Scampir

are there any tactics ttrpgs with distinct enemy factions that introduce their own bespoke secondary objectives?

reading through the age of sigmar 4e quick start stuff. faction terrain is so far the most interesting idea to me. Wargaming terrain theory is mostly the domain of judges and ttrpg terrain theory is the work of the game master, but there's somethign funny about in either of these games, players bringing their own terrain in addition to their list or build.

oh shit if you last-first you miss out on secondary objectives? fuuuuuuuuuuuck they're cooking. I think i gotta play this game.

As someone glancing from the outside looking in, it's so hard to articulate how "Image Color" is a thing in Japanese media to other anime watchers - American cartoons and the like obviously do assign characters color associations all the time, but it's not acknowledged as a discrete-yet-overarching concept in the same way, I think?

Ryuutama matter-of-factly treats assigning an "image color" as part of the character generation process, alongside age and gender; obviously there's nothing stopping you from doing this with a character in a western TTRPG with a similar fantasy milieu, but it's not something you're explicitly encouraged to do.

Princess Wing also tells you that your PC should have an image color, but that feels a bit more obvious to me; it's playing in a genre space I already associate with that concept.

I've also seen TRPGs that don't explicitly mention assigning image colors, though, so it's not universal by any means - after all, it's not universal in anime, either.

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

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.