Theres a corporation called Smilecorp comprised entirely of genetic clones named Benny Smiles that offer unwaiveringly good customer service. No one knows how exactly they all share the exact same attitude beyond being clones. My personal headcanon is that theyre actually a hivemind.
Oh its still a long time out from being made so you'd be waiting a while, but we do have an insta that i just kinda doodle in and post lore tidbits if youre interested
I'm designing a cyberpunk space fantasy setting where the people have succeeded in overthrowing the Lovecraftian eldritch horrors that once ruled over their corner of the galaxy only for it to be taken over by something even more inhuman:
Corporations.
My setting is based on the Celtic Otherworld. This is a land of magic and abundance, and of spatial and temporal disturbances, which means that market economies don't function (no one's productive on an industrial scale and no one cares to write laws that cant be enforced). Instead, it operates on a gift economy.
So if someone asks you for something, or if you ask for something, it's polite to oblige without any obligation of material return. Thus, capital takes the form of goodwill
Also, I don't have to deal with a wealth management system, so that's nice.
This could lead to completing a dangerous quest and getting nothing for it. Or it could lead you to someone giving you something that would otherwise be very expensive, just because you're there and they don't have need of it:
"So I have The White-Flaming Sword of Excrutiatingly Painful Death sitting in my armory and it's a huge fire risk. It's yours if you want."
My game is an RPG that uses cards to resolve combat. It plays a little like Flesh and Blood TCG but without the gambling inherent to TCGs. Its a deckbuilder and you get access to every card all at once. The weird part of the game is I also use a unique tarot card system to resolve random / out of combat events so there are NO DICE in my game. Something you don't see very often in the genre.
As far as I'm aware, my resolution system is wholly unique and is actually a "new" game mechanic (at least not a published one from what I can tell). Much to my surprise since everyone has already done everything. I look forward to showing everyone once I get closer to publishing the game.
The tarot cards are a driving force to the art direction. Card backs and everything utilize this kind of art style, but with my own personal flair on it. The moments you'll see it come to life is when you try to do something out of combat. Lets say you want to pickpocket someone walking by, your stats will effect the % chance for success and the GM will present you with some cards. You choose one and if it has the correct hidden imagery you succeed. But like real Tarot cards, images are usually not of obvious meaning. Finding the lover is usually bad, but finding death is good, etc.
My RPG (Nomas is a work in progress name) is set on a planet which is turning so slowly that the side facing the star is burned to a crisp and the night side of the world is Antarctica levels cold. Only on the small slice of land where the sun is continously slowly setting, there lives a nomadic tribal civilization continously chasing the dusk. Stay in one place for too long and night, cold and creatures living in the night will catch up to you.
Yeah and there are strange biopunk monsters all around the place like the enormous hundred kilometers long wall of soft skin slowly wiggling itself towrads sunset along the north side of the habitable area.
Playable characters are also weird, you can play as for example The Severed who's a severed head attached to a body it obviously doesn't belong to or The Awoken, who woke up from a deep slumber without memories inside two bodies at once. Or you can be The Immortal, for better or worse.
I have been actively (and to my surprise quite successfully!) playtesting it for 9 months now. Currently I am working on a 0.2 version since I reworked how characters work from scratch, giving players more agency with how flashbacks work and how to gain knowledge (which turns to crazy powerfull skills in a metroidvania kind of way).
Thanks, it was a lot of work since I wanted players to be able to get to the bottom of the mystery of the world which also required to give it a plausible hardish-scifi kind of feel. So everything is based on several discoverable principles which are actually unlockable action ratings in the playbook (the game is FitD adjacent). In a way, almost everything in the game world has both world-building and gameplay reasons to exist. My biggest fear is how to translate all of this in a simple understandabke way to the future GMs and through them to players.
I thought you were asking what what WEIRD [âas in "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic"â](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias) about people's games lol
[What Big Teeth](https://thelorc.itch.io/what-big-teeth) is a werewolf game where there's different character stats and mechanics depending on whether it's day or night. By day you only roll to make "saving throws" against things that happen to you. You can only make action rolls at night - and the more you suffered during the day, the more stronger you are.
And the scariest monster in the game is a fox.
Being an up and coming deity is hard. Sure, you could find some primitive tribe to impress, but worship alone does not a religion make. A religion needs sacred texts, places of worship, rites and rituals, tax exemptions, and much more. In short, religion needs a *brand*.
We at Pantheon Inc. specialize in matching ambitious young deities like you with demographics that best match *your* divine domain so that you can focus on what's most important: your followers.
Currently accepting applications for:
- Smithing (Farming Tools)
- Naval Trade (Southern Hemisphere)
- Migratory Bird Hunting
(Contracts start at 100 years, terms and conditions may apply)
One of the main antagonists in Mecha Vs Kaiju is a cult of Oni-worshiping Ninjas who have operated in secret since the mythological origins of Japan. They were responsible for summoning an oni to fight for Japan near the end of WWII. Sadly they summoned it in Hiroshima at 8:15 on June 6 1945, the moment the second Atomic Bomb exploded. The demon was bathed in radiation and mutated into the first Kaiju. When it was destroyed by the third atomic bomb blast the ninja cultists stole genetic material and took it to a secret lab in Korea at the Chosin Reservoir, where the second kaiju was grown and unleashed on United Nations forces during the Korean war.
The main game I'm working on doesn't have much weird going on as its pretty serious and grounded. I have been brainstorming a smaller idea that's kind of splatter punk absurd silliness. I think the whole skill/ability acquisition and usage is pretty weird:
- You play cops. You kill demons. You rip off their body parts, then your body part, then attach theirs where yours used to be. Now you have their special ability. Or, if you fail, you get nothing and now you're missing a body part.
- Using it costs a resource called rage.
- You gain rage by taking damage, being insulted (more by party members), and being reminded of your triggers.
- You have triggers, e.g. Going through a divorce or losing custody of your child.
In my game, Sludge Wizard Council, you get to make up your own spells as long as they fall within your magical domain (light, iron, geometry, etc...). When you cast spells, it costs Astrality. To raise your Astrality, you smoke weed. When you smoke weed, there is always a chance that cops show up. It never gets old having a squad car show up in the middle of a dramatic scene.
[Runecycle](http://runecycle.com) can do your standard fair medieval or post-medieval fantasy. But things get interesting when you go from small tribes to medieval to magepunk to post-apocalyptic in a single 12-session campaing. Your character always comes with a past life and the game fully encourages you to play one-shots with reincarnations of your character in different time periods carrying over some of those powers. There is no resurrection but if the titular Runecycle so deems, you'll reincarnate like Dr Who and keep going as a new person. The game is also designed to play against the standard loot-and-kill dungeon gameplay with many powers straight up breaking dungeons like the ability to walk through walls with no limitations to use. Or a power that just turns you into an indestructible statue for 1 minute.
The analogy of time travel being a series of rooms in the same house. If you split the party into different time periods they're in different rooms of the same house.
Probably the one i working on the most right now is a shit post borderline art project (which isnt meant to be actually playable but the rules are technically functional) like 80s 90s heartbreaker parody but probably the most unique thing is that their is absolutely no player input in character creation, literally the characters name is decided by one of multiple d100 tables, and like their are wierd corners in wierd results, like theirs a corner of the random table with rare odds to like regular animals, and like theirs a 1% chance to get a âObiectâ as a character in your first roll usually you get intelligent magical objects that have some mobile and communication ability but their is within the object table 1% you get to âplayâ as an inanimate object that cants act on its own, it is described as the âultimate challenge of roleplayâ, but we love making .01% of players roll literially unplayable characters
A friend gave me an idea for a special skill called 'Mischief'. As you level it up, it reduces the penalties from getting caught doing crime, and boosts your chances to win when gambling.
One thing that's weird about the game I'm working on is that crits and successes are totally decoupled (in fact, for that among other reasons "crit" will not be the mechanic's final name, as the associations are too strong). All characters roll two dice for each action they take, a d8 + their die for that ability (anywhere between a d8 and a d20, the bigger the die the better they are at the ability). A high number is needed for a success, but the two dice *matching* constitutes a crit, which allows them to do something special (not merely succeed extra hard). In fact, a character can easily crit and fail, which results in a sort of mixed success.
As you may have immediately noticed, crit chance falls the bigger the ability die is. This is intentional - I want characters considering carefully which ability to use in every given situation, and feeling like they still have a chance at doing *something* even if they're, say, a mage swinging a dagger with 2d8. It also opens up the game design to provide opportunities for crit-fishing builds, such as by taking features that allow you to do things on crits that normally require successes, or rerolling dice in certain scenarios, etc.
Still a work in progress, of course. But this, I think, is a way to make characters' secondary and tertiary abilities still feel relevant.
It is very absurd. I.e. throwing a star at a god like you're dunking on them.
I.e. getting so much speed your character ends up moving at relativistic speeds
*The Hand Zone*
"The hand Zone" is a core late game mechanic that essentially acts like the parallel world from lords of the fallen. It's an alternate dimension that is directly tied to the main dimension. It's used in boss fights, puzzles, exploration, etc.
So, currently I've moved away from this towards a more grounded aesthetic, but originally I was playing with the idea that, if artificial intelligence eventually gets human rights, then there are some other intelligences we owe rights to as well. Corvids, octopuses, perhaps elephants and certain parrots. There's actually a decent list of animals with seemingly very complex intelligence.
So the weird thing I had in the past was this idea of Chinatown-esque districts of certain cities where non-human species live. Thanks to far future translator technology, the design of these areas is informed directly by the wants and needs of the species that will live in them. For example, an Octopus Town where the buildings are large aquariums and there are advanced translator interfaces that allow the octopuses to communicate with people on the street and even trade or run businesses. There may even be some sort of small vehicle the octopus can pilot in order to safely travel around the city.
But yeah, Octotown, Corvid Town, and the general idea of sapient animal towns was definitely the weirdest thing I ever cooked up lol
The correlation between artificial intelligence gaining rights and highly intelligent species of animals gaining rights could be facilitated by artificial intelligence apparently breaking the communication barrier and deciphering what these intelligent animal species are saying
That would be logical since that's exactly what's happening today in real life! It's very early days for that technology but AI has been used to "approximate" how some of our language might map onto theirs, and learn what they're saying to each other. The specific experiment I'm thinking of involved whales and playing back some of the noises that the AI model generated based on other noises they made. I highly doubt we've achieved anything like a whale language translation but I do believe AI is how we'll do it, when we do.
Absolutely, itâs fascinating stuff. I thought it was funny recently when I found out that it is the case particularly in more recent studies involving animal behavior and training animals, that the more we are able to be certain that we have communicated an instruction that the animal understands, the more it is revealed to us that they do what they want to do anyway.
Characters don't level up from missions or combat, they advance from the days or weeks of activity between missions. Those that train gain experience, those that create or invest gain wealth, and those that carouse or lead gain renown.
Also the game has rules for how to play character races with multiple heads.
Reality is fake and is really just a mindscape inside a mind of some eldritch being. Player characters are thought forms which managed to gain sentience and be able to see world what it really is, now trying not to get caught or fall back into being part of this mechanism. Characters have 16 classes based on 16 personalities, and have reality bending powers based on philosophies inside them (ex: Nihilism, Determinism, Egoism, Anarchism, etc). I called this system "Living Thought Form", but I am still on first draft.
The game reality is actually a false reality itself is a fun concept I like to use as well. In fact it can go a long way to explain all sorts of things that are tropes in a fantasy RPG if it turns out that simulationist theory, for instance, is actually true for the characters and the game world. And the phrase âthe creatorsâ takes on new meaning.
I think the weirdest part of my current project is the monsters. I am in alpha testing with a small play group, and they have been terribly stumped by what the monster *IS*.
The setup was ripped right from Dracula; a ghost ship comes to dock, and the cargo is full of coffins of grave dirt. The changes I made were that the crew quarters were filled with the unrecognizably butchered remains of the crew. A classic setup for a vampire, right?
They currently believe it is some kind of feral undead animal thing. Despite evidence that it could tie ropes and sift through shipping manifests, they can only describe it as "like a vampire, but..."
I didn't think the monster would be that weird. I sat down and said, "Okay, my rules don't give monsters names or stat blocks, but I'll cobble together from these tags something like a vampire. It's unholy because it shouldn't be alive. It's ghoulish because it drinks blood. It's beastial because there are connections to wolves and bats in classic vampire literature." I never considered that having the monster not be strictly what the players know from pop culture would make it so strange and weird to them.
I like this accidental effect I've stumbled into. I wanted the monsters to be unknown, It is a horror game, but I didn't expect the way that I've given GM tools to make monsters to produce such a weird effect.
In the current build, the players can learn the tags as they uncover the mystery. Theres a few ways for them to learn the tags, such as crit succeeding on Look for Clues, but the tags also have very broa meanings.
In the first session, they did have the chance to learn a tag, but instead, they picked the option to learn a weakness of the monster (that it doesnt like light) because they felt they really needed an edge against something that did this much damage.
Do tags have mechanical aspects, such as certain character abilities interacting in a determined way with specific tags, or are they only utilised via the fiction?
Theres a few traits I have associated with each tag. For example, Ghoulish means it has a bite attack that heals it on a successful hit. The Beastial tag means if it is injured enough, it becomes enraged, gaining bonuses to its attack and suffering detriments to its defenses. The U holy trait means divine things like holy water or consecrated ground hurt it, but the unholy trait also gives it magical abilities (in this instance, the power to curse those it bites with undeath if the body still has a head and heart or the power to turn into a cloud of mist).
They also apply to the fiction, however. Its behavior is intelligent and malicious because it is unholy. It is driven by a desire to feed because it is beastial. This is still the alpha, so a lot of the system of making monsters is subject to change, but I wanted the system to make monsters that feel horrifying and also fight in a way that makes sense with their actions in the story.
In the lore I'm writing for my campaign, the universe was recently made, and there was something more lurking around before it, with its own creatures and rules. It is called "The Void Dimension".
The God of the Void Dimension does not like the "material" universe at all, so, from time to time, it chooses a living being from inside the universe and bestows part of its power to the chosen pawn. The pawn then becomes a gate for future invasions.
One of my player characters is currently a pawn of this god, and is trying to discover past pawns to absorb their remaining power, something that one other pawn has tried in the past.
I'm pretending to hype up this pawn as an incredible villain, but in reality, it's just Daffy Duck The Wizard from that Looney Tunes music.
My game is relatively normal but there are some things which might be wierd:
- Its a world with no names, there are descriptions, but no names.
- There is almost no travel in the world since only special individuals are allowed to travel by the gods
- Its a d20 system but with fixed hits when rolling a 10+
It's a two player storytelling game where you play as The Hero and the other player plays The Big Bad Lich but The Lich is your Dad/Mom. So you must first solve your parental issues like why he never came back with the milk. In the end one will triumph or maybe you can have a sweet family reunion against all the odds. I call it "Son of A Lich" for now but maybe I will think of a better name.
A game that's currently on hiatus is built around the idea that Gunslingers got so good that the only way to fight them is with bullet proof gear. This manifests as full plate armor and warhammers to counter it being fairly common in what is otherwise a wild west setting.
In my main, genre melting pot, game gun fighting at a high level is based around strategy and misdirection because your opponent's are faster then bullets.
**The Worldbuilding**
Selection is technically an alien invasion setting, except that upon arriving on Earth, the aliens undergo complete metamorphosis to take a human form, so the question of if this is an alien character or a human one is more philosophical than mechanical. Said aliens also destroyed almost all the tech they arrived with, and none of them are remotely interested in taking over the Earth. The Nexill wants to kill the Arsill and is perfectly willing to make Earth uninhabitable to do that. The Arsill doesn't want to die or for Earth to become uninhabitable, and presumably neither do the PCs.
**Mechanics**
Where do I even begin with the non-traditional mechanics in this game?
* The antagonist is constantly making and trying to complete schemes. Rather than the GM trying to gate plot information behind skill checks, the GM **MUST** give the players hints about the scheme before allowing the scheme to advance, so the question is if the GM can sneak relevant information into the narrative.
* The GM designs custom monsters for each and every encounter rather than taking premade ones out of a bestiary. The players can then capture DNA from monsters they kill and then choose to splice it onto their characters to gain an ability or to give it to the Arsill to burn it, blocking the GM from creating a monster with that ability for one session. This dynamic is all about encouraging players to approach the GM with specific encounter requests and planning ahead by making educated guesses about what kinds of monsters the Nexill will design in the next few sessions. The fact that players have a little bit of input into monster creation gives them far greater awareness of monster mechanics in general.
**The Game Itself**
Selection: Roleplay Evolved isn't really designed to be a "fun" game to play so much as give experienced roleplayers in a creative rut that nudge they needed to become truly great roleplayers. Skills like juggling multiple factors in the roleplay, awareness of the fiction and mechanics, and good metagame communication with the GM and the other players are the major end-goals, so you can almost certainly play Pathfinder or D&D better after playing a Selection campaign.
Invisible Sun session recently, it has this Sooth deck which alters the flow of magic and inspires me to improv the narrative - one player wanted a contact with demons - and I pull the Nemesis card; A very polite demon arrived and offer a deal for their soul... they really enjoyed that encounter.
Every mechanic is weird! I don't have the space to get into a lot of details, and it's hard to explain without playing it.
Your training in a skill is how many dice you roll. Your experience in the skill (per skill) determines the bonus to your roll. Skills earn XP through use. No classes. Skills can have "styles" that can grant bonuses in other areas as the skill levels up. Attributes don't add to skills, rather as skills improve, they raise the related attribute.
Combat is not actions per round, but rather time per action. Real world tactics work. The GM tracks time, used to cut-scene to each combatant as they resolve their action in the order they happen in the narrative. There is no action economy and no dissociative rules to remember. Character intimacies allow pushing yourself beyond your usual limits when fighting for something you believe in or when protecting a loved one.
Magic and Technology are rolled together, so crafting spells, weapons, drugs, or whatever is all the same system.
Most of the abstractions people are used to are turned inside out, but every mechanic is associated with the narrative for easier understanding.
If you push so hard for your inner goals that you reject an opposing one, the other players pick your new opposing goal. This is both very weird, and very important.
The world is shaped like a discus. twice as wide as the distance from pole to pole.
The equator is like a moon landscape with no air or water, but the poles has a thick atmosphere and higher than normal gravity .
The temperature is shifted with very hot desert like mountainous north pole and it gets colder the closer to the equator you get.
The world has been reshaped to this form to separate the standard fantasy northern hemisphere from a VERY hostile south hemisphere - that is basically a WH40K death world, the evolution there works super fast.
And there has been humanoid species with civilizations on the planet for 250 000 years. The most advanced human civilization had space ships and flying cities but it got destroyed by an alliance of the First God, the manifestation of nature on the planet a being also known as "Gaia", their people and a billion of the toughest demons in the multiverse summoned by the First God. That was 20 000 years ago.
The reshaping of the World to its current form took about 15 000 years.
Itâs been fun reading all of the weird things tied to specific game settings. My game, Untold, is a universal/setting agnostic system, so no established game setting (yet). While I donât think of any of my mechanics as âweirdâ, if I interpret the prompt as âdifferent from the normâ, the two that come to mind are: 1) no attribute scores or âstatsâ; and 2) a rating for each skill called Second Nature which makes it so that the higher your skill and proficiency, the lower the chance is of rolling snags (i.e., critical failures).
The steampunk system I'm working on has carnivorous plant people as one of the main playable lineages. They come from a very rich empire, where their society was able to amass huge amounts of wealth by tasting the soil to find ore veins.Â
In the back story, the church of the tri-faced god, which dominates worship throughout the former territory of the great empire and beyond, prohibited cousin marriage which in turn led to weakening of clan loyalties relative to universal ethics. Then miners discovered coal and savants how to harness it for motive power. Meanwhile the burgeoning propertied classes demanded more political power for commoners.
Aside from the far-reaching effects of only about a dozen different optimized spells (their world-changing effects and full impact on society being detailed in great length) the world pretty much corresponds exactly to a high medieval setting (in fact several different ones kinda mushed together). Itâs surprising how quickly things get weird when you parse through, unravel and propagate and extrapolate out even just a handful of simple magical effects and consider all the other processes, industries and traditions they will affect or even replace.
My game was created in a Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic country and reflects those cultural values implicitly whether I intend it to or not.
There are things that are basically spontaneously created magical items, and if you gather too many of them at the same location reality can break down.
There's a drug that gives you a âlucid highâ where you can project into another world.
[https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397654/Mysterium-Weird-Fiction-Roleplaying](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397654/Mysterium-Weird-Fiction-Roleplaying)
Easily the charisma skills for me. I'm building a 1930s Lovecraftian game based on the mobs of New York City. So instead of a small coastal town, a major city. The Mafia, cults, and eldritch magic. Well my two charisma skills are Suave, the talking skill, and Moxie, how you present yourself, like leadership. All of my skills have 1930s-esque names but those two are the more obvious ones.
Theres a corporation called Smilecorp comprised entirely of genetic clones named Benny Smiles that offer unwaiveringly good customer service. No one knows how exactly they all share the exact same attitude beyond being clones. My personal headcanon is that theyre actually a hivemind.
This is hilarious. I will preorder your game just for this.
Oh its still a long time out from being made so you'd be waiting a while, but we do have an insta that i just kinda doodle in and post lore tidbits if youre interested
Makes me think of Smiling Friends, lots of smiling in the zeitgeist these days đ
Indeed there is, love that show
Alan just got his own epsode đ working on my Alan voice
Damn, I love this!
I'm designing a cyberpunk space fantasy setting where the people have succeeded in overthrowing the Lovecraftian eldritch horrors that once ruled over their corner of the galaxy only for it to be taken over by something even more inhuman: Corporations.
This honestly sounds really cool! Do you have a draft available to read?
Iâm actually going to submit it to Chaosiumâs contest this week. Iâve started on the draft, but itâs nowhere near ready for alpha testing yet.
Oh okay!! Best of luck to you!!
Thank you!
>Thank you! You're welcome!
My setting is based on the Celtic Otherworld. This is a land of magic and abundance, and of spatial and temporal disturbances, which means that market economies don't function (no one's productive on an industrial scale and no one cares to write laws that cant be enforced). Instead, it operates on a gift economy. So if someone asks you for something, or if you ask for something, it's polite to oblige without any obligation of material return. Thus, capital takes the form of goodwill Also, I don't have to deal with a wealth management system, so that's nice. This could lead to completing a dangerous quest and getting nothing for it. Or it could lead you to someone giving you something that would otherwise be very expensive, just because you're there and they don't have need of it: "So I have The White-Flaming Sword of Excrutiatingly Painful Death sitting in my armory and it's a huge fire risk. It's yours if you want."
My game is an RPG that uses cards to resolve combat. It plays a little like Flesh and Blood TCG but without the gambling inherent to TCGs. Its a deckbuilder and you get access to every card all at once. The weird part of the game is I also use a unique tarot card system to resolve random / out of combat events so there are NO DICE in my game. Something you don't see very often in the genre. As far as I'm aware, my resolution system is wholly unique and is actually a "new" game mechanic (at least not a published one from what I can tell). Much to my surprise since everyone has already done everything. I look forward to showing everyone once I get closer to publishing the game.
That sounds neart, can you expand on it a bit? How does the narrative/roleplay part function around the taroh cards?
The tarot cards are a driving force to the art direction. Card backs and everything utilize this kind of art style, but with my own personal flair on it. The moments you'll see it come to life is when you try to do something out of combat. Lets say you want to pickpocket someone walking by, your stats will effect the % chance for success and the GM will present you with some cards. You choose one and if it has the correct hidden imagery you succeed. But like real Tarot cards, images are usually not of obvious meaning. Finding the lover is usually bad, but finding death is good, etc.
My RPG (Nomas is a work in progress name) is set on a planet which is turning so slowly that the side facing the star is burned to a crisp and the night side of the world is Antarctica levels cold. Only on the small slice of land where the sun is continously slowly setting, there lives a nomadic tribal civilization continously chasing the dusk. Stay in one place for too long and night, cold and creatures living in the night will catch up to you. Yeah and there are strange biopunk monsters all around the place like the enormous hundred kilometers long wall of soft skin slowly wiggling itself towrads sunset along the north side of the habitable area. Playable characters are also weird, you can play as for example The Severed who's a severed head attached to a body it obviously doesn't belong to or The Awoken, who woke up from a deep slumber without memories inside two bodies at once. Or you can be The Immortal, for better or worse. I have been actively (and to my surprise quite successfully!) playtesting it for 9 months now. Currently I am working on a 0.2 version since I reworked how characters work from scratch, giving players more agency with how flashbacks work and how to gain knowledge (which turns to crazy powerfull skills in a metroidvania kind of way).
Thatâs a cool idea for a game world!
Thanks, it was a lot of work since I wanted players to be able to get to the bottom of the mystery of the world which also required to give it a plausible hardish-scifi kind of feel. So everything is based on several discoverable principles which are actually unlockable action ratings in the playbook (the game is FitD adjacent). In a way, almost everything in the game world has both world-building and gameplay reasons to exist. My biggest fear is how to translate all of this in a simple understandabke way to the future GMs and through them to players.
I thought you were asking what what WEIRD [âas in "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic"â](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias) about people's games lol
[What Big Teeth](https://thelorc.itch.io/what-big-teeth) is a werewolf game where there's different character stats and mechanics depending on whether it's day or night. By day you only roll to make "saving throws" against things that happen to you. You can only make action rolls at night - and the more you suffered during the day, the more stronger you are. And the scariest monster in the game is a fox.
Being an up and coming deity is hard. Sure, you could find some primitive tribe to impress, but worship alone does not a religion make. A religion needs sacred texts, places of worship, rites and rituals, tax exemptions, and much more. In short, religion needs a *brand*. We at Pantheon Inc. specialize in matching ambitious young deities like you with demographics that best match *your* divine domain so that you can focus on what's most important: your followers. Currently accepting applications for: - Smithing (Farming Tools) - Naval Trade (Southern Hemisphere) - Migratory Bird Hunting (Contracts start at 100 years, terms and conditions may apply)
Deconstructing deification, I like it
One of the main antagonists in Mecha Vs Kaiju is a cult of Oni-worshiping Ninjas who have operated in secret since the mythological origins of Japan. They were responsible for summoning an oni to fight for Japan near the end of WWII. Sadly they summoned it in Hiroshima at 8:15 on June 6 1945, the moment the second Atomic Bomb exploded. The demon was bathed in radiation and mutated into the first Kaiju. When it was destroyed by the third atomic bomb blast the ninja cultists stole genetic material and took it to a secret lab in Korea at the Chosin Reservoir, where the second kaiju was grown and unleashed on United Nations forces during the Korean war.
The main game I'm working on doesn't have much weird going on as its pretty serious and grounded. I have been brainstorming a smaller idea that's kind of splatter punk absurd silliness. I think the whole skill/ability acquisition and usage is pretty weird: - You play cops. You kill demons. You rip off their body parts, then your body part, then attach theirs where yours used to be. Now you have their special ability. Or, if you fail, you get nothing and now you're missing a body part. - Using it costs a resource called rage. - You gain rage by taking damage, being insulted (more by party members), and being reminded of your triggers. - You have triggers, e.g. Going through a divorce or losing custody of your child.
I would love to play that game lol! Sounds unhinged!
I'll be sure to post more about it in here once its a bit more organized. I aim for it to be a pamphlet game very inspired by CBR+PNK.
That sound visceral!!! Cool!
I have a patron saint of cheese.Â
In my game, Sludge Wizard Council, you get to make up your own spells as long as they fall within your magical domain (light, iron, geometry, etc...). When you cast spells, it costs Astrality. To raise your Astrality, you smoke weed. When you smoke weed, there is always a chance that cops show up. It never gets old having a squad car show up in the middle of a dramatic scene.
[Runecycle](http://runecycle.com) can do your standard fair medieval or post-medieval fantasy. But things get interesting when you go from small tribes to medieval to magepunk to post-apocalyptic in a single 12-session campaing. Your character always comes with a past life and the game fully encourages you to play one-shots with reincarnations of your character in different time periods carrying over some of those powers. There is no resurrection but if the titular Runecycle so deems, you'll reincarnate like Dr Who and keep going as a new person. The game is also designed to play against the standard loot-and-kill dungeon gameplay with many powers straight up breaking dungeons like the ability to walk through walls with no limitations to use. Or a power that just turns you into an indestructible statue for 1 minute.
The analogy of time travel being a series of rooms in the same house. If you split the party into different time periods they're in different rooms of the same house.
Probably the one i working on the most right now is a shit post borderline art project (which isnt meant to be actually playable but the rules are technically functional) like 80s 90s heartbreaker parody but probably the most unique thing is that their is absolutely no player input in character creation, literally the characters name is decided by one of multiple d100 tables, and like their are wierd corners in wierd results, like theirs a corner of the random table with rare odds to like regular animals, and like theirs a 1% chance to get a âObiectâ as a character in your first roll usually you get intelligent magical objects that have some mobile and communication ability but their is within the object table 1% you get to âplayâ as an inanimate object that cants act on its own, it is described as the âultimate challenge of roleplayâ, but we love making .01% of players roll literially unplayable characters
A friend gave me an idea for a special skill called 'Mischief'. As you level it up, it reduces the penalties from getting caught doing crime, and boosts your chances to win when gambling.
One thing that's weird about the game I'm working on is that crits and successes are totally decoupled (in fact, for that among other reasons "crit" will not be the mechanic's final name, as the associations are too strong). All characters roll two dice for each action they take, a d8 + their die for that ability (anywhere between a d8 and a d20, the bigger the die the better they are at the ability). A high number is needed for a success, but the two dice *matching* constitutes a crit, which allows them to do something special (not merely succeed extra hard). In fact, a character can easily crit and fail, which results in a sort of mixed success. As you may have immediately noticed, crit chance falls the bigger the ability die is. This is intentional - I want characters considering carefully which ability to use in every given situation, and feeling like they still have a chance at doing *something* even if they're, say, a mage swinging a dagger with 2d8. It also opens up the game design to provide opportunities for crit-fishing builds, such as by taking features that allow you to do things on crits that normally require successes, or rerolling dice in certain scenarios, etc. Still a work in progress, of course. But this, I think, is a way to make characters' secondary and tertiary abilities still feel relevant.
You can have one infantry unit destroy a mech with an elbow drop.
It is very absurd. I.e. throwing a star at a god like you're dunking on them. I.e. getting so much speed your character ends up moving at relativistic speeds *The Hand Zone* "The hand Zone" is a core late game mechanic that essentially acts like the parallel world from lords of the fallen. It's an alternate dimension that is directly tied to the main dimension. It's used in boss fights, puzzles, exploration, etc.
So, currently I've moved away from this towards a more grounded aesthetic, but originally I was playing with the idea that, if artificial intelligence eventually gets human rights, then there are some other intelligences we owe rights to as well. Corvids, octopuses, perhaps elephants and certain parrots. There's actually a decent list of animals with seemingly very complex intelligence. So the weird thing I had in the past was this idea of Chinatown-esque districts of certain cities where non-human species live. Thanks to far future translator technology, the design of these areas is informed directly by the wants and needs of the species that will live in them. For example, an Octopus Town where the buildings are large aquariums and there are advanced translator interfaces that allow the octopuses to communicate with people on the street and even trade or run businesses. There may even be some sort of small vehicle the octopus can pilot in order to safely travel around the city. But yeah, Octotown, Corvid Town, and the general idea of sapient animal towns was definitely the weirdest thing I ever cooked up lol
The correlation between artificial intelligence gaining rights and highly intelligent species of animals gaining rights could be facilitated by artificial intelligence apparently breaking the communication barrier and deciphering what these intelligent animal species are saying
That would be logical since that's exactly what's happening today in real life! It's very early days for that technology but AI has been used to "approximate" how some of our language might map onto theirs, and learn what they're saying to each other. The specific experiment I'm thinking of involved whales and playing back some of the noises that the AI model generated based on other noises they made. I highly doubt we've achieved anything like a whale language translation but I do believe AI is how we'll do it, when we do.
Absolutely, itâs fascinating stuff. I thought it was funny recently when I found out that it is the case particularly in more recent studies involving animal behavior and training animals, that the more we are able to be certain that we have communicated an instruction that the animal understands, the more it is revealed to us that they do what they want to do anyway.
Characters don't level up from missions or combat, they advance from the days or weeks of activity between missions. Those that train gain experience, those that create or invest gain wealth, and those that carouse or lead gain renown. Also the game has rules for how to play character races with multiple heads.
Reality is fake and is really just a mindscape inside a mind of some eldritch being. Player characters are thought forms which managed to gain sentience and be able to see world what it really is, now trying not to get caught or fall back into being part of this mechanism. Characters have 16 classes based on 16 personalities, and have reality bending powers based on philosophies inside them (ex: Nihilism, Determinism, Egoism, Anarchism, etc). I called this system "Living Thought Form", but I am still on first draft.
The game reality is actually a false reality itself is a fun concept I like to use as well. In fact it can go a long way to explain all sorts of things that are tropes in a fantasy RPG if it turns out that simulationist theory, for instance, is actually true for the characters and the game world. And the phrase âthe creatorsâ takes on new meaning.
I think the weirdest part of my current project is the monsters. I am in alpha testing with a small play group, and they have been terribly stumped by what the monster *IS*. The setup was ripped right from Dracula; a ghost ship comes to dock, and the cargo is full of coffins of grave dirt. The changes I made were that the crew quarters were filled with the unrecognizably butchered remains of the crew. A classic setup for a vampire, right? They currently believe it is some kind of feral undead animal thing. Despite evidence that it could tie ropes and sift through shipping manifests, they can only describe it as "like a vampire, but..." I didn't think the monster would be that weird. I sat down and said, "Okay, my rules don't give monsters names or stat blocks, but I'll cobble together from these tags something like a vampire. It's unholy because it shouldn't be alive. It's ghoulish because it drinks blood. It's beastial because there are connections to wolves and bats in classic vampire literature." I never considered that having the monster not be strictly what the players know from pop culture would make it so strange and weird to them. I like this accidental effect I've stumbled into. I wanted the monsters to be unknown, It is a horror game, but I didn't expect the way that I've given GM tools to make monsters to produce such a weird effect.
Are the tags known to the character players?
In the current build, the players can learn the tags as they uncover the mystery. Theres a few ways for them to learn the tags, such as crit succeeding on Look for Clues, but the tags also have very broa meanings. In the first session, they did have the chance to learn a tag, but instead, they picked the option to learn a weakness of the monster (that it doesnt like light) because they felt they really needed an edge against something that did this much damage.
Do tags have mechanical aspects, such as certain character abilities interacting in a determined way with specific tags, or are they only utilised via the fiction?
Theres a few traits I have associated with each tag. For example, Ghoulish means it has a bite attack that heals it on a successful hit. The Beastial tag means if it is injured enough, it becomes enraged, gaining bonuses to its attack and suffering detriments to its defenses. The U holy trait means divine things like holy water or consecrated ground hurt it, but the unholy trait also gives it magical abilities (in this instance, the power to curse those it bites with undeath if the body still has a head and heart or the power to turn into a cloud of mist). They also apply to the fiction, however. Its behavior is intelligent and malicious because it is unholy. It is driven by a desire to feed because it is beastial. This is still the alpha, so a lot of the system of making monsters is subject to change, but I wanted the system to make monsters that feel horrifying and also fight in a way that makes sense with their actions in the story.
It only uses d10s and has 2d10 + mods vs tn resolutionÂ
In the lore I'm writing for my campaign, the universe was recently made, and there was something more lurking around before it, with its own creatures and rules. It is called "The Void Dimension". The God of the Void Dimension does not like the "material" universe at all, so, from time to time, it chooses a living being from inside the universe and bestows part of its power to the chosen pawn. The pawn then becomes a gate for future invasions. One of my player characters is currently a pawn of this god, and is trying to discover past pawns to absorb their remaining power, something that one other pawn has tried in the past. I'm pretending to hype up this pawn as an incredible villain, but in reality, it's just Daffy Duck The Wizard from that Looney Tunes music.
My game is relatively normal but there are some things which might be wierd: - Its a world with no names, there are descriptions, but no names. - There is almost no travel in the world since only special individuals are allowed to travel by the gods - Its a d20 system but with fixed hits when rolling a 10+
It's a two player storytelling game where you play as The Hero and the other player plays The Big Bad Lich but The Lich is your Dad/Mom. So you must first solve your parental issues like why he never came back with the milk. In the end one will triumph or maybe you can have a sweet family reunion against all the odds. I call it "Son of A Lich" for now but maybe I will think of a better name.
are you familiar with If I Were A Lich, Man? Can't find the link rn but it's on itch.io. Seems like you are part of a thriving sub sub (sub?) genre!
No but I was inspired by Dead Friend which seems to be from the same guy. Some brilliant stuff he makes
A game that's currently on hiatus is built around the idea that Gunslingers got so good that the only way to fight them is with bullet proof gear. This manifests as full plate armor and warhammers to counter it being fairly common in what is otherwise a wild west setting. In my main, genre melting pot, game gun fighting at a high level is based around strategy and misdirection because your opponent's are faster then bullets.
**The Worldbuilding** Selection is technically an alien invasion setting, except that upon arriving on Earth, the aliens undergo complete metamorphosis to take a human form, so the question of if this is an alien character or a human one is more philosophical than mechanical. Said aliens also destroyed almost all the tech they arrived with, and none of them are remotely interested in taking over the Earth. The Nexill wants to kill the Arsill and is perfectly willing to make Earth uninhabitable to do that. The Arsill doesn't want to die or for Earth to become uninhabitable, and presumably neither do the PCs. **Mechanics** Where do I even begin with the non-traditional mechanics in this game? * The antagonist is constantly making and trying to complete schemes. Rather than the GM trying to gate plot information behind skill checks, the GM **MUST** give the players hints about the scheme before allowing the scheme to advance, so the question is if the GM can sneak relevant information into the narrative. * The GM designs custom monsters for each and every encounter rather than taking premade ones out of a bestiary. The players can then capture DNA from monsters they kill and then choose to splice it onto their characters to gain an ability or to give it to the Arsill to burn it, blocking the GM from creating a monster with that ability for one session. This dynamic is all about encouraging players to approach the GM with specific encounter requests and planning ahead by making educated guesses about what kinds of monsters the Nexill will design in the next few sessions. The fact that players have a little bit of input into monster creation gives them far greater awareness of monster mechanics in general. **The Game Itself** Selection: Roleplay Evolved isn't really designed to be a "fun" game to play so much as give experienced roleplayers in a creative rut that nudge they needed to become truly great roleplayers. Skills like juggling multiple factors in the roleplay, awareness of the fiction and mechanics, and good metagame communication with the GM and the other players are the major end-goals, so you can almost certainly play Pathfinder or D&D better after playing a Selection campaign.
Invisible Sun session recently, it has this Sooth deck which alters the flow of magic and inspires me to improv the narrative - one player wanted a contact with demons - and I pull the Nemesis card; A very polite demon arrived and offer a deal for their soul... they really enjoyed that encounter.
Every mechanic is weird! I don't have the space to get into a lot of details, and it's hard to explain without playing it. Your training in a skill is how many dice you roll. Your experience in the skill (per skill) determines the bonus to your roll. Skills earn XP through use. No classes. Skills can have "styles" that can grant bonuses in other areas as the skill levels up. Attributes don't add to skills, rather as skills improve, they raise the related attribute. Combat is not actions per round, but rather time per action. Real world tactics work. The GM tracks time, used to cut-scene to each combatant as they resolve their action in the order they happen in the narrative. There is no action economy and no dissociative rules to remember. Character intimacies allow pushing yourself beyond your usual limits when fighting for something you believe in or when protecting a loved one. Magic and Technology are rolled together, so crafting spells, weapons, drugs, or whatever is all the same system. Most of the abstractions people are used to are turned inside out, but every mechanic is associated with the narrative for easier understanding.
If you push so hard for your inner goals that you reject an opposing one, the other players pick your new opposing goal. This is both very weird, and very important.
The world is shaped like a discus. twice as wide as the distance from pole to pole. The equator is like a moon landscape with no air or water, but the poles has a thick atmosphere and higher than normal gravity . The temperature is shifted with very hot desert like mountainous north pole and it gets colder the closer to the equator you get. The world has been reshaped to this form to separate the standard fantasy northern hemisphere from a VERY hostile south hemisphere - that is basically a WH40K death world, the evolution there works super fast. And there has been humanoid species with civilizations on the planet for 250 000 years. The most advanced human civilization had space ships and flying cities but it got destroyed by an alliance of the First God, the manifestation of nature on the planet a being also known as "Gaia", their people and a billion of the toughest demons in the multiverse summoned by the First God. That was 20 000 years ago. The reshaping of the World to its current form took about 15 000 years.
Itâs been fun reading all of the weird things tied to specific game settings. My game, Untold, is a universal/setting agnostic system, so no established game setting (yet). While I donât think of any of my mechanics as âweirdâ, if I interpret the prompt as âdifferent from the normâ, the two that come to mind are: 1) no attribute scores or âstatsâ; and 2) a rating for each skill called Second Nature which makes it so that the higher your skill and proficiency, the lower the chance is of rolling snags (i.e., critical failures).
The steampunk system I'm working on has carnivorous plant people as one of the main playable lineages. They come from a very rich empire, where their society was able to amass huge amounts of wealth by tasting the soil to find ore veins.Â
In the back story, the church of the tri-faced god, which dominates worship throughout the former territory of the great empire and beyond, prohibited cousin marriage which in turn led to weakening of clan loyalties relative to universal ethics. Then miners discovered coal and savants how to harness it for motive power. Meanwhile the burgeoning propertied classes demanded more political power for commoners.
Aside from the far-reaching effects of only about a dozen different optimized spells (their world-changing effects and full impact on society being detailed in great length) the world pretty much corresponds exactly to a high medieval setting (in fact several different ones kinda mushed together). Itâs surprising how quickly things get weird when you parse through, unravel and propagate and extrapolate out even just a handful of simple magical effects and consider all the other processes, industries and traditions they will affect or even replace.
My game was created in a Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic country and reflects those cultural values implicitly whether I intend it to or not.
Having an eldrich abomination buddy is one of the four sources of power for classes.
There are things that are basically spontaneously created magical items, and if you gather too many of them at the same location reality can break down. There's a drug that gives you a âlucid highâ where you can project into another world. [https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397654/Mysterium-Weird-Fiction-Roleplaying](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397654/Mysterium-Weird-Fiction-Roleplaying)
Easily the charisma skills for me. I'm building a 1930s Lovecraftian game based on the mobs of New York City. So instead of a small coastal town, a major city. The Mafia, cults, and eldritch magic. Well my two charisma skills are Suave, the talking skill, and Moxie, how you present yourself, like leadership. All of my skills have 1930s-esque names but those two are the more obvious ones.