Insomniacs is out! The journey through its design has ironically mirrored an Insomniacs campaign - an incredibly long odyssey punctuated by false hope, mistakes, research projects, and self-discovery.
Insomniacs, a Cryoship Road Trip
Horsepower
Car chases in TTRPGs continue to be my white whale. I've watched a ton of car chases in movies, real life, and video games, but the problem is you don't often read car chases. It's primarily a visual spectacle, and so the challenge in translating a good chase to a roleplaying game lies in finding where the decision points are.
Destroying the World
The Earth in doomed in Insomniacs, but how it's doomed is up to you and your group. The Kurzgesagt youtube channel continues to be an invaluable source of information on existential threats, mass extinctions, and productive nihilism. Here are a few choice options that either made it into Insomniacs more or less directly, or were inspirations for some of the doomsday scenarios or exoplanets.
Peace Was Never An Option
I wrote up a very light PbtA game about mischievous animals trying to act like people and generally committing low stakes crimes in the process. The fever dream prototype of this game turned out to be the perfect fit for the roleplaying club I ran for elementary schoolers last year.
24XX: BANDIT
YOU ARE A STARFIGHTER. You dance through the void, strapped into a fragile hypervelocity shell capable of glassing moons. Now your colony worlds burn. Your fleets are scattered. The false prophets and traitor kings call you renegade. They hound you through uncharted space while billions of ghosts cry out for vengeance. Let them come. Show them how easily the hunter can become the prey.
24XX: BREACH
BREACH is my first submission to Jason Tocci's 24XX game jam over at itch.io. His 2400 series of microgames are one-page rpgs that range from psionic thriller to cyberpunk to space horror, and I appreciate this small format. He's used Creative Commons art by BEEPLE on all his covers, and I continued the trend. Finding … Continue reading 24XX: BREACH
Glow in the Dark Hard Zones for Apocalypse World: Burned Over
Here's the Wasteland from Glow in the Dark reframed as Hard Zones for AW: Burned Over.
Get Insomniacs. Play Insomniacs. Taste Insomniacs. (Because It’s a Real Book Now)
Insomniacs is available in print and pdf from DTRPG!
Shipping Containers the Hard Way
I'm building some ISO/conex/shipping containers for 28mm gaming stuff, and instead of following the several fine tutorials for scratchbuilding your own or using readily available 3d models or just buying one, I'm making these myself.
Giving Me Life
Here's some stuff what's been making life in the plague regime bearable. Some of it's old, some of it's new.
The Chromatic Pilgrimage, Part 3
My UVG-inspired D&D 5e campaign has a lot of weird Masters of the Universe-style quasi-future arcanical engineering stuff in it, because that aesthetic helps me keep focused on the kind of Zardozian prog-rock and heavy metal album cover shenanigans I like to see in fantasy gaming. Here's some loot!
