I don't know if Google docs count as a 'source file'. It's clearly the source. Is it a file? I guess everything's a file if you go by the UNIX definition, so 'close enough'?

Licensing riddles aside, it looks great, and it's nice seeing a fast-paced intro that gets straight into what the game's about.

That's never been the case with any of the open source movement. If someone says their project is open source, then they give out files which are not the source, we would normally say that's not open source. We don't ask Microsoft if they feel that X, Y, and Z are 'the core components' of VSCodium. It's just not open source.

Providing text is good, and you might say the text files are 'open source', if they have a licence which allows modifications and so on. But you can't make closed-source pdfs out of them, and say 'this has text, which is open source, so I feel like it's open source'.

I get that it seems like a small distinction to some, but it's been an important distinction since the inception of the open source movement, and without it, we won't be able to tell open source projects from projects that have open components which people 'feel' are core.

"Open source" [files] means the source of the pdf. If the source files aren't available with the download, it's not open source.

I hope it doesn't come across as a small point, as it's a pretty big deal to me. I've spent years looking about for others doing open source RPGs, but most people using the word 'open source' mean something like 'copying this pdf is okay', which makes it very difficult to find open source RPGs under all the false signals.

Are the source files included in the drivethrurpg link, or somewhere else?

it’s now on my list!

Glad to hear it!

s there a simple way to just download a bunch of pdfs

Yes. Each book's repository comes with a download link.

• Metabind: a collection of the core rules, players' book, and GM's book, all stuffed into one. Getting the books separately is better if you're printing, but a single pdf works better for searching.
• Missions in Maitavale - a full campaign setting and long story.
• Goblin hole module, the intro module.
• Goblin Horde, another goblin-filled introduction module, but this one is in the style of more traditional fantasy RPGs.

But fair warning: despite the hyperlinks, the books all prioritise printing. Reading two-column bright-white pdfs can give you a headache.

I couldn’t make the downloads work in my phone

Thanks for letting me know!

It appears that (some parts of?) this is available in English and in German,

We only have the tiny core rules translated right now, and the character sheet.

Would this be suited to playing with kids, too?

The system is just 2D6 + Attribute + Skill [ + Equipment sometimes ]. Should be fine for kids who are okay with small sums.

The books have one or two spots of harsh language.

I've just playtested and released a oneshot module. If you have any questions about running it, let me know!

much obliged!

Ye gods, I finished this video and now I'm going grey.

Worth it though.

I'm likely starting a game next month, so if you have any ideas, shoot them over. There's an issue boards on Gitlab.

You can definitely port Requiem ideas with the files, though if you want 100% actual Requiem, you're better off remaking it from scratch (took me 3 months though, so it's not done lightly). And I've kept a branch called 'original' which has the original, unmodified books, or as close as I could make in case anyone wants to start from there (go to source files, click 'branch', then click 'original').

After you mentioned Malkavians, I started thinking about better derangement rules. I've just pushed a new copy up 5 minutes ago (same link, but the Derangement rules have been changed).

I think it'd work, though I added a little more in terms of stakes. Mostly, the stakes are backgrounds, so characters can steal or destroy others' backgrounds.

Also, it annoyed me that the backgrounds don't have a mechanic, so they're gained and lost by Storyteller fiat.

There's a short overview as a primer.

If that sounds like what you're after, I've recreated the original books, and modified them, so I don't have to reference a Google doc for house rules:

• Dark Ages
• Modern
• Source files

I feel like the Malkavians need mechanical solutions for these problems.

On derangements: something like 'you go mad when it's a full moon' is vague. I feel like it'd be easier with a just any system, for example 'renew all Willpower during a full moon, but lose one each scene thereafter', which encourages the player to try just about anything during that night.

Twisting the mechanics also means the player doesn't lose agency by thinking 'oh well, time to act crazy I guess'.

On the combat problem: I feel like this is a symptom of a larger problem with the system. Combat has a system - it has levers everywhere which do things. Nothing else does, and you can't push buttons which aren't there.

I've solved the second problem by replacing Combat rules with general 'Contest' rules -- a single system for Extended and Resisted actions, which works for Investigations, competing companies, or snide remarks at Elysium...and sword fights, if you must.

The internet's fine - the web's the problem.

ssh, Call of Duty, email, random voice-call software on strange ports - all of them work fine. People have problems with websites.

Plenty of websites of course are fine, the problems present when people use search engines and find a bunch of guff written by a bot, Paywalls, and sign-up screens.

They say the best way to predict the future is to create it, so if you want to help there, 'make good art', write and share good content, don't feed the machine. Sounds like you're doing that already if you're on Lemmy.

And if you want to check out a quieter corner of the internet, where things aren't all in-your-face-sing-up-click-here-now-NOW-DOIT...download the lagrange browser and check out Gemini. It's a mostly plain-text protocol, where people read and write, and sometimes share whacky music.

Yea, 'bottom-up' is a great way to put it.

Like, I can still add a totally different gnoll tribe later on in a module, or just add one 'from the icy South', and let the GM imply a world without yammering about it.

The thing is, this is still tying culture to race.

I had a go at breaking past this barrier, and found it extremely difficult. I started with the idea that geography informs culture, and made a split between elves in the frozen South and elves tropical jungles. This left me with half the normal space to write about elven cultures.

So I figured I could do 2-3 cultures per race, and end up with (5 x 2.5) ~13 descriptions of fantasy cultures. But who wants that? I can't use that much in my own game. Writing because you have to write something makes for bad writing.

Another route is to limit cultures even more. Maybe dwarves and gnomes basically live the same way, as do gnolls and humans. But then it seems odd that gnolls having the mouth of a canine changes nothing about them. If nothing else, their language has to be deeply different, given the lack of lips.

So in the end, I've decided to just fill in a very small part of the world, and leave an underlying assumption that elves, humans, and gnolls might do things differently elsewhere.

Goblin culture doesn’t have a concept of “Property”. A stick on the ground and a tool in a locked shed are equally up for grabs if a thing needs doing. They casually take and leave things all over their communities, eat from communal pots, and genuinely Do Not Understand why the Core Races are so Angry and prone to Violence all the time.

This is nice. It reminds me of the Piraha notion of ownership. If they swing by someone's place to use their boat, but the person isn't there, they'll just use the boat anyway. Once they return with a catch, the boat-owner gets the first pick (e.g. the biggest fish), because it's 'their boat'. So they still have property rights, but they overcome the potential waste of someone not using a boat.

I have cultures'/ races write-ups in BIND.

Here's some snippets:

Roleplaying Dwarves

Check then double-check.

• Does this person really know where the lost temple lies? Ask him about the rooves, doors, and other items made of wood. If the temple was lost three centuries ago, those constructions must have degraded. Does his story match?
• Does the beer taste good? A really good beer still tastes good when you drink three in a row.

Roleplaying Elves

The various elven languages have no words for good', bad', or `evil'. As a result, elves to not fully understand or use these words, even when speaking other languages.

Bread cannot go bad' -- it has mould. They will never call a song good' -- the song feels lively, or sounds like a Sunrise, or makes one think of home. They would never call someone evil' -- they might say destructive' or useless', or selfish', but never use language which characterizes anything with such a wide notion as good' or bad'.

If someone says your plan sounds good', make sure to clarify if they mean that they want the results of the plan, or if the plan seems likely to succeed, or if the plan has been stated clearly. And when you hear something is bad', clarify that too.

Roleplaying Gnomes

Think sideways.

Can we apologize to the mage and make amends instead of killing her? Can you use a hammer to communicate? What else do shoes do?

Gnomes see the world from a different perspective. They look up people's noses all day. Gnomes see the ceiling while others look down at the ground.

Gnomes travel slowly but it looks like a large space to them. From a relative perspective, a travelling Gnome has travelled farther than the rest of the troupe. Are we counting footsteps or miles? Did you know that every mile has 5.280 feet?

Where did the mage commission her traps? Is the architect still alive? Does he have standard schematics for his traps in a workshop where he builds traps for people?

What kind of contract do you make when you sell someone a trap to guard a dungeon? What happens if I roll a boulder down the stairs? Have these traps killed before? Where do the bodies go? Does someone climb down to get them out and do they use a ladder? If we dig out the stream nearby, we could flood the dungeon.

The latest version is a wip, available here (Chapter 4).

I continuously hear from ex-Twitter people that they had some thousands of followers, but that engagement on Mastodon is much higher on a per-follower basis.

Maybe Twitter just had more bots? Like, a lot more.

It's not like anyone's checked those 40,000 accounts.

Random thoughts in no particular order:

• The writing seems clear after a skim.
• The formatting is ugly as all hell. If you want a plain document with nice formatting, can I recommend LaTeX?
• Given that indie projects are only read by people who read indie RPG projects, maybe the 'what is an RPG' section could swap out for 'very fast rules summary'. But I guess the "Philosophy" section covers that.
• With all the emphasis on time tracking, maybe provide a character sheet which lets you pin-point things which will happen at a particular time? Like coins for 10-minute tracker, and pencilled-in events for the months-long actions?
• I don't understand this magic system.

I tried to understand how merging several columns into one would work

It's this button.

Also there are no in cell checkboxes in Calc,

Checkboxes:

https://ask.libreoffice.org/uploads/short-url/biHcqD9rpmk0V92ShVFWZwDVIUD.ods

Something new with Calc? Not to my knowledge, though I've never found something I couldn't do. What additional features do Google Docs have?

For online-usage, nothing will ever beat spreadsheets. They exist to crunch numbers and compare values. They work with both text and numbers. And they're flexible.

• Want to add +2 to perception for elves? Check if race = "Elf" and if so, add +2.
• Want to add a fixed list of weapons for the player to choose from? Stick the entire list on a secret sheet, then reference them in a drop-down menu.

If a bespoke tool ever came out, it would only do one system, badly. Spreadsheets do any system, and the skills you learn with them are transferrable to almost all other spreadsheet programmes.

There's my indie RPG character spreadsheet (requires Libreoffice Calc). Fill in your name, and it'll use numerological constants to find your race and stats, then tracks your XP every time you buy a skill.

People want to use something like a pdf because it looks like paper, but this instinct is wrong. PDFs are for printing. Their fill-in text boxes are ugly, and programming them is clunky.

It's a great book.

Oh - and also they have zero 'phatic' communication. Everything means something. So you can't say 'good night', unless you are saying 'this night is good for dancing'...or for something else. It's precise, representative statements, or gtfo. Instead, they remind people 'Don't Sleep, [because] there are snakes'.

It reminds me of Bilbo's 'Good morning!', with Gandalf.

I'm over on ttrpgs.com. It's a general RPG design log, plus a boat-load on BIND, my open source RPG.

The apps are certainly in need of all the help they can get. I have Lemur and Jerboa, and they're both janky as all heck.

Fantastic suggestions, cheers for the write-up.

General principles are good - with the right design the entire thing should reduce to a flowchart and some tables.

...and then we have magical items and areas, so plenty to conceptual work to do. It's turned into a mammoth discussion on the board.

Probably Don't Sleep, There are Snakes. It's the story of a Christian missionary who goes to convert the Piraha people. Unfortunately, their language stamps empiricism into the verb, so every single sentence has to come with how you learnt the information.

• Learning by experience ("I saw a jaguar")
• Learning by deduction ("There's jaguar poops, and tracks, so a jaguar was here")
• Learning by another's experience ("Someone said she saw a jaguar")

Gossip is grammatically impossible.

So he starts translating the Bible, but they keep trying to clarify what he means.

What colour was Jesus? Black or white?

But he never met Jesus.

Okay, so when your dad met Jesus.....

But his dad never met Jesus, so the translation cannot work.

The book goes over how they craft, their attitudes towards sleep (it's a vice - just don't), the way they think about time.

Eventually, Dan left an atheist. In the end, they converted the missionary through grammar.

My game has fewer rules than Pathfinder by any measure, although 'a page or two' seems a very low number - that sounds more like a little zine than a fully-fledged RPG.

I like this idea, but given that players never read the rules, it's a little like asking my granny what kind of package management system her computer should use.

We're not splintered. We're distributed.

How do you write your own original cultures? Is there a better way than carefully laundering things you’ve stolen from real human societies?

I wish more writers would steal. A lot of fantasy races look like pretty generic, bland, cultures. Reading Anthropology books has shown me cultures far stranger than any of the fantasy races.

Things I've "stolen":

• Languages can be whistled coherently, like entire sentences, communicated only through whistling. The sound travels further in some locations.
• Fire placement in caves is a matter of life or death.
• You don't need words for 'good' or 'bad', for a language to function, but once you meet a culture which doesn't have those words, it's extremely difficult to communicate (and hilarity often ensues).

I'm making a magic system for an NSR/ OSR RPG. It has a few things on the 'must have list'.

System Goals

• The system should have clear rules to make simple spells, so players can use simple spell lists, or make creative spells on-the-fly.
  • Rules for making spells don't have to be simple, because players will mostly just interact with the lists of spells.
• The system must have an underlying structure, and internal logic that makes sense in a Dark Ages setting.
• It has to produce a sizeable chunk of standard fantasy RPG magic tropes, like necromancy, clairvoyance, et c.
• The world should still 'make sense' - if spells impact trade and economics, then that's okay, as long as the world remains coherent.
  • You can't make lots of gold with magic, if gold is used as coinage.

The System So Far

• Each sphere is one of the four classical elements.
• Mages buy Magic Spheres as skills (rated 1-3).
  • E.g. Air 1, Fire 2.
• The mage can target that element with two effects:
  • Detect/ Identify (e.g. 'Detect water')
  • Alter (e.g. 'alter fire' and make a torch explode)
• Spend 1 additional mana point to 'create' something with magic (e.g. 'Create rock')
• Spend X additional mana to make the target 'bigger' (detect fire everywhere in a city, make all the air in the room noxious).
• Every sphere combination allows one additional target.
  • Water + Earth lets you affect life, so you can 'alter life' (and give a cat wings) or 'create life' (and make thorny bushes grow).
• Every mechanic will have a standard effect, e.g.:
  • If a spell can cripple someone, it will inflict a -1 penalty per Mana Point spent, to one Attribute.
  • If a spell can grant the target Damage Resistance, it grants 1 per Mana Point spent.

The conceptual phase is taking a lot longer than I thought, and there's a lot of work to be done.

I like some of the oddities (fire and light will have to lumped in together - I think this makes sense).

Some of the oddities I don't like

• It has no teleportation magic.
• I don't want healing magic, but the chart is just screaming 'Water + Earth makes healing'.

And a lot of it needs to be conceptually tighter (the bottom left corner makes less sense than the top right corner).

Upon stepping into the room, the players are ambushed (see the core rules for ambushes) by a drow mage (see the Monstrous Manual for more on the drow) riding a Grizwoz (see Appendix B: New monsters). The drow is level 7 (the GM should prepare a spell-list before the adventure starts).

About 50% of what I read online is just RSS. For cli fans, newsboat lets you extend the RSS feeds really easily. So far, I have:

• gemini translation, to get gemini feeds, and a hotkey to open them.
• a hotkey to open things in w3m (most articles work fine in the terminal, many are easier to read)
• a hotkey to open youtube videos
• another to download them and watch later

I don't think it much matters.

Virtualbox works fine for me. Just remember to note if you're setting up the VM with a modern EUFI, or an old fashioned BIOS, so you can install the right bootloader.

This place looks plenty minimalist to me.

You can also sign up to other RPG communities, like the original on lemmy.ml.

I wonder if people will coalesce on a single community, or if each community will have their own tendencies and specializations.

I've never played it, but I've had a mess around with the SRD.

Instead of markdown and html versions, I've made it into just a markdown version, with a script to output html and an epub.

I can't put in all the symbols and such in, as I have no idea what the original book looks like.

Link

All PRs welcome.

Haggis whiskers are similar, but quite rare nowadays.

One of the greatest joys of federation, is de-federation.

Kbin is very young software. The dev was doing really well, then /u/spez dumped 10-bajillion users on it. I'm surprised the servers are still operating.

Lemmy's a lot more mature, but it's never been tested with this kind of traffic. It's impressive that any of these sites are still going. I'd give it at least another month until things settle, adjustments are made, instances update, et c. et c.

An art instance is a brave move. Lemmy takes up a lot of disk space already, but encouraging images means a lot more disk space. Lemmy also allows multiple images per post.