Greetings internet wanderer! You can call me Vermin/Elvie and I'm a game designer, actual play streamer, and ttrpg cretin lurking around twitter, twitch, youtube and now tumblr!
I have work on itch.io that has everything from medium weight tactical RPGs, to lyric games, to goofy erotic larps. Most stuff is either free or pay what you can, and anything that has a set price point also has a barrel of Community Copies that refill whenever someone buys the game outright.
https://legendary-vermin.itch.io/
I'm also an AP streamer who shows up predominantly on Neon Lights Roleplay! I've been in everything from high-fantasy games, to Resident Evil style horror games, and you can find VODs of my work here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUYBnjyXT3Cp4KTnM1gqrVI4S9-k1FUhL
A couple of highlights:
Games Stuff
Alley-Oop!
Alley-Oop! is a game I wrote with my wife in 2019 that is based on the WNBA's trip into the Wubble, a recreation center that was closed to the public, allowing the players to play in relative safety in spite of the dangerous early days of the pandemic. It was also inspired by the rise of Blaseball and Marbula One, and the idea that we as humans are really good at taking totally random noise and creating exciting stories by giving otherwise meaningless objects their own personalities.
As such, the game isn't about simulating basketball as much as it is about commentating it, and then deciding who these players are based on how the dice fall. Oh, and those dice? They are your players! Yeah! The pink d4 is Ollie Orion, and she's in the running for rookie of the year! But it's been hard for her to concentrate because she recently had a break up with that orange d10 on the other team. Maybe after this round of basketball, you and your friends will RP a scene between the two of them, where they have to shoot a commercial together. Maybe their love will be reignited?????
Alley-Oop! is also one of only a couple of games I wrote that got a print run, and the book is Gorgeous!!
Æthernet
Far and away one of my most popular games, Æthernet asks the question "What if, in the far future when humanity travels the stars and the internet is immersive VR, someone accidentally opened a rift to another dimension in the internet, and turned the internet into a literal digital hellscape?" and follows that question up with "What if we had to do dungeon crawls there as part of the gig economy?"
Inspired by Doom (duh) and dozens of stories about the intersection of Magic and Technology, Æthernet is a small version of a game I want to make Very Large one day.
No Amount Of Armor: Ashcan Edition
I will probably talk about this game a ton here, but No Amount of Armor is my diet-tactics story-driven mecha RPG that takes you to the razor's edge of warfare. Mechanically, it sits between heavy tactical games like Lancer and fully story driven games like Firebrands, giving players the tools to embody characters that feel like they have a stake in the world, and build mechs that feel like they can throw a punch to level a building.
Right now, this game is still in development, and you are invited to give feedback and help shape the game's final form!
Actual Play Highlights
You can watch any of the shows I've been in on the youtube playlist above, but here are some finished Series that are digestible and fun!
Resident Evil: Catalyst
A game of The Company made for The Top Shelf in three parts! It follows a group of engineers, scientists and soldiers in the wake of an early break out of a combination of a G-Virus and Las Plagas. It ends in tragedy in one of the highest stakes conversations I've ever had the pleasure to participate in in TRPG.
Under Twilit Skies
Under Twilit Skies came together as a charity stream, and became so much more than that. At its core is the very real pain of living under state violence, and the need to fight back.
5 talented pilots fight against the empire that colonized, brutalized, killed and created them. 4 episodes of high octane, high drama mecha action in Armour Astir: Advent.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
It’s a mess here: someone looked your gift dark horse in the mouth, led it to water, and jumped back on it. Your ducks aren’t in a row, someone counted the chickens before they hatched. Your geese are silly, your brown cows aren’t explaining how, and every one of these sheep is a wolf but they don’t even notice with the amount of wool over their eyes. I’m fining you one million gold coins.
lesbian sex but you're a supervillain and you strap the hero's girlfriend to a table to perform evil and dangerous experiments on her while the hero watches on a comically large and evil screen but it turns out they're both into it.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
“my father is a boy and my mother is a girl so i’m mixed” is the funniest possible response to someone asking your gender and it came from 6’5 Viking footballer and notable weird little guy Erling Haaland on a Snapchat
bsky post complaining about a TTRPG (lancer, if it matters) uses the phrase "mechanical support for storytelling" and the only thing I could think to do is ask you if that seems like a cromulent complaint to have about a TTRPG because based on everything I've read on your treatises on the subject it doesn't seem like one but I am willing to live in the timeline where I pissed on my reading comprehension
See, the context actually does matter there; while "lack of mechanical support for storytelling" is a meaningless criticism in the abstract because nobody can agree what we actually mean when we say "story", let alone what it entails for a game to support having one, with respect to Lancer I strongly suspect that they're saying "story" in the way that folks who've mainly experienced tabletop roleplaying via Dungeons & Dragons and its various imitators say "story" – which is to say, as a shorthand for "literally everything other than combat"; and by "combat" in this context we mean "things that happen when you're inside a giant robot".
(The problems with treating "story" and "combat" as disjoint sets are, of course, beyond the scope of this post!)
It's a frequent complaint regarding Lancer that the framework of play doesn't give a shit about anything that happens when you're not actively stomping around inside a giant robot, and it's not an unfounded one. Heck, one earlier first-party supplements straight up yanks out all of the non-giant-robot mechanics and replaces them wholesale with something more suited to that supplement's particular milieu and it basically doesn't affect the gameplay loop at all; that's how severe the disconnect between giant-robot play and non-giant-robot play is.
Now, given the kind of game that Lancer is, we can quibble about whether "the non-giant-robot play is almost entirely unconnected with the giant-robot play" is a reasonable criticism, but at the very least it's an intelligible criticism.
I think a more useful paradigm here rather than "Story" is an interest in "the dynamics of narrative conflict". Especially when you compare it to games roughly in its aesthetic and thematic lane, such as Armor Astir or MF0: Firebrands, Lancer really isn't interested in helping you cultivate dynamic moments that aren't in a mech, or that focus on the intent and personalities of the characters involved. On top of that, the moments in the mech are most often dynamic not in a narrative way (e.g. about showing who the character is as a soldier) rather than about what the player selected to solve combat scenarios.
If you ever hear the phrase "fascism is aesthetics as politics," that's what this post is talking about.
It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.
It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.
This is why a lot of conservatives and other right wingers can get straight up angry when you suggest things like reform or social measures to reduce crime. They don't want crime to be reduced, they want an eternal war against "crime" because it provides an arena for the righteous to demonstrate virtue by brutalizing their enemies.
sorry to everyone out there who thinks they have the funniest tshirt but i think i can confidently say i just saw the actual funniest tshirt just now. i passed by a beautiful black woman with long multicolor braids blowing majestically in the beach breeze & she was wearing an oversized tshirt that said in gigantic letters "WHITE BOY OF THE YEAR"
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.
Kids books is probably not the best way to word it, you can enjoy them at every age, including your childhood, as you get older you may find new truths in them, but they're still good for any age.
I think it would be really wonderful if seagulls were constructed more like bottles with a mystery inside. What I'm imagining is that were you to catch one, you could then unscrew its face and there would be a glowing gem nestled in some sort of socket. The Core of the Gull so to speak. Then you could swap that around with other seagulls, and after screwing the faces back on they would fly off as if nothing happened. Hm... Is this too esoteric, or do some of you see what I am getting at?
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I do think the ability to emoji-react is a net win for human communication. not only does it give you an outlet for 'I see and acknowledge this but don't have a verbal response' but it also adds a pleasing alethiometer element to things
my coworker announces that he's off to the dentist. someone reacts with a tooth emoji. is this a statement of dentist solidarity? a wish for my coworker to return with more (or fewer?) teeth than he set out with? simple word association? who can say
