#rules lite

Guess who turned it into a TTRPG?

DEMON CALIBER is a new game that I made! It's focused on fast everything! Fast character creation! Fast killing of enemies! Fast movement! Fast dying!

If you've ever wanted to feel like V1 Ultrakill smashing through the hordes of hell or Duke Nukem or Lo Wang or B.J. Blazkcowicz, this is for you!

If you've also wanted to do something akin to Left 4 Dead, CoD Zombies, or Payday, this is also for you!

It's also pay what you want, so for free as well. There was also no CC0 art online that held the exact type of violence I wanted for the cover art, so I suppose what you see will have to do for now.

You can get it now at itch.io!

Girls just want to have a coup. Play a friend(ish) group of your favorite feminine archetypes as you find a way to stage a coup to overthrow the mayor (he knows what he did).

Favorite kinds of girls!

You can be any kind of girl you want (as long as it's on the list). The kind of girl you are will make certain tasks so absolutely easy that you can just... do it. Where other girls might struggle and have to make a skill roll (ugh), you're not like other girls. Anything you do that fits your stereotype will just work. And actually work, not todd howard work.

VSCO Girl

Tradwife

Big Tiddy Goth GF

e-Girl

Athlete

Fangirl

Astrology Girl

The Feminine Urge to have stats!

Everyone knows that stats are a spectrum. So every character gets three spectra on which to place themselves! Every character gives themselves a score from 1 to 10 on each spectrum, a score that they will try to roll over or under in various scenarios throughout the game

The Gaslight/Emptah spectrum

This spectrum denotes your emotional abilities. A low score indicates that you're good at gaslighting, while a high score means you're more of an empath. Roll over your score to gaslight, and roll under your score to do some empath shit

The Gatekeep/Enlighten Spectrum

This spectrum denotes your relational abilities. A low score indicates that you're good at gatekeeping, while a high score means you love to enlighten others. Roll over your score to gatekeep, and roll under your score to enlighten that bitch.

The Girlboss/Enable Spectrum

This spectrum denotes your attitude towards action. A low score indicates that you're a girlbossing bitch, while a high score means you're an enabler. Roll over your score to girlboss, and roll under your score to be an enabler.

When you try to do something which has a chance to fail, your GM will ask you to roll 1d10 against some skill (gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss, empath, enlighten, or enable). If your roll succeeds then you accomplish what you were trying to do (you go, girl). If your roll fails however, then not only do you not get what you wanted, but the situation gets worse somehow (if you want to be really cool and sexy then you could suggest a way for it to get worse to the GM). Rolling exactly on your score will always succeed.

Criticals When making a roll, you can (and will, eventually) roll on one of the extreme ends of your spectrum. When you're trying to roll high (G-skills) then you will critically succeed on a 10, and critically fail on a 1. When you're trying to roll low (E-skills) then you will critically succeed on a 1, and critically fail on a 10.

A Little Something Special

In addition to your archetype and your skills, every character can instantly succeed on a G-skill check (gaslight, gatekeep, and girlboss) by deciding to Be Toxic. If you Be Toxic to pass a check, then you will get -1 karma, and any relationship related to the check takes a -1.

Karma's a bitch

When you critically fail, if you have negative karma then the situation gets remarkably worse. Karma will go one step towards 0 (perfect balance 😌). But, uhh, don't rest too long on the euphoria of cosmic bliss. Your situation just went to shit.

Relationships?

All relationships start at a neutral value of 10. When someone likes you more, their relationship score will be higher. If they like you less, that relationship score will be lower. The relationship score doesn't necessarily relate to how close someone is. You can be very close to someone and still absolutely despise them. Use relationship scores as a roleplay aid.

Add on to this!

I am a real person and not a spam bot. I'm based in Ireland, and didn't really know what to do here at first. I was just liking and reblogging stuff, but not posting, and that certainly looks like bot behaviour.

Anyway, I wrote one post about ttrpg stuff, so I think I'll keep it on that trajectory with this blog.

When it's Halloween, I like to play creepy Halloweenie games. Ok, well I might like spooky games all year-round, but for the horror season it's time to pull out all stops. When I received this package in the mail last month, I knew it'd be perfect for the weekend before Halloween:

Curios: Albrecht Manor is "an epistolary horror mystery experience" by Seb Pines, the first in the new Curios series from Good Luck Press. There is no single person who runs the game. No one knows what they're about to open, other than what you see on the blurb.

The notion of the game is that the players are "Researchers" of "The Archive" who receive evidence and ephemera leftover after the appearance of supernatural phenomena. The details on the Archive is sparse, but you an unbothered dayjob vibe oozes from the tone. This manila envelope is all you're going to get, and your job is to make some declarative statements by the end of the research.

It's a fun space to play. I could see the experience of play spanning the spectrum between a total LARP and completely player-facing. For our game, we were closer to the player-facing end of that spectrum, and had a fabulous evening.

What's inside?

The Albrecht Manor manila envelope contains 11 letters and two postcards, along with a short mailing notice and the "Archive" report card. Like any good horror story, the letters start off tame with bits of weird, yet quickly start including photos, newspaper snippets, blueprints and administrative papers.

From tearing open the letters to the difference in paper textures, styles and handwritten bits were thrilling to handle. We were surprised how each piece, and sometimes innocuous details at first, came back to have us rifling back through what we'd read before.

Play Experience

With the stack of letters in the center of the table, without prior discussion, we naturally began to play by each picking up a letter/postcard, and circling, writing notes, and sharing weird details. This created a fun, anachronistic revelation of details, as sometimes one bit would go unremarked earlier would pop up in someone else's letters.

When an important detail came to the forefront of this developing narrative, I appreciated how the spotlight would pass around each of us adding more context or details or asking questions we weren't sure how to answer. But it's extremely difficult to discuss direct details without spoiling the contents of the letters. The discovery of certain documents and finding the inter-connectivity is the fun of this game.

The game comes with a single paragraph of instruction, which can seem daunting, but I was in awe of how the physical presentation made space for our own curiosity to define the bounds of how we approached the mystery. We examined photos under different types of lamplight, tried using the zoom on our smartphones as impromptu magnifying lenses, and folded paper in all sorts of ways. Most importantly, we were enraptured by this game for nearly three hours and were astonished at how fast the time passed.

We all appreciated how there is no direct, singular answer, and that we the players were the ones to define the story from our collective interpretation. It's not a good mystery, especially a ghost story mystery, if you're not left with more questions by the end.

Spoilers at the next heading!

Three specific moments literally gave me chills. I don't want to spoil those here. After the photo and line break is the report that was sent to the Archivist at curiosarchive.net. I realize now that we didn't "even "formally" discuss how we would classify the Albrecht Manor phenomena, but the classification is hinted at.

While I don't intend to spoil specific details in the letters, the submitted report has major spoilers. So if you haven't played this game, don't read any further!

Submitted Report to the Archivist

29/10/2023

Dear Archivist,

The first sentence on the first postcard, unwittingly, says it all, "the house is a dream."

This group of Archive researchers have deemed this household, built by one Damian Albrecht, to be a spiritual machine. This trap inhabits the mind of its occupants, and grows and shifts according to its creator's and past occupants' hopes and dreams of a warm household. The researchers are even hesitant to call this a haunting, but agree the house appears to be a spatio-temporal machination propelled by the spirits it is required to consume to keep operating. The fire, in this interpretation, is a convenient excuse for the house to re-enter its slumbering stasis. The researchers' consensus is that there must be only one true fire, but could not access WHEN that may be.

The researchers agreed, though without substantial evidence, the purpose of this machine is to sustain not only long life to its creator, Damian Albrecht, but also to impose HIS dream onto others, and subsume their dreams to feed his own. Again, the fire is a convenient cover-up for the displaced spirits Albrecht has trapped.

The researchers were divided on several facets, foremost questioning the actual existence of the principal figures: Alex Dunn and Anne Wilson. Could it be that Alex Dunn is in fact Albrecht? Has the persona of Alex Dunn created the character of Anne Wilson to represent the inhabitants of St. Ann? Will there be an all-consuming fire that destroys the town, and this house (and letters) are calling the community to action, as a sort of warning? Does Albrecht Manor's machinery twist and channel the powers of the Catholic Saint Ann, whose emblem is a Door, to imbue itself with supernatural power? If Alex Dunn is/was a real person, were they drawn to the house due to past trauma involving Anne and the implied kitchen fire that took place in the past? Did this oft-alluded-to fire kill Anne?

Many loose ends remain, but these Archive Researchers remain confident that the initial readings of the Albrecht Manor as deviating from the traditional haunting are correct. The "ghosts" are most likely Albrecht himself, and the temporal echoes of the Manor's past occupants. We put forth that through mechano-spiritual insights, "Damian Albrecht" built Albrecht Manor to trap people into its/his dreams of a perfect home. As a single household can never be "perfect" in his madness, the Manor and its master yearn to consume more ideals to feed this imperfect spiritual machine.

Thank you for reading, dear Archivist.

Yesterday, I chatted with an artist who has created a beautiful piece for my upcoming game Invitation.

This artist had never played TTRPGs before, and we're casting a broad net with the audience, which means Invitation is incredibly rules-lite (and honestly pretty RP-lite as well).

It's a coloring game where you collaborate and discuss with the other players as you go.

So much to love about the talented artist, but my favorite moment was when she revealed that she'd playtested the game to make sure her piece was playable. She and her daughter sat down, read the rules, and played together over multiple sessions!

They brainstormed, got creative, and ended up with a unique and stunning piece that they worked on together.

An artist and her child, collaborating, playing, creating together.

That's the point of Invitation. It's welcoming players to make the game their own. It comes with suggestions but invites you to ignore any that don't work.

And the piece that this artist created is absolutely an invitation as well. There's a story in it, a mystery. And the mystery will be solved a thousand ways by a thousand players (okay, that's a bit ambitious).

Hello! I am writing a book for Warlock! the rules-lite OSR game by Greg Saunders. This is subject to change, but this may be one of the careers included in the book. Skrilt Corpse Nurse

Small Blade 10, Throw 10, Medicine 12, Streetwise 12, Stealth 12

You dedicate yourself to the continuation and prosperity of Ratmen. You are a midwife, caring for Mother Rat before she births a brood. You provide fresh human corpses for the young to feed on. You teach them the way of Skrilt as they grow.

When times are tough and death does not come to humans when needed, you are an assassin. You kill, not with malice, but with love. You kill to replace humans with Skrilt and cover The Kingdom with Swarms of your kind.

Equipment: A small dagger, three sharp darts, 50ft of rope, basket or bucket, rag wrap that obscured your identity, sort of. Vile of poison.

Who have you killed? (roll a d6)

A noble. He wore shiny shoes.

An elf of the Wildfire. Oops. They wore cloak--thought they were human.

Guard captain of home city. Guards vow to take my tail.

A rival Skrilt from your Swarm. Hope nobody find out.

A mother of four children. Don’t know what I feel bad.

I kill a woman who were assassining noble. Now noble be my friend. Weird human.

Who is your favorite child? (roll a d6)

Skrilt 79, they good Tracker. Love in their heart.

Skrilt 92, they work with we as Corpse Nurse.

Skirlt 143, they ride biggest Feral ever!

Bone Crusher, they have big hammer. Save my life one time.

This And That, they make anything out of this and that.

Well hey if you're not gonna download the thing, spare a boy a reblog?

Well, I'm not sure you could call it an update, but it sure is a big-ass change. We have an actual layout and design now! Even a little art! Though not that much, because I don't have the assets to do it. Mostly just text in boxes.

But c'mon, don't tell me you don't want to launch a fascist through a door straight onto a jump pad and shoot him in midair, richocheting the bullet into five other Nazis.

Don't tell me you don't want to blast a demon into a fine red mist with a megavolt tesla and then burn whatever's left of him into ash.

Don't tell me you don't want to blast yourself into the air with a kiloton explosive and plant a shovel through a mutant skull on your way down

I will tell you that not only are these things possible, they are encouraged.

If you've ever wanted to be V1 or Soldier from TF2 or Jacket or Doomguy or generally just have BFG Division play in the background whenever you enter a room, this is the thing for you.

Pick up Demon Caliber today on itch.io! It is completely and totally free unless you want to pay me, in which case it costs as much as you want it to.