Roleplaying Games - Tumblr Posts
A map for a TTRPG campaign I'm running. The town of Groville
Chariots of Steel, by Erika Chappell, is a 314 page super-heavy expansion book for Flying Circus, both massively expanding the rules and options for fighting on the ground for crashed pilots, as well as adding an alternate mode of play as landsknecht, mercenary army companies operating in Himmilgard’s least-stable regions.
Here’s a fun thing about tieflings: while many folks – particularly critics – seem to be under the impression that tieflings are the offspring of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition’s brief dalliance with dungeonpunk aesthetics, their first appearance as a playable race actually came six years earlier, in 1994′s Planescape campaign setting for D&D 2nd Edition. Interestingly, though later iterations of the game would push hard for a standardised tiefling appearance, in their original incarnation you had the option to randomly generate your demonic features.
The tables for this are reproduced in their entirety below; roll 1d4 to determine the number of demonic features your tiefling possesses, then 1d100 on the Tiefling Appearance table for each feature, re-rolling any contradictory or redundant results. Some entries in the Special Side Effects table have been lightly re-written for mechanical compatibility with D&D 5th Edition, and may not represent reasonable racial features in a typical 5E game – the objective here is to reflect the source material as closely as possible, not to achieve balance.
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Make sure the system you use matches the kind of players you have, for an optimal experience
Admin Note: This is part of the ongoing series called “D&D isn’t the only TTRPG if you don’t want fantasy play another goddamn game!”
Genuinely did not realised the French RPG scene had so much of an influence/impact!
I remember the release of In Nomine being a big deal (in the UK, at least) but not much beyond that - it's fascinating to see at what point some of the English-language staples (like the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf books), as well as seeing some of the less well know series such as Way of the Tiger, and Grailquest being included in the Un livre dont vous êtes le héros series!
Remember last time, when I posted about this excellent roleplaying guide, and shared various info about the French history of RPGs? Well I come back with more. Enjoy!
One of the big influences and helpers of the RPG genre in France was a series of books published by Folio Junior/Gallimard from the 1984 onward. This series was usually what introduced many people to the roleplaying game experience as a whole: and it is the line Un livre dont vous êtes le héros, "A book of which you are the hero". Thing is, this line actually gathered and united numerous English-speaking series into one whole. What I mean is that the French "A book of which you are the hero" (sometimes translated as "You are the hero") line wasn't just one translation, but a compilation of Fighting Fantasy (by Livingstone and Jackson), of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, of Joe Dever's Lone Wolf, of James Herbert Brennan's Grailquest, and more...
Another game that deeply marked the early years of RPG in France was L'Oeil Noir, "The Black Eye". It is not an American game, however: it was a German game, Das Schwarze Auge, created by the Fantasy Productions group, itself founded by Ulrich Kiesow, Werner Fuchs and Hans Joachim Alpers. This game was created after the group had translated two American roleplaying games in German: D&D, of course, but also Tunnels & Trolls. Released in Germany in 1984, this game had a HUGE success in Europe, so much that it overshadowed the sales of D&D in some countries! In France, the game was notably purposefully sold in the same format and aesthetic as the Un livre dont vous êtes le héros - again, French folks wanted to give a cohesive look to all of these games.
The first two French RPGs were both flawed, but in opposite ways. The first one, L'Ultime Epreuve (The Ultimate Trial) was written by Fabrice Cayla and published by Jeux Actuels in 1983. It took place within a medieval fantasy setting (which even at the time felt a bit "recycled" and "already seen") and was about adventurers (the players) fighting various monsters while gaining power and strength, to finally vanquish the creatures that guard the gates of the Valhalla - it is the "ultimate trial" of the title. And then... That's it. The game is over. This game was very simplistic - too simplistic - but one of its originalities relied in its system of experience point. Or rather its absence of XPs: to have characters evolve, the players needed to spend money during "training sessions".
The other "primal RPG", Légendes, was created by a collective of five authors - Stéphane Daudier, Marc Deladerrière, Philippe Mercier, Jean-Marc Montel and Guillaume Rohmer. Published by Descartes in 1983, it is sometimes referred to as "Légendes celtiques" - which is actually incorrect... "Celtic Legends" was only the world-setting offered with the basic set/starting box - but it is just one possibility among many (the line also includes "Légendes des Milles et Unes Nuits" for an Arabian Nights setting ; and "Légendes de la Table Ronde" for an Arthurian setting). However, this game was far too complex: its rules were very heavy and very convoluted, and so the game was not fit for beginners. In fact, Descartes, understanding this, published in 1987 a lighter, simplified version called "Premières Légendes" (First Legends)
In 1985 was published Denis Gerfaud's Rêve de Dragon (Dragon's Dream). Described as an "oniric fantasy" game, this RPG is a strange and fascinating experience where each new adventure plunges the players in an entire new world, created out of the dreams of dragons. Every character was dreamed up by a dragon, and if they die during a game session, their "archetype" will be rencarnated under a new shape once the dragon goes back to sleep. The game ingenuously uses the symbolism of the Zodiac, the Tarot cards and more for its playing system. Gerfaud managed to create a very inventive, very poetic but also quite humoristic game. The first edition of the game was notably illustrated by Bernard Verlhac (aka Tignous), who was unfortunately murdered during the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack... Dragon Dream was a real "author game" where Gerfaud showed his talents as a writer, but it suffers from quite austere rules, definitively coming from the 80s, and which "chain" the dream rather than encourage the players' imagination... The problem was solved when a simplified version of the game was released in 2001, called Oniros. More recently, the game had a luxury re-edition at the Scriptarium editions, in 2018. As for Denis Gerfaud, he published only one other RPG, just as innovative and strange: Hystoire de fou, in 1998.
Christophe Réaux, alias "Croc", is another French author of RPGs. He first self-published games under the label Futur Proche. He created Bitume, about a post-apocalyptic world a la Mad Max, half-destroyed by the Halley comet ; and then Animonde, a poetic fantasy universe where all weapons and all technologies have an animal origin. Croc was quickly hired by the team of the Siroz Productions to create a game. Siroz Productions was founded by two members of a roleplaying circle of the Viroflay town (Parisian region) known as the "club 20 naturel" (nat 20 club), Nicolas Théry and Eric Bouchaud - a club to which Christophe Réaux belonged. Siroz Productions started out as a minor editor named "Théry-Bouchaud et Cie", but became quite famous due to its games relying on very strong, very contextualized concepts, and satirical humor - tackling issues such as the decay of suburbs, evolutionism, totalitarism, the misuse of ideologies and other futuristic predictios: Zone, Silrin, Whog Shrog, Berlin XVIII...
The game Croc and Siroz created was In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas. This game of biting humor is about the players embodying angels and demons infiltrated among humanity, and waging there a secret war for either heaven or hell... Except, as it turns out, both sides use the same methods and the same tactics. Unfortunately, Siroz found itself in a bad situation right before the game's release: drowned in debts, about to close, to survive the publishing house had to agree to the involvment of new investors, and a full restructuration. Siroz Productions became Idéojeux, under the leadership of Marc Nunès. It was under Idéojeux that INS/MV was first published - inaugurating a long line of RPGs written by Croc. Heavy Metal, Bloodlust, Scales, Nightprowler, COPS... Later, Idéojeux renamed itself Asmodée... From the name of the Demon Prince of Gaming within INS/MV, Asmodeus. While the society has gone away from the RPG world, it still forms today one of the big players within the French game industry - in fact, even within the international world of games! Since not only did they buy several French publishing houses (such as Descartes), but they also recently absorbed the American editor Fantasy Flight Games...
While it is quite rare, sometimes French RPGs are brought over to the United-States! It was the case with In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas, which in 1997 was published by Steve Jackson Games under the title In Nomine. However it wasn't a translation, but an adaptation: rewritten by Derek Pearcy, the American game is much darker, less serious and less parodic than the French game. The second edition of Rêve de Dragon was translated in English in 2002, under the title Rêve: The Dream Ouroboros.
I'm jumping a lot of things, because this book has so much info... But there is a cover about the "renewal" or "renaissance" of the RPG game from the late 2000s onward. It contains a brief segment about France. Among the numerous new editors that popped up during this "shifting era", when the old generation of gamers left the ground for a new, younger one, one famous is the Black Book Editions, created in 2004 in Lyon, and currently one of the biggest French editors of games. They are behind the French creations of Pavillon Noir, Chroniques oubliées, Polaris, and Héros & Dragons ; but they also are the ones in charge of bringing to France the American monsters that are Pathfinder, Shadowrun, and even (for a brief time) D&D5. The other emblematic editor of this era was Sans-Détour, created in 2008, which became the new French publisher of Call of Cthulhu and helped "renew" it and give it a "younger", "fresher" energy (unfortunately Chaosium removed the license from Sans-Détour in 2018 due to a case of unpaid royalties). A third unmissable name would be Le 7e Cercle, with a diverse and memorable catalogue including games such as Qin, Yggdrasill or Carpharnaüm.
Hey all! Once again I'm helping out with Roll For Good's charity stream! I won't be on camera this time, but I've done a lot of work behind the scenes (and made a lot of the intermission content!). It would be great to see people tune in.
There will be 6 games over the weekend - with giveaways, intermission content and lots of other good stuff too. World Central Kitchen is an amazing charity doing a lot of good work in Ukraine right now, so if you're able to show your support we would all super appreciate it <3
See you there next weekend!
The Unexplored Places is an actual play podcast that understands all the important reasons why we make characters for RPGs:
to make them fight
to make them kiss
to put them through hell
and perhaps MOST importantly:
to dress them up in lots of different outfits like paper dolls
Hearing news of a break-in and theft at the Museum of the Modern Superhero, our heroes are joined by a brand new teammate to do a little breaking of their own as they try to figure out what was taken and why. In ISSUE #03: BREAK IN, RUSALKA makes a splashing entrance, SILVER SPIRIT finds the missing piece, and THE MUTANT takes a wild swing.
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/unexploredcast Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/unexploredcast Art by Ben Prevas Music by Andrew: https://andrewperricone.bandcamp.com/
Who's got your attention at the table?
At Dragonmeet in December, I played a game of galactic (2nd edition) by riley rethal with a group of five other players, none of whom I'd met before. I've played galactic before with Merely Roleplayers, and played a few other games in the same style, but with this group I noticed something I've never noticed before about cooperative roleplaying games.
This player wasn't missing everything. When I established a detail or an event, that seemed to sink in. It was only the other players' contributions they kept missing.
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Today: planned another Monster of the Week session for @merelyroleplayers
Tomorrow: planning a two-shot of Heart: The City Beneath for Actual Play UK
Wednesday: GMing my first session of Lancer (not for public consumption)
You give me a week off dayjob work and I fill it wall to wall with RPGs 😇
The bounty hunter thing is a GM move I've pulled a couple of times now and I highly recommend it.
Got a player who didn't provide much character backstory, or just prefers to fill in the blanks at the table?
Introduce a cool, dangerous bounty hunter who's after that character.
Don't come up with why.
When it's revealed that they're who the bounty hunter's chasing, ask the player: do you know what this is about or is it a total mystery? Any answer they give is awesome.
If you need it, the line "YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID, DON'T DENY IT" keeps things moving while everyone fills in the blanks
Tonight in Lancer
The supersoldier got ransomeware'd by a Horus hacker so the team befriended some other hackers who immediately doxxed the guy just to prove they could
The rockstar got drugged and kidnapped by members of his own fanclub – our game is full space opera but he was in his own little Coen bros story tonight
The scrapper bought a big beautiful used Buick of a space skiff
We invented a new variant of Robot Wars that's less about directly controlling your bot and more about who can remotely hack and sabotage the opposing bot the quickest
The bounty hunter the players ASKED me to add to the story showed up, and everyone was inexplicably SURPRISED that he's chasing a bounty on one of THEM (you ASKED for a bounty hunter, friends!!)
Why am I not suprised
The conflict between Orcs and Humans actually began due to their very different takes on Steven Universe
It's been a long time in the making, but#TheStarlitKingdom is finally finished and available for purchase. The Starlit Kingdom is a game about magical girls struggling against tragic fate, and is inspired by Sailor Moon, but you don't have to be a fan of anime or magical girls to appreciate this game. This game tells beautiful, sad stories about the fall of a magical kingdom full of beauty and wonder, and your doomed efforts to save it and the people you love. It is MCless, and runs 2-4 sessions with 3-5 players.
(If you want to pick it up in print, you can get it on Lulu here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/anna-kreider/the-starlit-kingdom/paperback/product-22426269.html)
T-Day Sale: Because Transitioning is Expensive
PLEASE reblog.
I'm starting T in a couple days I just started T(!!!), and there are a number of associated expenses for things that would be REALLY HELPFUL in managing my dysphoria and making public washrooms safer/more accessible, but are also pretty hard to justify while I'm unemployed.
So for the next month I'm running a sale on Itch:
Ash's T-Day Sale on Itch
- you can pick up any of my queer games for 20% off, or save a little more and get a bundle of 5 games for $37.50.
The Games:
Fellas, is it Gay...?
Fellas Is It Gay…? is a darkly humorous yet silly party game for 5-8 players that deals with exploring the ridiculous nature of fragile masculinity through humorous and specious arguments about what “counts” as gay, or what “makes” something gay. (It’s important to note that slurs are NEVER used while playing. This is a game about the inherent ridiculousness of fragile masculinity, not about denigrating queerness or queer people.)
There Is Only One Bed / Queer Sir
There Is Only One Bed and Queer Sir, are a pair of games that use the same character and situation generation engine, but are played in two different ways:
There Is Only One Bed is a card-based RPG (originally a hack of Alex Roberts' For The Queen) in which two players take turns drawing cards and answering questions to create a story of queer longing and romance as inspired by queer fanfic tropes in approximately 1.5 - 2 hours.
Queer Sir, is an epistolary game in which players tell the story of a romance between two queer characters by sending letters as your characters. Play will progresses over three acts (Realizing the Attraction, Tortured Pining, and the Declaration of Love) according to prompts that will reproduce tropes from queer slash fiction.
Both games end when one person declares their love and the romantic tension is resolved into a happy and successful queer relationship.
Our Traveling Home
Our Traveling Home is a GMless game for 4 to 5 players that uses simple-but-evocative questions and prompts to help players tell a story inspired by the works of Studio Ghibli’s many movies that feature both otherworldly magic and slice-of-life intimate emotional moments. Our Traveling Home is for people interested in telling stories about happy queer romance and oddballs and misfits finding family with each other. It's also for anyone who is hungry for stories about weirdos flourishing thriving in spite of a society that is trying to break them.
The Straights Are Not Okay
The Straights Are Not Okay is a comedy LARP about gender essentialism, heterosexism, and the rigidity of gender expectations in which you play a group of people at a gender reveal party in a national forest. The game ends when the gender reveal goes hilariously wrong and the party-goers burn dcown the forest.
(Content Warning: This game revolves around themes of gender-essentialism, gender binarism, and heterosexism, although it does so as a way of holding up a critical lens to these common stereotypes.)
I got my first dose of T today!!
T-Day Sale: Because Transitioning is Expensive
PLEASE reblog.
I'm starting T in a couple days, and there are a number of associated expenses for things that would be REALLY HELPFUL in managing my dysphoria and making public washrooms safer/more accessible, but are also pretty hard to justify while I'm unemployed.
So for the next month I'm running a sale on Itch:
Ash's T-Day Sale on Itch
- you can pick up any of my queer games for 20% off, or save a little more and get a bundle of 5 games for $37.50.
The Games:
Fellas, is it Gay...?
Fellas Is It Gay…? is a darkly humorous yet silly party game for 5-8 players that deals with exploring the ridiculous nature of fragile masculinity through humorous and specious arguments about what “counts” as gay, or what “makes” something gay. (It’s important to note that slurs are NEVER used while playing. This is a game about the inherent ridiculousness of fragile masculinity, not about denigrating queerness or queer people.)
There Is Only One Bed / Queer Sir
There Is Only One Bed and Queer Sir, are a pair of games that use the same character and situation generation engine, but are played in two different ways:
There Is Only One Bed is a card-based RPG (originally a hack of Alex Roberts' For The Queen) in which two players take turns drawing cards and answering questions to create a story of queer longing and romance as inspired by queer fanfic tropes in approximately 1.5 - 2 hours.
Queer Sir, is an epistolary game in which players tell the story of a romance between two queer characters by sending letters as your characters. Play will progresses over three acts (Realizing the Attraction, Tortured Pining, and the Declaration of Love) according to prompts that will reproduce tropes from queer slash fiction.
Both games end when one person declares their love and the romantic tension is resolved into a happy and successful queer relationship.
Our Traveling Home
Our Traveling Home is a GMless game for 4 to 5 players that uses simple-but-evocative questions and prompts to help players tell a story inspired by the works of Studio Ghibli’s many movies that feature both otherworldly magic and slice-of-life intimate emotional moments. Our Traveling Home is for people interested in telling stories about happy queer romance and oddballs and misfits finding family with each other. It's also for anyone who is hungry for stories about weirdos flourishing thriving in spite of a society that is trying to break them.
The Straights Are Not Okay
The Straights Are Not Okay is a comedy LARP about gender essentialism, heterosexism, and the rigidity of gender expectations in which you play a group of people at a gender reveal party in a national forest. The game ends when the gender reveal goes hilariously wrong and the party-goers burn dcown the forest.
(Content Warning: This game revolves around themes of gender-essentialism, gender binarism, and heterosexism, although it does so as a way of holding up a critical lens to these common stereotypes.)