#bxllet

doin a Halloween sale themed around the scariest things I can imagine: guns, ghosts, and capitalism!

guns: we of course have the post-apocalyptic cowboy game BXLLET, and its companion piece RXLOAD!

ghosts: check out KATABASIS, a game about a broken afterlife and the restless spirits trying to escape it!

capitalism: struggle to pay your bills with a shitty minimum-wage job in Unskilled Labor, or revel in the excesses of consumer waste with IMMORTAL Pop!bat 2: funK.O. (Definitive Edition)!

It’ll plant a kiss on your forehead wet with heat,

It’ll hold you at night and lay you to sleep,

It’ll paint reds and yellow and purples and fears,

It’s a stranger, it’s a ghost, it’s a lover, it’s a killer,

They only say the name in whispers and lies

IT’S A GUN IT’S A GUN IT’S A GUN

DEADLY WEAPONS LIVE ON ITCH

The new TTRPG from myself and @sublimemarch is out now! Deadly Weapons is a game about power, gender, trauma, desire, and hope. It is set in an urban fantasy world very similar to our own, but where underneath the surface Demons prowl and Avatars hunt. Players will create these Avatars, girls who one day had a gun arrive in their possession. A gun that cries in their dreams and never leaves their side. A gun which whispers in their ear that they must hunt and kill Demons. Demons are all around the Avatars, existing as classmates, bosses, or even romantic interests. But whether an Avatar fires their gun is up to them.

Deadly Weapons is a tabletop roleplaying game for about 2 to 6 players, including a guide. It is a hack of the [BXLLET> system by @rathayibacter, with a focus on atmospheric and narrative play. The game uses no dice or other randomizers. Instead, characters willingly take on various risks represented by the Avatars gaining Dooms and suffering fallout over the course of play.

Deadly Weapons is also a collage piece, made using at least 75% recycled or secondhand physical materials. The art, rules text, poetry, and fiction contained within this 32 page digital zine serves to inform your play.

I'm a big fan of @rathayibacter's [BXLLET> system, so I made a lil expansion for it!

=[SILXNCER] adds 8 new classes to the game:

The Revenant: an ultra-lethal undead who loses themself as they kill

The Debtor: a false prophet backed by a malicious, godlike entity

The Rider: the fastest damn thing in this hemisphere

The Duelist: a showy gunman with a past they can't run from

The Old Timer: just a tough old bastard

The Headsman: a supernatural bounty hunter/slasher villain

The Fallen: an old world astronaut-turned-angel

The Lovers: a well-meaning fool and their evil, sapient gun

I have the opportunity to do something very funny if I pick Treat (though I could do something equally funny with Trick), so…

A game on my wish-list, to either buy, read or play.

Have you heard of BXLLET? It's by this excellent game designer who goes by @rathayibacter. In all seriousness, I love this game and wish I could actually get to play/run it at some point.

It's set post-apocalypse, with the core resource of the game being bullets (surprising, truly). What makes it special, in my opinion, is that you are encouraged not to use your bullets, as they increase your abilities the more you own, thereby encouraging finding other solutions than simply violence. I also adore the starting equipment options for each class: the classes in this game were a strong inspiration for the choices I made for the classes in The Curse Lingers. It's a very concisely written game and I adore it.

Find BXLLET here (thanks for the ask Rath):

"The thing that got me into K6BD was someone posting a screenshot of Mother Om saying “Perish” and blowing off Gog-agog’s head. I saw that and thought, ‘Oh, that rules!’ Fun Rath trivia, the last D&D character I ever played, and ever will play, probably, was in a West Marshes campaign. They were a Kenku warlock named Pwk [pronounced “Pook”]. And Pwk’s gimmick was that they were obsessed with spellcraft and sold their original name to a fairy queen to be able to cast spells because they have no natural talent for it and never got the education you need to be a wizard. But they’d been obsessed with magic for so long that they’d trained themselves to be able to say spell names. So, instead of just being able to imitate noises, I could also say the names of spells. And I used that as how I talked. I had a notes document on my phone of every spell in D&D, with all the ones that were good at conveying ideas bolded. And only a few people managed to figure this out, but Pwk’s name was spelled ‘P-W-K’, and it stood for Power Word: Kill. Because, ultimately, that’s what Pwk saw magic as: as the power to say a word and have anything you want happen.”

Rathayibacter Toxicus

You want to read more cool stories, musings on game design and Pokemon fuckability? Then you should check out Bxllet Clip, the new ttrpg periodical! In our first issue, I interviewed Rath to get this gem and a host of others. You can also grab a fantastic new hack by Adira Slattery, a couple of adventures, some new classes, and more!

I haven't played either of these RPGs and I haven't even read Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast btw this is all just interpretation. Also I might be misremembering the Yazeba's BnB ability but I'm too afraid to check because now I wrote this whole thing

Ever since the ttrpg ability bracket I've been obsessed with the Rag-and-Bones ability that ends the fucking world. It's a fake mechanic, something that has no real effect in the game's world but creates and condenses an entire character dynamic.

[BXLLET>, another game in the bracket, has a playbook with a pretty similar mechanic, and I thought the difference between them was interesting enough to suddenly express something here for once. A BXLLET expansion, ShXll CasXngs has the Smile playbook (who might be my favorite but I haven't read all of them), whose final ability requires 30 bullets, and ends the fucking world. Like Rag-and-Bones Journey in Yazeba's BnB, this is extremely unlikely to occur, and even has a similar token cost. Obviously the abilities have entirely different emotional impact due to the wider context of the games their placed in, but I think the small differences between them really help the vibe of each ability fit in their world.