Tag: Soulslike
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Early thoughts for #Dungeon23
If you’ve read 2400 (or are wondering when I’ll ever finish or revise my various other long games), you know I find it easiest to make RPGs in bite-sized chunks. No wonder that I was immediately excited by Sean McCoy’s #Dungeon23 idea — building a 12-level, 365-room megadungeon, one day at a time for a year.…
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2400 devlog: Data Loss
Data Loss is a soulslike sci-fi TTRPG scenario about waking up in a cloning station on a ruined world, tasked with gathering memories of the dead to piece together the situation and how to survive it. It’s available as part of the full 2400 series on Itch.io, and on its own and in the 2400…
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Soulslike campaign suggestions
I got a nice email today from someone wondering what kinds of adventures I’d run using Grave, and my response was so long I figured I might as well turn it into a blog post. Here are some things I used for my own soulslike RPG campaigns—maybe you’ll find them handy too! Exhumed is a…
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Gauge: A diceless RPG about survival
The Your Move Jam posed a challenge: Design a “Powered by the Apocalypse” (a.k.a. “PbtA”) game with only a single move. I’d been sitting on an idea for just such a game for a long time: Gauge, a diceless, token-based game about surviving in hostile environments with tight resources. I’d been sitting on it because…
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Grave 1.0 release notes & alternate rules
After five months of playtesting, I’m finally calling Grave (more or less) done. This game offers a minimalist D&D-inspired rule set for soulslike fantasy adventures, built on Ben Milton’s tried-and-true Knave. Like Knave, it only offers hints of an implied setting, so it works best when paired with “Old School Renaissance” (OSR) adventure modules and…
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Playtesting the dullest demonslaying
Yesterday, my group took Grave for a spin for the third time. I knew that they were nearing the end of their journey through the Veins of the Earth, so I prepared a number of other locations for them to visit next, unsure of which they’d pick. An ever surprising lot, they picked the absolute…
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Exhumed: Pamphlet Dungeon Edition
Last night, I completed a version of Exhumed for the Pamphlet Dungeon Jam hosted by Nate Treme—about half a minute after the jam closed at 1:00am local time. (It’s been a rough week.) I was disappointed to be unable to show it off among the other excellent pieces, but I figured, hey, I made the…
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Searchers of the Untitled: 2 one-page D&Dish games
Searchers of the Unknown is a one-page take on old school D&D, built on a simple premise: Any character can be boiled down to a five-item stat line of the sort used for monsters (like “AC 12 MV 10′ HD 3 HP 12 #AT 1 D d8 sword”). In a clever bit of design, armor…
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Play Report: (Soulslike) Veins of the Earth
Veins of the Earth is a weird, evocative, generally excellent guide to subterranean D&Dish adventure. There is more in there than I will ever be able to use, but I intend to milk it for as much as I can for my soulslike Knave campaign (a.k.a. Grave), and then dig even more out when I…
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Design Diary: One (more) foot in the Grave
Much to my own surprise, I think I’m about to finish Grave—a variant on Ben Milton’s Knave, built for soulslike games. Today was only the second session I’ve run with these rules, but after the session, the players generally agreed that it’s pretty close to done. I shouldn’t be so surprised, though: The rules don’t…
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Rumors, Legends & Lies for a soulslike campaign
Here are 45 snippets of lore that probably aren’t making it to the final text of Grave, but that I could imagine making use of someday. I figured I’d put them here rather than just leaving them on the cutting room floor. This list came out of an attempt to provide d50 Dark Souls-inspired “Rumors,…
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Grave: Hacking Knave for soulslike adventure
I’ve been wondering aloud for months about how (and whether) to fix the rules for my soulslike game, Exhumed—but learning that its working title is taken by yet another metal band may have been the final straw. (“Titles that inadvertently turn out to be taken by metal bands” may be the only consistent thing in…
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That time we killed the AntiPhoenix
“There is one AntiPhoenix and only one. It’s written on this page; there is no other. It came alive when you read these words. You can use this Black Phoenix in your game. It’s the only one you’ll ever get. When it dies, if it dies, tear out this page. Take it outside. Burn it.…
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Design Diary: Grave Knave
I recently wondered aloud whether I’d be better off rethinking my soulslike game Exhumed as a Knave hack, especially given that my earliest pre-playtesting version of Exhumed unwittingly looked quite a bit like Knave. (I ended up using much of those rules in in a Fallout hack instead.) Now, I know the smart move is…
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Exhumed design diary: Action-packed minutiae
I’m still sorting through the trickiest design issues in Exhumed, my soulslike tabletop RPG: how frequently characters act, and the options available to them when they do act, as I wrote awhile back. I got to try some ideas in my last playtest, and have been approaching various problems with different kinds of actions atomically,…
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Designer’s block
Do game designers get writer’s block, or some equivalent thereof? I’m very curious how you other designers, hackers, and homebrewers experience this (or not). Me, though? When I get stuck on a game, it feels like the exact opposite of writer’s block. With writer’s block, I just stare at the page blankly, trying like hell…
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Lessons from playtesting once in a blue (super wolf blood) moon
When I last wrote about playtesting Exhumed, I lamented that it seemed impossible to deliver a fun experience to my friends and whip my rules into shape. I had been trying to test so many different mechanics across so many sessions that each session was getting bogged down with the fallout of experimental fixes that…
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Designing a Soulslike Action Economy
The greatest design problem I face with my soulslike tabletop RPG, Exhumed, is getting the feel right for the action economy—that is, the rules for how frequently each character can act, and what they can use those actions to do. When I showed readers online the initial approach, the most common reaction was doubt that…
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Playtesting Perils
My soulslike RPG playtest has hit a bit of a road block. As I described in a recent playtest review, Exhumed is already technically a playable game, and my free time is at a premium, so I jumped right into running a campaign to test every system. Unsurprisingly, this has indeed revealed some issues, which…
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Playtest Review: Exhumed
Every time I’ve run Exhumed—an RPG built on the Into the Odd rules, and inspired by Dark Souls—it seems to have worked more or less like I intended. Playtesters familiar with soulslike games tell me it manages to evoke the same feel, and players new to the genre assure me it’s still interesting and accessible for them too. The…
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A Selection of Soulslike TTRPGs
If I enjoy a video game enough to actually complete it, then I’m unlikely to stop thinking about it after the credits roll. Instead, I’ll find some like-minded fans, and try to find a way bring what we loved about that game to our tabletop game sessions. And so, when I resolved to run something…
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Inventory Management
“What are you working on?” This should be a pretty easy question, shouldn’t it? When asked last year, though, I realized my answer was absurdly long. I could name at least a dozen games I had been “working on” for weeks, months, even years in some cases—but not a single one I had actually finished…
Pretendo Games 