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The voice of the Bop-It! game is actually a malicious Archfey and people have been found bopped, twisted and pulled to death. The only way to defeat him is to cheat at his own game…
Other games to make into rpg adventures: Candyland (find your way through a bizarre world), Guess Who (solve a crime in a village of doppelgängers), Monopoly (survive the brutal politics of property development in Waterdeep)
A slice-of-life game about androids who have escaped from a secret lab and live in an apartment together. They have one human roommate, played by the GM. The androids must learn the basics of human life, overcome their programming glitches, and discover the meaning of friendship.
The GM goes to each player and tells them they’re the only android.
Playing a roleplaying game is an act of intimacy. When we play a character, we discover something about our own personalities. When we explore a fantasy world, we are really exploring ourselves. When we tell a story, we tell what our own story could be. When we do that with others, we share our deepest fears and longings through the symbols of the story.
A slice-of-life game about androids who have escaped from a secret lab and live in an apartment together. They have one human roommate, played by the GM. The androids must learn the basics of human life, overcome their programming glitches, and discover the meaning of friendship.
Apparently during the last three months when I was mostly absent from the game industry, there was a #MeToo explosion. Yikes...
My constant lament as a game designer is that I spend more time thinking about RPGs than I do actually playing them.
I need more weird high-concept RPGs. Posthuman AIs with edited memories? Played that. Sentient instants of time reordering physical reality? Played that. Beams of light having sex? Played that.
The bionicle movies walked so that The Lego Movie could run.
Mysteries can be frightening, but a world without mystery is a world without excitement. Cthulhu reassures us that no matter how much we figure out, the universe will always have more mysteries to offer. Cthulhu doesn’t frighten us. Cthulhu comforts us.
We are afraid of science’s power to unveil every mystery; to shine a light on the last shadows of the unknown. Just as the popularity of retro aesthetics is a retreat from the horrors of modern technology, the popularity of Cthulhu too is a retreat: an escape to a simpler time when it was possible to believe in the unknowable.
H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction was all about the fear of the unknown. What are we supposed to do now that Cthulhu and Pals have become familiar and cliched?
Have you ever explored religious themes in a game? The relationships between God(s) and us? the limits of faith? the challenges of pluralism and secularism?
When I hear about the interactions between long-existing corporations, I can’t help thinking that must be what elf relationships are like. Contracts conflicting with each other or paying off decades after they were forged. I think long-lived corporate drama is the model you would have to use to write an RPG about immortals.
You should check out the Boeing/Pratt and Whitney drama. Basically they were best buds who did a lot of projects together until Boeing came over with a new project to work on together and P&W thought it was stupid and said so bluntly, and cue decades of pointedly not working together on anything again for decades.
Make a character sheet first, then build a game around it.
The best way to do this is to play with another designer. Each of you has to design a game based on the other’s sheet. Troll each other as hard as possible. When you get to the game design phase you’ll have to pull out all stops explaining abstruse attributes like “secondary backstory” and “maximum existence”
When cultures meet, ideas clash. Once-solid beliefs crack against new worldviews. Members of the merging cultures are frightened. People struggle, often against one another, to make sense of a world they can no longer explain. Rather than throw more fuel on the fire, a humble few bring their thoughts forward. Perhaps together, they can discover a better way.
This would make a brilliant premise for a roleplaying game. Imagine characters with conflicting perspectives forced to work together; how their beliefs will clash, change, mix, diverge. Imagine a game where all the action is in service of exploring the ideological tensions between the characters.
I thought this was the premise of a tabletop RPG called Sig. The cover describes it as a game of planar fantasy that “focuses on confronting beliefs, changing perspectives and relationships”. I was invigorated when I imagined beings from disparate planes of existence challenging one another’s cultural assumptions while still trying to work together. I was violently disappointed.
Ok so my character definitely has a crush on another character. They’re quite good at people, even if they can be a little sarcastic/abrasive sometimes.
I am not good at people. I don’t knowingly flirt. I don’t notice when other people are flirting.
How do in character flirt?
(If it’s relevant I’m a sea-elf druid)
That’s the trouble with non-physical stats in RPGs. It’s almost impossible to roleplay a character who has social abilities you don’t.
There are lots of ways to win a person’s affections besides flirting, though. Try anonymous romantic gestures, personal conversation, and spending quality time together.
yknow what i’m just going to give a quick bit of advice for any DnD or whatever tabletop players: if you’re trying to create a character and are stuck on their background, give them a job. Like a normal-ass job.
We have a witch in our party, but his greatest contribution to our campaign so far is that he’s also a fucking lawyer. The fact that in any given situation he can read the legality of our actions, the punishments for digression, the loopholes through it, it’s turned out to be absolutely vital to how we get through our dumbass shenanigans.
Our fighter, meanwhile, has a job as a professional dominatrix, and you’d be amazed how often it comes up? Her intimidation checks are through the roof she can just slam the butt of her spear against the floor and everyone shuts up and listens to her, it’s fantastic.
Like maybe this is an obvious thing to a lot of players, idk, but i have just been utterly charmed by how much you can get out of it–both in terms of utility and personality–if you have your character paying the bills not with dragon slaying, but with regular human professions.
One of the most hilarious things to me personally is the combo of Creationist Jirt Tolkien and Actual Professor Jrrt especially re: evolution in Middle Earth.
Here are the canonical facts.
Elves did not evolve, they just woke up one day when God willed them into existence.
Dwarves (and ents and eagles) are like, the Archangel Gabriel’s school project. Definitely tinkered with a bit, but also very intentionally made.
Humans probably happened the same way as elves but since they’re not immortal and don’t still have primary sources from the dawn of time, there is no evidence of this. God definitely made them, but an argument can be made for engineered evolution as part of The Grand Design.
Orcs and trolls are a result of selective breeding, not natural selection.
So, in short, elves are an early release beta prototype with no patches, dwarves are a R&D experiment, orcs are a horrifying garage project, and humans are an actual slow release product with regular updates.
This means hobbits are the only species/sub-species to presumably evolve without divine intervention.
Tolkien canon has it that they are a “branch” of men. They did not show up in Eru’s blueprint. Hobbits are the result of nature just going wild.
Hobbits are the zenith of evolution. Peak adaption. They didn’t need the ultimate creator’s help, the cruel laws of the wild placed hobbits on top.
This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like
It would be interesting to see an RPG all about characters caught in the middle of great cultural upheaval. Perhaps an empire recently began occupation, maybe slaves are rebelling, or perhaps magic has just been discovered. I wonder how you would run a game like that? What would it look like?
