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Eow Links 33 |
| 2021-08-14 |
Eow Links 33
"Eow" for End Of Week. Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 33.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection or Alex's Blogosphere posts.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a RPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
A crunchy week. My favourite post is In Praise of Vanilla Fantasy (sorry, I know, it's a 2019 post).
FKR: It’s not the amount of rules
A bit of a preamble for anyone not familiar with the acronym – there’s a movement or set of movements known as the FKR, standing for Free Kriegsspiel Revolution, a (mostly) joke term intended to contrast with the OSR to focus purely on a relationship to rules in gaming – namely that the referee is the interface between the fictional world and the player characters.
Fiction Ketchup Rococo. Sorry, my new game is to replace "Renaissance", "Revival", or "Revolution" by "Rococo". When I feel dark, I replace by "Reformation".
In 1314 things started to go really seriously wrong on the island of Britain in that it started raining in the winter did not stop. I am talking the type of rain that caused flooding so severe that livestock drowned.
Famine then epidemy, that reminds of the old Civilization board game.
Tabletop Techniques - First and Third Person Narration E82S02 Daydreaming about Dragons
Podcast episode by Judd Karlman. Robust teaching, solid delivery.
Silence is very effective when used as part of a speech, or even a conversation, so long as you can maintain the floor during that silence. This is much easier in person where you can use body language to indicate you're still speaking.
This reminded me of primary school when cutting sentences into pieces, subject, object, indirect object, and color coding them. Later, in high school (Gymnasium), we got a lot of training in summarizing text. Reminiscences.
Re-associating exploration speed
However, B/X already has a small, seemingly mostly forgotten rule, that can be adapted for the purpose. Part of the rules for exploration movement is that after every 5 turns of exploration, the party must rest for 1 turn or the characters suffer a -1 penalty to hit and damage from exhaustion
A welcome reminder of the rest interval.
frus·trat·ed fan·ta·sy nov·el·ist, n. A caricature of a tabletop roleplaying referee who has developed a complex imaginary world, or particular plot, and would really much rather show players around or tell a predetermined story than play a game.
An excellent post, but I have to admit that that first quote is mesmerizing me.
Hostile Negotiations: A Framework for Social Combat
It is easiest to not design rules for social interaction because it is most easily run without rules. It involves conversations, and that’s what tabletop games are, no? The referee need only embody the NPC, the players need only stay in-character, and the game runs on thespian magic. Social interaction eludes efforts to mechanize it
This is probably one of my favorite "regional" type maps I've drawn.
Nice map.
Epic Humble Beginnings, a tale of starting a campaign
Be sure to write your name on this, so they can identify your remains
Nice map also here.
A picture says more than a thousand awkward words
Make a simple color palette and show it to them
Show, don't tell. Excellent idea.
IT Perché i giochi Powered By The Apocalypse (PbtA) non sono tutti uguali - my 2 cents
La confusione nasce spesso dal considerare i giochi PbtA "tutti uguali" in virtù del fatto che gran parte di essi condividono apparentemente la stessa struttura
A comparison of five PbtA games and a reminder of the focalization achieved by such games. It might be easy to fool oneself by thinking "yet another PbtA".
Frankly, going Full Vanilla might be the only truly radical and unexpected move left.
April 2019, but since it's included in Knock 2 and I love the quote...
Building Characters From Archetypes
Archetypes will never go away; we love tropes and we love knowing where we fit in a story or on a battlefield.
Priest, warrior, commoner. Is that an archetype hypothesis?
History. No pizza before 1544.
Le scénariste Kinoku Nasu (né en 1973) a créé depuis 20 ans un ensemble complexe de romans pour la jeunesse, de fictions interactives, mangas & anime dans le même multivers (le "Nasu-Vers" ou univers Type-Moon) et notamment la série FATE qui développe de manière très étendue les références arthuriennes (avec certes pas mal d'autres mythologies, comme la Matière de France).
Oh, the Japanese are taking liberties with european themes.
Ah, the Europeans were already quite liberal about it, ages ago.
FR Quest
Quest est donc un jeu d'initiation qui fait le pari de la simplicité. L'ambiance est medfan, le propos est didactique et l'angle d'attaque est résolument positif : on a affaire à un jeu inclusif qui parle de consentement et de collaboration. La création de perso se base ainsi sur un petit texte à trous qui permet à la joueuse de rapidement donner vie à son alter ego.
A nice french review of Quest, with a link to the Monster Manifest.
C'est de l'OSR. Ça veut dire que c'est aussi nouveau et innovant qu'une énième série télé avec des zombies (« Non mais dans celle-là a un pitch inédit : on suit un groupe de survivants qui essaie de trouver un refuge »)
"Coeurs Vaillants" is a fine piece of OSR by John Grümph, it's translated in English as Gallant and Bold, I presented it in May.
Gallant and Bold got a nice shout out on Twitter by Eric Nieudan, one of the fathers of Knock.
BROKEN LUCK is a full-color 28 page zine supplement for the science-fantasy tabletop RPG TROIKA! Inside this zine you will find mythical backgrounds, magical tarot cards, spell tables, adventure sparks, NPCs, and everything you need to spice up your Troika! game with (un)godly adventures. Use it in combination with any preexisting sphere or as an independent setting.
It's funded :-)
