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jaztice:

Extra Ordinary Kickstarter… 2!!!

Hi y’all! Guess what? My game Extra Ordinary, a TTRPG about kids with powers on the run from danger, is coming to Kickstarter next month to fund a physical copy!

Coming soon: Extra Ordinary TTRPG Softcover Print Run

Extra Ordinary is a tabletop roleplaying game where you play kids with extraordinary powers on the run from danger in the ordinary world. It is a game of belonging outside belonging, a dice-less and GM-full game system that uses tokens and the players’ imagination to create a narrative-focused and roleplay-heavy story. The game is built for 3-6 players and intended for longform play, but alternate rules for GM-ed or one-shot play are included in the book. Inspired by Maximum Ride, Percy Jackson, and Animorphs, this game tackles themes of homelessness, child endangerment and abuse, bigotry, young kids with grand destinies, and what it means to be something other than ordinary—in more ways than one.

If you want to check the game out before the Kickstarter, a PDF version is available for $12 on itch!

Extra Ordinary by Kodi Gonzaga

If this sounds like something you’d enjoy, follow the Kickstarter page to be alerted when the campaign goes live.

See you on February 1! :D

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talenlee:

I fancied writing a Jim Henson style song opening, a poem about down in the swamp where the people come from goo, but it turns out those are super hard and there’s a lot to talk about in this excellent mid-sized Tabletop RPG.

Something of a warning, though; I don’t have a full, complete copy of Eat God. What I have is the Early Access version for the kickstarter. You can check out this version here. This is not a consideration of the game as a product for purchase nor as a game used in play, but rather about the ideas the system gives me and the reasons it gives me to play it.

Eat God is a game, by David Propoketz. It’s a game that comes with a minimally defined setting but a very distinct, important vibe, where players take on the role of The Folk. The Folk are the weird little creatures that exist as a byproduct of the world, not as its agents. They’re Goblins, they’re Kobolds, they’re Imps, but they’re also things like Minicons and Gnomes. The Folk are not the owners of the world; the dominant structures are against the Folk, and in a lot of ways, the Folk exist because the rest of the world needs them to exist. You are the dungeon trash, ennobled by knowing the secrets of the world, and you are together on the grand quest to Eat God.

The game positions ‘Eating God’ as an ambiguous idea, where it could be something like an economic revolution or an emotional recognition or it could be just, like, actually finding and eating God. It creates an episodic story structure, where players show up in some circumstances, try to solve a problem that they’ve identified, and there are consequences that, depending on the genre, are either hilarious or terrible, or, given the tone of the game, both! Then at some point all these little errors and little problems build up to the point where the Calamity happens and the campaign becomes about this boss monster encounter, whether narrative or like some elaborate trap.

That’s the setup; you play a weird little muppet in a gaggle of other weird little muppets, and you go out on your way to find the problems in the world around you. It uses a dicepool system, and at this point I would normally give you a quick run through of that, but I don’t want to this time, because Eat God‘s mechanical system is pleasantly sophisticated.

Eat God uses for its resolution system a dice pool system that uses a set of twelve-sided dice (d12s), a pair of six-sided dice (d6s), and a deck of playing cards (for non-redundant randomisation). Then there’s a set of print-and-play cards for character customisation and building, and also players have a character sheet. There’s a Gamemaster, and the play numbers seem to scale from three to seven.

The main way you make checks in the game, is you find out how bad the die roll can go which gives you a sort of threshold number. Then you find out how many die you can roll, add those together, chuck the dice, and see what the highest number you get that lands underneath a specific stat of yours.

This is where you’re probably expecting me to complain right.

I think that’s what I do.

Maybe I’m overly anxious about complaining about indie TTRPGs.

See, this level of components and detail is the stuff I would normally see for a board game, and I would also, normally, hold this complexity as a mark against the game. Conventionally speaking, this kind of stuffness is useful for holding onto a lot of meaningful information that players need to coherently maintain in order to understand the fictional game state. A great example of this is playing Dungeons & Dragons with miniatures, which are one, yes, useful for drawing people into the physical space, but also, are cool little things that make it easier to stop thinking about how far away you are not from one person but from two people. The material stuff of the game keeps track of that.

For the typical indie TTRPG, this level of information preservation is just not necessary, because, and I mean this as gently as I can, most indie TTRPGs have very little in the way of meaningful mechanics. Eat God doesn’t need miniatures, it’s not built like that, but instead, the mechanical system here is made to maintain sophisticated game information.

Character building is done with a card system, which is done to ensure that, unless players actively choose it, that player characters are by default going to be completely distinct from one another, both mechanically and aesthetically. The die roll system is built around the d12 for a few obviously extrapolated reasons, like how it’s a die that doubles a d6 (meaning the d6 can be used for ‘easier’ versions of the check) but it also has a wide variance which is also a reasonably handleable number to estimate. And the game has a system called Calamity, where every time you roll die and your numbers go too high, not just too high for you to use them, but too high for the check, then you build up Calamity. Calamity is a thing the gamemaster can spend on the spot to bully your character, or they can opt not to and the points go straight to the Calamity Clock.

And yes, Clocks! If you’re seeing something of the shape of Blades in the Dark in Eat God I think that’s reasonable, but I also don’t think that you need to know how to play Blades in the Dark to play this. They’re also different enough and use similar terms (like Stress) that you might bring mistaken assumptions on. Fortunately, the system of Eat God is extremely thoroughly written with a clear technical overview and robust glossary.

The Calamity Clock feels like (but doesn’t have to be) the ‘campaign ending event’ clock. The Calamity Clock builds up every time you accrue Calamity that the gamemaster doesn’t use, which means that as you start trying more and more difficult things and fail more and more often, as you do bigger and cooler and fancier things (where you get to roll lots more dice!) then the clock inexorably ticks upwards. This gives the game a natural tension, and the clock striking midnight means that it’s time for the gamemaster to bring up a big new event to draw a narrative line under things.

There’s some great advice too about the nature of the clock, where it isn’t just that when the clock strikes, a bad event happens but it needs to be a bad event the players can engage with and can expect to understand and affect. If it’s a plague outbreak, the plague has to be a thing the characters can do something about or help address, if it’s a political assassination, there’s got to be something in the aftermath of that assassinations that brings the story to a peak and you need to get involved to do it.

Eat God is a thoroughly written, technically robust, aesthetically delightful game by a developer I think has a fantastic sense of game design, and particularly in making sure that that design follows through on the type of narrative the game is meant to express. The form of Eat God‘s campaigns seem to be about giving you a setting and a hook for your weird little monster critters, and then suggestions for the Calamity you’re building to. It looks excellent.

I don’t think I’ll ever run or play it.

This may surprise you as I am a fan of horrible monsters and muppets and goblins. I brought the game to my local goblin expert (the goblin that lives in my house), and after my arm was done being chewed on, I was told that the premise of a goblin in a group of goblins is not interesting. Rather, the point of a goblin is to be in contrast to the players, not to be the form of all players.

The fact is, when everyone is goblin mode, then nobody is.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

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