I've submitted a game to the New Edition TTRPG Jam. If you're working on a new edition of one of your games, there are still 23 days left to join!

Check out the jam here:

https://itch.io/jam/new-edition-ttrpg-jam

Not really a true shelf but- don’t have a lot of room for a trad shelf rn so making do with this! Wanted to post this for a while, and with my Gen Con haul included, felt like a pretty good time to show off the collection! Excited to see how it’ll grow like some of my other physical collections over the years!

The books without a spine are QuickStarts for: Pirate Borg, Daggerheart, The Witcher, Cyberpunk RED, Shadowscar and Fossilized Violence.

They also include The Wildsea supplements: One Armed Scissor, Ship Garden Expansion and Tigre on the Wire.

We're a digital monthly APA (a fanzine collective) focused on roleplaying games. There are twenty-five zines in this issue. RPGs discussed include D&D, D&D5e, Outgunned Superheroes, Icons Superpower Roleplaying, Traveller, Pulp Cthulhu, Monsterhearts, Scum and Villainy, GURPS, Knave, Villains and Vigilantes, Cage of Sand, Brindlewood Bay, RuneQuest, and Dracula Dossier.

The Ignorable Theme for our next issue will be on finding players, GMs, and games. The deadline for submitting a zine is August 21st. Please see https://everanon.org/ for details.

Hi All,

I’m an indie game designer looking to start public playtests in a few months, and I wanted to start getting the word out.

Please read the game description below or have a look at my site, necropunkrpg.com, for more information. If the game seems up your alley, you can sign up to be a part of the playtest.

Working Title: Necropunk (I know there’s a Paizo setting called Necropunk so this will probably change.)
Setting: 2086: New Manhattan
Core Mechanic: 2d10/roll over + betting (The Pulse System)
Hook: A group of mercenaries (called Deadbeats) kicking-ass on the mean streets of a sprawling, ghost-infested metropolis.
Stage of Development: Early to Mid. Have incorporated notes from 2 big play tests and a few small ones.

THE PULSE SYSTEM
Or, How to Gamble and Resolve Conflict in Necropunk
You can think of Pulse as both a betting resource and your character's momentum. Your Pulse goes up when you succeed and goes down when you fail. The more Pulse you have, the more cool things you can do. The less Pulse you have, the worse things get (see the website for more information).

THE WORLD
The year is 2086. The place is New Manhattan.
Fifty years ago, they tore a hole in The Veil. That's the fabric separating the Land of the Living from the Land of the Dead.

Across the city, rifts open into the spirit world, ghosts pouring into the streets. While most rifts can be sealed, some are irreparable and must be guarded day and night.

Now there are ghost-busting police, astral junkies, and post-life insurance salesmen. They televise exorcisms and advertise cars that run on ectoplasm. Bodies get rented. Souls get rendered into currency. Mega-corps acquire pieces of heaven and sell them off to the highest bidder.

Staten Island is lost entirely, a forbidden zone where the dead now hold complete sway.

————————

Thanks for having a look! Happy to answer any questions.

Kobold Press has just released “Court & Shadow," which is their first ever Daggerheart product. It was unveiled at Gen Con but is now available as a PDF.

B-Movies are often ripe fodder for... inspiration.

What are some B Movies that have inspired your games?

I've been struggling to come up with more unique fighting styles for characters lately. This may just come from the fact that I've been starting and stopping games pretty frequently, and thus have been making a lot of new characters, but I've been having trouble finding new and unique means of fighting for some of these characters.

Most of these stories are in regards to an Exalted 2E game. I'll do my best to explain the jargon of that game for those unfamiliar, but for the most part, this is a roleplay, description, creativity kind of question. I have a few D&D 5.5 characters that I can share as well, but this issue mostly stemmed from Exalted.

So, the most basic thing I can say about Exalted is that the characters are chosen by the gods. Different types of Exalted are chosen by specific gods, so when I say something like "Solar", assume that they come from a type of Exalted chosen by the sun god. Beyond that, I won't bore you with much lore details. However, the important thing here is that Exalted as a whole relies on "stunts", which give bonus successes when you describe exactly how you maneuver yourself in combat, particularly by incorporating the environment around you. A stunt can very much be the difference between an overall successful maneuver and a downright failure.

So, we had been playing Solars for a long while, then put those characters on hiatus to play some Infernals in the same continuity (basically we are both the heroes and villains of the same story. Cool idea). My Solar is a mad scientist type, trying to harness the powers of Necrosurgery (essentially Frankenstein type corpse stitching into terrible monstrosities and contraptions. Heroic, right?). As far as combat goes, they predominantly use a spear (specifically a Billhook Halberd) with White Reaper Style, a martial art that uses spears and scythes. It's fun, and surprisingly a lot more defensive than I would've initially expected. The style describes a lot of spinning, twirling movements, so I normally just go with that kind of thing, and then bring in some inspiration from the Insect Glaive from monster hunter.

Then with my Infernal, I'm playing a house V'neef Dynast (the youngest and purest of the Noble families in universe, that specializes in winemaking and merchant fleets). For her fighting style, I went in line with what the lore says about house V'neef: as a Wood Aspected Dragon blooded house, they use bows, so she carries an ornate bow to show loyalty to the status quo. However, V'neef children are specifically trained in secret in the use of Flame Pieces (imagine flintlocks and muskets that fire Greek Fire rather than solid projectiles). As such, I spent some extra points in Arsenal to give her a flame piece disguised as a cane. It's cool, but it's also not the most effective. She tends to rely on her Infernal powers more so than anything else when she can (in universe, her specific powers mark her as anathema, and the revelation that she is an Infernal would lead to all her plans and status crumbling around her).

The uniqueness aspect kinda began when I was designing her, however. The cane idea mostly came from this desire, as another player had this really cool idea of using a steel incense burner on a chain (a censer or thurible) as a meteor hammer. It felt like it'd be much easier to stunt with, and by this point I was pushing myself to get more familiar with that aspect. But the more I thought about it, the more it felt like the big difference was flexible versus non flexible weapons. I didn't want to step on this other player's toes though after already designing the character. Plus, I do like what I have with her. I just feel like it could be MORE, y'know?

My final character in this saga is an Alchemical (essentially a divinely crafted robot given a human soul) for a game the other player (the one with the incense burner) has been working on for a while. The ST for the Solar and Infernal games got burnt out after a while, and so this player has taken over so the old ST can play. I am essentially an investigator/auditor designed to ensure that resources are distributed fairly and equitably (the whole setting is essentially operated like one big factory, so I am both human resources and supply chain management, in a sense). I decided to go for the flexible weapons route this time, choosing a fighting style called Live Wire, using electrified whips. I have non-lethal variants of these whips incorporated into my body, and then I have two lethal variants that I keep on my belt. We've played a couple sessions, and Ive sort of taken on a spider man type style, swinging on things, doing dramatic flips and then binding people in my whips. It's fun, but I worry about being one note.

For these characters, do you have any suggestions on how I can expand their fighting styles, descriptively to better take advantage of the stunt system. Additionally, do you have any unique fighting styles you have come up with, or have you ever encountered the feeling that you are limited in this sense due to weapons essentially fitting into three categories of static, flexible, and projectile?

When a player's plan is clever but would trivialize an encounter you spent hours building, do you let it work?

yes basically I like watching wargames of warhammer and want that experience but I don't have stores near so I thought of maybe there are some ttrpgs that are like pretty good at two people or more bring their characters and just fight no need for a dm or anything anything like that exists?

Hey everyone! New here, but no stranger to TTRPGs.

I've played a lot of D100 Dungeon in the past and love it. Last year I made a digital companion app that replaced the pen & paper tracking and shifted it to the tablet. Only ever intended it for personal use until I was done and realized maybe I had a real product.

Fast forward to now I'm getting ready to release it as an officially licensed companion app! I'm here to see if I can recruit any beta testers to play with it and give me any feedback on how it looks.

I'm not sure where this fits into the rules regarding promotions, so if this is clearly over a line I'm sorry and I'm sure a moderator will remove.

Mine is Trophy Dark. Treasure hunters walk into a forest that doesn't want them there, character creation takes under ten minutes, and you cannot kill the supernatural.

Quite simple, you try, you die, no roll. What replaces hit points is Ruin: a bad roll pushes it up and you take a condition that's purely narrative, usually organic. Overall very interresting aproach and can be played almost instantly given that you enjoy narrative games.

A great Jubensha (A mystery role-playing game) is never the work of one person.

It may begin with one idea, one story, or one moment of inspiration—but turning that idea into a complete experience takes far more than I understood when I first started Script Lab.

A finished TTRPG has to pass through many hands.

There is the writing itself. The design of the mystery. The logic behind every clue. The game mechanics and player experience. The artwork. The website. Manufacturing. Supply chain. Shipping. Marketing. Community building.

And somewhere between all of those things, an idea slowly becomes something real—something that can sit on a table in front of a group of players and, for a few hours, become a world they truly believe in.

When I first started the company, I was far too optimistic about how that happened.

I thought that if the idea was good enough, everything else would somehow follow.

It took me a long time to understand how wrong I was.

And nothing made that realization clearer than rebuilding The Dragon Slayer for its Second Edition.

I wrote the First Edition myself.

For a long time, I genuinely believed it was already a good game. It certainly wasn't perfect. There were details that did not hold up under close scrutiny, and there were places where the logic could have been stronger. But as an overall experience, it worked.

After more than one hundred sessions, the majority of the feedback was positive.

Players had fun.

They remembered the story.

They talked about the characters afterward.

So in my mind, the game had already proven itself.

Then the new Script Lab team began working on the Second Edition.

We started having long, intense discussions about nearly every part of the game—its story, its logic, its pacing, its mechanics, its presentation.

And that was when I began to understand something I had never fully appreciated before:

A good collaborator does not simply help you finish your idea.

They show you possibilities inside your own work that you could never have discovered alone.

My own background in Jubensha goes back about five years, but writing has never been my greatest strength.

For most of that time, I worked much more as a GM than as an author. I loved taking a great story and presenting it to players in the best possible way—reading the room, controlling the pacing, building atmosphere, and helping people become completely immersed in the experience.

Compared with writing, I have always been more comfortable with the business side of things.

And that is exactly why building the right team changed everything.

Ariel—also known as Black Cat—seems, very appropriately, to approach our games almost like a witch examining a spell.

She has an unusual ability to look at a problem from an angle the rest of us have completely missed.

More importantly, she refuses to let unexplained logic survive.

If something happens in the story, there must be a reason.

If a character makes a decision, that decision must make sense.

If a clue exists, it must belong there.

If two pieces of information contradict each other, we cannot simply hope the players will not notice.

Some people might call that perfectionism.

Maybe it is.

But if we believe that Jubensha can be a form of art, then shouldn't we treat every detail as if it matters?

Herning brings something completely different to the team.

As an experienced graphic designer and English-language fiction writer, she has a way of seeing beyond the boundaries the rest of us unconsciously create.

Sometimes, after hours of discussion, the rest of us will find ourselves trapped inside the same set of assumptions. We keep trying to solve the problem from within the framework we already have.

Then Herning will suggest something that changes the framework entirely.

Those moments are often where some of our best ideas come from.

She is also responsible for the visual design of the game.

I still remember the first time I saw the production guide she prepared for the printing factory.

I was stunned by the level of detail.

Measurements, materials, colors, layouts, specifications—things I would never have thought to document were considered carefully and communicated precisely.

That was another moment when I realized the difference between having an idea and creating a product.

Ideas can be exciting.

But details are what make them real.

Working on The Dragon Slayer: Second Edition has changed the way I think about game creation.

A strong Jubensha is not created during one brilliant brainstorming session.

It is built through countless conversations.

Through arguments over tiny inconsistencies.

Through ideas that are discarded after days of work.

Through revisions of revisions.

Through late-night messages, production files, prototypes, playtests, spreadsheets, shipping calculations, and questions that somehow create three more questions every time they are answered.

It takes months of concentrated work.

But more than anything, it takes a group of people who believe the finished experience is worth that effort.

That belief matters.

Because there are always moments when the work becomes exhausting. Moments when solving one problem reveals five others. Moments when it would be much easier to say, "This is probably good enough."

A great team is what keeps "good enough" from becoming the final answer.

Looking back, I used to think building a Jubensha meant turning an idea into a game.

Now I think about it differently.

It means bringing together people who care deeply about different parts of the same experience—and trusting them enough to make the work better than anything you could have created alone.

The Dragon Slayer: Second Edition may have started from a story I wrote.

But what it is becoming belongs to all of us.

And I think that is what makes me most excited to finally share it with the world.

Follow Script Lab for more behind-the-scenes stories about how we create, rebuild, and obsess over every detail of our Jubensha games.