-wise, here's how my interactions with Aish / Phung tend to go:

Me: Okay, make a DEX save to duck before the hunter stabs you. Aish: Damn, my DEX is only 6, guess we'll see ... Amanda: Oh, no, Phung!

In a previous session:

Me: Okay, I think I'll call for a WIL save, because the ghost in the goat skull is trying to possess you. Aish: Well, my WIL is 5, hopefully this works out ... Vesha: Oh shit, Phung!

Some sessions back:

Me: The automaton shoves you. Make a STR save? Otherwise you'll be on the ground at its mercy. Aish: Guys I have 6 STR, I may be in trouble here. Me: Wait wait wait. What are your stats again?

So it turns out that Aish had terrible rolls at chargen. STR 6 DEX 6 WIL 5. Just going by ability scores, Phung is an idiot weakling.

+++

Thing is, Phung isn't an idiot weakling.

I've got crafty players; they are pretty good and cooking up multi-part schemes. (Their go-to tactic is bamboozling rival factions to show up at the same place, then benefit from the fallout.)

Phung is generally the face for whatever racket they've got going: he's the most obvious leader (the party is generally "Captain Phung and crew"), and Aish plays him as a capable, charismatic go-getter.

Looking at the character sheet, is Aish playing Phung wrong?

Fuck that. A player cannot play their own character wrong. I reject this notion outright.

What's going on?

+++

Different rulesets try to bridge the gaps between player action, character ability, and abstract math in different ways: eliminating mental attributes; going totally skill-based; etc.

The ruleset that comes closest to "solving" this, for me, is Into The Odd.

Saves are the only kind of test player-characters make, in ITO and its derivatives. This is key.

The ruleset assumes competency on the part of characters; you only go to the dice if you need to figure out stuff that is out of your control.

How badly a straight-up fight goes; whether you can jump aside in time if you've accidentally sprung a trap; whether you can improvise a lie on the fly.

+++

Implicitly, and in practice:

The STR stat in ITO is more accurately toughness---ie: how well you can withstand a physically demanding situation you didn't prepare for.

Ditto DEX, which is an abstraction for how quickly your reflexes trigger.

Same with WIL, which is how well you stay calm under duress.

I can be sharp when I've got time and it is a subject I have experience in. But suddenly ask me to make a speech and I'm toast (low INT).

Some folks have no martial arts training but can hold their own if a brawl breaks out in a bar (high STR).

Captain Phung is a pretty cool operator when he's in control, but tends to seize up when things go off the rails (low WIL).

There's my answer to the conundrum of Captain Phung: he's a genuinely capable guy. He's just not necessarily great under stress. His reach exceeds his grasp, sometimes.

+++

Your ability score doesn't represent how capable you are. Your ability score represents how capable you can be, when forced, under duress or pressure.

In other words:

Ability scores are who your character is when they are not in control.

+++

I do feel slow on the uptake, for only grokking this now.

Chris McDowall probably has a post from the mid 2010s or something where he discusses this aspect design in detail, the clever genius bastard. It is probably internalised play-culture within the ITO-and-descendants community ...

Still!

Am glad to have a regular TTRPG group again, and I have them to thank for my epiphany!

(They are kickass. I ran them through Whirling Mummy a while back and it was a RIOT)

#I actually also did not get this

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seedlinggames · 3 months

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I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

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seedlinggames · 3 months

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This is like 50% of the Murky Bog pamphlet dungeon for Mork Borg, but you can find the rest here: https://seedling.itch.io/murky-bog

#I can reblog my own stuff right

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seedlinggames · 3 months

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#to consider buying

Another thing I feel like I say a lot: zine is a sort of meaningless term, interchangeable with chapbook and booklet and probably other words that all refer to the same basic format. I think for a lot of folks “zine” implies photocopied and chapbook means “really nice paper” and I am usually dismissive of these sorts of taxonomies. However! I have a bunch of publications (both real and, courtesy of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, fake), dedicated to short monographs on different historical subjects or artifacts. These are formal looking, are printed on fancy paperstock and just feel, well, academic in their presentation. They’re still essentially zines, but also somewhat different. Tyler Vance’s Void (2021) feels of a kind with those.

Void: Records from the Frontier 001 is a world building exercise consisting of six of Vance’s gorgeously strange, fossil-like paintings accompanied by brief vignettes. Taken together, the reader/viewer should begin to cobble together some facts — there is a Void, people go in, sometimes they don’t come out, sometimes they come out carrying things with them. I don’t want to pollute your potential experience with my notions, so I will mostly leave it at that, but I find it and its sequel volumes wonderfully meditative and evocative. (OK, a little more: Stalker, Annihilation and Gibson’s short story “Hinterlands” are all touchstone for my reactions to Void).

I think it is well known that I like these sorts of no-system world-building projects (A Thousand Thousand Islands, Rainy City, Lodestar to Karamouska), but I like that this goes one step farther and, aside of the artist’s statement at the front, it feels like an in-universe artifact, a catalog for some strange museum exhibit, an auction book, a secret black market log. Volume two has similar vibes and oh man, volume three, A Young Person’s Introduction to Erratics, takes things in a fantastic new direction (that is pretty clearly signposted by the title). It will pull you even further into this strange underground.

Grab all three from his store. You won’t be sorry!

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seedlinggames · 3 months

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Wither and Grow out now!

You wake. You wonder why you’re here and what the world is like.

You hope for things and think of the future.

You wither and grow.

Wither & Grow is a solo journaling game. You are a plant creature that has just gained sentience for reasons unknown. The game is played over 5 stages of your life. In each of these stages, parts of you will grow and wither. You will document these physical, mental, and emotional changes in your journal. Your story may end early if your growth stagnates or becomes uncontrollable.

In addition to the game rules, you need 4 six-sided dice, paper, and something to write with. The entire game can take an 1-2 hours, or more, depending on how much you decide to write in your journal entries.

The game is a 32-page pdf with lots of great hand-drawn illustrations.

It is formatted to be printed as a 4.25''x5.5'' booklet. Please share!

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seedlinggames · 3 months

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Milk Bar: my sci-fi RPG set in a post-Soviet Poland is now live on Kickstarter!

Hey folks!!

Milk Bar is a sci-fi tabletop roleplaying game set in an alternate-timeline, post-Soviet Poland. After the Soviets grew in power, their ultimate clash with Capital left your city in ruin. All you can do now is gather your fellow Communards, salvage whatever you can, and build your Milk Bar.

Based on RPGs like Cairn, Mausritter, and Mothership, and video games like Disco Elysium and Control, Milk Bar is a game about the post-collapse and rebuilding.

A 100-page book featuring:

Quick, simplified rules in the old school tradition

A toolkit for generating a retro-futuristic, alternate-timeline post-Soviet Communist Poland

Funnel Rules which have your group of upstart Communards find and take back a Milk Bar from the grasp of Capital. Start at level 0 and Cut Your Milk Teeth.

Unique progression system tied to basebuilding. Want to stitch up those wounds? You better build an Infirmary and find a Doctor

Abandoned Soviet Superstructures containing reality-bending Future Tech deep within

A Bestiary melding Polish and Slavic mythology with classic science fiction

Solo Rules. Become the Biggest Communism Builder of the year '24!

Gorgeous production values: high-quality, uncoated paper and an exposed, yellow thread binding. Full of graphic design work from Eryk Sawicki (me!) and art from SADGHOBLIN

Pierogi

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