Avatar

David J Prokopetz

@prokopetz / prokopetz.tumblr.com

Social Justice Henchman; main website at prokopetz.net

Finally creating a pinned post of my games. I’ve included all titles I’ve been involved with in some capacity, not just ones where I’m the author; when I’m not the author, I’ll note my role in (parentheses).

This post will be updated over time to reflect changes in the status of these projects, so if you’re looking at a reblog, feel free to click through to the original and see if it differs.

Last updated: 2023-04-25

From "Loyal and True": "If your chosen die’s value is less than your equal to your current Stress, your Knight becomes temporarily indisposed, and is unable to act for the remainder of the current scene; you may still participate in play if the circumstances of your indisposition permit, but may not roll dice." Did you mean "less than or equal"?

Avatar

(With reference to this post here.)

You know, you're the first person in the three years since I posted that to notice that typo. It should be fixed now.

Avatar

By popular request, player characters in Eat God can now do the Jekyll and Hyde thing.

(This one stupid paragraph is probably the most complicated piece of rules tech in the whole fucking game; you would not believe how much creative editing I had to do to prevent it from taking up half a page. I'm very curious to hear from those who've read the game's most recent playtest draft whether it's clear how this addition's rules work!)

I know there's a trait you can pick to make one of your forms bigger, but I'm having fun picturing a werewolf who's a muppet the size of the average raccoon that can transform into a vicious, ravening canine that's also the size of the average raccoon

Avatar

I mean, even if you did pick "Hulking" for your alternate form and the maximum height and weight it permits, the were-whatever you turn into would still only be about four foot seven.

Avatar

(Granted, it'd be four foot seven and 330 pounds, assuming you maxed out both height and weight, so you're looking at a were-form with the approximate build of Wario.)

Avatar

A partial rewrite based on reader feedback received in response to this post. I hope it's clear enough now, because there's a soft cap of ten lines/100 words on these writeups, and it's currently using every last one of them!

Starting a business with two separate bathrooms, except one of them has the symbol for alchemical antimony on the door, and the other, the symbol for alchemical phosphorus. If you ask the staff about it, they claim to understand your confusion, then lead you to a third, previously undisclosed bathroom with the alchemical symbol for potassium carbonate.

nice on the new rebelleous art, where are we on the 6 traits and 3 arts that where remaining. Cant wait to test it

Avatar

(With reference to this post here.)

"Modal Morphology" is a Trait, not a Rebellious Art. It'd be pretty underpowered if it was the latter.

Overall, we're currently sitting at 18/18 Rebellious Arts and 32/36 Traits. The last four Traits will probably take a while, though; I've committed to making them notably weirder than the existing lot (as the recent teasers of "Curative Corpus" and "Modal Morphology" no doubt attest!), so the editing is proving to be a thorny challenge.

Avatar

By popular request, player characters in Eat God can now do the Jekyll and Hyde thing.

(This one stupid paragraph is probably the most complicated piece of rules tech in the whole fucking game; you would not believe how much creative editing I had to do to prevent it from taking up half a page. I'm very curious to hear from those who've read the game's most recent playtest draft whether it's clear how this addition's rules work!)

I know there's a trait you can pick to make one of your forms bigger, but I'm having fun picturing a werewolf who's a muppet the size of the average raccoon that can transform into a vicious, ravening canine that's also the size of the average raccoon

Avatar

I mean, even if you did pick "Hulking" for your alternate form and the maximum height and weight it permits, the were-whatever you turn into would still only be about four foot seven.

Avatar

(Granted, it'd be four foot seven and 330 pounds, assuming you maxed out both height and weight, so you're looking at a were-form with the approximate build of Wario.)

Avatar

By popular request, player characters in Eat God can now do the Jekyll and Hyde thing.

(This one stupid paragraph is probably the most complicated piece of rules tech in the whole fucking game; you would not believe how much creative editing I had to do to prevent it from taking up half a page. I'm very curious to hear from those who've read the game's most recent playtest draft whether it's clear how this addition's rules work!)

I know there's a trait you can pick to make one of your forms bigger, but I'm having fun picturing a werewolf who's a muppet the size of the average raccoon that can transform into a vicious, ravening canine that's also the size of the average raccoon

Avatar

I mean, even if you did pick "Hulking" for your alternate form and the maximum height and weight it permits, the were-whatever you turn into would still only be about four foot seven.

By popular request, player characters in Eat God can now do the Jekyll and Hyde thing.

(This one stupid paragraph is probably the most complicated piece of rules tech in the whole fucking game; you would not believe how much creative editing I had to do to prevent it from taking up half a page. I'm very curious to hear from those who've read the game's most recent playtest draft whether it's clear how this addition's rules work!)

My mental state on a good day is like a character in a video game where status conditions that do opposite things stack rather than mutually annihilating. All of my numbers look perfectly normal, but then you look at my status HUD and see that I have every buff and every debuff all at once perfectly cancelling each other out, and not even God knows which one is going to wear off first.

Basically, if you're writing a story about a cursed character rules-lawyering their curse, I think the best way to go about it is to imagine that character is in a tabletop RPG and the curse is governed by a human GM who has a good sense of humour and a taste for goofy wordplay, but reacts very poorly to being treated like they're stupid.

I'll realistically never have the bandwidth to actually do this, but it occurs to me that it would in fact be extremely funny to develop a game based on that mushroom people premise I posted a while back sharing the same core system as my current project and publish them as a duology, because then I'd be able to run a crowdfunding campaign titled "Eat God and Fuck the Moon".

Avatar

Trying to creep a mutual's recent posts right now and making no headway whatsoever because their blog theme is paginated and they're posting so fast that by the time I flip to page two it's the same posts I just read on page one.

Avatar

I get to page three and see posts I haven't read yet and I'm like good, I'm finally getting somewhere – and then five posts down is what was the first post on page one when I started. They fucking lapped me.

Avatar
Image
Avatar

Hey, folks. Starting today and continuing through July 13th, all of Penguin King Games' non-PWYW titles are 50% off. This includes Zach Welhouse's Cerebos: The Crystal City – a surrealist travelogue game about riding trains and getting mixed up in existential shenanigans – as well as my own Costume Fairy Adventures (a game whose title is entirely self-explanatory) and its various supplements. You can get the whole lot for $22.50, or pick and choose individual games for half price – it works out the same either way.

It you're are interested in seeing any of the games I've got cooking right now go 1.0, the back catalogue is what pays to keep the lights on, so why not send a few bucks our way? In particular, if you've picked up Costume Fairy Adventures but not the supplements via one of those charity bundles on itch.io, this is a great chance to round out the collection – all three CFA playsets are only $7.50 with the sale.

(Credits for the preceding illustrations go to @shelandsorcery for the crab on the left and @kalkiedoodles for the queen on the right!)

Avatar

Seven days left!

Avatar

Trying to creep a mutual's recent posts right now and making no headway whatsoever because their blog theme is paginated and they're posting so fast that by the time I flip to page two it's the same posts I just read on page one.

Avatar

I get to page three and see posts I haven't read yet and I'm like good, I'm finally getting somewhere – and then five posts down is what was the first post on page one when I started. They fucking lapped me.

Trying to creep a mutual's recent posts right now and making no headway whatsoever because their blog theme is paginated and they're posting so fast that by the time I flip to page two it's the same posts I just read on page one.

Avatar

The real challenge of cooking for one is that potato size takes on disproportionate importance. There are so many dishes where one average potato isn't enough, but two average potatoes is too much, so now I'm assessing diameters and ratios like a tuber phrenologist in search of the potato that's just the right amount of potato.

Try going by overall weight rather than size

Avatar

Do I strike you as the sort of person who can reasonably be expected to keep track of partial potatoes?

consider: any partial potato can simply be boiled. miniature mashed potato for you

Avatar

Any partial potato will be forgotten in the back of the fridge until the resulting mould culture starts developing a state religion.

The Avignon Potatocy

I'm doing another KS

I'm going to be hosting a Kickstarter soon for DAWN in order to fund it as a fuller more professional project.

I'll be sharing more info as we go along, so be sure to sign up if you're interested!

Avatar

I have to confess I initially misread the ability costs table in the excerpted pages and thought we were talking about a game where standard player character abilities include "Melt Others", "Distort Food", "Repair Time" and "Breathe Ghosts".

Avatar

Like, I'm not gonna say that the X-Men and their various imitators are anything like a perfect allegory, but "it's a bad allegory because super powers really are dangerous" has never held water for me. Like, are we really just gonna uncritically accept the implicit assumption lurking in that argument that bigotry is only wrong to the extent that its targets lack the ability to threaten the status quo? Hand-wringing over whether certain minorities are inherently dangerous is – and, critically, always has been – a smoke-screen for the real conversation about who has the right to possess the capacity for violence, and you can't engage with that conversation if your opening move is to concede that the only legitimate victim is a powerless one.

Avatar

To underline what I mean about "the right to possess the capacity for violence", let's peel back the allegory and bring it back to the real-world issues that are allegedly being allegorised.

Every time the cops roll up and shoot some poor guy thirty-seven times in the back because the cell phone in his pocket looked kind of like it might be a gun, the public conversation always centres around questions like "are the police telling the truth about thinking it was a gun?" and "were the police reasonable to assume it was a gun?"

These are not the right questions to be asking.

The right question to be asking is "so what if it was a gun?"

Would the public execution of a guy who was literally just walking down the street have been justified then?

It's not accidental that stories of this type are most popular in America, where the people who can be counted on to argue that cops are behaving correctly when they kill on sight every time they see a member of a visible minority who looks like they might be packing are the exact same people who argue that carrying concealed automatic weapons without a permit is the God-given right of every red-blooded American man, woman and child.

This is not hypocrisy. They know exactly what they're doing. It's not about who is and is not dangerous: it's about who has the right to be dangerous.

Like, I'm not gonna say that the X-Men and their various imitators are anything like a perfect allegory, but "it's a bad allegory because super powers really are dangerous" has never held water for me. Like, are we really just gonna uncritically accept the implicit assumption lurking in that argument that bigotry is only wrong to the extent that its targets lack the ability to threaten the status quo? Hand-wringing over whether certain minorities are inherently dangerous is – and, critically, always has been – a smoke-screen for the real conversation about who has the right to possess the capacity for violence, and you can't engage with that conversation if your opening move is to concede that the only legitimate victim is a powerless one.

Avatar

The real challenge of cooking for one is that potato size takes on disproportionate importance. There are so many dishes where one average potato isn't enough, but two average potatoes is too much, so now I'm assessing diameters and ratios like a tuber phrenologist in search of the potato that's just the right amount of potato.

Try going by overall weight rather than size

Avatar

Do I strike you as the sort of person who can reasonably be expected to keep track of partial potatoes?

consider: any partial potato can simply be boiled. miniature mashed potato for you

Avatar

Any partial potato will be forgotten in the back of the fridge until the resulting mould culture starts developing a state religion.