Rather than slowly recover these posts one-by-one, separating them out from their main topics and apologetic framing, I just put all of them here in| beast.blot.im
All of the entries posted on Benign Brown Beast tagged Maritime| beast.blot.im
A MOSAIC Strict framework for giving your character a mech suit. Set #31313. ©2013 LEGO Group. Cores The size and weight of a cinderblock, all three common cores are basically similar. Fitted into an appropriate exoskeleton, they amplify the wearer’s strength, extend their reach, prevent RSI, etc. Mechs are not independent armor, weapons, or tooling platforms, but their cores do provide other“edges.” In any test of the mech’s edge, the mech succeeds with the highest degree of success...| Benign Brown Beast
Between the formation of earth and the birth of man, the moles built an empire. Its inverted spires plunged deep into the crust, gluttering with dim| beast.blot.im
Suppose I have a game that involves rolling on a table of prompts. The table has ten entries and I’m going to roll eleven times. Necessarily, at| beast.blot.im
In 2020, two people sent me copies of solo RPGs. (In one case explicitly for review, but in this case that was left unclear.) Solo games were having| beast.blot.im
All of the entries posted on Benign Brown Beast tagged Essays| beast.blot.im
Since 2020, I’ve been writing on-and-off about the early-2000s MMO RuneScape and how and why different aspects of its gameplay could be imported| beast.blot.im
As I find myself thinking about minimal game structures, I keep coming back to the elegance of this setup. So I thought to bump it up the recovery| beast.blot.im
I’ve been thinking about afterlives as places, and especially how they show up in games. In this momentary obsession, I’ve at least partially reviewed the following: Ghostwalk Wraith: The Oblivion, Orpheus, and Geist: The Sin-Eaters Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen etc. My own take on it. Kelsey Krogman of Burnt Thicket Theatre, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Extant Afterlives What features does a good“interactive” afterlife have? First, all of these afterlives have a universal and cen...| Benign Brown Beast
Construction on York Minster Cathedral was finished in 1472, having begun c. 1220. For two-hundred and fifty years, the unfinished cathedral was a part of the city, an ongoing project longer than the life of any one person. In that time it brought in specialists and materials from far away and gave work and benefit to the locals.1 Treadmill Crane. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Toolbox This toolbox is intended to quickly sketch a settlement defined by its largest ongoing project. The ...| Benign Brown Beast
The earworm in my nostrils. The ringing in my fingertips. Coins of Southeast Asia. Seashells. Koh Samui, Thailand. By Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC-By 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Two Rules of Three I ran into these game design experiences around the same time, and couldn’t shake the conviction that they’re running into the same truth from opposite ends. Hannah: Was there anything that wasn’t on that list of things that you already want to change that cropped up? Evan: One big thing that crop...| Benign Brown Beast
Into the Odd is my one-shot game of choice. It has just enough of everything. Just enough mechanics, just enough character, just enough world. I| beast.blot.im
All of the entries posted on Benign Brown Beast tagged Mechanics| beast.blot.im
All of the entries posted on Benign Brown Beast tagged Math| beast.blot.im
The overland monsters of Minecraft are a memorable bunch. They blend familiar and unfamiliar and behave in interesting emergent ways. Be warned, if you’re a Minecraft fan, this is hardly comprehensive. Background Minecraft has pretty limited controls, so varied modes of interaction really push the boundaries of the game. Players can move, jump, swim, look, listen, dig, build, and attack (melee or ranged). Fire, sun, water, and so on all work roughly as expected. Monsters take falling damage...| Benign Brown Beast
(Spoilers below for various Star Wars properties.) With the final death of Emperor Palpatine, history was ended. The Skywalker destiny doubly or triply fulfilled, the ultimate evil laid to rest, balance restored to the force. There are no more blockbuster movies to be made in the world of 36 ABY,1 but that doesn’t mean there aren’t stories to be told. Smaller in scope and more nuanced in morals, I think these stories may be ideal for a role-playing game. If the prequel trilogy took the fa...| Benign Brown Beast
This‘lead suit’ varies according to the type of pack, and also according to whether the game is played during the day (between sunrise and sunset) or during the night. With a Moghul pack the lead suits are zar-e zorkh (red gold coins, or figuratively‘suns’) by day, and zar-e safid (white gold coins or figuratively‘moons’) by night. — Ganjifa on Wikipedia Caspar David Friedrich, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Suppose a game meets in-person regularly. Let’s also say that ...| Benign Brown Beast
Quest World™ is my entry into The Great Troika! Pocket Sphere Jam. For the unfamiliar, a pocketmod is a small booklet folded from a single sheet of paper, and a“sphere” is Troika’s rough equivalent of a plane or a planet. Quest World™ is one part of a stew I’ve had simmering for the better part of a year now, which I call the Uncanny Hinterlands. RuneScape login glitch, c. 2010. The Uncanny Hinterlands The first ingredient in the Uncanny Hinterlands was the Mothership adventure Hi...| Benign Brown Beast
Suppose I have an image and I want to reduce the number of colors in it.1 How can I go about this? I’m including ImageMagick commands throughout,| beast.blot.im
I called my last RuneScape post “pseudo-penultimate,” but I may have gotten ahead of myself. This post picks up some threads from Defining Terms| beast.blot.im
Bits and pieces from 2020. Game Jams and More to Fight Social Isolation Blues I added art to my entry in the Troika! Tarot Jam (11 days left at time of writing), and I now consider it finished. For these I wanted to communicate a lot of flavor without the standard explanatory preamble, to help them fit in such a small space. I think a lot of the backgrounds would be better remixed, but can stand alone as-is. I only hope that the illustrations aren’t so specific that they interfere with anyo...| Benign Brown Beast
There are no novel insights here, but I needed to sort these things visually to get a handle on them. I can’t describe this timeline easily in| beast.blot.im
I’ve enjoyed hearing how people have made use of Crisis on Christmas Prime in the last few weeks. I hope that by providing a brief sample adventure it might be more approachable. I rolled“Rag-tag adventurers are buying up candy!” on the crisis table, so that was the starting point. 3 Great Holiday Numbers, via Wikimedia Commons. Hook Ol’ Gran Yule has realized that Santa’s bag is a few thousand chocolate coins short. Can you find some before he leaves tomorrow? Investigation Loosely...| Benign Brown Beast
I’ve been thinking about cards a lot recently. Really, for a while. I wanted to lay out a little bit of how I’ve started thinking about them, why I| beast.blot.im
Until tomorrow (22 Dec 2020), the Mothership Discord server is hosting the 20x20 Jam. Make a piece of Mothership content (any sort) in Playscii in 20x20 format, and upload a png to the server. Winner gets a shirt? I entered this thing,“Containment Sphere 5”. 20x20 is just too dense to be easily digestible, so I thought I’d expand some of it here (the submission itself is still only the image). The map is the net of a regular icosahedron (d20). The repeated letters at the top and bottom ...| Benign Brown Beast
Little Nemo losing control of Santa's sleigh, Winsor McCay Last year I put together a little seasonal Troika! supplement and put it up for free on itch.io. This year I’ve reworked the whole thing, and I made it pay-what-you-want. Briefly, it has eighteen backgrounds, six spells, twelve adversaries, miscellaneous tables, and a sketch of the land of Arctica. It’s 48 pages of A5, all black-and-white. Please don’t let the pay-what-you-want feature discourage you from downloading it. If you ...| Benign Brown Beast
is a simple dice game that I thought might make a good minigame. On a player’s turn, they roll five six-sided dice, up to three| beast.blot.im
Let’s say you have a skill with rank R∈[0,101]R R∈[0,101], starting at R0=0R_0=0R0=0. To test the skill, roll a d% and compare: If you roll under or equal to RRR, you succeed. If you roll over or equal to RRR, you learn. When you learn, increase RRR by a=1a=1a=1. Naturally, if you roll exactly equal to RRR, you succeed and you learn. This is substantially similar to the core mechanic of Penny Spent, but broader. I am naming this Fail-to-Learn. Initially, I had intended to submit this...| Benign Brown Beast
Spoilers below for some of the more notable parts of Tomb of the Serpent Kings by Skerples. Brown Snake, Purple Door; Rod Waddington, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons In my review of Tomb of the Serpent Kings, I wrote: I’d read the hammer trap a dozen times and thought I’d figured it out. But as soon as I tried to run it, it escaped me, my descriptions were inadequate, and the players spent more time being frustrated than they should have. It really wants a rough diagram and just a couple ...| Benign Brown Beast
The adventure I spent the most time with this year was Skerples’ Tomb of the Serpent Kings (TotSK), running it for a group of 5e players. I also| beast.blot.im
At the turn of the year, everyone hurries to make their plans and predictions for the coming year. I’m not sure I’ve ever been good at that. Here| beast.blot.im
See last year’s summary here. 2024 was busy! I traveled internationally to Iceland, Mexico, and Portugal. I played in campaigns of OSE, Fate, and| beast.blot.im
In thermodynamics, a reversible process is one that happens near equilibrium and with minimal dissipation. In a reversible process, a tiny change in some variable can be put back with the same effort that made it. Phase boundaries are well-modeled as reversible processes: the amount of energy it takes to melt an amount of ice is the same amount it takes to re-freeze it. Strictly, no process is truly reversible, but a model of a reversible process gives us the most efficient version of it, and...| Benign Brown Beast
Flavors of Horror I’ve been thinking recently about why the early episodes of the Magnus Archives hooked me so immediately. In addition to solid storytelling, I think it’s down to the blending of two“flavors” of horror that I’m a bit of a sucker for, which I’m calling1 skeptical horror and conspiratorial horror. Both of these also work well with the conceits that some information has been withheld or redacted and that ominous but vague warnings have been issued, but I don’t thin...| Benign Brown Beast
The implicit setting of PALACERUN. The palace is richly-appointed, labyrinthine, and endless. Some would say“infinite”, but it is surely partly bounded as it has relatively easy access to the outside. The format is from Jack Shear, although I’m sure I haven’t done it justice. Reception of the Grand Condé at Versailles by Jean-Léon Gérôme, via Wikimedia Commons Aesthetics Whole rooms of one color or material, tables set for hundreds, imperial staircases, gilt-framed family portrait...| Benign Brown Beast
Before I can explain the Minideck, let me tell you about the Everdeck. The Everdeck is 120 cards“designed with a ruthless combinatorial efficiency” to be useful in playing and prototyping a variety of games.1 It maps to many existing decks and even includes provisions for Scrabble-like word games and cartomancy. I wanted to make something like that, but with only 18 cards. Why? I knew someone excitedly working on Buttonshy’s 18 Card Challenge last year. I haven’t stopped turning it ov...| Benign Brown Beast
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective was released in 1982, apparently to great critical acclaim. I’ve been thinking about it recently because while I play it cooperatively, I think it would be a fine solo game, and solo gaming is having a bit of a moment. It’s also inspired many imitators. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (SHCD) The game itself is very simple once you get the hang of it, and it only has a few components: A case book, which has the initial details of the case in read-a...| Benign Brown Beast
The crabs in my lobster pot. The third bird, alive and in a bush. The walls at Pavilhão Chinês in Lisbon. --- Starfleet encounters a libertarian space steading colony in need of help. They attempt to render aid, but the colonists will make no lifestyle concessions nor recognize the authority of Starfleet. This is merely distasteful, until: they are found to be harboring fugitives. they are inadvertently about to make first contact. they are emboldening the local fauna. they are polluting a ...| Benign Brown Beast
I’ve had the pleasure to run three new systems in the last year or so, and I’ve collected some notes here. Mothership Mothership is a Science Fiction horror game in the vein of Alien or Event Horizon. The Player’s Survival Guide is available from Tuesday Knight Games in print or from DriveThruRPG as a free PDF. Character creation is as easy as the character sheet makes it look. It was great for new players and they picked up the percentile system quickly. It is much harder to GM than it...| Benign Brown Beast
Flames of the Meta-Dragon is a TTRPG system by Matthew Jarmak, published in 2024. It’s available PWYW on itch.io, and licensed CC-BY 4.0. At only| beast.blot.im
For a while now,1 I’ve been dreaming of a maritime campaign, so I jumped on Weird on the Waves a year or so ago. It’s finally out, and it’s OK I| beast.blot.im
Let’s make some magic. Let’s do some divination. Let’s play pastamancy.1 “Little Waterfalls.” Cascatelli were developed in 2019 by podcaster Dan| beast.blot.im
I’ve been running D&D 5e for a group of remote friends recently. These are the “house rules” that I’ve adopted to make things go smoother, or at| beast.blot.im
Itinerarium is a daily solo walking RPG that I wrote in March when I was thinking of game mechanics to “explode” for the Game Exploder Jam. In the| beast.blot.im
Dan D. at Throne of Salt requests from the jackalope: d6 Chuckleheads you have to deal with from the local wizard mafia This should be easy:| beast.blot.im
I’ve put a lot of thought into this series, but I never developed it into a coherent vision. There are a few reasons for this, which I’ll lay out| beast.blot.im
On 20 Feb 2020, PlanetNiles (Ey/Em) NB on the workshop channel of the OSR Discord asked:1 7d6, split between two attributes One way to think| beast.blot.im
As an area for role-playing, “language” is both rich in potential and generally underutilized in D&D-like games. I’m not the first to observe this,| beast.blot.im
In many editions of D&D, everyone learns a handful of languages at character creation, and then either never thinks about them again or never has| beast.blot.im
I recently released Palace Run Remastered as an entry into the Disc 2 TTRPG Jam. There are plenty of free “community copies,” and you should feel| beast.blot.im
All of the entries posted on Benign Brown Beast tagged RPG| beast.blot.im
All of the entries posted on Benign Brown Beast tagged Recovered| beast.blot.im
I promised my players I would “concoct some suitable fable” about atomic bees. It’s not great prose, but I think it’s functional. I didn’t find a| beast.blot.im
The cat’s claw in my tongue. My snoozed reminders. Select units of time by increasing duration. Millisecond (ms). seconds. Jiffy. Variably small,| beast.blot.im
On 7 Feb 2020, diregrizzlybear on the GLOG channel of the OSR Discord asked:1 5d6 but only count straights and matching. One solution might be to| beast.blot.im
This is my entry into Anne’s Summer LEGO RPG Setting Jam. I don’t have my old Lego handy, so I’ve had to make do with images I could find online.| beast.blot.im
I spent a lot of my time in 2019 solving little problems and coming up with ideas on various forums and Discord servers. With this collected post,| beast.blot.im
It’s no secret that I have been low-key obsessed with Richard Kelly’s Rod, Reel, & Fist. So when the Game Exploder Game Jam suggested: Want to turn| beast.blot.im
The problem with Troika! is that it’s written in a bunch of encapsulated little thought-forms. And they’re infectious ideas, like the way you start| beast.blot.im
The meatballs in my gazpacho. Maybe you can find a better place for them. Vampires, as agents of chaos, stand opposite the Hounds of Tindalos. They| beast.blot.im
Were you a professional in a shop with kit and space enough and time, you could extract every coin of value from this carcass. But instead, you’re| beast.blot.im
Apparently Zak S is an abusive PoS (CW: abuse, sexual violence, violence).(2024: Dead link, sorry.) Later today he is planning to make a statement,| beast.blot.im
W.F. Smith of Prismatic Wasteland challenges everyone to describe a novel resolution mechanic, name it, and blog it. I want a fighting mechanic| beast.blot.im
I’m still very pleased with my first attempt at a minigame. But it didn’t feel like a minigame when I played it. It felt like every other procedural| beast.blot.im
The files for Bloodring remain as unencumbered as I can make them, but if you’re willing to download them from itch.io instead, it’ll make the| beast.blot.im
Returning to my example tracking system in the catacombs. Several bits of feedback were gathered from playtesting and some weaknesses became| beast.blot.im
Rival adventuring parties are a classic device. But if I expect one to appear more than once, I’d like to make it an explicit foil to the party,| beast.blot.im