ttrpg

Excited About Doctor Who Again

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

I just watched the new Doctor Who specials and I’m sorry but this is a Doctor Who blog now. I fell off during the Capaldi years, not because I thought the show got bad or anything but life stuff just got in the way and I never really made the time to get back to it. Then I heard Chibnall was taking over and I’m sure the 13th Doctor is great, because everyone that has played the Doctor has been very good and just has to deal with various quality levels of scripts, but I never enjoyed Chibnall’s writing and the idea of him running the show sounded rough.

Anyway, people were saying nice things on the internet about the new specials so I decided to watch them and they’re really good! I was a little pessimistic that I would since I thought the last year of specials in Tennant’s run was rough (except Waters of Mars, which I loved). I also felt like bringing him back right before a new Doctor would make it tougher on the new guy, which I guess is still possible but at least I feel better about Russell T. Davies as a showrunner again. There isn’t much I actually have to say about the episodes without spoiling anything. They’re just really solid hour long episodes and it was nice seeing people return. I forgot how queer the show was while RTD was showrunner so that’s also been very nice. Unfortunately it feels even more necessary now than it did during his original run. It’s also wild that the show has an actual budget now. I’ll have to go back to watch all the episodes from New Who that I missed before.

It also got me to start rewatching the original series again starting with An Unearthly Child. I’ve seen all of the stories for the first 3 Doctors that weren’t thrown out, along with a bunch of other ones for each of the other Doctors, but it seems like a fun excuse to watch them all again anyway, watch the animated reconstructions, and listen to the Big Finish audio dramas I have along the way. I didn’t know Unearthly Child wasn’t available because of some weird licensing stuff with the son of the writer, who owns the rights. Luckily I own the dvd of it but it sucks this is even a thing. I think the story holds up alright though. I remembered Hartnell’s Doctor being kind of an ass but not this bad. But it does help setup the growth that he eventually goes through. It’s funny to me that the first episode is so iconic and the next story introduces the Daleks but the rest of the story is basically just about some cave men. Probably makes sense to not introduce aliens in the very first story though. The soundtrack is still great too!

A few days ago I also picked up the Doctor Who Humble Bundle that’s ending in a day because of all the Big Finish stuff it has. I don’t have too much interest in the comics since the ones I read before from this line weren’t too memorable to me, but I want to play the tabletop rpg at the time. My Doctor Who ttrpg hot take is that none of the players should be the Doctor and if anything that should be the GM, or maybe a GM-less game. I’m assuming that someone has made a Doctor Who-like game on Itch.io at some point. Although I do like that the book makes it clear that you can in fact play the game without having anyone as the Doctor and basically do your own weird little Doctor Who spinoff.

My other gripe about the ttrpg is that the 8th Doctor book doesn’t mention the Big Finish audio dramas at all! I’m sure it’s for legal reasons and they didn’t get the license to but man, they’re so good. Same goes with the 6th Doctor, where he also gets to have his own character arc and growth and wear a blue suit sometimes. It just feels like, what’s the point of putting out an 8th Doctor book that only references the movie and a short regeneration special?

Oh well, I’ll make sure I keep posting about video games stuff too. Just having fun being really into a tv show again.

Tabletop RPGs Inspired By Adventure Games

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cover art for Parsely, showing a variety of icons in pixel art

It’s not surprising that there’s a lot of tabletop rpgs based on video games. They often have an interesting universe to base a tabletop game on and many already have rpg mechanics, where while it’s not a 1:1 conversion to a tabletop game it does give designers a place to start. What I was surprised by was the number of tabletop rpgs that are based on or directly inspired by adventure games. I knew a lot of ttrpg creators grew up playing them but there’s quite a few that mention specific games or license the IP. Here are the ones I could think of but please let me know if the comments if I left anything out.

Myst

With Myst being one of the best-selling games ever, it’s not surprising that it has inspired a few tabletop rpgs. Unwritten: Adventures in the Ages of MYST and Beyond is a game that uses the Myst license and uses the FATE core system for the foundation of its rules. The game is strongly influenced by Uru/Myst Online and has players exploring modern or historical D’ni and the ages connected to it. The game has received a few smaller supplements as well as a larger sourcebook that was recently Kickstarted and focused on the reconstruction of D’ni

There’s fan games too. Bring the Page With You is a free one-page ttrpg where there is no GM/DM and is focused on players collaborating together to create Myst ages.

Text Adventures

There’s also a few games inspired by the Infocom-era of text adventures. Parsely is a collection of games where a group of players control one character by telling one player, known as the Parser, what they would like to do in the form of text adventure commands and the Parser describes what happens next. The collection even features a trilogy of Zork-like games known as Action Castle. The creator of Parsely has a few games in the series on their Itch page.

They’re not the only one to develop group text adventures. Goldfinch Games has developed a couple Out-Loud Text Adventures as well, with one in an abandoned amusement park and one at an abandoned spaceship.

Uresia: Grave of Heaven is a system-neutral setting book by S. John Ross that is strongly inspired by the Zork series, with there even being a section explaining how it influenced the book and why they love the series so much. The book is now available for free here. Check it out and then consider hiring him for book or map design if you’re a ttrpg designer. The author also wrote a Z-Machine text adventure game that ranks as Polite on Andrew Plotkin’s cruelty scale. This game is also available for free.

Point-And-Click Adventures

I found a few games on Itch.io inspired by point-and-click adventure games. Pocket Full of Stars is a cozy two-player ttrpg inspired by Samorost where the players have the roles of an Astronomer and the Storyteller and work together to tell a story about a giant jumping from planet to planet and meeting people.

Loom is a fan fiction game based off the classic Lucasarts adventure game of the same name. It’s a solo journaling game where you explore the game’s world using the mechanics described in the book and write about what happens. Both games are available as Pay-What-You-Want.

Citizen Sleeper

With it being so strongly inspired by indie tabletop rpgs like Blades in the Dark, it would make sense that Citizen Sleeper has its own tabletop rpg. It’s not actually out yet so I can’t say much about it but it is available for pre-order here.

TTRPG Supplements

Instead of developing their own systems, many designers have created supplements for existed games. Blood Mountain Resort & Spa is a free download for fantasy ttrpgs. Inspired by the Monkey Island series, players explore a pirate themed resort. The NPCs are statted for DURF but the rest of the supplement is built to be system neutral. Lost to the Starlit Reptiles is another adventure for DURF by the same folks that is inspired by adventure games.

In Other Waters: Tidebreak is a supplement for the horror ttrpg Mothership that is set in the In Other Waters universe. The supplement is playable in either as a group or solo and designed to be less stressful than the typical Mothership adventure.

Let me know if I’ve left anything out. I would love to know what else exists out there. If you enjoyed this article you can play any of my tabletop rpgs inspired by adventure games like Accomplice, my Gabriel Knight inspired solo game, Alone in Cyberspace, inspired by Hypnospace Outlaw, Friendship Quest, my two-player map drawing game, and ERROR, a play out loud text adventure. The first two games are paid but just take a free community copy if you’re interested.

Indie Game Roundup ( Nov. 24, 2023)

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screenshot from In Stars and Time showing the game's first person combat mode

It’s Itch.io’s Creators Day, where they aren’t taking a cut from sales today. I’ve put all my paid games in a little bundle you can pick up if you want some solo TTRPGs.

Shannon McMaster has a cool and free system-neutral guide to hex crawling in time dimensions for your tabletop rpg.

Misty has a great post on Cohost about all the games she enjoyed playing while judging for the Independent Games Festival.

Hand Eye Society’s Super FESTival is still going on. Check out all the great talks and indie games going on.

Goose has made a very good demake for the Game Boy of a game they previously made a decade before for a game jam.

James Chip has a new solo journaling game set in space. It’s based off their previous game The Adventurer and seems very cool.

The results of this year’s IFComp were just announced and as usual, it’s another great batch of interactive fiction games that are worth your time.

In Stars and Time looks like a very nice time loop rpg that’s now available on Steam.

There’s a new Indie Tsushin, highlighting indie games from Japan.

Tristam Island is now open source and released under a Creative Commons license. It seems like a great reference if you’re looking to build a text adventure game in PunyInform for retro platforms.

It Came from Studio 9

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I was digging through my google drive and stumbled across a ttrpg I wrote for the 200 Word RPG Challenge contest back in 2018. It didn’t win nor should it have, but it seems alright and maybe I’ll come back to it someday.

It Came from Studio 9 is a GM-less RPG where 3-5 players are part of a crew making a B-Movie. The crew collaborates on the framework of a science fiction, horror, or adventure movie before producing a film in three acts. Players then choose one of the following roles in the movie’s production:

Director (Required)
Lead Actor (Required)
Supporting Actor
Location Scout
Stunt Person

Players then film the scenes in each act (usually two or three) by taking turns to say what they’re doing in each scene. If the action seems difficult, they must roll 2d6 to determine the result.

10+: Action is a success (Ex: Lead actor delivers a great performance)

7-9: Action is successful but there’s a complication (Ex: Location Scout gets the beach they wanted but there’s turtles everywhere)

6-: The movie has a disaster (Ex: Director couldn’t get prop guns and actors now must fight killer birds with coat hangers)

After all three acts are completed, the movie is released and the group discusses if it was a huge success, box office bomb, or film that is so bad it’s a cult classic.

Some Neat Games (May 1-7, 2023)

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I just did one of these a week ago but a bunch of cool things have come out since then that I’ve played and I think they’re worth checking out.

Gobliiins 5

a bunch of various goblins and potato people on a snail-like thing

After many years, we finally have a new Gobliiins! Gobliiins is an adventure game series that started in the early 90s, by French game designers Pierre Gilhodes and Muriel Tramis. After three games, they moved onto other things (like the wonderful Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth) and then eventually the studio Coktel Vision closed. Years later Pierre released Gobliiins 4 in 2009 but I bounced off of this due to the ugly 3D graphics and early puzzles. I’ve heard it improves later on so I’ll have to give it another chance. Unfortunately I’ll have to do it from my physical copy since it’s not legally available on any digital stores.

Which brings us to 2023 and a new Gobliiins game after being crowdfunded on a couple sites. I had pretty low expectations but it’s actually a nice little game and everything I wanted as a fan of the original trilogy. It’s rough around the edges due to it being a solo dev game and Pierre’s first game in Adventure Game Studio, but it has everything I wanted like nice art, weird sound effects playing all the time, and goofy little guys. I don’t know if it would be the first game in the series that I would recommend to new players, that might still be Goblins 3, but I do think 5 is a solid entry in the series and worth checking out if you were a fan of previous games.

Undrium

a person hopping on paintings

Undrium is a free platformer by BitGlint Games, a small studio (single dev?) who has been remaking ZX Spectrum games and doing homages to that era for a while. To be honest, Rob does a much better explanation of the game and why it’s so good on his blog. So all I’ll really add is that as someone who was too young for that whole era, I just think it’s a really good game even when I have no nostalgia for that time and nothing to compare it too.

Dinocar

dinosaurs drawing a map at a table

Dinocar is a really cute tabletop rpg where you play as dinosaurs driving cars and build a little dinosaur city in the process. I played this with my 3 and 6 year olds and we all had a great time, even if my 3 year old had no interest in following the rules. The art is great and the layout and game structure made sense to my 6 year old and I. The same designer also made the game Sprouts which I keep meaning to play as well.

Indiepocalypse #40

I’ve talked about it a billion times by now but the new issue of Indiepocalypse is out and as usual, very good. I just think Indiepocalypse is doing very good curation work and bringing more attention to a lot of neat indie games while helping some others get made in the process. I’ve discovered so many games through the zine and this issue is no exception. At the moment there’s also a little PWYW bundle ($1 minimum) where you can get a bunch of games that were commissioned for the zine. It’s good! Go check out an issue! You can buy them in cassette form now!

Aseprite 95

the layout of aseprite redesigned to look like a windows 95 app

This isn’t a game. I just think it’s a nice theme if you use Aseprite and also have an attachment to Windows 95 because of nostalgia.

Doom II RPG

Technically it’s not a new game, it’s a port of a mobile game from over a decade ago. But the mobile version has been unplayable on iOS for a very long time now because Apple absolutely doesn’t care about games preservation so I’m very happy it exists. Back when mobile phones were starting to have more complex games on their platforms, John Carmack created a few turn-based rpgs using the Doom and Wolfenstein properties. Ars Technica goes into the history a bit more and how you can download it here but they’re actually very good games and worth checking out if you’re a fan of Doom or rpgs like Eye of the Beholder.