The thing that connects both these games in my mind, and many of the releases of the past couple years, is that they are game-shaped objects. They come in boxes. They come with extra accessories. They’re priced like midrange board games. Our dumb monkey brains pick them up and say “ooh heavy!” and want to possess them. They look good on shelves and spread out on a table. But they’re incomplete as games.
This shit just drains my enthusiasm for where games are going. And don’t @ me with zines or itch.io sketches. I’ve got tons of both. They never make it to the table.
a necessary corrective to the quinn’s quest pollyanna approach to ttrpg reviewing
glad to hear someone say it out loud. they point out a key difference (the time it takes to actually play an rpg), but I feel similar things about new board games at the moment. more encouragement to explore what’s already on your shelf is like such a antidote these days.
Went to a local anime con that was mostly dead, ran into a friend, and then sat down with him and a couple of other for a few hours running through character creation for Lancer. That game world seems really cool! I really liked the art they were showing me and they said there’s a hundred pages of lore in the rulebook, so I picked it up and am going to read through it even if we never get an actual campaign going.
What other TTRPGs have cool art and lore that are fun reads even if you don’t end up playing anything with it? I’m getting lots of ads for TTRPGs now and a game called “The Wildsea” seems cool. There’s another game called Fabula Ultima that has some nice art (even if its extremely derivative of late PSX into PS2 era Final Fantasy), but I’m not sure how much actual worldbuilding its books has. And someone recommended I go back and check out Shadowrun.
mork borg is pretty much an art book with some random tables attached, very attractive book
Stuff put out by Free League is generally quite good if what you’re after is just worldbuilding and cool art. I’ve heard their recent game, Vaesen, def excels at that
It’s a bit older but one of my fav RPGs just to read are the Castle Falkenstein books, which take place in an alt historical 19th century centered on an occult bavarian kingdom
All the content warnings apply (I’m not kidding) but the most recent edition of Kult is a great looking book. Kult is a Clive Barker-esque RPG and a not so subtle early influence on the Matrix movies
Chris McDowall’s recent games, Electric Bastionland and Mythic Bastionland, are absolutely gorgeous books
The absolute best fantasy setting in RPGs is Glorantha and the Guide to Glorantha is fun to read even if you never play the game Runequest
A|State got a 2nd edition recently, its a great looking book, very good to read if you’re into bizarre dystopian cityscapes that might be the entire world.
to be fair, emulating this mood is the entire reason fabula ultima exists.
ryuutama is definitely the prettiest rpg book i own, and since the game is about exploration and survival rather than combat, contains lots of stuff about biomes and weather conditions and the elemental dragons that cause them.
tenra bansho zero is also a nice read, it comes as two books in a slipcase, one full of rules (plus enough lore to give them context) and one full of world/setting lore.
I would rather believe that Brak’s sense of taste and skill at cooking is so infernal that he has merely attempted to use an ordinary fork in a way so wrong that he has tapped into a devilish energy lying dormant in the world. To wit, he is using the fork to scoop brains and drink water, both things that should be done with a spoon.
Yeah ryuutama is great… my pick for pretty rpg would be Cloud Empress, which is sort of an addon for Mothership (tbh pretty much everything i’ve played that mothership touches seems to have some kind of effort put into it’s direction)
It’s not very long but there’s lots of Nausicaa+psychedelia action going on
also lots and lots of cool stuff coming out of Southeast Asia at the moment. I’d never really played any rpg that was influenced by this bit of the world until a few years ago unless you count dnd having some fluff that mentions ‘Mystic Cathay’ or whatever.
So much cool fantasy + modernstories to draw from that you hardly ever see in other english language games. I’d recommend Gubat Banwa or anything written by Zedeck Siew (who often goes more into the realm of worldbuildy/prose poetry stuff) as fun to just read through if you haven’t seen them before
Delver’s Guide to Beastworld is drop dead gorgeous, actually looks better aesthetically than anything WoTC has published in years (especially the new Player’s Handbook), and it’s all furries which could be a plus for you. There’s a handful of random interesting ideas in the book, and almost none of it seems coherent enough to play game but much of it is compelling. It’s kind of the perfect “This is an art book” type book if “A lot of cool looking D&D furries” is your thing, especially if you’re not going to actually, y’know, use it.
Usually all the prewritten backstory and setting stuff just goes out the window for me since it feels like homework for the players, and I’d rather just come up with my own and supply it organically as the players need it in game. So generally anything too deep with that is an instant turnoff. But that being said I did love all the weird philosophical based factions and different locales in Planescape for AD&D 2nd edition. Plus the Tony Diterlizzi art was so refreshing after years of Larry Elmore knockoffs and he’ll do fun things like toss in grotesques from renaissance art amongst all the more modern (and modron) designs.
I am considering doing something interesting and different for this CoC game I am planning for my friends. I am coming up with what I hope will be a pretty open scenario for my players to explore with multiple threads to pursue, leading to different angles on the same final problem (big monster captured by humans, calling out for its mom). Letting my players bring any kind of character to the story seems like it could create an issue of having weaker hooks, though. So instead I think I am going to tell them I want three characters with these three professions. They can play them however they want, but I am giving them character premises and asking them to assume them. It did occur to me that maybe this would deprive them of some agency. And then I thought of some examples from crpgs I’ve played where during character creation you get asked to respond to prompts that determine your morality or backstory, and figured I should lift that idea and tailor a series of rich questions for my players to help carve out their own backstory for these specific roles, and set them as events leading up to the beginning of the game. I think that’s a really fun idea.
the hater in my heart is happy to hear that lancer is some bullshit i just do not like the lore of that game at all i’ve never had the misfortune of actually having to play it
I played like two sessions and clocked it as “SotDL with some poorly designed house rules” back when it was brand new (a little before the final release iirc)
really ticks me off that they don’t acknowledge the game they traced over most extensively
It’s like someone putting out a game with gm moves, basic moves, 2d6+stat rolls with a failure-partial success-total success split and acting like they’ve never heard of apocalypse world
I forgot to bring it to the meetup this year because it wasn’t out of storage but I should bring the night witches game to the meetup because it’s lesbian soviet aviation themed apocalypse world made by the fiasco guy. tulpa already knows that but this is a good time to put it down on paper so i have to do it next year. I even have the little card deck companion that’s got really cool art on it
It works well for one shots because it basically has a campaign built into the game
same designer as Fiasco but much more mechanically crunchy so if anyone was scared off/intimidated/not engaged by fiasco’s freeforminess, you gotta check out night witches
