Quote from: Trond;898983My game has some of this ("cultural appropriation" or whatever), but the names are partially made up, and partially drawn from several cultures. Not sure if anybody would make a big deal of it. Sometimes people are just glad to be remembered.

Your game seems to be fairly well researched though.
The root of the problem with cultural appropriation is ignorance and disrespect. When white college-age hipsters take photos of themselves wearing Indian head dresses to look cool they are demonstrating a lack of understanding and a lack of respect towards a symbol that others hold a great deal of respect for.
La Vendetta doesn't look all that insulting to me though. My grandfather and grandmother are from Sicily, and I don't see anything in your pdf that upsets me at all or that my grandparents might think insulting.

Quote from: Trond;898983My game has some of this ("cultural appropriation" or whatever), but the names are partially made up, and partially drawn from several cultures. Not sure if anybody would make a big deal of it. Sometimes people are just glad to be remembered.

Yeah. My settings are basically "mostly Europe" but that is because its what I know and love best of all but I have no use for Internet whingers who shit a brick over some Polynesian themed ideas or whatever. Hell I've borrowed from Nation of Islam /Black Supremacy for a highly capable  separatist  culture, Africa and modern China for a future Afro-Chinese culture and Islamic thought for another, I have no issues with it any more than I care about say Japan borrowing European culture for some manga or anime




I have not yet published my 24 hour RPG  system, one I literally dreamed up one night and while I have technically published a couple of articles  in a now defunct d20 magazine from my game world, I've never published the world itself.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;898980Entirely your own creation, or based on some mechanics like AMBER, Active Exploits...?

Mostly my own, the results were heavily inspired by FU rpg- the whole "yes, yes and...,  yes but..., no, no and...., no but...."  It was a wafer thin rules light story game thing.  

In a nutshell, you had a list of possible results- some good, some bad, some that just led to things.  If there was any sort of test to be made in the game, you chose what level of success (or failure) you wanted, and crossed it off the list.  Whatever you had remaining on that list were the only choices you could make for the next time.  So yeah, eventually you would only be left with choosing failure.  It was completely breakable, open to abuse, but I had fun with it.

Quote from: Necrozius;898918My setting was going to be a wholly archipelago world set in the Cambrian age in terms of fauna, and most if not all of the cultures based on Pacific Island or Pacific Northwest peoples. I got the idea while imagining Haida art of prehistoric creatures, especially trilobites.

Each Island has its own spirit creature (Tupua of Kupua)that could be bargained with for a variety of reasons. Lots of ruins too. Lots of random generators for these lesser deities and places to explore (a deity coild be a white tree with red feathers instead of leaves and it represented deception and storytelling).

The whole thing was to be called Koru (a Maori symbol). I did a lot of reseaech but when that debacle about cultural appropriation came up I had second thoughts. Then I spoke to someone living out in British Columbia about the idea and she said to be careful (and she's not aware of a lot of Internet gaming controversies). So I'm scrubbing out all cultural names from real peoples and keeping it imaginary.

You should finish it, it sounds great.

To contrast with The Strange's issue (speaking as a white male dude with a background in archaeology) the stuff the Strange did was less accurate, poorly researched, and aimed at stereotypes/tropes with no effort at interesting or accurate detail derived from the source (plains indian cultures), in a setting that apparently has a type of entity in other dimensions that is really just a construct, theby implying all of the pseudo-plains indians in the setting were soullness (or something, I am not entirely clear). Your three paragraphs above already blow away the entire write up in The Strange that got them on the hot seat. I would be really shocked if you got hit with a cultural appropriation attack (well, not at rpg.net where its all the rage and even vegepygmies are subject to social justice rage) so long as you keep up what is a clearly effort at good research and representation.

Quote from: Catelf;898855So much indeed here, been working on several projects, for more than five years, and the origins for several started in the 90's.
It is a full-blown WoD-, Palladium Books- and Boardgame-inspired System and Setting which is supposed to include several "titles", including one with Anthropomorphic Animals, one with "Monster Kids", and one with Masked Heroes, among other things.
I have yet to complete one of them, though, due to indecisions and other problems.

Monster Kids?  You've gotten my curiosity up.  Tell more please.

Well, maybe I should talk a little bit about my own project, [Dragon Forest]. I've mostly been sharing my progress with the kind gentlemen of /tg/, where I go by 四.
[Dragon Forest] is a fantasy roleplaying game where you play as supernatural heroes and liminal beings protecting the last surviving remnants of the human race in a world caught halfway between death and rebirth during a stalemate between warring cosmic forces of Chaos and Law.
It's basically another D&D clone, but the major difference is that I'm subverting the game's reward mechanisms. You aren't playing to accumulate XP and treasure.
Instead of starting with 0XP and gaining levels as you kill monsters, you start with a pool of Doom points determined by how many Dark Gifts you select at character creation. The GM spends your doom points to add monsters to scenes, to activate the special abilities of monsters, or to activate the curse effects tied to your dark gifts*. You can also burn off your own doom points by roleplaying Redemptions. When all your doom points are spent, you can refresh your pool of doom points to gain a level.
Instead of adventuring to loot gold and magic items, characters in [Dragon Forest] instead struggle with their burdens in a world where gold is worthless (no economy to speak of, since the only human beings in the world are the small handful following the heroes) and any magic items you might find are weaker than the dark gifts you start out with at character creation. Items in the equipment section have no GP value listed, but they do have weight. Players start off with one horse each and they are allowed to start off with as much equipment of any type as they want (regardless of the items' past monetary value) as long as they can carry it on horseback. Heroes and their followers have Need and Sadness scores that accumulate, however, so players will have to make room for rations in order to deal with that problem. In addition to encumbrance, I'm also considering adding an attunement limit; in addition to physical weight, some items may have a kind of magical weight called 'memory'.
The purpose of subverting D&D's reward mechanisms like that is to shift the game's tone from that of bloody conquest and a quest for power to that of endurance and an effort to ease one's burdens.
The game's fail state is subverted as well. When your hero dies, their spirit passes on but their power remains; you can have one of the survivors elect to inherit the hero's skills and abilities along with their equipment. However, each survivor has their own hopes and dreams, and the magic that allows them to inherit a hero's power rewrites reality so that the survivor's dreams then become impossible to attain.
The trouble is that this is not an OSR clone; I'm basing my game off of 4E as it makes for the strongest contrast.

*It is important to note that doom points are not a meta-game currency that players have to take control of the narrative. Players have doom points, but they can't spend them. Only the GM can spend doom points. Doom points basically amount to a pool of "Fuck this character in particular" points that each character has. The only thing players can sort of control is when the GM spends their doom points, as the GM is only really supposed to spend doom when certain triggering conditions are met (when a hero enters dangerous territory, when a hero provokes violence, when a hero activates a dark gift, when a hero breaks the restrictions of a redemption, etc.)

Quote from: Cave Bear;899005Your game seems to be fairly well researched though.
The root of the problem with cultural appropriation is ignorance and disrespect. When white college-age hipsters take photos of themselves wearing Indian head dresses to look cool they are demonstrating a lack of understanding and a lack of respect towards a symbol that others hold a great deal of respect for.
La Vendetta doesn't look all that insulting to me though. My grandfather and grandmother are from Sicily, and I don't see anything in your pdf that upsets me at all or that my grandparents might think insulting.

Well, that's very interesting to hear! Thanks!

I have yet to get into the meat of your PDF, but it struck me as somewhere in tone between D&D and John Wick (who sometimes has been called "anti-D&D" though I don't think he dislikes D&D). An interesting blend, and an interesting blend of East/West in the artwork as well. I almost get the feeling that there is some sort of setting lurking here, although as far as I can see it is meant to be a more or less generic fantasy system, right? In this case the art can simply serve as an inspiration of course. The sections that are finished also seem to be REALLY finished. As in, some of these pages could go to press tomorrow, with nice layout and all (compared to my own tendency to work on everything at once, so virtually nothing is finished). Also: your point systems; love it. Good stuff.

EDIT: oops, didn't see your info above.

Quote from: Trond;899017Well, that's very interesting to hear! Thanks!

I have yet to get into the meat of your PDF, but it struck me as somewhere in tone between D&D and John Wick (who sometimes has been called "anti-D&D" though I don't think he dislikes D&D). An interesting blend, and an interesting blend of East/West in the artwork as well. I almost get the feeling that there is some sort of setting lurking here, although as far as I can see it is meant to be a more or less generic fantasy system, right? In this case the art can simply serve as an inspiration of course. The sections that are finished also seem to be REALLY finished. As in, some of these pages could go to press tomorrow, with nice layout and all (compared to my own tendency to work on everything at once, so virtually nothing is finished). Also: your point systems; love it. Good stuff.

EDIT: oops, didn't see your info above.

Thanks!

I am going for more of an implied setting, rather than something spelled out explicitly in fluff-blurbs and whatnot. But I also want everything to be easily reskinnable and adaptable.
I do intend on adding fluff-blurbs, but these will be more general things where I talk about the inspiration behind things. For example, I'm currently reading about Greco-Buddhism, and the Western origins of the Misshaku and Naraen temple guardians (from depictions of Herakles that traveled eastward toward India where they were conflated with a Hindu deity, then traveled further eventually making their way to Japan.) My notes will be used to write a flavorful blurb for the Pankrator class.

Quote from: SionEwig;899010Monster Kids?  You've gotten my curiosity up.  Tell more please.

Well, perhaps not all are kids, but it is where a big deal of the inspiration comes from.

Humans, often teenagers, somehow given abilities and frequently some of the looks of vampires, ghosts, zombies, demons, and perhaps even skeletons ....
Some try to keep up a normal façade, and continue going to school and such, while others drops out, some even from "normal" human society.
Some searches for ways to get normal, some for ways to get more monster-like, and some are "happy" as they are.

They often find themselves inbetween self-proclaimed monster hunters on one side, and true vampires and demons on the other side, and trying to run damage control when some real monsters causes havoc, or are about to do so.
Other times, they end up just running errands.

Their main allies are usually others like themselves, and enigmatic angel-like beings referred to as "The Sephira", and/or some mythological gods and goddesses.

I've got a fairly tight-match alt-history game set in the Ming China of 1555 is something I've got penciled in for 2019/2020, to go along with the Tudor England 1555 game I've got marked out for 2017/2018. In both cases, it's building the GM tools for actually leveraging the culture as something more than a paintjob that is apt to be the hard part.

I'm working on Lejends of Yveria, a campaign-centric clone of the Lejendary Adventure system.

My intentions here aren't to reinvent the wheel. I'm not out to make up some new wacky game mechanic or gimmicky setting. My emphasis is mainly on a) clear presentation of the rules, with the goal of being even clearer than the original, b) creating some rule expansion into areas in which are important to the flavor and feel of the campaign, but the main priority is c) just creating some fucking awesome content.

You could call it "generic fantasy" but that would be a misnomer. I despise generic, thus the emphasis on the content.

I'm currently working on an adventure wherein the party scours the nether realms in search of a relic, a sword of legendary status (think Excalibur), after the deathbed confession of a royal assassin reveals that the king wields a forgery and his rule has been based on fraud. This is unbeknownst to the king's best knights who are pursuing the heroes, convinced they've stolen the sword. To complete the quest, the heroes must follow in the footsteps of the same quest undertaken by the Paladin-God over a century ago on his path to immortality. Being that his powers never manifest themselves in his Earthly followers, it is believed by some that he actually perished rather than achieved godhood. And according to the assassin, the path must lead to the final resting place of his relic sword--in the bowels of hell itself. The quest requires players engage in thinking, combat, and role-play to be successful as they face their personal demons as well as literal ones.

Aside from being a thrilling ride, the purpose of the adventure is sort of an expose of the cosmology of Yveria and some of the political forces at work as well as important NPCs.

Okay I'll give this a go.

My game is called Hachi:Blue, which is loosely based on a cheesy manga styled web comic I did a few years ago. I ran a couple of games of it on Mythweavers first using Mutants and Masterminds 3e, but later using a hack of Marvel Heroic which worked really really well. As I was running play by post, I needed a system that was optimized for that kind of play and hacking Cortex Plus Heroic had the best results.

So for the moment, my system of choice for Hachi:Blue is Cortex Plus, particularly since MWP released the guidelines for releasing custom content for their system. A while back I wrote up a bunch of conversion stuff for Jadepunk, which runs in Fate. I think Ryan is still working on stretch goals so it might be some time before he gets to the Cortex Plus version. I'll ask him about it sometime. Anyhow, I have most of the conversion written up with some expanded mechanics to make it more Jadepunky and because I like stuff and I want my games to account for people having stuff. There's a lot of reasons I like that system, and I'd happily go into them in a Cortex Plus related thread. However, there is a thing called Ultramodern5 coming out, by Deus Ex Machina. It's essentially modern rules for D&D 5e. I love 5e. I loved d20 Modern. So I might just go with that. Or if one of my doctors finds some magical cure for chronic fatigue I might do both. Most likely the game will be a bunch of unformatted text files.

Anyhow, the setting of Hachi:Blue is Post Cyberpunk urban fantasy. Fantasy in the sense that some stuff has pseudoscientific explanations that I made up because it sounds cool. For instance, one of the driving metaplots is the supposed War Amongst the Angels which has gone on longer than humanity has been a species. These "angels" are not physical beings like D&D Celestials, but are beings living in an overlapping world comprised of non-baryonic matter which may or may not be dark matter. Told you, BS made up to sound cool.

So there's two factions of these angelic beings, though they are essentially the same species. One factions are the ones identified as Angels have been around shaping civilization for centuries through the use of religion to gain followers. The church in the setting is totally fictitious. Certainly it borrows from judeo-christian themes and there might be some implications that two of the highest ranking entities are in fact the same beings as Enlil and Enki from the flood story in Gilgamesh. For the most part, I'll leave it vague and cultish. The main attraction of this church, I had some pretentious name like the Instrumentality of The Immortal One, is that they offer something that no other religion can offer. They can in some cases bring the dead back to life. By bring the dead to life I mean if the body is fresh enough one of these non-baryonic dark matter aliens can inhabit it. The other faction are referred to as the Demons. They are exactly identical to Angels except the Angels don't like them and they also have better lobbyists. The "Demons" differ from the Angels in that they do not take possession of the freshly dead, they make pacts with willing humans and live in the same body symbiotically.

So they have this war but most people don't know about it. I guess I should talk about the location. Hachi:Blue is set in the City State of Mirai. Mirai is a sizeable island as well as active volcano in the Pacific in the same location where the Midway Atoll is in our world. It looks like this. One day I will finish that map. I'm still learning Campaign Cartographer. In this world, the island has been inhabited since the 60s after it formed from an immense volcanic eruption in the 50s. The main settlers were from Japan, Hong Kong, Russia, Australia and New Zealand. Blah blah a bunch of stuff happened, Mirai is a technological haven. The caldera of the volcano is over a mile wide itself and completely enveloped by the base of an immense Arcology in the middle of the island. The Arcology houses most of Mirai's population, some food production on the upper levels, as well as a massive supercomputer which houses an Artificial Intelligence named Maitreya.

Maitreya controls Mirai. Absolutely and without question, though most of the population is unaware that she exists except as some Siri/Cortana like personal assistant that is present everywhere and knows everything. Mirai, being a superintelligence, also knows about the Angels and the Demons. She doesn't like them. Moreover, they insult her by dismissing her as a harmless toy made by hairless monkeys. So Maitreya came up with a new hobby. She makes dolls. Androids. If an Angel or a Demon becomes troublesome, sometimes she has her dolls deal with them.

However, Maitreya also cares for humans and wishes to protect them. As such, she made an interesting discovery. If you genetically mutate a human in a certain way then neither Angels or Demons can inhabit the body. The side effect of these altered humans, called Espers, is that they gain paranormal abilities. The most gifted of these Maitreya attempts to recruit. This doesn't always work out. Same goes for her dolls.

So I could go on but that would be boring. Basically there are a few factions. Corporations can be powerful and there are two I'll detail to a certain degree. Something to keep in mind that Mirai has an openly Corporate Oligarchy as a form of government. Corporations control everything. Well except the Instrumentality of course (if I call it that). The two I'll be detailing are the ones that are aware of Maitreya and deal with her directly, bypassing the puppet regime that's there to make the humans happy.

There is one more major species that can be found in Mirai, though their numbers are far less than either the Espers or the Angels, who aren't all that numerous themselves. These are the Youkai. In my world, Youkai are kind of analogous to Fae folk. Sort of. The Youkai are creatures (mostly) that were the result of "Angelic" interactions with other species, mostly animals. In Hachi:Blue these are mostly Kitsune and the Bakeneko/Nekomata. The Kitsune are almost extinct due to an incident where Maitreya had to take drastic measures to deal with a particularly troublesome Demonic cell. She had indefinitely borrowed a US orbital laser platform that they couldn't complain about because it didn't officially exist and erased many angels. At the same time, she opened vents from the volcano into the storm drain system to deal with the ones in hiding. What Maitreya did not know was that the Kitsune "Goddess" Inari and most of her clan lived underground in the drain system. They were mostly wiped out and Inari survived though with bad burns over most of her body. The Bakeneko fared better, many of them being Henge (shape changes, where the term Hengeyokai came from in the AD&D 1e Oriental Adventures) and as such able to live among the humans. After the incident, many of the Bakeneko have mostly turned away from the old ways and try to live among the humans without drawing attention to themselves.

There are a few factions. For one, I realize not everyone is going to want to play the big Metaplot, at least not all the time. There are some street gangs, some of whom have Espers among their numbers. There is a presence from the Russian Maffia and Japanese Yakuza who often do not see eye to eye. The corporations Olletech and Toragon are the big players. Olletech maintains the Arcology and supercomputer, and is the company responsible for the creation of Maitreya. Toragon creates robotic technology including androids as well as mechs for Mirai Security (MirSec). For all intents and purposes, Toragon IS Mirai Security. Crime inside the Arcology is practically zero. Outside though... Well, mechs have operational costs so the outlying areas aren't as well patrolled.

Anyhow I've gone on enough. Originally this was an anime themed game. I think in the iteration I'd like to make of Hachi:Blue, I'd like to drop the anime tropes and just develop the setting as a setting. With the mish mash of cultures (don't get me started on languages or how Japanese speakers have adopted Russian honorifics. Cause you gotta have Cityspeak, especially in the suburbian sprawl.) so there should be potential for characters that are heroic, villainous or somewhere in between. I probably left out crucial details, my apologies in advance.

Oh boy, so much interesting stuff!

Quote from: kobayashi;898906Finishing an OSR-ish oriental adventures game. It should look good at least.

(...)

So now, ladies and gentlemen, I will give you Dark Leningrad.
(...) Welcome to the Sovietploitation.

Dojos & Dragons will be a Tranchons & Traquons variant? Great! I really like the minimalistic take on "life path" character generation.

And Dark Leningrad cries out for John Grümph art. (Though he seems to be busy with his own Chibi line of games?)

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;898992Thunderclad = "Classic Neobritish Fantasy Roleplay"
Crusaders of the Polymyth = a faux 70s RPG

In have no idea what "Classic Neobritish Fantasy Roleplay" and "hex-and-counter-wargame influenced" means for you but I am already in love...

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;899353Oh boy, so much interesting stuff!

Dojos & Dragons will be a Tranchons & Traquons variant? Great! I really like the minimalistic take on "life path" character generation.

And Dark Leningrad cries out for John Grümph art. (Though he seems to be busy with his own Chibi line of games?)

Dojos & Dragons will have its own system, better suited for long-term play (but still something simple)

For Dark Leningrad I'm looking for art with a more "underground comic" style (Stefan Poag...)

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;899353In have no idea what "Classic Neobritish Fantasy Roleplay" and "hex-and-counter-wargame influenced" means for you but I am already in love...

We since know that some of our aesthetical preferences align when it comes to RPGs, Dirk, so I'm not surprised.

In regards to Thunderclad, I am just gathering my thoughts and ideas into a semi-coherent mess: think DIY/Punk-attitude, lots of Heavy Metal, rules inspired by the original WarhammerQuest and Fighting Fantasy, an abundance of b/w art, 'The' Law vs. Anarchy Alignment-Axis (basically Dredd vs. Punk), Örks=actual fascist pigs, Wizard-PCs are old, because they devoted most of their lives to learn magic, while Warlock-PCs are young, because they took the darker, more dangerous shortcut, etc.

Crusaders of the Polymyth I entered with the mindset of somebody who was in a Wargaming Club in the 70s and got a copy of Empire of the Petal Throne (and idea I stole from real-life Magira/Armageddon). How would they have made a game that better fit their playstyle? It has a simple system, but it utilises combat charts, because "realism" (also, the fake authors have connections to the SCA), you have an overworld map of a fantastic medieval environment you can travel, characters are your actual selves transported into this magical milieu, etc. In a sense, it is my answer to Encounter Critical, even though it has almost nothing to do with it.