Now at IPR: This Wretched House

You are the Tenant. Your new home is many things. Huge. Sprawling. Too much for you. A refuge. A prison.

In this solo, journalling roleplaying game of gothic horror, move into an eerie, dilapidated house that may well be the death of you. Resist the ghosts, fix the damage, shoulder the demands and burdens of the outside world, and wrestle with your own melancholy.

This Wretched House uses the Wretched & Alone system, so you'll need a six-sided die, a pack of cards, and an optional wooden block tower. This Wretched House includes instructions on how to use additional playing cards instead of the block tower.

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/This-Wretched-House-Print-PDF.html

I named my company "Masturbate" after an Ancient European word. It means "to bring pleasure to one's life"

Toby (they/them) enjoys a quiet life in their small town, putting to use their enthusiasm for nitpicking and obscure nature facts as an editor for the "Regional Geographic", an esoteric publication that Toby insists is well-regarded among its small readership. They have a bit of a nervous smoking habit, but it's only really a problem on the days following a particularly bloody night of poking around the neighborhood "demon-cursed" house... [I made Toby to play a TTRPG that's currently being Kickstarted, called Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, created by the folks over at @anim-ttrpgs !]

can I have a badass picture of a wolf howling at the moon please

I see your "Laios is trans" but that dude is THE most apathetically agender person on the planet. Laios does not have time for gender. Laios does not even HAVE a gender identity, he removed it to make room for more Monster Facts.

Remember, if you have fun while History posting you're a slack-jawed pseudointellectual. But if you approach it with any nuance at all, you're an elitist who does not actually care about the accessibility of knowledge.

As someone who has actually studied the English language there's a common phrase about English that kinda annoys me because while it makes for a funny haha line it's such a gross oversimplification that it actually ceases to be funny. It's the one that goes "The English language is just three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat" or something to that effect.

I'm not going to go into detail as to why that sentence is inaccurate, just take my word for it as a person with a master's in English. I suggest we withdraw this expression from usage and replace it with the much more accurate "The English language is a dirty little slut that loves it when other languages cum big loads in it"

me & my ex wife in divorce court trying to get the dog to choose which one of us he wants to go with

you came back wrong and i am racked with guilt because i cannot bear to see you like this and i should have let you rest. i loved you so much that i defied death itself but i do not think either of us are happy

My one friend group can't stop saying, "See you in hell!" in a cheerful voice instead of, "Talk to you later!" and my other friend group can't stop calling things "penis" instead of "cool" or "good", so I just unironically uttered the phrase, "Sounds penis, see you in hell," as I got off the phone.

Yeah Burning Wheel is a fantastic game but it's also, as I said, very complex beyond its core system! It has very gritty and detailed combat rules, as well as a "social combat" system called Duel of Wits. Heck, character creation itself is a minigame :D It's a game I've never been quite able to wrap my head around but it looks like it would be intensely rewarding if it ever clicked for me.

Hey do you know any ttrpgs that take place in high fantasy worlds but aren't combat centric?

I've got a sprawling fantasy world or several I want to keep using for games but I want to step away from the combat-centric dungeon crawls of your dnd's and pathfinders for a bit and experience more of what's going on in the RPG space.

Sorry if you're not the right person to ask, you just feel like someone who might have opinions on the topic.

I have a few I could recommend!

First of all, Burning Wheel. Burning Wheel is an interesting game because it's a fantasy RPG with a very simple core system (d6 dice pool) with a bunch of systems built on top of it to the point where it's actually amazingly complex. Now, the default setting of Burning Wheel is very Tolkienistic. It assumes a medieval level of technology and a human-centric world, with elves, dwarves, and orcs filling the non-human side. It's a fascinating system but also a lot. What it does best is support characters with firm beliefs and ideals living according to those beliefs and ideals, and it can support high intrigue just as well as combat. (There is a combat system but it is almost better suited to duels instead of skirmishes.)

Mythras and RuneQuest are d100 fantasy RPGs, the former being basically a version of the latter but without the Glorantha license. Now, they are very trad RPGs and as such combat remains the one part of their systems they are most opinionated about, but both make combat into a very gritty and lethal affair to the point where engaging in combat without thinking is very much discouraged. They also have extremely detailed and fine-grained magic systems, as well as systems that encourage characters growing organically. And the system of Passions that mechanically reward characters acting according to their beliefs and building connections to the world. Now, Glorantha is one of the coolest fantasy settings on the planet, but if you've already got a setting of your own Mythras might be the better of the two.

Hmmm. I'm actually drawing a blank here. Oh, there's Free from the Yoke, which is a game based on Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, but set in a medieval fantasy setting where an alliance of noble houses has staged a revolution and freed their people from foreign rule. The game has some implied setting to it, with there apparently being some Slavic influences to the setting, but looking at it I think it could fit into almost any high fantasy setting with minimal modification. However, the gameplay loop will center around each player controlling a noble house, with two different levels of fiction (house level and character level, as they each also control an individual member of their own house), so it shouldn't be treated as a generic game.

Title: Statuette (figure) - Lumpfish Artist: Erik Nielsen Date: ca. 1896-1897 Material: porcelain Source: Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest

The 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie is obviously not without its flaws: its production was not only hell for the actors but it was also, frankly, dangerous, and in retrospect it was definitely not the sort of film Nintendo wanted to attach their flagship franchise to. But much more so than the 2023 film the film understood that film and video games are two completely different mediums and that gameplay as it is shown in a video game is mostly a contrivance to grant players agency over the action. You can't make a film about an Italian man jumping on turtles and driving go-karts because jumping on turtles and driving go-karts are simply means of utilizing the language of video games towards telling the story. A video game movie that simply translates the act of gameplay (down to a progression of "levels") into film simply turns the player into a spectator: the interactivity lost the viewer is reduced to a passive recipient for what would undoubtedly be a fun set piece to play but does not serve any major narrative function,

The bank robber on the phone with the hostage negotiator: Please just send the SWAT team in to kill us all

Not asking that one blog because it's more of a idle wandering than actual ask, but what are currently the most popular setting-neutral games? Like the ones that I see invoked most often are Savage Worlds and FATE, with GURPS being the classic, but am I missing something?

Like absolutely neutral games, not families of related games like PbtA or hacks of Into the Odd or 5E for everything

I do think it's probably Fate but I think that's more to do with the fact that Evil Hat produces a steady stream of new Worlds of Adventure supplements which give people something to play around with. I think Genesys and Cypher also count and are pretty big. In fact, given the fact that Monte Cook's name carries a lot of weight, I might go as far as to say that it's probably Cypher at the moment. Like, obviously Genesys and Cypher both started as systems built for specific games, but they have since been made into generic toolkit systems. And yeah, Savage Worlds, absolutely.

There's also Lumen and Caltrop Core but they're more known within the indie side and I think those might be more on the side of "frameworks for building games" rather than "setting neutral games," but I will admit that I am not intimately familiar with them. Actually I should give them a more in-depth look, like I've read a bunch of games that use them but I should actually delve deeper into the bones of those games.

And yeah I think it's good to distinguish between actual setting neutral games (even though the systems themselves bring some assumptions but that's besides the point) which are like here are the rules to run it, some assembly required, and games that are frameworks for building your own games, as you outlined in your ask. :) Like, PbtA is not a setting neutral game, it's a framework for building games. Same with FitD and d20. (Although there are arguably some setting neutral applications of the d20 system, like True20, which would absolutely count for this question, but I think True20 is somewhat past its prime.)

This was a nice ask, it got me thinking of how there are lots of cool games :)

Hey do you know any ttrpgs that take place in high fantasy worlds but aren't combat centric?

I've got a sprawling fantasy world or several I want to keep using for games but I want to step away from the combat-centric dungeon crawls of your dnd's and pathfinders for a bit and experience more of what's going on in the RPG space.

Sorry if you're not the right person to ask, you just feel like someone who might have opinions on the topic.

I have a few I could recommend!

First of all, Burning Wheel. Burning Wheel is an interesting game because it's a fantasy RPG with a very simple core system (d6 dice pool) with a bunch of systems built on top of it to the point where it's actually amazingly complex. Now, the default setting of Burning Wheel is very Tolkienistic. It assumes a medieval level of technology and a human-centric world, with elves, dwarves, and orcs filling the non-human side. It's a fascinating system but also a lot. What it does best is support characters with firm beliefs and ideals living according to those beliefs and ideals, and it can support high intrigue just as well as combat. (There is a combat system but it is almost better suited to duels instead of skirmishes.)

Mythras and RuneQuest are d100 fantasy RPGs, the former being basically a version of the latter but without the Glorantha license. Now, they are very trad RPGs and as such combat remains the one part of their systems they are most opinionated about, but both make combat into a very gritty and lethal affair to the point where engaging in combat without thinking is very much discouraged. They also have extremely detailed and fine-grained magic systems, as well as systems that encourage characters growing organically. And the system of Passions that mechanically reward characters acting according to their beliefs and building connections to the world. Now, Glorantha is one of the coolest fantasy settings on the planet, but if you've already got a setting of your own Mythras might be the better of the two.

Hmmm. I'm actually drawing a blank here. Oh, there's Free from the Yoke, which is a game based on Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, but set in a medieval fantasy setting where an alliance of noble houses has staged a revolution and freed their people from foreign rule. The game has some implied setting to it, with there apparently being some Slavic influences to the setting, but looking at it I think it could fit into almost any high fantasy setting with minimal modification. However, the gameplay loop will center around each player controlling a noble house, with two different levels of fiction (house level and character level, as they each also control an individual member of their own house), so it shouldn't be treated as a generic game.

New Release: Godslingers!

I've just released Godslingers! It's game for telling the stories of cosmic cowboys who have the power of dead gods locked and loaded in their weapons. The weapons will one day consume them entirely, but for now each of these interstellar desperados can't let go.

Comes with rules for inventing the Old Dead Gods in a storytelling phase, mechanics that support dramatic character arcs and tense showdowns, as well as an introductory adventure and lots of stuff on running the game.

You can also grab Godslingers along with Old Gods & Young Guns and Thirty Foes OR Once again, we are defeated in a bundle for a tenner discount for the rest of the month. They're three stand alone books that share a wider world.