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.
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I wish I was better about paying attention to channel names because I did watch a video a while back and this was basically the whole video summed up. Like, everyone knows Light was an arrogant fool who sewed the seeds of his own destruction but his solution to the societal problems he lamented about in the first chapter was literally something only the juvenile son of a cop could have come up with.
To Light, Crime was the source of society's "Rot." And his philosophy on what constituted "crime" was basically about normal-ass people who were willing to break the law. you know, the laws Cops enforce.
It also explains why he's indiscriminate rather than surgical. Because of his own biases, he never stops to consider the flaws in the methods of who gets arrested, or how that never actually seems to have an impact on Crime Rates tm. Cops (like Light) simply see this as evidence that they're not arresting enough people! That they're not going far enough! And these are the values our protagonist was raised with. A surgical strike would let Real Criminals off the hook, while targeting people who, yes, may be more evil by orders of magnitude, but they do it in a LEGAL way!
I don't think the story ever consciously addresses this. The Watsonian explanation for that would be that we don't really get to see exactly WHAT values Light's dad instills in his children - he's a major character, but Light spends far more time putting him on a pedestal than actually engaging with him. A couple Doylist explanations might be either that Ohba didn't condone Light's actions, and considered an outside exploration of his motivations to be either uninteresting to explore, or perhaps too much of a challenge to pull off in a story that so heavily revolves around the protagonist's inner monologue. I think it's far more likely, though, that this wasn't intentional - Light's dad was a cop so that he could be on the Kira taskforce and we could get the drama of Light being hunted by his own father, and the blind spots that created for both characters. Knowing the story, and how these characters are used, I find it hard to believe there were intentional ramifications beyond that. But that doesn't change the fact that they're there, and more than anything it serves as an explanation for why Light was the way he was.
Corollary: the Netflix adaptation that moved the action to America could've been so fucking good but they were too cowardly to write an actual exploration of how Light is basically a school shooter
the thing about Tangled is that this is a story geared towards little girls (even if it's "fun for the whole family," it's a disney princess movie, it's geared towards little girls), and it says, "here is a girl who is naive and doesn't know anything about the 'Real World' or how to navigate it safely and correctly. now pay close attention: the good guys are the ones who help her grow and explore new things while still respecting her own perspective and feelings, not making her feel stupid. the bad guys are the ones who tell her that she is too weak/immature/naive to do the things she wants to do, because she is fragile and needs protecting." and I watched this when I was nine years old and it resonated deep in a part of me that I couldn't articulate with words yet.
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
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.
“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
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.
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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.
Vermin's Fetid Pit @legendaryvermin - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
