TTRPG enthusiast from Germany, rolling dice since 1988. As an eternally online player and GM I create games for easy VTT use in various genres.
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Open Games
Open Games
With everything going on I press pause on my SWADE work to create a new Open License game. I have released some in the past and I think now is the perfect time to do so again. For anyone interested there is a great starting point at https://fari.games/ . There will also be a Jam hosted at itch for open games I plan to participate in.https://itch.io/jam/open-gaming-jam
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More Posts from Chaosmeistergames
OOPS, went quiet
i didn't abandon my Tumblr! Just holidays, family life, and keeping my nose on the grindstone has kept me quiet. So have an update!
Echoed Invocations is a "supplemental zine for Sigil & Shadow". Currently wrapping up Issue: 0, which is just a quick rules reference with clarifications/errata. I like to think of it as a GM screen, except it's a booklet you can print out and shove in your book.
I'm also already beginning to write articles for Issue 1, which will be a hodge-podge of optional mechanics. Hope to start dropping these in the new year!
TRICUBE TALES
I'm going to start moving (and updating) reviews from my website, and today I wanted to start with a rules-lite system that packs a surprising amount of punch: Tricube Tales by Richard Woolcock of Zadmar’s Games. There’s a lot I want to say about it, which is crazy because it’s also pretty lite and simple. Also, the damn game is free (full thing in the DTRPG preview) so you can easily check it for yourself.
I’ll keep this brief: Tricube Tales is a minimalist, lite RPG using a mechanic where you roll 1 to 3 six-sided dice, and if any of them hit the target number you succeed. It uses fluctuating difficulty (a base scale of 4, 5, and 6) and Players make all the rolls. This makes it a great system for solo gaming and asynchronous play-by-chat games over Discord.
Character creation is very straight forward, appearing almost too simple but there is weight for it. Here’s what a playable character looks like at a glance:
Sam Strongblade, a Brawny Dwarf Soldier Perks: Dwarf Stamina Quirks: Wooden Peg-Leg Karma: 3 / Resolve: 3
That’s it. You can glance at that, have an idea of what the character does, and maybe dismiss the fact that there’s no stats (Karma and Resolve are point pools, which I’ll explain in a bit.)
That first statement is your archetype, which includes a trait (Agile, Brawny or Crafty) and a concept. Your archetype will help determine if you’re rolling two or three dice (or 1 if it has nothing in common with the action being performed). Your Perks establish special qualities, powers, abilities or unique equipment. Often you can spend a Karma point to use a perk significantly in an action (such as lowering the difficulty). Quirks, likewise, can hinder the character. A player can actively choose to work their Quirk into the narrative, taking a penalty but in doing so restores 1 Karma.
So, if you haven’t guessed yet, Karma is the luck/fortune/power pool that lets the players do cool things. Resolve is the stress/health/endurance pool for every character. When a character hits 0 resolve, they’re taken out of the conflict, and the victor (either PC or GM) gets to narrate what happens. When this happens to player characters, they return next scene, their Resolve restored but now with an Affliction — usually a temporary quirk, but sometimes these can become more serious. Character death isn’t off the table as long as GM and Players agree to the arbitration.
Running things on the GM side is pretty easy-peasy. Most challenges are static pass-or-fail; more elaborate obstacles or tasks are assigned a pool of Effort tokens (where each successful die roll against it removes a token). Combat encounters can track multiple foes separately or you can just say “a horde of goblins” and track a single pool of effort tokens.
There’s a lot more going on — the game covers some quick ground on genre rules, like handling cybernetics, fear, magic & psionics, varying power levels, superheroes and vehicles. For the most part, all of these are just common-sense guides for arbitrating things based on context. This may be the deal breaker for some — this is a game system where players and the GM should be comfortable going back and forth making their own judgment calls on how things go down. It’s pretty much “Roll the dice, and if you succeed — narrate what happens.” It was a system originally designed with kids in mind, but obviously it has appeal to older gamers as well.
I love the damn thing. I’ve played solo games with it, and even made a pocketfold game based on it.
Definitely check it out, and if you dig it — toss the guy a couples bucks. Buying the game gets you a PDF scaled for tablet/PC use as well as a Word doc so you can hack it and make your own stuff with it.
Patchwork World is a weird fantasy game that mixes principles from powered-by-the-apocalypse (PbtA) and old school renaissance (OSR) games. I wrote it for people who prefer or need simple character sheets and rules and for people trying to move away from D&D. I’ll go into more detail about each of the bolded terms below.
1. WEIRD FANTASY is the genre description I settled on because the game is fantastical, it’s about fantasizing about a better world, and it doesn’t draw from the same fantasy traditions as D&D.
Instead, I wanted to recreate the feeling of playing games like Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Super Mario World for the first time. I drew inspiration from books like Hav by Jan Morris, Iceland’s Bell by Halldór Laxness, Circe by Madeline Miller, and A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. I wanted the game to feel like my favorite surreal comic books, like Krazy Kat by George Herriman, Rudy by Mark Connery, and the works of A. Degen.
In Patchwork World, you can burst into a herd of cats, be haunted by your troll grandma, speak with birds, and tend a crystalline garden.
2. PbtA: Patchwork World draws on the principles and system originated in Apocalypse World by Vincent and Meguey Baker and the “roll with the questions” iteration created by Brandon Leon-Gambetta for Pasión de las Pasiones (one of the finest RPGs ever written).
Players (including the GM) have clear principles to help them get started, like being a fan of each other and being open to change. Players have a lot of power over what a session will look like based on the moves (special abilities) they pick for their characters—a group that owns a castle (the Castle move) and can burst into cats will have a much different approach to problems than a group with a Magnificent Weapon and a bunch of curses.
And rolling with the questions means that every time someone makes a move, they have to consider the state of their character, both emotionally and fictionally. You have a better chance to avoid danger if you made an ominous prediction about it, for example, and you’re more likely to win a fight if you’ve witnessed your enemy acting unjustly.
3. OSR principles are tailored around “old school” gaming and are often phrased as in opposition to newer “story games” like Apocalypse World. But looking at the headings in the classic Principia Apocrypha, one of the building blocks of OSR culture, there’s a lot that aligns! And a lot of stuff I love.
Embrace chaos, telegraph lethality, subvert expectations, build responsive situations. These are all principles I love, and I tried to give the GM advice and tools to do this. There are lots of tables to roll on in Patchwork World to build strange places and drive the strange occupants of those places.
It’s also really easy to make a character in Patchwork World, much like in OSR games, because…
4. SIMPLE CHARACTER SHEETS & RULES! I run games for people with full-time jobs, people with kids, people with ADHD and memory issues. And it can be such a barrier to say to people like that, “We’re going to have a bunch of fun! But we’ll have to reference this big book, and you’ll have to parse this tiny text, and if you want to be a cool wizard, you’ll have to flip back and forth between even more complicated rules.”
Patchwork World has no stats (thanks to rolling with the questions) and no classes. Making a character is as simple as choosing two moves (and if I were richer, I would have printed them on a deck of cards so players could just have them that way) and describing who they are.
(And because I embrace chaos, there’s also a table to roll for random moves instead.)
Other than their two moves, players will need to reference a simple sheet to track their wellness and experience and a sheet of basic moves that everyone has. And you’ll only need two six-sided dice to play.
5. MOVING AWAY FROM D&D is hard! You get invested in those big books and the time and money you’ve spent on them. You’re invested in the stories you’ve told. I get it. But D&D ended up actively pushing against a lot of what my weird friends wanted to do in a game, and we’d either have to follow the rules (meaning stuff was less cool), write new rules (more homework for the DM), or toss the rules away. And if we did that, why bother using them in the first place?
If you’re moving from D&D to Patchwork World, you can still play an elf wizard, a human fighter, a dwarven barbarian, or anything else like that. You can have cool weapons, fancy magic, and roguish charm and stealth. Just choose those moves and get going.
But you can also be an elf barbarian without having to worry about balancing your stat bonuses. Or you can be sneaky and cast spells without having to make it to a level three subclass or deal with multiclassing. And my hope is that once you start getting weird with that stuff, you’ll only get weirder.
6. A FINAL WORD: Making Patchwork World was an intensely personal experience for me. I was writing it in 2020 and 2021, in the rise of COVID and the aftermath of my city’s police murdering George Floyd a mile from my home. I was thinking about building communities in a broken world. I was struggling with the solitude of lockdown, away from my joyfully radical and queer communities. I was thinking about how much I’ve changed and how much I still want to change. So this is a game with rules for building communities, for mutating, for going on dates and making friends.
But you can also have a cool sword that takes memories or an eyeball helmet that sees through walls. Players have been grubby raccoons, otherdimensional children, necromancer puppets, and sullen teen busboys. This game has brought me a lot of joy! Maybe it can bring you some too. (It’s free, btw.)
(Doing a little post here about each of my games so that they’re around for me to reblog or link to. Reblogs welcome!)
Hey you beautiful people!
My name is Ethan H. Reynolds, and trans and pan creator who has created 20+ games and have gotten 9,000+ downloads on my games!
On this blog, you can find some stuff that I have created, as well as just some fun stuff. I'm not here to preach to people or make sales only; I just want people to enjoy what I make!
You can find my games right here. I promise they're amazing! (https://linktr.ee/EthanRey12)
If you want separate stores, look below as well!
Itch.io: https://ethanhreynolds.itch.io/
DriveThruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/browser/publisher/Ethan-H-Reynolds/19942
Kofi:
Have a wonderful day! 💜✨💜✨
I just want to show off some of the interior of Into the Riverlands, because ;
I think its really good!
It shows what someone can do with a couple of public domain pieces of art, minimalist layout, and paying a little more attention to typesetting!
I used only two pieces of art. One for the cover, and one as embellishment throughout the book. Both pieces were public domain from the Rijiksmuseum collection, which has a ton of fantastic pieces you can use too!
Out of everything, I probably spent the most time on typesetting, just to make every paragraph and column look nice.
Other than that, I was just careful and deliberate with my layout, focusing on readability of the text. Granted, I am using a layout software, but you can put together very clean looking documents in even just google docs.
I feel like there is an arms race in the ttrpg sphere, where we're all rushing to make the biggest and flashiest game out there. And I get it! Its both fun, and also is a great way to get eyes on your games!
But you don't have to do that! Especially if you're just starting out making ttrpgs. There are a ton of ways to make things look nice without spending any money.