#tatterpigs

Trap someone and edit their memories, tailoring them to your tastes. Struggle as you see who you were, slipping away. Remember: there is no self. There is only you.

There is no self, there is only you is a semi-epistolary game for two. One player, the Captor, will progressively edit the memories of the other player, their Subject, as the Subject struggles to retain scraps of who they were. Play consists of a series of rounds, alternating between scenes observing the Subject’s day to day life and the their being confronted by their Captor’s visions of who they could be as they fight against the changes they're making. They'll lose, of course, unless they can escape. But maybe they can convince their Captor to consider their wants and needs? We all have delusions we're comforted by.

Play continues until the Captor’s work is done and they wish to play with their doll, or until the Subject grasps freedom for even a moment- but there's no going back. You are always never more or less than yourself.

Love and hate are just two sides of obsession.

Toxic Sword Lesbians fight their shared enemies when they’re not fighting each other. They know they shouldn’t say something hurtful or give in to escape over responsibility, but they do. They lash out over disagreements on ideals and on expectations. They give in to their worst self-destructive impulses. And then they pick themselves up off the ground and go help their loved ones, because that’s the right thing to do.

Toxic Sword Lesbians is a game for telling stories about the most awful women you can make up to love, which is to say: it's a hack for telling spicier, more emotionally fraught stories in Thirsty Sword Lesbians. In it, you'll find the following tools for Making Her (Your Character) Worse:

Tailored GM and player agendas for running the game

Updated core moves

New Sex and Intimacy moves for each playbook

New relationship questions and GM moves for each playbook

More evil Truths of Heart and Blade

Recommended TSL-official settings and scenarios for running Toxic Sword Lesbians

Four new settings that highlight the fraught nature of many aspects of queer identity

Four musicians. Thirteen dice. One final, desperate shot at immortality.

LAST TRAIN TO BREMEN: A Tragedy for a Doomed Quartet, by Caro Asercion , now available on itch

LAST TRAIN TO BREMEN uses snappy mechanics based on Liar's Dice to deliver a grim tale of secrets, backstabbing, and betrayal.

Six years after a cosmic ray entered my brain and gave me the idea for this, I've finally gotten it edited and formatted into a nice, polished one page (front and back) TTRPG.

The game's premise is that, three years ago, a mad scientist invented an improbable T-cell injection that lets people permanently change their shape. A person can come up with any biologically valid form (and quite a few biologically invalid ones), and with just one needle-poke and a weekend of bed rest, make that hypothetical body their own.

But the game's thesis is that it's not enough, on its own, to magically become your "ideal self". Like a teenager going through puberty, one must still take the necessary time and awkward effort to grow into that self – figuring out how to be that person, and how that person fits into the world around them.

“Listen now: we have nothing but time, so I shall not rush. The first violence I commit to you is to tell you my story. You will know before you die: My mother died when she bore me, hooked to tubes and deadlife machines. Your men had her bear me with the assistance of an exo: a machine massaged her heart, currents forced her muscles to work, a black box strapped to her chest forced breath into her lungs. All of this because you knew. You knew at that point the only protest we had was to die and deny you new bodies.

So you took me from her and I never knew her again and in the care of your stone-matrons I learned how to tear worlds to pieces. I learned the lash, and the pick, and how to read the earth you had me kill.

“When I was ten, I learned that I must take these pills to survive. That I was born riddled with cancers that you would never take from me – too expensive. The recovery process too long. And your quarterly profits could never slip, as it would mean ruin for your name.

“Look at me. You are why we are hideous. Your propaganda paints us as beasts – but it is your hand that shapes our flesh. It is your word that scars our skin and bids cancer grow thick in our bodies. In the names of manna and your house, you ruin millions.

Millions. There are millions of us and countless more. This is your unbecoming. Your death, below your feet. Every inch of every palace and ship and grand city you build, you build on our backs, with our labor, at the cost of our lives. It began in the mines, but it will not end there: your Baronies are as riddled with us as my body is with metastasis.

Yes, weep now. For your perfect face. Your perfect worlds. Your perfect dominion.

Do you know that I did not know what the sky was until the Ungratefuls found me? Liberation means this: not simply seeing the sky, but knowing that there is such a thing as land without stone above you. And then knowing that there are those who put you there. I always thought – we were always taught this – that we were damned and penitent. That we had transgressed against Lordgod’s perfect kingdom and must mine in penance.

How wrong I was! It was not a divine prescript that doomed us to labor, but you and others like you. How surmountable the problem became then.

“This is the Ungratefuls’ gift to me. This is their gift to the rest of us – the waste, the offal of your courts and palaces. This is why even your machines fight alongside us. Because you never taught us there could be a thing like the sky. Because you thought that we would never learn.

Goodbye, grand baron. Your house burns, your coffers have been emptied, your monuments have been torn down. Your line – your sons and daughters – hang from the balconies of your own palace.

We learned, grand baron. We learned how to hope, and who to hate.