Open Gaming Jam Has Started

Open Gaming Jam has started

The Jam has just started on Itch! I would love to see some of you fine creative folks participate and share your open-license games. Don’t know what a Jam is? Essentially various creators come together to make something for a specific theme/topic/system and share it on Itch.io. Can be free, can be sold. However you like. They usually run for a month so you need to get cracking. However, there is no need for the game to be finished by the end of the Jam. Many participants in other Jams developed their submissions further, even into Kickstarters. https://itch.io/jam/open-gaming-jam 

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.

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.

Hello, I'm Penflower Ink, and I created the Four Points RPG System. What is Four Points? Four Points is a simple but highly customisable TTRPG rules system. Here is the core mechanic: Whenever a Character wants to do something important to the game/story, their Player has two options: - Spend Energy Points from the most relevant Stat pool in exchange for varying degrees of guaranteed success, - OR roll 1d6 with a base 50/50 chance of success. Everything else in the SRD is pretty much optional! When building a Four Points TTRPG, you can incorporate and adapt as much or as little of the additional rules as you like. What are the Four Points? Four Points is so named because it focuses on 4 aspects of TTRPGs: - Characters, - Narrative, - Player Agency, - Customisation.

Where can I find the Four Points SRD? The SRD is on itch.io, available as a Pay What You Want document. Four Points RPG SRD What Four Points TTRPGs are available? The following is a list of all the Four Points games I have designed, written and illustrated, in chronological order: Loot the Plutes: an industrial fantasy game about swashbuckling, magic and wealth redistribution in a capitalist hellscape. Guarden: an experimental micro-RPG about being an elusive gnome protecting your patch of green. Outward Bound: a utopian science-fiction game about space exploration, inter-species cooperation and weird anomalies. Goblins & Grimoires: a retro video-game inspired fantasy game about being goblins trying to learn magic. The Creature's Features: a setting agnostic game / supplement about observing and cataloguing weird creatures, such as aliens, mythological beasts and cryptids. Come Rain Come Shine: a GM-less storytelling and role-playing game about creating a solarpunk community of animalfolk, and helping it flourish. (Dinosauria Expansion: lets you play as dinosaurs!) QuestFellows: a GM-less storytelling and role-playing game about forming an Adventurer's Guild and going on quests in a high fantasy setting. I hope that if the Four Points system - or any of the game descriptions above - sound interesting to you, you'll check them out. I'll be adding a bunch of Community Copies to each game, and I add more with every purchase made. Thanks for reading! - Tom / Penflower

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

I have had this account for a while, but I have no clue what to do with this and how Tumblr works. So this is gonna be weird for you and me.