Another OSR blog, mostly

This blog is about tabletop role-playing games, mostly. Most of those games will probably be OSR (old-school revival, or renaissance, or something. No one seems to be able to agree on that one) games, since the more RPGs I play, the more I find that the OSR is very good at providing what I actually want out of these games. 

I'm also primarily a designer just as much as a player. I wanted to document all of my projects in one place, and I'm at a point where I feel like I have enough to show for my efforts that that's finally worth the effort. I could spend more time introducing myself, but I think I'd rather make a first impression just by dumping my work out onto this page and letting it speak for itself.

FANGED
You know how there's apparently a whole genre of vampire tabletop RPGs? I was interested in branching out from typical fantasy dungeon-crawly games, checked out Vampire: The Masquerade, and I thought it was kind of inscrutable from the short look I gave it. Then I looked for a more lightweight vampire game and I couldn't find a single one. So I started putting one together myself with no intention to ever actually finish it, or publish it, or do anything with it beyond put some ideas in a document to amuse myself.

But then after a day of messing around with it, I finished it, to my own surprise. This one ended up meaning a lot to me just because I'd felt trapped in this cycle of "start project, get bored, drop it and do something else" without ever finishing everything; then, I finished this random project and someone nice threw me $10 for it on itch, and now I might have my life together, I think. Check it out.

The pitch for fanged is as follows:

• 10 pages of lightweight rules for vampire role-playing. 
• Mechanics mostly center around managing your hunger for blood, bonds with mortals and notoriety amongst mortal society. Juggling these three things creates drama and a sort of ticking clock for every vampire character.
• Simplistic character customization to differentiate vampires somewhat, ability-wise.
• All players (aside from the GM) get one vampire and one mortal to play.

It's currently free. Once the art is finished, the artless version will still stay free.

LULLABY: A wholesome RPG
This one isn't a tabletop game, actually. It's a videogame made in a really old version of RPGmaker. It's not done, but a demo I haven't updated in like a year is up on itch if you want to give it a look. 

Mechanically it's basically an old Final Fantasy game, with as much interesting stuff as I can cram into something as barebones as RPGmaker without knowing how to code works. Aesthetically it takes inspiration a lot from Kirby and of course those old Final Fantasy games mentioned previously.

An update is coming, eventually. This is one of those big years-long projects that I just chip away at when I have the motivation. I hope I'll finish it before the heat death of the universe, but y'know. No promises. Check it out if you want.

IRON HALBERD
This is my latest project, and one I'm excited for. It's an OSR game taking significant inspiration from Ben Milton's Knave. It also isn't playable quite yet. While I have a lot to say about it, I think I want to save that for another post when the playtest draft is complete.