Return of TTRPG Brain (It Never Left)
Jan. 14th, 2025 12:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skulldaughterThis week I've been thinking a lot about my Umbra-kai project. I would like to post about it here, but I need to rewrite some things before it's ready for public eyes. Primarily, I need to shift it out of the Planescape D&D setting and into a bespoke fantasy world. This involves changing quite a bit, in fact! The Umbra-kai are planar wanderers; nomads who walk the Outlands on the outskirts of the Outer Planes and ritually reject the alignmental influence of those planes nearest them. They simply don't port easily into a more mundane fantasy continent without a little tweaking.
One thing I'm considering is not taking out the planar elements. I don't think I want to use alignment in the way D&D typically does, but I do think that despite how popular multiverse stuff is in corporate fiction, I don't see many examples of it in literature (at least not where I see people discuss it). Even the thing that comes closest (Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere) doesn't really fit that description. But with how much everyone loved This Is How You Lose the Time War, you'd think there would be more fantasy worlds that get weird with it.
Obviously the thing I'm thinking about does exist. The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny is a really fun version of this kind of thing. The way they "walk the shadows" to shift between realities is really fucking cool. I should read more of these, but I would also like to read more things in this sort of metaphysical fantasy space. If you know of something like this, let me know!
I'm also starting the process of creating a new ttrpg character for a game of the Veil! We're taking this cyberpunk rpg and running it in a fantasy game, which is one of my favorite ways to spice up a campaign! Once I shifted a 5e game I was running to use Masks instead and it was SO fun. For this game, I am having trouble because of the same pitfall every "PbtA" dev falls into: over-specific playbooks. The one I was most excited about at the start is the Onomastic, but as I think more on it I find that I'm really struggling to make a character to fit this really specific plot. Other playbooks like the Wayward have narrative elements attached to them, but those don't come with an arc. The Onomastic, meanwhile, kind of lays out a lot of your character's personal journey before you even start the game. Not with details, mind you. Just...expectations. The Cybertome is interesting, and technically you don't have to ever open it. But it will always be there on your sheet, reminding you. It isn't the end of the world, and this is far from the worst case of this I've seen. It's just a type of friction I am not as accustomed to these days, as I mostly play d20 games or Blades-likes.
In any case, the setting that our GM has created sounds really interesting, and I can't wait to play in it. Whether I stick with the Onomastic or switch to something else, I know it will be a really fun time. Also, over the weekend we started up our Planescape campaign again! I didn't take very good notes this time cause I was in way more of the scenes, and more alone in those scenes, than I typically am.
Also I listened to that new Ethel Cain album and it really whipped. It's so cool that she, in the words of my beloved girlfriend, "made an album with two songs on it." I really liked it.
(If you're wondering why I put "PbtA" in scare quotes it's because I'm still a little bit of a ttrpg design snob who holds that most people who say powered by the apocalypse don't actually understand the design decisions that went into Apocalypse World or what the phrase was supposed to mean in the first place.)
One thing I'm considering is not taking out the planar elements. I don't think I want to use alignment in the way D&D typically does, but I do think that despite how popular multiverse stuff is in corporate fiction, I don't see many examples of it in literature (at least not where I see people discuss it). Even the thing that comes closest (Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere) doesn't really fit that description. But with how much everyone loved This Is How You Lose the Time War, you'd think there would be more fantasy worlds that get weird with it.
Obviously the thing I'm thinking about does exist. The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny is a really fun version of this kind of thing. The way they "walk the shadows" to shift between realities is really fucking cool. I should read more of these, but I would also like to read more things in this sort of metaphysical fantasy space. If you know of something like this, let me know!
I'm also starting the process of creating a new ttrpg character for a game of the Veil! We're taking this cyberpunk rpg and running it in a fantasy game, which is one of my favorite ways to spice up a campaign! Once I shifted a 5e game I was running to use Masks instead and it was SO fun. For this game, I am having trouble because of the same pitfall every "PbtA" dev falls into: over-specific playbooks. The one I was most excited about at the start is the Onomastic, but as I think more on it I find that I'm really struggling to make a character to fit this really specific plot. Other playbooks like the Wayward have narrative elements attached to them, but those don't come with an arc. The Onomastic, meanwhile, kind of lays out a lot of your character's personal journey before you even start the game. Not with details, mind you. Just...expectations. The Cybertome is interesting, and technically you don't have to ever open it. But it will always be there on your sheet, reminding you. It isn't the end of the world, and this is far from the worst case of this I've seen. It's just a type of friction I am not as accustomed to these days, as I mostly play d20 games or Blades-likes.
In any case, the setting that our GM has created sounds really interesting, and I can't wait to play in it. Whether I stick with the Onomastic or switch to something else, I know it will be a really fun time. Also, over the weekend we started up our Planescape campaign again! I didn't take very good notes this time cause I was in way more of the scenes, and more alone in those scenes, than I typically am.
Also I listened to that new Ethel Cain album and it really whipped. It's so cool that she, in the words of my beloved girlfriend, "made an album with two songs on it." I really liked it.
(If you're wondering why I put "PbtA" in scare quotes it's because I'm still a little bit of a ttrpg design snob who holds that most people who say powered by the apocalypse don't actually understand the design decisions that went into Apocalypse World or what the phrase was supposed to mean in the first place.)
