#genesys

CW: Implied Violence

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With the power cut the courtyard's lanterns hold no light. The garden's various plants and flowers all have adopted the night becoming sharp and angular shadows. From the moon a pale blue light shines and sky appears thrice. Twice above and once below onto the still pool that lies uninhabited at this hour. Standing at its edge lies to the source of the low and melodic wails that echoed through out the apartment complex.

It stands tall enough to peer through a second story window and several nearby are caved in undoubtably by its intrusion. Its a sleek bipedal form with muscular legs and arms that end in three wicked claws. Its head is long and narrow, belying rows of wicked sharp teeth that glisten covered in a dark liquid. From its back extends a round sail, down the spine.

Most striking are the eyes, pure white orbs staring as if they are a void looking outward to the world. The beast emits another call and the message is clear. This land is haunted and here is the ghost.

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The whole session is here:

Nothing I’ve really been drawing is anything worth posting but I do have a couple of sketches folks might be interested in?

Our pathfinder gm is teaching three of us a new system called genesys, and we made au versions of our characters in the pathfinder game- so here’s Ingo!

His backstory is that he is a changeling that failed to replace emmet and was then taken in and raised as emmet’s twin, though the truth of what he is wasn’t hidden from him. But it wasn’t demonized either and his parents loved him dearly.

However doing his own research on changelings, he started to think of himself as a parasite, and then turned to the magics of nature- trying to replace the otherworldly magick that makes him with something from “the natural world”

It fails, and only ends up warping him.

Now bearing a curse that causes him to become almost “mindless” and violent when under too much strain, he ran away from home to try and find a way to manage his new life, surrounded by adventurers he hopes can keep everyone around them safe from him.

He writes his family letters, and is going to find a way for them to send him letters back due to the group never being in one place for too long…

emmet doesn’t know what he’d write him. All he can think to say is to beg him to come home. To let them help.

Design Under cut cuz. Body horror. But if folks wanna know more about him I’d love to share- I do plan on cleaning up the second drawing more cuz I’m proud of it!

I wanna shift away from filthy biopunk to clinically clean biopunk

Snow white flesh, white and clear chitin and keratin, thin layers of clear antimicrobial slime on the internal bits

Glowing nodules for lights and neuron clusters and neural link points

Medical, clinical, clean, yet squishy, soft, alive

Go run a one-shot in Genesys.

I’m serious. One session. Pick a premise. Grab three friends. Run a heist, a dungeon crawl, a tense negotiation, whatever sounds fun. Give yourselves three hours and see what happens. You don’t need to commit to a campaign. You don’t need to master the system. You just need to roll some weird dice and find out if this thing clicks.

Maybe you’ve never heard of Genesys. Or maybe you know about narrative dice and collaborative storytelling, or you read my Book of Genesys. If so, you know what the system does and what it asks of you. If not, and you’re still here, some part of you is curious.

You will be bad at this at first. You’ll stare at Advantage and have no idea what it means. You’ll call for rolls out of habit for things that don’t advance the plot. You’ll miss obvious complications. You’ll forget Story Points exist. You’ll interpret dice wrong and fumble mid-scene.

That’s fine. Do it anyway.

Done is better than perfect. You learn Genesys by using it, not by reading about it. Be messy. Let scenes spiral. Its whole design assumes you’re figuring it out together as you go. Let your players make assertions you didn’t prep for. Every player I’ve taught this system to stumbled through their first session and came out the other side wanting more. If you’re waiting until you feel “ready” to run Genesys, you’re going to wait forever!

Start small. You don’t need a setting bible. You don’t need a campaign arc. You need a situation, some NPCs who want different things, and enough context for your players to make interesting choices. Three factions. One location. A ticking clock.

Use a published adventure if that feels safer. Steal a plot from a movie. Run a session in a setting you already know. The barriers to entry are only as low as you make them.

And if the one-shot doesn’t work? If the dice feel like too much system, if the improv exhausts you, if your table bounces off it completely—fine. You tried something new and you learned what your table needs.

But if it does work... If someone at your table has that moment where the dice surprise them and the story pivots and everyone gasps because nobody saw it coming…you’re going to want more.