Gaming

Short post this week – Orcacon was this weekend and consumed most of my available weekend braincells. I wrote up two more People cards and started working on something to generate playtest cards. (For the geeky: the cards live in Obsidian, using YAML frontmatter for metadata, and I can pump that into HTML templates and then convert the HTML to PDFs easily enough.) Whitney I’m Whitney, and they pay me to make them look good. They’re not bright enough to know that’s why they pay me, but it is. I don’t get high before I go on stage, I don’t sleep with underage fans, and I’m a good musician. And I am so tired of seeing no-talent idiots like Jay getting royalties for albums he barely plays on just because he went to school with the almighty Robin. I wonder what it would take for Jay to get fired? ...

We attended a fascinating panel at Orcacon today; Caroline Pitt, a University of Washington postdoc, and several graduate students (Runhua Zhao, Lane D. Koughan, and Michele Newman) discussed their work on a TTRPG designed to teach digital civic engagement skills to teens. (“There’s no definition of that term. We polled the youth we worked with to figure out what would be meaningful to them.”) They’ve previously done some really interesting work on misinformation education games, including escape rooms and a Minecraft server designed to be an educational resource for elementary school kids. This all apparently informed their current project. ...

Short week but I wanted to get started! Today I have the first draft of the relationship map I’m using to design my People cards, and the first three of those cards. We’ll start with the former. I took a pretty straightforward approach here: I made up 12 band members and associates and made sure they each had one clear point of relationship friction with another person. By keeping track on the map, I made sure there weren’t any tight closed loops. You don’t want to set something up where three people hate each other and none of them have any connections to anyone else in the band. I wound up with one grouping of four people who’re unconnected to the rest of the band anyhow. ...

So the other day I mouthed off on Bluesky about a game I’ve been wanting to write for a year or so: Oh crap. Well… let me be gentle with myself. 1 game I want to make in 2026: - Just A Rock and Roll Band (a rock band’s final tour, using @bullypulpithq.bsky.social’s Desperation engine) — Bryant Durrell (@innocence.com) 2025-12-24T03:29:54.077Z I played Jason Morningstar’s Desperation twice with friends the other year and loved it. I have a couple of ideas for hacks rattling around in my head; the less ambitious one is The Last Tour, which will capture a fading rock band making a comeback tour in Europe in the late 1970s. And failing, of course. Now I’ve gone and told the world in an attempt to pressure myself into getting it done. ...

Kind of a belated Character Creation Challenge post here, huh? ANYway. I was reading through the Hollows corebook after this weekend’s game, thinking about the Priest pregen, and I noticed that the stats on the preview seemed a little off in the low direction. I also had the aforementioned dissonance with optimal tactics for the two weapons. So I ran through character generation, mostly for the sake of checking the math but also to see if there were any easy tweaks I’d make if I wanted to play Caleb in a campaign. (Which I do, of course.) ...

Welcome back to my read-through of Dark Inheritance, a mostly forgotten child of the D20 boom! Find all the entries in the series here. The first chapter after the introduction is a big old lore dump. This matches general expectations at the time, although you know there’s gonna be more lore integrated into the mechanics, and it’s also probably smart for the modern world but occult setting. It’s only 20 pages long, which probably helps explain why it was an impulse purchase for me way back when – I skimmed this quickly in the dealer’s hall.

I don’t own a lot of remnants of the D20 boom any more, just a few select books, for the novelty and quality of the ideas rather than for anything mechanical. Tynes’s D20 Call of Cthulhu, for example. The least remembered of these is a D20 Modern setting called Dark Inheritance, which I bought at GenCon. I absolutely adored this back in the day, for its weird mix of genres and modern occult vibe, plus I always thought D20 Modern looked like an interesting system. So in my constant effort to blog a bit more, I dug around till I found my copy, pulled it out, and am spending some time reading it and blogging my thoughts. This is not a review, because I haven’t played it, although that’d be a kick – it’s just a once over. No promises on how often I write these. The original book was published in 2003; I believe there’s also a Spycraft version, published a year later. It is not available in PDF. Noble Knight has a copy of the D20 version, and it occasionally shows up on eBay. The publisher is Mythic Dreams Studios, which appears to have been mostly Chad Justice. Chad is no longer working in the industry and Mythic Dreams only had these two releases, despite plans for other books as per an advertisement in the back of this one. Still, one solid 200 page campaign book isn’t bad. The other writers are a range, career wise. Alphabetically, we have Edward Milton, Jason Olsan. Aaron Rosenberg, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Jeremy Tibbs, Wil Upchurch, and Sam Witt. There’s no indication of who wrote what, but I’d bet that Ryder-Hanrahan wrote at least some of the words that sparked my imagination back then. The cover artists is a dude named Mark Sasso, who sets the tone with a painting of a shadowy figure stepping forward out of what appears to be a fire. Sasso’s gone on to what looks like a decent career in and out of the TTRPG space, with some fantasy-inflected design work for the WWE and metal bands like Dio. The interior art is B&W, mostly spot illos. The book is good 2000s TTRPG design: clear layout, in-world fiction broken out into sidebars, nothing to complain about. This is definitely the era when people expected big metaplot and lots of fiction in their game books. OK, let’s dig in.

I’ve been rereading Greg Rucka’s Atticus Kodiak books on the occasion of him republishing the first four in the series, and it’s been a pleasure. A gloomy, morose pleasure but a pleasure nonetheless. As always they seem like they ought to be quite adaptable to tabletop RPGs, so I spent a while thinking about that last night while I was falling asleep. The super-easy adaptation would use Night’s Black Agents, drop the vampires. It’s easy to dial that flavor of GUMSHOE into gritty dangerous street level action, and the bursts of competence that result from the Military Occupational Specialty rule – automatic successes once per session on your chosen MOS skill – would also fit perfectly. Atticus and his friends spend a lot of time being able to push themselves to unreasonable levels of competence when the situation really calls for it. ...

I wanted to build something completely weird and gonzo and that’s Heart in a nutshell. It’s a weird dungeon delving game into a dungeon that wants to give you your heart’s desire but isn’t very good at it. The world is just deeply weird. Let’s mess around in it.

It turns out that business trips are poor places to work on posting challenges, especially if you’re horribly jet lagged and you have a lot of evening meetings. I’m gonna try and hit 31 of these anyhow, just not before the end of January. I found myself thinking about action a lot, so now that I’m back in the US I’m gonna do a quick Outgunned character. Outgunned is designed as a modern action RPG, very much in the spirit of John Wick. Since it’s been pretty successful as measured by Kickstarter success, the designers (Two Little Mice) have added a couple of genre books packed full of potential settings – Wild West, space opera, etc. – and a second corebook aimed at 30s pulp action. This time out I’m doing the “A Kind of Magic” mini-expansion, or Action Flick. I’m going to frame this as modern espionage with magic, which seems like a fun game idea.