#the arpees

Idea: online game of Armour Astir, where instead of people piloting mechs you are magical girls*, to be played for c. two hours a week starting somewhere 8:00-16:00 US Central time Monday-Thursday

Pictured: the druid, who is an actual literal bird, as a size comparison for the two ancient dreams the party invited out of the ruins.

Last time in our “D&D” group, the players shot down an ENTIRE DUNGEON that I had been CAREFULLY CRAFTING over the course of like A YEAR, and also invited an ancient dream into a 37000yo giant handgun. This time, the party teleported to the crash site of said dungeon, where the divine casters focused on manipulating water to quench some of the fires, and the scouts dug into the corpse of MY BELOVÈD DUNGEON. The former was fun because they saved about 250 square miles of forest from burning in wildfires, mostly using methods that don’t quite follow the rules but absolutely follow from the fiction. The latter was fun because they got to play cards with two dream monsters, and also spelunked the corpse which let them see some of the cool things about THE BEST DUNGEON I WILL EVER CONCEIVE OF IN MY LIFE, WHICH THEY DESTROYED WITH A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION INSTEAD OF SPELUNKING PERSONALLY WHILE IT WAS ALIVE. At least I got my fix of exposing friends to audio descriptions of body horror, which is one of my favorite parts of GMing >:^3c.

The setting is dominated by goblinoids, but kobolds, orcs, humans, and dwarves are also major players in the area. Characters should expect to be extraordinary, but not extrapowerful; adventures will be full of magic, much like the world itself, but not necessarily focused on it.  

As the GM for this game, my agenda is to:

Create a realistic world with fantastic underpinnings

Think small and play big

Incentivize risk-taking

Ask questions without expecting one answer

Play to find out what happens 

The principles I want players to hold are to:

Describe the world in explicit, rich detail

Take risks

Receive consequences

Muck things up

Together, I hope we can:

Hold on lightly to the lives of the characters

Collaborate to tell the story

Think outside the box

Have fun! :^)

If those agendas & principles sound interesting and you would like to play, please like this post! Even if two people have already responded! If you have limited availability or wanna be proactive for when we're deciding who plays, reply to this post/send me an ask/message me with times of the week where you could devote 2-4 hours to playing tabletop RPGs.

Minimum technical requirements:

A Discord account, and preferably the app because running it through a browser window is super buggy (free)

A sufficiently stable internet connection to communicate verbally

A sufficient command of spoken English to communicate verbally

Today in D&D we had individually tailored visions where something was just…different, about the universe in each vision, where the PCs were either weaker or in a different job or wildly successful and popular, and we poked at how a life would play out in a way that I was hoping would bring emotional distress. Mercury expressed surprise, after the session, that the nightmare that Lledhyxshek was put through wasn’t more…sad? Like they didn’t expect any particular thing, just, they Won a lot more than they thought they would (I mean like don’t get me wrong they died painfully at the end it just wasn’t in, like, a climactic battle where they were powerless to shield everyone and literally 100% of their friends died; it was instead “you can’t save everyone, and you trying in yr usual way almost destroyed the same people you tried to save”).

I woke up from a dream at 2:20 in the morning - thank you, Discord app notifications and also Hauke talking in group text at 8:20 local time, genuinely thank you - and shared with Mercury the, like, motivating principle behind why I structured their nightmare like I did

Like, the nightmares I played out for my players are basically how my nightmares play out. I just woke up from a dream that there was some sort of Boy Scout Troop 391 reunion and I had only agreed to go bc I was told that there would be women there as part of official business but like after arriving, a) the task I had been assigned to was something that I was just about to get good at but then they were like “oh yeah definitely…definitely stop that please we don’t need it anymore” and b) I found out that they had registered me in the male contingent instead of as the second of two women in the female contingent and I was just angry? about the feeling of impotence - not in the sense of “loss of male virility” but in the sense of having no outlet for myself and no way to Make People See.

No matter how much I was incredulously like “we need to change this right now immediately! How could you have done this to me, do you not understand the problem?” I was just met with noncommittal shrugs and “it’s not a big deal”. So like my nightmare didn’t hit me over the head with threatening my sense of femininity - in fact it was kind of affirming bc I was Oh My Lordt So Very Different In Subtle Ways From These Weird Men - but instead got very directly at my deep-seated fears of obsolence and oblivious cisgender bureaucracy, both of which come from my central fear of having no agency nor talent.

Also for some reason I literally never saw this other woman in our contingent? Even in the dream I thought that was odd, lmao.