Reviewn June 2025 part 3: Game books

In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025

Part three: TTRPGs and game content

 

What games have I checked out in the last six months? Here I'm including published books and files, commercial or free, but not blog posts (which I read too many of).

It's Reviewn June!

 

Tiny Spaceship

An alien exploration to understand Planet Earth 

By Tanya Floaker (https://floaker.itch.io/tiny-spaceship)

A wholesome diceless three-page mini-RPG about a spaceship that's come to visit us, and the dangers it faces (from other players, in the roles of e.g. "a big flock of birds"). Has a beautiful cover by August Charters, and the layout is nice (although it would benefit from a proofread and a looser line spacing).

I appreciate the extensive endnote about inspirations and mechanical sources, and the use of CC0. 

Mechanically this is a collaborative story-building game with simple natural-language rules. The tiny spaceship plays off exploration (drawing attention to itself) against understanding (thereby resolving problems). With the caveat that I haven't yet played this, I would call it story-telling gaming done right: a game at a high level of abstraction should be fuelled by simple, abstract, broadly-interpretable rules. Looks fun.

 

RPG Design Zine 

A how-to zine about tabletop roleplaying game design

By Nathan D. Paoletta (https://ndpdesign.itch.io/rpg-design-zine)

Published 2019, it's 28 pages of quite abstract, but useful, advice. The thesis is "I'm not here to tell you which [design decisions] to make, but I do want you to know why you’re making them." That's largely borne out. The content covers pragmatic approaches to, and implications of, various design angles: articulating inspiration, interplay of structures, roleplaying-as-conversation, iteration, etc.

Overall, the zine doesn't align perfectly with my own conception of TTRPGs, but I found it all the more useful for that. For example, it makes some interesting points about granularity and utility, different to my usual approach of complexity is a cost you pay, and left me with lots to think about.

The scan quality had me squinting a few times. Corrections were made to the physical paper, which adds to the zine aesthetic, but a fair number of typos stayed in. Also, a lack of cite marks on the pasted text might have played well with the aesthetic, but meant the works cited list was less helpful than it could have been.

I'm looking forward to reading the 2025 edition to see how the author's approach has developed.

 

Sinister Hovering Orb

(Sinister Hovering Orb)

By David J Prokopetz / Penguin King Games (https://penguinking.itch.io/sinister-hovering-orb)

A single-page solo mini-RPG (plus title) which interested me because of the complete lack of strictly-flavour text: all the themes, implied goals, and flavour are purely wrapped in game mechanics. We have to learn the game to find out what it is about (to the extent that it can be said to be about something in particular).

For example, the reader discovers in the rules that they have four choices of activity/situation, used variously "when you are simply and suddenly present", "when your very presence brings down calamity", "when those who ponder you know what they must do", and "when you radiate a palpable sense of doom".

There are no player goals, high-level structures, rules about direction, best practises or suggestions to serve as connective tissue: only a series of game elements, presented with a sense of finality. I played a quick game and found it quite a compelling story generator, though a very open-ended one.

PUBLIC GUEST 5

Living With The Certainty of Death by the imminent explosion of our orbiting artificial planet PUBLIC GUEST 5

By Turtlebun (https://turtlebun.itch.io/public-guest-five) 

A solo RPG on a poster, with a delightful visual style. It's about, well, exactly what the subtitle says. It's a sort of journalling game, meant to be played a sentence at a time over the course of a long real-world period (probably about a month on average).

The diary mechanics are very simple, with two dice informing how you spend a week on your doomed world. When you roll boxcars, PUBLIC GUEST 5 explodes. (I broke the rules and played through in a single sitting, for a fairly melancholy experience.)

PUBLIC GUEST 5 and Sinister Floating Orb were interesting diversions. Together they're inspiring part of my approach to some upcoming projects which will explore themes of cosmic doom, inscrutability, inevitability, and loneliness.

Writing With Style

An editor's advice for RPG writers

By Ray Vallese / Rogue Genius Games (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/217525/writing-with-style-an-editor-s-advice-for-rpg-writers)

A 44-page book of advice for TTRPG writing. It had some tips and reminders I found useful. For someone without a background in technical writing, I bet this book is absolute gold.

There's plenty of generic advice, but plenty is specific to RPGs: sins to avoid (like read-aloud text that dictates the players' choices), lists of RPG-specific overused and confused words, writing to a game publisher's specification, etc. My only criticism is with the visual design: some odd typeface choices and the line spacing is too tight.

Worth the $5 on DriveThruRPG, especially for a new writer.

Dwarf Mine

A mapping game of adventure 

By James Hron / Paper Dice Games (https://paperdicegames.itch.io/dwarf-mine)

Perhaps not strictly an RPG, but a 25-page tabletop exploration game. You play as the location, and instead of levelling up, you add levels further down. It sort of feels like how Dwarf Fortress felt ~20 years ago: one plane, inscrutable dwarf characters, simple mechanics, inevitable doom, etc. But the cutaway is cross-section, not top-down.

There's a points (prestige) system for scoring, and a huge block of random tables. My trial game was quite enjoyable, and I definitely want to come back and give it a more thoughtful treatment.
 

The presentation has some rough edges, with typos, misplaced page references, inconsistent capitalisation, and the font size varying between tables.

A few of the rules could do with a rewrite:

• I'm a bit confused about multiple attacks vs entering combat multiple times, with persistent enemies who attack back.
• The connective geometry is mostly explained by example, not rules. Some of the rules contradict the examples, as in: "The walls of rooms, hallways, and ladders must all have at least a 1x1 square separating them", and also in "Rooms must be built in the orientation shown".
• Goblin invasion mechanics seem underdetermined.
• The appendix leaves the crucial word 'once' off the end of the sentence for Trap room. 

There's lots of neat mechanics, especially with the big monsters. I like that the Cave Wurm can damage the map itself.

The First of the Stone Folk puzzles me. It must be entombed in a 6x6 room – internal dimensions 4x4, so you only need to make 16 squares. Using 21 dwarves per square to minimise deaths, you will lose on average 168 dwarves. But I don't get the impression that total population is ever going to be over 100. Am I off the mark there? Or are you meant to wall this monster off really slowly? 

The dwarf leader ability adds a little more strategy. More inheritance tracking with the 'Bloodline' system would be interesting. I do like the idea of the Achievements list giving all future leaders a title. The room name generator appendix is clever, although wacky; you could get a barracks named "Bottom Watch" or a tomb named "New Trophy".

The author has written lots of official expansions and supporting content to keep the game fresh.

 

GURPS "Discworld Also"

A companion book for the original GURPS Discworld RPG

By Steve Jackson Games, Terry Pratchett, Phil Masters. Generally good, but most of the best stuff made it into the new edition (which I already read, and wrote some reviews for last year). So because I'll focus on the stuff that didn't, this review may sound more negative than I feel!

Sean Murray's illustrations feel quite Discworld-y, sketchy pen/pencil pictures that don't try to rip off Kidby's or Kirby's style. I like them. I'm not a fan of the book's layout, though. There's weird stuff going on with the kerning and text wrap. The column breaks are terribly confusing when there's a subheading (e.g., p 48 reads left to right then top to bottom, but p 49 reads top to bottom then left to right).

It's poorly copyedited for a professional product. For example, on just one page (29) I noticed

• A mangled seven-clause sentence
• "almost" should say "always"
• "could" should say "would"
• "fall off" should say "falling off"
• "unaging" / "ageing" spelling inconsistency
• "They not" should say "They are not"

The alternative troll stats, and the extra information on elfkin and gnolls is good to have. There's a nice robust peasant character template, with various background skills. We get a 'sentient animal' template, a disappointing miss on terminology (it should of course be 'sapient animal').

Translation of Discworld magic is done well. The additions are a bit uninspired, e.g. a magic item which replicates an air conditioner, with maybe a subtle joke about Maxwell's Demon.

The book provides some campaign settings. I mostly already read this content in the new edition GURPS Discworld RPG, with a couple of exceptions: Smarlhanger and Fourecks get more space here.

• Smarlhanger is a frontier boom town in sheep country. It doesn't commit to some details ("there may or may not be changes made", p 86), which is frustrating in a setting guide. Lots of other details to work with though.
• Fourecks cart races is a new subsystem, a spin-off of the GURPS Vehicles rules. The Mad Max pastiche from The Last Continent is fleshed out to a whole societal thing here. (It doesn't say so, but Fourecks definitely has a bunch of ultra-hardwood trees that would be used for the highest tier of armour.)

The book also has three adventures and three 'adventure seeds'. Again, I mostly already saw these in the newer edition. These seem pretty good, barring some vague patches.

'Walking the Spiral' is an adventure with an excellent idea: druids come to look for megaliths in Ankh-Morpork. (I really liked that the mouldering records were in the form of an ancient school essay.) The problem is that the implementation is painfully linear, with very little for the PCs to actually do until the setpiece fight. Especially if the druid emissaries are NPCs. The adventure also implies that the University's NPC wizards are perfectly capable of saving the day by themselves at the end, making this an adventure that doesn't need player involvement at all. The adventure premise is good enough that it's worth rescuing by redoing the structure, though.

Highland Vice

System-neutral Martian cowboy hexcrawl

By Strange Ian (https://ianstrange.itch.io/highland-vice) 

A 'kitchen sink' futuristic setting that meshes well. The concept: Mars has been scarred by poorly-thought out terraforming projects. It's reminiscent of Red Dwarf and Fallout and Futurama and Borderlands and Charles Stross, with extra Tibetan, Mongolian, Peruvian, Japanese, and Weird West elements. The goal is to find and retrieve a chunk of computer megabrain.

A 100-entry hexcrawl in 28 pages. With four hexes per page and system-neutral style, Highland Vice favours high-level terse description over gameplay details.

There's a great density of evocative ideas, which is what I want most out of content like this. An algae plantation heiress hunting with an overtuned laser rifle. The electromagnetic rail launcher used by wire-crowned shamans to send captives into orbit. A buried chest full of mismatched halves of different treasure maps. A hillbilly cyanobacteria moonshine shack guarded by a truck-sized amoeba. A monk riding a solar-powered robot turtle terrarium. An android executive assistant living for years impaled on a mammoth's tusk. A colossal mining engine meditating in the middle of a mountain, trying to free itself from the material. Gauchos duelling over a holographic pop idol in a field of cherry blossom. The primitive town built by a crashed trainload of plush robotic cuddle dolls.

Many of the hexes are linked, but some of the conceptual through-lines could be highlighted. For example, 'satellite shamans' come up in 0006, 0104, 0107, 0307, 0408, etc. If I ran this I'd make a quick setting overview using key concepts as subheadings, and add relevant pointers to/from each hex:

• Satellite shamans
• Teratorns, poebrothers, and other revived megafauna
• Robot prosthetics
• Hive drones 
• Sky bandits
• The Spinal War
• Sindovar
• The Maze 
• Josung (game)
• etc 

Definitely worth a look. It's recently published and free on Itch.
 

In progress

By my quick count, I have six different rulesets and splatbooks bookmarked and partially read. Possibly there's more, lurking in browser tabs or forgotten on the desktop.

I'd like to put some real effort in there. My ambition is that when I next fling reviews together, my "unfinished list" will be completely different!

Reviewn' June 2025 comes to a close.

So how'd I do? I didn't read as much as I hoped, but overall, not bad. For me, reviewing is ultimately about self-accountability, but hopefully you got something out of it.

TTRPG art on a shoestring budget

Here's a little general advice for indie game creators who can't afford all the art they want.

Stock art

If you have a little bit of money to use, stock art is cheaper than commissioned art and it's way easier to find what you need compared to trawling through commons (more on that later).

Understand and abide by licenses!

Artists license their art in different ways, with drastically different conditions. If all your art comes from one or two artists (or is all under particular licenses, like CC-BY), you'll save some headaches when it comes to complying with licensing terms and laying out credits.

An aside: I have found several pieces of licensed art where artists specify how they must be credited, and then the provided credit line has a spelling mistake or grammatical error. Should you fix it? I wouldn't personally risk it. I'm not a lawyer. I follow instructions.

I'm assuming you're not using AI material. Stock art creators are increasingly (and understandably) forbidding use of their work alongside it. Note that stock art websites don't do a very good job of tagging and filtering this stuff out!

• Some, like Adobe Stock, are moderately diligent for mediocre results: exclude generative AI from a search and maybe one will slip through in ten pages of results.
• Sites relying strictly on self-reporting, like Pixabay, are pretty much all saturated in untagged AI images. They've become practically unusable; you're basically reduced to searching in older time periods or within specific artists with a consistent, identifiable style.
• DriveThruRPG also relies mostly on self-reporting, but I haven't seen many AI images passing themselves off as handcrafted.
  

Stock art directly from the creator

If there's a specific look/type of art you want, Patreon is one of the better sources, because you can support currently-active artists on an individual basis and at reasonable prices. I can't speak to whether or not it's better for the actual artists (I know they hiked their cut a little while ago).
 

An aside for Patreon artists: Please provide something like an actual license! It doesn't have to be long or detailed. It just has to make me feel confident that I am permitted to use your work for commercial purposes, can or can't advertise with it, won't be infringing on your moral rights, etc.

Open-sourcing your game art

So, on to doing it yourself! Lots of indie game makers have achieved great results by sourcing, compositing, and laying out their own art. Expect it to take a lot of work.

You'll probably have looked into public domain art. Specifically, works that have lost copyright status due to the amount of time that has passed since the death of their creator. If someone tells you a hard and fast rule for establishing this, they are wrong!

• The "falls into PD" age differs between nations, there are all sorts of carve-outs, and even a photo reproduction may or may not be transformative. Don't rely on anyone but your lawyer for legal advice.
  

A lot of sites purport to collect and curate art "in the public domain". They almost always mean "in the public domain in the USA", and even if that's fine with you, they might be wrong, and even if they're right, they might not be conscientious. Check your sources!

Where can you get free-to-use art? Well, there's tons of places. Start with Wikimedia Commons, which is huge and usually quite accurately labelled with regards to sources and licensing (...but I have found errors before. Check your sources! Check your sources! Check your sources!).

Other sites for free art include: OpenGameArt, Pixabay, Pexels, Adobe Stock, various open clip art creators, and museums and libraries like The Met and the NYPL digital collections. All have their own foibles.

Understand that "free" doesn't mean "obligation-free".

I mentioned stock art licenses earlier. Learn what the various Creative Commons licenses do. CC0 (essentially a PD dedication) is the most generous, but fairly rare in the wild. As well as the license requirements, learn about and respect creators' moral rights. Credit people even when you're not required to by the license terms.

A lot of old PD art is unfortunately physically degraded. There are great pieces made unusable by age. Too bad. Don't waste time on things that are too small for your DPI, too faded or blurry, or too palimpsest'd. Understand that entropy is mostly irreversible. Or try tracing.

And know the value of your time. If you spent a hundred hours sorting through public domain art trying to find suitable works, and you didn't enjoy the process... would you have been better off just working for money and using that to pay an artist?

Good news

Anyone can be a competent collage artist by compositing, cropping, tweaking, and laying out PD / open license art. And digital tools stratospherically expand what the word 'collage' means. Have fun testing things!

The more you try things out, the more neat combinations you'll find. Sometimes even a very simple effect can make a serviceable piece of art out of something stylistically inappropriate.

For example, I had this old black-and-white John Batten illustration saved:

 

I wanted to use it as the Nuckelavee demon in my current monster compendium (https://bit.ly/ancblasph). But it's a bit cartoonish, there's no colour to make it pop, and the solid white won't work against my backgrounds. It only takes six or seven trivial image operations to get something a bit more atmospheric:

I'm not much of an artist, but if I spent a bit more time on it, I could use more masks and curves and things to make this into a really crisp, vibrant piece.

Software

What tools should you use for image editing? I love FOSS in principle, and the people striving to make it work, but you do tend to get more or less what you pay for.

GIMP is perhaps your best free option, but it lags behind Affinity Photo (having no proper CMYK support, for example). APhoto in turn is cheaper than Photoshop, but lacks a few of its features.

You can do pretty much everything in a suite like Affinity Photo or Photoshop. But there are specialist tools for TTRPG-specific things (hexographer, inkarnate, etc), and their narrow focus may make them easier and more convenient than doing the same thing in an image editor.

Using these tools

What do you need to learn? I would say the ten basic concepts to familiarise yourself with are:

• colour level/curve manipulation
• selections
• non-destructive editing
• filters/adjustments
• brush tools
• geometry tools
• perspective tools
• touch-up tools
• layers and layer modes
• masks and clipping

There's plenty more, of course.

What do you need in terms of meta-level knowledge? Mainly, where to go for help. The internet is awash with tutorials. Start by reading/watching one of those, and then turn to searching/asking in the forums for your software.

Concluding thoughts

I started this by addressing those "who can't afford all the art they want". Again, don't forget that your time on Earth has value. If you have some exact image in mind, and it takes you 50 hours to assemble a pretty good version of it from diverse sources and painstaking image manipulations... then maybe you were better off paying an artist.

Except.

You're gaining skills as you go, and that alone may be worth it in the end. You're trying new things and making stuff.

Assembling other people's work in new ways is itself an art form, and constructing things from publicly available works may lead you to explore other ways to create.

There are side benefits, too.

Once you have the basics down, you can make your life easier by using your image manipulation tools to do mockups and visualisations. For example, I spent ten minutes this morning pairing up different candidate typefaces against different grungy/distressed visual styles in a scratch-built design, as in this snapshot:

Art, like everything in life, is a learning process. You'll find that you can cut some corners and not others.

And finally, if none of the above works for you, you could always Learn To Do Art Using Raw Materials yourself. I hear it can be very rewarding!

Reviewn June 10: Fey Critter Tea Party

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Today for Reviewn June I read Fey Critter Tea Party, by AnnieDisaster09. I picked it up in the “Your Best Games” Indie TTRPGs bundle on Itch.

The game is 15 pages, and strictly a story-telling game rather than a TTRPG, although each player does have ownership over one character (‘critter’). Being the storyteller is a matter of turn-taking plus collaboration.

The characters must journey through a sort of liminal fantasy fairy-world, gathering ingredients to prepare food for a witches’ tea party. The tone is cutesy, perhaps even twee, carried by both the subject matter and the verbiage – ‘ask nicely’, ‘Orchardhome’, ‘sneezefests’, ‘tricksy’, ‘yield the sweetest reward’, ‘hurt feelings’, etc. I’m a sucker for games with an unusual focus (food preparation) and setting (interlocking fairy worlds). It feels a little like Candied Violets.

The game system:

Fey Critter Tea Party is built on the Caltrop Core game engine, which I’m not familiar with. A 1d4-based system is rare (they don’t seem to be a popular dice type). Having only four outcomes necessitates a coarse-grained dice resolution system, in this case packing in four different degrees of success. You can have a success requiring teamwork, for example. I was interested to find that you can't roll a simple failure, only a ‘success plus a bad side effect’ or a ‘failure plus a bad side effect’. It makes sense, for a story-telling game; everything has some immediate impact, serving to drive the narrative forward.

The game isn’t mechanically complex. It has a nice, simple split of stats, Gumption / Grace / Guile, and character generation looks like it would be fast.

It’s always interesting to me what goes unexplained in a full game release, especially for a small game. The hobby has a certain amount of jargon. In this case, both common TTRPG elements (‘d4’; ‘stats’; ‘NPCs’; ‘an adventure’) and common story game elements (‘scene’; ‘mechanical element’; ‘story element’; ‘the prompt’) are left undefined.

There are a few undefined phrases, like ‘magic ability’ and ‘movement ability’, which feel like an oversight. Notably, the game mentions eight specific types of magic but has no magic system. You use the ‘Guile’ stat for it and then make the 1d4 dice roll. If you have a 2 in Guile, you will always succeed. It’s interesting that there’s no meta-guidance on magic, since (a) at the upper limit you can just ‘cast a spell to win the game’ if you want, (b) in practise players are going to have different ideas about which particular power level is going to be in the spirit of the game, and (c) rotating through the GM role means there’s no authority.

I’m curious whether things like magic are deliberately elided, or are something given a complete treatment in the underlying Caltrop Core game system. If the latter, they could have been included in the Fey Critter Tea Party text, if the author’s relying on the Creative Commons license to use the Caltrop Core SRD. But I’m actually not sure on that point – the text references the CC-BY-SA license, but doesn’t appear to actually state that the game is released under that license, which is a requirement of using CC-BY-SA.

The tone and feeling:

The titular critters, who are also the player characters, are sort of like witches’ familiars, but in fairy form. I tend to associate ‘critter’ with a small animal, and some of the options are anthropomorphic animal fairies, but you can also play as a pixie, water spirit, walking plant, and so on. They have fun little abilities, like ‘Anytime you use an object that is your favorite color, add a +1 to the check’. I think such class features probably work fine for collaborative low-stakes story games like this whereas for a classic TTRPG they’d be fodder for tiresome min-maxing.

The text provides just enough detail on various creatures and backgrounds to build from, without constraining or needing the players to memorise a bunch of canon. All the characters are capable of using magic, which is a fine solution to the matter of ‘spellcaster disparity’, and of course is thematically appropriate.

Following its tone and aesthetics, Fey Critter Tea Party limits the severity of negative consequences to any bit of gameplay. (Although I did notice that the text sometimes evokes the idea of harm greater than the rules strictly allow.) It’s interesting to see how rules try to route around needing to depict harm when they can’t directly prohibit the player choices leading to that; for example, in Fey Critter Tea Party, sufficient failure in combat leads to the character involuntarily running away. With this, the simple mechanics, and the primacy of story participation, it might be a good game for kids of a certain age.

The layout makes nice use of simple graphics. The sections have nice descriptive titles like “The scones and cream of it all”. The text does a good job of making the food and ingredients sound tasty, a prerequisite for a food-focused game. I like the tone, and I like the intermingling of fluff and crunch which is more common in indie games like this: things like “Storytelling will continue until the Critters successfully obtain their ingredient for each chapter.”

 

The adventures:

Any good game includes a starting adventure (scenario, etc), and this one includes four. They have to be a little vaguer to fit the purposes of a story-telling game, but Fey Critter Tea Party handles it with aplomb.

• I really like that the text breaks down each adventure into a shallow hierarchical information structure of goals and subgoals, rather than making the players search around for what they’ll need. These are also optional, so you can improvise and adjust for your level of comfort. Each adventure is similarly structured, so I’m not sure I’d want to run several back to back.
  
• The adventures have some evocative details (hot peppers that only grow in the dark, a sapient tide, etc) and there’s a bit of magical treasure which interacts directly with the few facets of the very simple rule system (e.g. providing a type of magic, or preventing a critter from losing in combat).
• The specific challenges are left very open-ended, almost always amounting to just a few short NPC descriptions; it’s not clear if you use just one or all of them (the latter is both more constraining and offers more complexity to sink your teeth into). I suppose that open-endedness is part of the intrinsic fun of story-telling games when you’re taking turns to run the challenges.
• They also don’t dictate a mode of problem solving, even implicitly: there are rules for combat, there’s the previously-discussed unconstrained magic, and the biggest challenges are clearly written with either subterfuge or social interaction in mind. This subtle emphasis on player choice is something I look for in any game, and is one of Fey Critter Tea Party’s best features.
• Each adventure has a built-in climax in the form of a slightly bigger NPC obstacle between the characters and the last ingredient on their list. On the whole it’s good, tight design.

 

Minor text quibbles:

• A fair number of grammar problems, in particular punctuation problems (in the form of missing commas, spaces, and periods) and inconsistencies: mismatch of number words; inconsistent capitalisation for most of the key terms.
• A few typos (‘reccomended’, ‘lychens’) and homophone errors (‘weary’ for ‘wary’ throughout). One typo particularly confused me: ‘Guise’ for ‘Grace’, not for another stat, ‘Guile’.
• Layout-wise, I don't like the ragged right edge, runt lines, and indents on section start. But my biggest quibble is that the text uses up more space than necessary (combining paragraph indents and paragraph spacing) while the headings suffer from lack of space.

 

My favourite bit:

Playable mushrooms!

Where to get it:

On itch at https://anniedisaster09.itch.io/fey-critter-tea-party

Updating past TTRPG work for the year 2024

I set aside some time this week to apply last year's fancy purple Periapt Games logo update to most of my previously published work. Along the way I found myself freshening things up with some nicer graphics, improved hyperlinking, typo corrections, and a little bit of extra content.

This meant minor updates to half a dozen different things (note, affiliate links):

120 Fantasy Food Inspirations

We Will Yet Triumph: An Imagination Game

Spells: Made More Magical (5e)

and

Spells: Made More Magical (system neutral)

Almanac of the Archaic

A Fistful of Curiosities: Ten Site-based Mysteries, Oddities, and Puzzles



 

 

 

 

It was a bit more of a process than I expected, with all the files in different layouts and most of them generated using technology (LaTeX) that I stopped using for TTRPG content a year ago. And then there was the extra work of uploading and double-checking the files, resetting the file previews, updating storefront images, etc. It's definitely enough to make me want to stick with my nice new logo for a long time.

If you bought or received any of this older work via DriveThruRPG, you can download the new versions for free through your account there. Thanks!

Now on Kickstarter: A lifepath system for fifth edition fantasy!

Do you want characters to have deep ties to their world? Backstory that directly affects their mechanical traits?

We're crowdfunding the creation of a book that lets you create incredible characters using a uniquely tailored lifepath generation system. Click through to check out the project:

Lifepaths tell the story of a character’s early life, and let you discover how those experiences gave them the unique abilities and traits they start the game with. A lifepath is a process of discovery, and each step on the path is an event, decision, or encounter which will reveal things about your character.
​
We're writing Steps to a Hero, a 127-page book that will be available digitally or as a physical volume via print-on-demand. It contains tons of new game content, including 300 unique “steps” affecting a character’s ancestry, actions, and fortune, a lifepath system for combining those steps into millions of possible backgrounds, new background features, new ancestries, and more.

Back the book on Kickstarter to get a reduced price as thanks for your support in bringing the project to life!

Let's make character creation a journey of discovery!

Book announcement: Steps To A Hero

I'm very excited to announce that my first major book release will be coming soon to Kickstarter.

Steps to a Hero introduces a lifepath system for character generation in 5e fantasy games, replacing the usual 'select and array numbers' process with a path where you discover how your character got started, their ties to the world, and how each step in their life so far influenced their abilities in the game.

If you're interested, you can follow along through this linked page!

A Fistful of Curiosities: Kickstarter

Our new project, A Fistful of Curiosities, is now live on Kickstarter!

It's a collection of ten small, self-contained location-based fantasy mysteries. This toolkit will be great for game masters running fantasy role-playing games with pen-and-paper or at a virtual tabletop.

By backing the project before publication, you brighten our day and incidentally get the resource at a special reduced rate compared to later publication!

The Kickstarter runs for 15 days. You can check it out here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/periaptgames/a-fistful-of-curiosities-game-masters-resource