Scampir

Be the Choster you wanna read

  • He/Him + They/Them

One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.

Cohost Cultural Institution: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots
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posts from @Scampir tagged #perilous wilds

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Siberys
@Siberys

Like I haven't spent the better part of two years writing a game that was very carefully engineered around the idea you can make a perfectly satisfying tactical experience out of a web of boxes, connection lines, and tags, and given the first pair of playtests have wrapped up (due to independent, overlapping scheduling issues) with the general consensus of most of that component of design working, it is very weird that I keep coming back to really really wanting to do this. Which, given I now have a couple month break where I need to think about literally any other game, might take a crack at it again, despite making big maps being genuinely the most fatiguing part of any game design for me. But at least if I throw together everything at the start, that just means a lot of lead-up prep, rather than being trapped in a never-ending treadmill of making combat encounters

All of this to contextualize that right now, my brain says I should see how deep into the weeds I can get into making a Resident Evil mansion, but as a spaceship, and then run an Aliens long-shot in it, because I am nothing if not predictable and with a new movie in a month I can guarantee that I'll have the vibe juices for that kind of thing, pretty much no matter where on the sliding scale of quality it lands


Scampir
@Scampir

There's something about the work of making a dungeon where it snaps into place where I now understand why those OSR games are trying to be cross-compatible between systems and the many modules that were made like, what, 40 years ago? The method of making dungeons where you draw rooms and fill them can be really challenging and hard to get into. A lot of the advice thrown around is to experiment, but that's not what people want. They just want to play the game.

There are procedural dungeons that you can create at the click of a button online, and also dungeon crawl procedures or mechanics that eschew mapping. The dungeon rules for Perilous Wilds, Rhapsody of Blood, or the Delves from Heart: The City Beneath provide tools to structure dungeons in a form that doesn't require this prep (to varying degrees of success). This lets you play the game, but those procedures incur different affects (emotional responses, or vibes) than the map-exploration dungeon crawl and one another.

I've personally been adapting the Plumb the Depths chapter from Perilous Wilds with Icon 1.5 to build dungeons around Themes, where there are 1-2 overall themes to an Arkenruin (dungeon) that are broken up into expressions of that themes in distinct chambers. It makes for pretty simple flow-chart dungeons, but I have not put in the time or energy to build one of these dungeons that really gets down to the brass tacks.


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