Basements & Beards- Analogue Gaming Thread

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Of course they would get hung up on the gender stuff. They always do.
Also nice of them to dumb down Pratchett's satirical humor down to "Just make bad thing dumb". Haven's seen that in just about every strawman-filled woke product

I'll stick to GURPS Discworld.

GURPS is probably one of the most bizarre systems for such a comedic setting, but it's certainly the last time the source material will ever be honored.
And it noted that the one-off female wizard / male witch thing doesn't count specifically because of its one-off nature.

[ebin namefag]

Dicksworld

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

The Gurbintroll Games Brainrot

Holy fucking shit. How the mighty have fallen.

So, who the fuck is Gurbintroll Games, aka Blacky the Blackball? Well, he's some OSR dude mostly known for making retroclones of older games, the most well-known probably being FASERIP (a clone of Marvel Super Heroes, still the only Marvel RPG worth checking out) and Dark Dungeons (a clone of the Rules Cyclopedia, deliberately named after the infamous Chic Tract).

Dark Dungeons is particularly noteworthy for being the only retroclone of the Rules Cyclopedia (aka the final form of Basic D&D), though two more editions of the clone would at more of the guy's houserules to the game, mostly because the actual Rules Cyclopedia has since become available for purchase again (the original Dark Dungeon game out during the reign of D&D 4e, when WotC removed all older edition products from digital stores).

Fast forward to 2024. Nobody trusts the OGL anymore thanks to WotC epic blunder of trying to retroactively alter it in their favor. So the guy cranks out his own take on D&D that does not use the OGL: Light Fantasy.
Okay, the art's a bit on the tumblr side, but who cares if the game is goo-

• Non-human characters, both player-controlled and gamemaster-controlled being treated as being just as variable in culture and outlook as humans are. There is a refreshing lack of racial essentialism in the game. You'll find no "always evil" races, no equating of tribal lifestyles with being "primitive" or not really human, and no treating of some races as being inherently more or less intelligent or civilised than others.
• Fantasy without colonialism, where the emphasis on the forces of civilization "taming" the "uninhabited wilderness" by killing and driving out the people who already live there (but somehow don't count as inhabitants because they're not human and/or don't share your culture) has been removed.
• Fantasy without Pseudo-Christianity baked-in, so you don't get your fantasy settings inextricably intertwined with such Pseudo-Christian concepts as demons and infernal beings, and spiritual afterlife planes to which people are sorted based on their behaviour and beliefs.

Oh no, this guy went super woke in like 4 years, eagerly gobbling up the dumb ideas that WotC has had for 5e.
And then Dark Dungeons 4e happened.

• A repeat about the above dumb talking points regarding "racism" and "colonialism". Because killing orcs and taking their stuff makes you worse than Hitler.
• The former race classes like "Elf" and "Dwarf" have been reflavored to be race-agnostic. This kinda misses the entire point of the class design of Basic D&D.
• Now every class can be any "race". I put the latter in air quotes because your race has no mechanical effect whatsoever, aka you're just a human in cosplay.
• The formerly nicely formatted weapon list (weapon descriptions in DD/RC take quite a bit more space than in other versions, because they have different stats and capabilities based on your proficiency in that weapon) has been changed into a weird and confusing table.
• No more alignment ('cause that's also racist), even though there are still alignment-related spells? Dafuq?
• No orcs, goblins or any race in the bestiary. In a similar vein to D&D 5.5 you just get various versions of "Person".
• He still hasn't fixed the Manticore's stat block not actually mentioning how much damage the tail spikes do (it's d6 per spike, btw).

What the fuck happened, man? You used to be cool.

While I am personally cis-het, I have LGBTQIA+ people in my home and at my gaming table, and it is important that their existence is not erased when it comes to the role-playing games they might want to play.

A bit less funny is that this nigga has removed the older editions from both DriveThru and his personal website.

Oh well, there's always Adventurer Conqueror King System, which modernizes the Basic D&D formula without being massively retarded.
You want race classes? ACKS has multiple different classes for your elves and dwarves.
You want cool orcs that aren't treated as being black or Mexican for some fucking reason? ACKS lets you roll up different quirks and traits for individual orc tribes.

[ebin namefag]

Oh well, there's always Adventurer Conqueror King System, which modernizes the Basic D&D formula without being massively retarded.
You want race classes? ACKS has multiple different classes for your elves and dwarves.
You want cool orcs that aren't treated as being black or Mexican for some fucking reason? ACKS lets you roll up different quirks and traits for individual orc tribes.

ACK ACK ACK

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

It is time.
From Evil Hat, the wonderful publisher that gave us Thirst Sword Lesbians and the Tomb Raider RPG (which has been cancelled, but of course they're just gonna file off some numbers and release it anyways) comes...

Girl by Moonlight

In the name of the moon, I shall transition you!

(And thanks to itch.io for its Community Copy feature, because this shit is too lame to even pirate.)

Prelude

Of course I had to tackle this thing eventually.

• It's by Evil Hat, one of the most woke and cringe RPG publishers around.
• Just like their Tom Raider thing, it's Forged in the Dark, which is basically off-brand Powered by the Apocalypse with a weird die pool system.
• It's allegedly about magical girls.

I haven't given it a proper read-through yet, but by skimming through it, I could already make some intriguing observations:

• The writer his pretentious, and has his head so far up his ass he doesn't need a mirror to see his teeth.
• The art doesn't really scream "magical girl". There's like maybe one artist who might have seen anime at one point, but his art features spaceships and mecha instead of anything resembling mahoushit.
  • The art is admittedly less obnoxious than the one found in Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but it's also incredibly dull and bland (aside from Mecha Guy's art, but WTF is it doing here?).
  • Most of it reminds me of the type of art you find in some SJW-approved graphic novel that gets praised to high heaven, but doesn't really sell because of how aggressively boring and joyless it looks.
  • I'm pretty sure none of the artists are actually familiar with mahoushit. This isn't even about the lack of an actual animu style. I mean, this is the closest the book ever gets to a magical girl group shot:
    Prepare to be underwhelmedShow

    
    
    Has this artist ever actually seen a magical girl group shot? Where are the distinct color palettes? The poses? The fabulous outfits?
    I guess Bootleg Tuxedo Kamen looks okay, but then you have that incel in the background who's literally just some nerdlinger with a book. And how does the main chick manage to look uncomfortably masculine despite wearing a dress? And I don't even want to guess the gender of the fatass
• This isn't actually about magical girls, and I doubt anyone working on this knows much about mahoushit beyond Sailor Moon and Madoka - and that only because they feature lesbians.
  Though I guess in Current Year Haruka is probably considered "non-binary" or something.

Though before divind into this magnificient tome, let's check out the crowd-funding pitch (archive here)

Sailor Moon, Steven Universe, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, The Vision of Escaflowne… all these properties and more inspire Girl By Moonlight, by Andrew Gillis!

Okay, the Lesbian Space Rock Show I can kinda understand because this book is woke af, but Escaflowne? Really? What about Magic Knight Rayearth? You know, the actual magical girl mecha series?

Magical Girls grapple with destiny in this multi-genre tabletop RPG.

Multi-genre? "Magical Girl" is a genre.

Girl By Moonlight explores the heartbreak of denying who you really are, fighting for what you believe in, and the transcendent power of building relationships while embracing your true self.

Oh, so "magical girl" is just pretentious symbolism for queershit. Got it.

As a Magical Girl you will clutch your tragic struggles tight, seeking to score defiant triumphs against the darkness of an oppressive society.

"Oppressive society"? What planet are you from?
Mahoushit is, at the end of the day, just tokushit, and aside from some rare exceptions like Mechanical Violator Hakaider, tokushit is about protecting society as it is from external threats. There is no "punk" of any kind to be found.

The game reinterprets the classic examples of the genre to create an allegory for self-discovery and queer identity. The text uses ‘magical girl’ as a shorthand, but your magical girls need not be girls, necessarily, but people whose identities put them at the margins.

"Mmh, yess~. This book uses 'magical girl' as an allegory for queer identity !"

See what I mean when I say the writer is up his own ass? I can just picture him reciting this in a gay snob voice.

Designer Andrew Gillis takes the rules engine beneath highly-acclaimed Blades In The Dark and tunes it to create a unique play experience representing the breadth of the Magical Girl genre.

No he fucking doesn't.

Girl By Moonlight draws inspiration from many sources. When you sit down to play, your group will pick a Series Playset and tailor it with special rules, themes, threats, and more to make your game truly your own.

Aka "We couldn't actually be arsed to provide you with example settings, so here are some rough high concept elevator pitches for you to fill out!"

(Actually backers did get "Jumpstart" which did include like a handful of pages worth of example setting information, and like a short paragraph of context for the example characters )

This step also sounds very much mandatory, so fuck you if those "Series Playsets" don't fit what you have in mind.

And here are the for "major" Series Playsets. There is no other kind of Series Playset.

Pick your PoisonShow

You really should have copied Rayearth. That series knows how to pull off the armor-over-school-uniform look.

At The Brink of The Abyss. Heroic magical girls fight to reclaim a corrupted world. It's inspired by Sailor Moon and Steven Universe.

So I guess this is the "classic" magical girl playset.
Except for the "reclaim a corrupted world" bit. Where did they even get this from? The Lesbian Space Rock Nazis from Steven Universe?

(The Jumpstart for this reveals that the example setting is a city in the United States that has been a totalitarian police city-state for ten years follow a coup. I can see why they left that out of the actual book.)

On A Sea of Stars features mecha pilots struggling against extinction at the hands of the Leviathans and is inspired by Diebuster and The Vision of Escaflowne.

Nothing about this pitch has anything to do with Escaflowne.

Beneath A Rotting Sky deals with tragedy and betrayal where magical girls are doomed to an inevitable fate. It's inspired by Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

I love how they couldn't even come up with one other inspiration. It's just Meguca.
And just like how Meguca is tryhard edgy mahoushit, this pitch just sounds like a tryhard edgy version of At The Brink of the Abyss. Probably so they could put the "Being Meguca is Suffering" rules into their own section.

In A Maze of Dreams draws on both Paprika and Serial Experiments. Its central themes are desire, mass culture, and ideas developing a life of their own.

Spoiler alert: This is easily the most half-assed playset.
The pitch as a different format than the others, starting with the inspirations and then listing some general themese instead of telling us what this shit is about. Also it's "Serial Experiments Lain". You will respect her name, dammit.
The art for this playset is the most boring and forgettable of the bunch, which is leads me to believe that the artist has seen neither Paprika nor Lain.

Your everyday existence is oppressive and full of compromises. Defy society’s expectations, assume your full power, and transcend into your true self.

Are the monsters of the week gonna be landlords or something?

Oh, and there's also an official Actual Play which, well...

Abandon all HopeShow

Totally not trying to copy Critical Role by having everyone pose like an idiot on every thumbnail.
And I can't tell if they have troons, or just blokes doing bad crossdressing on purpose.

Prediction time!

• Despite the constant reminders of how "queer" the game is, it can be run perfectly fine without it.
• Except you probably don't want to because this is narrative bullshit.
• There will be a big mechanical focus on gamifying the relationships between the player characters. Because NPCs don't really exist in a mechnical sense like the PCs do.
• The "Playbooks" aka "classes" will be glorified premade characters.
  • Bonus points if at least one of them is clearly based on one specific fictional character (probably from Meguca). Because fuck being subtle.
  • Even more bonus points if this has obvious "You are the main character!" or "You are just a supporting character!" classes. These types of games love doing this for some reason.

Bonus: Sell Sheet!

So the official page for the book features a single-page "Sell Sheet", which is I guess for store owners to read and cringe. Let's take a look!

The SheetShow

Fans of Sailor Moon, Steven Universe, Diebuster, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, The Vision of Escaflowne, Paprika, Serial Experiments Lain, and more

Lies. I love all of this except for the one with the Lesbian Space Rocks, and I'm severely unimpressed by the book.

Gamers who enjoy resisting oppressive regimes, exploring identity, and supporting each other.

LMAO. There are multiple "Punch Nazis in the face!" games for those people.

Queer, trans, or otherwise marginalized gamers and their allies.

Even they deserve better.

Fans of existing Forged in the Dark games like Blades in the Dark or Scum and Villainy.

This is the actual target market. Blade- and Apocalypsefags are even worse than d20fags when it comes to thinking their favorite system is the greatest thing since sliced bread that can do everything perfectly.

Gamers looking to create their own campaigns of Magical Girls, robot pilots, dream investigators, or corrupted souls.

You keep saying this is about "magical girls", yet they're only making up 1/4 of the options? As a store owner I'd be slightly confused.
Speaking of stores, which of these would you rather put up in your shelf if you wanted to attract mahoufags?

One of these is not like the others...Show

An easy-to-play game that models your favorite Magical Girl media

No it fucking doesn't.

Next Time: I'll see if I can find something juicy about the people involved in this. Unless someone else beats me to the punch.

EDIT: Found and riffed the "sell sheet" for good measure.

[wulfenlord]

I don't see any girls there, the emo bloke on the right is not even trying, but it's alright, it's jUsT aN aLlEgOrY for self-harmdiscovery.


Worst girls sleepover ever.

Don't call it Girl by Troonlight by Evil Hat, or the cripple will get mad.

@andrewgillis.bsky.social‬
The big contradiction of living independently while disabled is that it's all good until anything breaks on my wheelchair and then I am alone, and potentially unable to even move around my apartment, while I wait for new parts/repairs or whatever.

See? They/them posts about life being hard, so he derived an escapism by ruining his favorite(?) franchises. But he's already cooking up the next banger:

@andrewgillis.bsky.social‬

Why make fun games for people with improv backgrounds when I can make pretentious games for prose writers instead?

And just to be clear, the above is about my 2 player ttrpg We Contain Solitudes which I will be releasing (at least in ashcan form) sometime this year.

Went to riff on the people behind this, but I think I'm in love uwu


Gonna make her embrace pronouns again, by the power of the pig breeding moonlight :3



Oh hey, it's the zoophile from Galactic/Going Rogue, along with this rape accusation in waiting:


And they went all out with the stretch goals for gay porn game zines, I spot at least 2 biological females

SpoilerShow

And if that doesn't make your girldick tingle, there's the amazing art

SpoilerShow

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

I don't see any girls there, the emo bloke on the right is not even trying, but it's alright, it's jUsT aN aLlEgOrY for self-harmdiscovery.

I'm pretty sure the black chick is a biofemme (not sure if that's an actual term, but if the Left can keep making up new fantasy words, so can I). No fucking idea about that Asian thing.
And I know the guy second to the left is doing the Gunbuster/Diebuster pose, but I can't help but feel that he's a bit Kamina- or Simon-coded.
Speaking of, I'd say Gurren Lagann would've been a better inspiration instead of Diebuster (much like how Rayearth would've been better than Escaflowne). They want this book to be some flavor of punk, and Gurren Lagann has "Fight da Powah!" as one of its central themes.

Don't call it Girl by Troonlight by Evil Hat, or the cripple will get mad.

>getting butthurt because people attribute your book by the well-known publisher instead of your nobody ass

What an entitled little shit. I will know call this riff series Evil Hat's Girl by Moonlight, by Evil Hat.
But it gets better:

First up, for context, Evil Hat Productions is the publisher for Girl by Moonlight (and to be clear, I am happy with my relationship with EHP, and they've been great to work with). It's a small publisher, with a small core staff, that brings in contractors to round out its workforce. I designed, wrote, playtested, and developed GBM independently, and was approached by Evil Hat with an offer to publish the game. Attributing the game to EHP cuts me entirely out of my own work, and at best I can only guess at why people might frame the game in this way.

I've looked up the guy's "bibliography", and it seems he was only a co-writer in two other narrative nonsense books. Dude's a complete nobody. He should thank that "small publisher" for giving him exposure.
If he truly wanted people to acknowledge his genius, he should've just shat it out independently on itch.io or something. But no, he wanted to play with the big leagues, and now he's salty that he's just a cog in the machine.

We don't talk about War and Peace by Penguin Random House, or Oppenheimer (2023) by Atlas Entertainment, and it would be absurd to do so.

False equivalency. These and GmB might all be books, but RPG books are much more of a group effort, like most video games or comics.
Plus people focus on the RPG publisher because those are more well-known, and everyone knows who you're talking about - and roughly what to expect - when you say "Evil Hat" or "Wizards of the Coast". Only a select few RPG writers ever become big enough to be considered household names in their own right, and this fucker has provided neither the quality nor quantity to be part of this exclusive group.

And if that doesn't make your girldick tingle, there's the amazing art

Hate it or not, but that sci-fi / space opera art is by far the best art in the book. Not sure why it's there though, and I also dunno why the artist isn't making shit for Lancer instead. That line even has the same style of faggy humans and kinda cool mechas and monsters.

[ebin namefag]

Speaking of, I'd say Gurren Lagann would've been a better inspiration instead of Diebuster (much like how Rayearth would've been better than Escaflowne). They want this book to be some flavor of punk, and Gurren Lagann has "Fight da Powah!" as one of its central themes.

row row
white the power