Tabletop Rpgs - Tumblr Posts

The Ranger for Marc LaSpada’s Paramount RPG.

The Ranger is a master of traps and hunting, and makes use of every part of her prey.

A pair of t-shirts for the next year of the local tabletop gaming mini-convention.

The hosts really like appearing as genre characters, so here they are as magic space knights.

Small magazine design and layout with original photography.

The Bard for Marc LaSpada’s Paramount Roleplaying Game

Mixed media on illustration board, 2016

The Beastmaster for Marc LaSpada’s Paramount Roleplaying Game.

He fights with the aid of his powerful beast companion, which he imbues with the traits of all the most fearsome animals.

Cover page for Hollow, a game by Kimberley Lam.

Cover illustration for Devour, part of an upcoming short games compilation.

Made entirely in Adobe Illustrator

Penultimate teaser image for a project I’m working on.

Game spaces can be unpleasant for women and minorities. Lots of folks have had overtly hostile experiences, or just a lot of little aggressive acts against them that pile up over time.

Still, I like to think that things are improving. They will only do so with our continued hard work, though. Let’s all try to make people feel welcome in our hobbies!

Diversity & the Tabletop Roleplaying Community

An hour-long video ethnography of the tabletop roleplaying community.

A cover/poster/page illustration for a game project.

The new version of the playmat for Armored Reckoning, a game of tank combat and camaraderie behind enemy lines.

The Barbarian for Marc LaSpada’s Paramount RPG.

Play materials for Armored Reckoning, a tabletop roleplaying game now in beta playtesting. In Armored Reckoning, 2 to 5 players take on the roles of Allied soldiers and freedom fighters in their makeshift tanks on a desperate mission to destroy the secret power source of a resurgent 3rd Reich and liberate Europe.

Design (C) 2017 John W. Sheldon. Some game play elements based on Atlas Reckoning by Stras Acimovic, Giacomo Vicenzi, and John Leboeuf-Little which you can watch played here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/175866613

Dressing up the playmat for Armored Reckoning in some more flavor-appropriate designs. Now it looks a little more like an aerial terrain photo with notes scattered on it - as you might use to plan a WW2-era assault.

Next up, updating the vehicle sheets to include some more realistic tank designs (M4 Chassis for center turret, T-34 for front turret, AMX-13 for rear turret, any of which might be portrayed with a Panzer IV turret).

Prototype game board design for the recently re-branded Roar of Alliance (previously called Armored Reckoning). I moved from a tabloid sized (11x17) playmat to a proper 20x20 game board (though this file is sized 20x17 for easy prototyping). This version of the board contains all the relevant rules updates from previous iterations, and moving to a full sized board let me put places for all the various custom cards directly on the board.

You can tell it is a game board because there’s a cat on it, ready to mess with any components.

This is the prototype game board for my RPG hybrid board game Roar of Alliance.

Your game doesn't need a "What is an RPG" section.

No, seriously, it doesn't.

If you try to actually define roleplaying games in a holistic way, you'll eat up a lot of page space and probably cover a lot of topics that aren't applicable to your game. If you don't try to define roleplaying games holistically and discuss at least some of the breadth of possibilities, you're not really defining the genre - you're just describing your own game. Embrace that.

Do this instead:

Just have a "what is this game" section. It frees you up to be more specific and concise, and divests you from the expectation of introducing the reader to every conceivable RPG.

Readers who don't know about many RPGs will get information specific and useful to actually playing your game, and readers with lots of knowledge might actually read it and get the useful information you're including about what you expect to actually happen at the table (instead of skipping it with the assumption that they know what an RPG is). You are including useful information about what you expect to happen during play, right?

Making High Fantasy Settings more Internally Consistent (Part 1)

Most high fantasy settings for tabletop games in the West (and elsewhere, but I'm focusing on tabletop games) have a couple of problems with internal setting consistency. Some of these result from game rules with very unclear fictional implications, and some come from writers and game designers not thinking through the results of the things they put in their books, and simply imposing their loosely remembered understanding of European medieval history onto their fictional setting.

Widespread Magic isn't that Widespread

Character classes are one of the biggest offenders here. Players tend to start off with interesting character abilities and a little bit of useful magic (for spellcasters, particularly), yet the vast majority of non-player characters have none of these abilities - no matter how useful they would be in their day-to-day life. A farmer with "create water", a blacksmith with "mending", or a valet with "prestidigitation" would find their jobs immensely more easy and productive. Two of these are cantrips that players can throw around for free all day in D&D.

If your setting is overflowing with magic to the point that low-level starting characters can access quite a bit of it, is there a reason that the people with the most use for it (as in, multiple times a day, every day, for their whole working lives) don't have any access to it? It would be so beneficial that, even if it takes months or years to learn, it would be worth it, and those would be the first sort of lessons from master to apprentice. Most children would be learning a cantrip or two beside their parents before taking an apprenticeship where they might pick up a few more. I'm not suggesting that every single person in every single village would have a full level of a spellcasting class, but also maybe they should? Or you should think about having each background come with one or more cantrips, and let each NPC have 2-5 cantrips appropriate to the sort of work they do or life they lead.

Then think about how different the lives of these common people would be: how much relative leisure they might enjoy, or how much time they would have for innovation or creativity, or how improved their comfort would be.

Nevermind that the common media portrayal of a medieval peasant as an unkempt and dirty person toiling for long hours every day in brown rags is woefully inaccurate (they regularly cleaned themselves and their clothing, which tended to be brightly colored in reds, yellows, blues, whites, and blacks, and had more days off than most white collar workers in the 21st century US). Now most of the peasants and common folk have just a touch of magic to make their lives that much easier, their bodies that much healthier, their clothes that much cleaner and fancier. How would you then describe the smells of a common farmer's home? How would you describe their clothing? How would you describe their personal appearance?

Next time, Technological Stagnation, Dungeons, Ruins, and Places of Adventure?

Making High Fantasy Settings More Internally Consistent (Part 2)

When last we spoke, I talked about how having widespread magic in the world should really have more of an impact on the day-to-day lives of common people. If it is abundant and easy enough to enable the magic of common low level adventurers, it should end up impacting absolutely everything. But what if we don't want that? What if we want a world of abundant magic and adventure, but where day-to-day life isn't as thoroughly suffused with magic and spellcasting? We need a reason intrinsic to the setting.

Also, where do all of these dungeons and sites of adventure come from? Why are they simultaneously ancient, but full of exactly the same technology level as the player's current civilization? Why doesn't technology ever advance (beyond the era of plate armor and very primitive firearms) if most people don't have access to the magic that might replace technological innovation (not that I think the presence of magic actually justifies total technological stagnation)?

The best explanations serve both problems.

Why Don't Most People Have Magic?

What we need to build an internally-consistent high fantasy world with limited magic for most people is some kind of normalizing force or limiting factor. My favorite explanations support multiple parts of the world's fiction, so those will be ranked more highly.

Some People (the Player Characters) are Just Special

I am opposed to the "only people with special ancestry/blood/destiny" as an explanation for limiting magic, especially in D&D style worlds with multiple types of spellcasters (it is okay if it is just one of many paths to magic), so we'll ignore the "every adventurer is super special, not like all these non-important people doing the farming and inn-keeping" explanation. That explanation sucks and makes it super easy to justify mistreating NPCs and generally supports eugenicist views where some sorts of people are inherently more valuable and should be superior to other sorts of people.

This explanation also doesn't do anything to justify the classic sites of adventure or the problem of why those places contain the same sorts of gear you could get from your own contemporary civilization.

Magic is Tightly Regulated or Restricted

This is a slightly more attractive explanation for why magic doesn't proliferate throughout populations: some cultural authority or authorities tightly police how and where magic is used, generally for selfish or superstitious reasons. These authorities might be dominant religious structures (we'll get to actual gods a little later), or guilds, or powers of the state. In any case, they forbid most people from using magic, and punish anyone they find using it in a way they don't deem appropriate.

No credible institution in a high fantasy setting would fully ban magic, even among their own enforcers. That would just make their entire society deeply vulnerable to any wielders of magic, in addition to barely working in the first place. So perhaps the player characters are among the few who have dispensation to use magic, or are on the run from those authorities, or even bridge that divide with some choosing to look the other way for the rule-breakers in their midst.

Of course, restrictions like this in a D&D-style world where magic doesn't come with actual inherent costs or drawbacks (apart from maybe some spell component costs), no authority would be successful in fully banning it. People would still trade in illicit magic and knowledge, and the places further from the centers of power would have the most - even looking like the societies in the previous post at the most extreme. It is just too beneficial for people to actually abandon.

This explanation also doesn't help us sort out the problem of technological stagnation and locations of adventure. It might suggest things like abandoned fortresses or structures built or used by those who disobeyed the social order and used magic anyway, but if they fell at the hands of the social authorities, it would make sense for most of their magical guff to get scooped up by those some authorities. Doesn't leave as much room for monsters and treasure.

The Gods Hate Magic

Here's the first explanation with real, broad explanatory power, but also resulting teeth for a setting. Here, the powers of the society (state, religions, guilds, etc) may be pro- or anti-magic as a matter of policy or position, but the gods actively interfere in the development of human society and the spreading of magic. The gods may be jealously hoarding their power or working to prevent mortals from ascending to challenge them, but whatever their motivation and whatever they say to their followers, they actually work to limit how magic is spread and used.

Their work might involve sending monsters to destroy or to guard magic items or places, interfering with the operation of magic itself such that only limited sorts or small amounts that escape their notice can be safely used, or employing natural disasters or other powers to disrupt and destroy societies that adopt magic too broadly and magic-users that get too strong.

From the outside, this will look like most any D&D style society where most people don't use magic for their mundane day-to-day needs, but there might be superstitions about why not. Monster attacks on outlying farms where the farmer and his children used magic to make their chores easier and their crops more abundant, or floods striking cities that try their hand at enchanting whole streets or wagon routes for easy travel.

Now magical ruins exist because those places were struck down by the gods, and many of them may have the same sort of technology as the players' current civilization because the gods operate a cycle where they become jealous and fearful of the mortals and periodically wipe away all civilization - the dungeon you adventure in is the monster-infested ruin of a previous civilization destroyed by the gods for becoming "too advanced". The fact that it looks just like yours should, in fact, be concerning - no matter how benevolent the gods claim to be.

This explanation covers both angles pretty well. I like it quite a bit, but it has two minor problems. First, it requires that all the gods be involved in this conspiracy (though maybe not willingly), and thus rules out most actually benevolent deities. It also naturally warps most long term campaigns into "Man Vs Gods" in a quest to save their civilization from destruction by the gods at its core.

In part 3, I'll talk about my current favorite solution to this issue, which doesn't necessarily warp every campaign into one specific story arc or completely re-cast the personality of whole pantheons.

Do you have any favorite setting tropes or lore that help explain why magic is or isn't widespread? I'd love to see others that I haven't encountered!

I'm biased because I worked with Beau on this, but I also love the art sprinkled throughout the book. It includes lovely illustrations for all of the beasts, little drawings for the human archetypes, town maps, and stunningly evocative poetry.

Pick it up for the thoughtful essays placed in each chapter, or the delightful feel of the cover, or the cute and fun art throughout, or to be transported to a place where -- just maybe -- your friends and your town can put aside fear and learn to love you for your differences.

Right before the pandemic, I did a Kickstarter for my TTRPG Turn, which is about playing shapeshifters in small mostly rural towns. I worked with some great people on it and I think it is still an amazing game and wish I could play it more and expand upon it extensively, but I don't think that it will be in the cards for me.

However, it still exists.

This game, where you struggle between your public and private identities, where the rules are mostly focused on avoiding faux pas in human social interactions in order to keep your beast side hidden, where violence is easy but has hard consequences, and where the biggest struggle is finding people who will still love and care for you when you're exposed to be something most people would see as monstrous or freakish & you're struggling to live, it exists. I made that, six years after I first conceptualized it, & now five years after I made it real, no one knows.

I didn't get to take it to tons of conventions & promote it heavily, in part because I was struggling with my health, in part because the pandemic cut short a lot of my plans, in part because I didn't truly have a community that loved & cared for me when I was exposed & struggling. Instead, I lost my community, & I eventually had to give up my dreams, too.

But Turn exists. It's still beautiful and special to me, and I have had experiences with it building community and finding myself that I don't think I will have in real life. It's how I found my name. It mattered. Today, I'm holding on to that.

Turn is here, with my other works:

https://thoughty.itch.io/turn

+supplement, Towns Like Ours:

https://thoughty.itch.io/towns-like-ours

+Script Change, which I recommend using with it/any RPG:

https://thoughty.itch.io/script-change

Print:

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Turn.html

DriveThruRPG:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/10592/daedalum-analog-productions

KS:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/briecs/turn-a-tabletop-roleplaying-game