game eater blog

Viv procedural narrative tool

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 03:57:19 GMT

This got posted in a game design channel i visit. I'm not sure who to pass it along to, but it does look intriguing

comments

Fellowshippin'

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:19:51 GMT

Finally got my hands on Fellowship through a bundle after years of telling myself "i should read Fellowship." worth it!

Fellowship puts some work into codifying GM actions and pacing. This is a good thing. Right now I'm looking at how it asks the GM to have two multi-stage plans running at all times, either to seize a new source of power, or to destroy a specified community. Certain actions of the player party trigger the advancement or completion of these plots.

Fellowship doesn't demand a fully-defined world, it invites you to continue to add details during play, each player contributing information that their character is most likely to know in-character. So, when the Overlord starts every game with a plan to destroy a named community, the most likely option is that you're targeting either an important location from the players' backstories, or the literal first location they're visiting in-game.

Without directly saying so, it nudges you into putting the players' hometowns in the crosshairs. This rules.

comments

semantic slippage narrativism edition

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:16:39 GMT

My day job (self-employed) includes wandering around the internet and keeping track what people say about PbtA. Occasionally a new one will pop up. Lately I've been seeing "in a PbtA game, you shouldn't be rolling dice that often anyway." I'm like, you shouldn't what now? Where did THIS come from?
— lumpley (lumpley.bsky.social [BlueskySocial]) Apr 16, 2026 at 10:51 AM

vincent baker i am so sorry the world has become this

I can propose a path for the shift in meaning, though. "Narrative" as used to mean "imaginary description of the fictional world" gets positioned against use of rules, and, separately, as used to mean "what's more interesting to me" gets positioned against ludic goals (victory in a combat, character progression (in the sense of accumulating personal power), etc). All of which gets mixed together with Forge or post-Forge narrativism (discussed previously), and people who intuitively understand those first definitions read those games as if they share those priorities.

it's fun to have such a clear demonstration that's just not the case!

comments

LuluttoLilly ambush

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:02:41 GMT

I'd heard that Studio Pierrot was doing a new magical idol anime for the first time in almost twenty years, and then forgot to follow up on it, and then saw that it's on youtube in English now. get hype. It's making some very clear callbacks to Creamy Mami, but the music design honestly reminds me of more modern American cartoons. bee and puppycat. idk. Real interested to see where this goes.

locking in and finishing Full Moon would make it easier to compare the two... both magical idol revivals but themselves separated by over a decade...

comments

Alternatives to narrative

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:03:13 GMT

One of my favorite mecha writers shared [this discussion]https://magicalstage.moe/2026/03/17/how-we-got-into-plot-and-how-to-get-out/] of the possibilities that open when we don't let The Plot be the main focus of our experience with a work, and included some further commentary:

I think that if anything this understates its case. Plot must be less essential to animation than image, because you can have animation without plot but you can't have animation without image. In the same way, plot must be less essential to literature than words, because you can have literature without plot but you can't have literature without words.

Many have adopted 'story' as a way to discuss everything—with their horizons for everything narrowing to exclude anything without a story. Everything is 'media', and all instances of media have a story, which we can apparently assess for its characterisation and its pacing. Heaven forbid we might ever wonder whether a brushstroke is well-placed or a metaphor well-chosen.

...which brought to mind for me some discussions that challenge the notion of tabletop role-playing games as (definitionally) a kind of storytelling. The logic is coherent for me: story is formed by giving order and meaning to events, in a lot of TTRPG play that order and meaning is something visible only in hindsight, not consciously shaped or pursued. Anecdotally: I took an oral storytelling class for a few months in the hopes of improving my GMing skills. It didn't help nearly as much as I had expected.

Unfortunately this decoupling of "storytelling" from "ttrpgs" brings to mind flashbacks of the old "storygames aren't real rpgs" flame wars, and remains pretty popular among the bitter losers of said wars. More reputable defenders of the distinction include Jay Dragon, Unboxed Cereal (I suggest reading "art" in this post as "narrative"), and... was this also a C. Thi Nguyen thing? if i make myself check i won't finish this post. sorry.

You can see my pinned post, you can see that I'm fascinated and compelled by games that do ask for meaning and order to be consciously shaped during play. But I find it helpful to remember that this is not an essential quality of TTRPGs; among other things, it gives me a better appreciation for the games that do contain it.

comments

disney direct to video interquels

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 03:23:25 GMT

they made a bunch of these. let's make a list

Beauty and the Beast: An Enchanted Christmas (1997); Christmas special, frame story is a sequel but the main body is not. makes sense, include their most marketable designs.
Belle's Magical World (1998); Beauty and the Beast again, compilation movie of a cancelled TV series (another recurring theme among Disneytoon output)
Hercules: Zero to Hero (1999); EDIT, MISSED THIS ONE, another tv compilation movie. I guess adding all the tv series and not just their movie versions would add to the list too but i'm not doing that this time
The Lion King 1 1/2 (2004); this is the famous one! This is the one people remember. get some use out of that split-second teenage simba design. fair amount of prequel to it too.
Tarzan II (2005); this is now the third (Edit: FOURTH) of these that takes place during a single song during the original. i can't find any production details but it feels too close to be inspired by the success(?) of Lion King 3/2
Bambi II (2006); BIG throwback, the others weren't as distant from their originals
The Fox and the Hound 2 (2006); they're churning these out huh. got Brother Bear 2 in there too somehow
Cinderella III: A Twist in Time (2007); this one is a time travel thing not a "true" interquel but i'm including it anyway because it's the time travel sequel to Cinderella and that's just fun

did you know? now you do

comments

gming #lifehack

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:28:02 GMT

If you run campaigns in systems that don't match the premise, you can be extra confident that the good and fun parts are the product of your own effort and genius. and when things go wrong you can blame the game. like and subscribe for more pro tips

comments

march report

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 02:51:00 GMT

forced to redo my RSS feeds bc my reader isn't working right. Theoretically, this would be my chance to stick it all onto my Dreamwidth reading page for convenience and to get me more active here... but i'm not feeling it so instead you're just getting this notice. sorry.

i've gotten back into Fate Hollow Ataraxia, really enjoying it. Something about the way Medusa's backstory is handled really reminds me of how Wheel of Time handles retold myths, some kind of mixture of intentional subversion and "I'm using this cool bit of scholarship, which may or may not be accurate, as the basis of my retelling." Makes for some cool material, but now i'm curious where the writers are getting their inspiration.

I still want to make a post about the No ICE in Minnesota bundle bc there's a lot of cool stuff there, just gotta muster the motivation

how are y'all, how's things

comments

RPG Maker Acquired (x4 combo)

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:14:02 GMT

Adding "figure out differences between RPG Maker 2000/2003/XP/MV" to my to-do list. And I suppose "actually make something with them" too, that would also be good to do.

it was a really good deal

comments

dracula draculer draculizt

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 05:34:34 GMT

I have discovered a new old Dracula, one even newer and older than my previous preferred new old Dracula: Mörkrets makter ("Powers of Darkness"), the likely-unauthorized Swedish version. It's nearly twice as long as the original, reframes Dracula as the head of a social darwinist conspiracy, and nobody realized it was different from the English version until a few years ago.

There's two secret draculas like this. at least two. maybe more undiscovered. whatever. The first is an Icelandic version, about one-third as long as the English version, but with a much longer exploring-Dracula's-haunted-castle section and a really rushed ending. Somehow it took over a hundred years for people to catch on that this was not the same thing as the original book, but it got an English translation in 2017. This is what I had already read; it's not as good as Stoker's version but I really like the additions to the haunted castle sequence.

The 2017 translation is what tipped off the folks in Sweden that they also had a variant instead of a straightforward translation. The Swedish version was serialized in a newspaper by an unknown translator just a couple years after Dracula Classic was published. Like the Icelandic version, it features an expanded haunted castle sequence... because this one was the source text that the Icelandic one was abridging. But instead of that rushed ending, it keeps going and going, accumulating more and more differences from the English version.

idk i just think it's neat. dracula forever

comments

the riddle of The Riddle of Steel

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 01:40:36 GMT

friend read through Riddle of Steel, which is mostly famous for its detailed combat system, and I'm struck by how much of a historical anomaly it is

Author commentary describes it as responding to "dnd is too gamey and easy these days (00s)" which i mostly associate with OSR takes, but, Riddle of Steel is tackling that by trying for more and more detailed and realistic rules, rather than the retrocloning or simplification that OSR takes would try; and the authors and games that tended to reference it were Forge narrativists, who were neither doing Low Fantasy nor trying for HEMA realism.

I'm reminded of Shadow of the Demon Lord doing Grime Murder Hours Fantasy at a time when that was a popular OSR aesthetic, but in a grid combat way, inspired by D&D 4e. This is a departure from both the OSR stereotype and the Riddle of Steel method, but still appealing to a desire for brutal combat and dark fantasy that all three tried to claim.

moral of the story: aesthetic will betray you, you gotta talk about rules

comments

rainbow dash vessel of torment

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 05:45:23 GMT

a friend is informing me that her youtube recommendations are filled with Rainbow Dash being subjected to "a broad swathe of medical and psychological horror." anyone know what's up with that. why is this happening to her. is this what "whump" means or was i misinformed about that particular bit of fandom lingo.

comments

but also i should finish hollow ataraxia

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 04:29:13 GMT

Ruminating on Magiamachy, my sketch for a knockoff Fate/Stay night ttrpg. It's gotta be pvp, or it just won't work, but I also want to provide some kind of alternative win condition that isn't just "play a different game now." So: When players are eliminated, they're assigned a new playbook that represents an additional threat disrupting the Magiamachy, like "the Order of Magi wants to shut down the ritual" or "yeah it's aliens." Each of these will either alter some of the fundamental rules, making cracks to allow alternative win conditions, or they'll just straight-up have defined wincons on them.

The initial rules of the Magiamachy look like there's only one way for things to end, but as those rules are broken, new possibilities appear. plus this lets players keep playing even after their character is gone

comments

and another worm

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 02:51:48 GMT

Wormgame uses spell components as the limiting factor for its spellcasting, which is a clever way to do spellslots without using the phrase "spell slots," but you mostly get the spell ingredients on the surface, not in the dungeon. The monster harvesting system is for alchemy, different thing, doesn't do spells. But! that one "spell components are the reason wizards dungeon crawl" post i saw was compelling to me, so now i'm imagining a megadungeon setup where "hey you found a vein of Sorcerer's Sulfur, you can harvest enough for one cast of Fireball every time you pass this floor" is part of regular dungeon exploration "new component cache discovered" on the event table, "your old cache has been raided by rival adventurers," etc. I'm also imagining "add a renewable component cache to the mapped dungeon" as a potential level-up option for wizards, or "you can now repurpose one component as another" idk i think there's juice here

comments

"draw the rest of the worm"

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:09:10 GMT

i read His Majesty the Worm! game's got plenty of buzz, you don't need my rec, but I come out of the book appreciating how much it explains how to use OSR trademarks like dungeon maps and random encounter tables. "integrate your random encounters into whatever spot on the map they show up, and swap them out with new events when the party returns to the surface" is really really helpful procedural advice, albeit one that necessitates a lot of preparation. And to its credit, it breaks down exactly what you need for that preparation really well. Once you have your city and underworld maps and their respective event tables, it gives you a ton of material to work with and dominoes for your players to knock down.

However

The dungeon creation advice itself left me a lot colder. It has a process for determining the macrostructure, but each individual floor kinda reduces to "draw maps, come up with a bunch of interesting things to happen." Even the "dungeon seeds" in the back have maps, but don't have room by room breakdowns. Which is the point, they're a starting point for inspiration, but the end result is that you still need to draw the rest of the owl when preparing things yourself.

His Majesty the Worm does a better job of showing me what a megadungeon needs than any other game I've read. It's bridging the gap between where you start and what it needs that's tricky for me.

comments

indie ttrpg history 2015-2025

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:18 GMT

Choosing to believe that any overlap with my own research indicates i am correct and wise

comments

Christmas Dragon Onslaught

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 04:51:18 GMT

Dragcave has limited opportunities to get holiday dragons from previous years. i uh. used that opportunity.

comments

Kaiju Girl Caramelise trailer!

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 03:11:34 GMT

(don't forget to kill the auto-dub)
I know what you're thinking: Can I run this in Chuubo's? I'm pleased to say it is the easiest thing in the world to run it in Chuubo's.

comments

theory page updates

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:36:20 GMT

Migrated some material from here to the Neocities, so my theory section now has three pages. Three! that's plural now. Also i've got dragons on the main page and kept tinkering with my links page, so that's fun

comments

TobiDen (new freeware TL)

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 06:16:55 GMT

new 100+ hour freeware RPG translation that i genuinely did not expect to see happen. This review and the others it links made me extremely interesting to see it translated, i just didn't think it would happen. because 100+ hour freeware RPG. but now it has. and I am pleased

comments

I'm A Hypothetical GM With Two Theoretical Parties??? My Competing Play Preferences In Another World

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 03:13:31 GMT

In a strange and hypothetical turn of events, you've found yourself running two mid-level Lancer campaigns. You're an experienced GM, you have plenty of time on your hands, you figure you're up to the challenge. You've recruited friends and familiar faces from your favorite TTRPG spaces, especially those that you know are really into the character-building side of the game. Build freaks! We know 'em and love 'em. But you're a little surprised when both groups end up with the exact set of character builds. It wasn't planned or anything, everyone just picked all the same character options as someone in the other group. Weird, but there is a silver lining: since it's the same party at both tables you figure every combat you prep can be used for both groups. What could go wrong?

First session of the campaign(s), you run a combat for Mobile Task Force Zeta-Zero-Two "Radiation Ronin," and they love every minute of it. It's a long hard fight with tough decisions to make, but they emerge victorious, and everyone talks about how much they're looking forward to the next sitrep. Feeling very pleased with yourself indeed, you put that same combat in front of the time-hopping band of rebels, Carrion Cavalcade. They hate it! By the end of the session, everyone is clearly frustrated, they're too tired to keep playing, and you're left wondering what went wrong.

Within a couple days, you've gathered something of a postmortem from the Cavalcade's players. They tell you that even though they won the fight, none of them feel like they really fulfilled the fantasy they built their characters for. The Really Big Sword player felt stuck making hacking rolls, the sniper had to ram and grapple to shut down the enemy. They weren't making any tactical errors, it was a difficult fight and they made the choices they needed to in order to win the sitrep. But they weren't playing the way they really hoped to.

Okay, that's good information, and you know enough to prepare differently for the next session. Radiation Ronin need to push their session back (someone has a cat wedding), so you even have some extra time. You set to work crafting a combat that will let every character show off their strengths and fulfill the role their players envisioned. It's not going to be an easy fight, just one where everyone can be where they want to be.

Showtime. The difference is palpable. Carrion Cavalcade pounces on every opportunity for a clever combo and fills the chat logs with their favorite moments. Everyone gets to see their mechs at their best, everyone leaves happy, you're feeling so much better about the campaign from here on out. You can't wait to run this same combat for Radiation Ronin and-

hm. that didn't go as well.

They're a quieter group, even at the best of times, but you can tell they didn't share the Cavalcade's enthusiasm. They won the fight with flying colors, triggered the same hype moment combos, but, they just weren't feeling it. They tell you the combat was fine, they enjoyed it, it just didn't have the same thrill as the first one. One of them says that things went a little "too smoothly," and things start falling into place for you.

Radiation Ronin enjoyed the first combat because they were forced to make new plans in the moment, Carrion Cavalcade didn't because they felt like they weren't getting the gameplay they had planned for.

Carrion Cavalcade enjoyed the second combat because they were able to fulfill their gameplay fantasies without a hitch, Radiation Ronin hated it because executing their ideal turn repeatedly felt boring to them.

Both groups genuinely enjoy the mech combat gameplay of Lancer, both groups genuinely enjoy building a character out of a smorgasbord of rules-chunks, but the things they enjoy about those things are different. Do you want to explore the whole space of possibility, and it's disappointing if you can get away with doing the same thing over and over? Or are you here to experience one particular slice of play, and it's frustrating if you feel like that's being denied?

To invoke some truly incomprehensible jargon, Radiaton Ronin enjoy their frotz in a nitfol sort of way, and Carrion Cavalcade have more of a gnusto approach to their frotz. I'm not suggesting either approach is inherently superior, or "more true" to Lancer or any other combat game, but I do hope I've been able to outline the different needs of different players, and potential opportunities for expectations to become misaligned at the table.

comments

Cardcaptor Sakura for WonderSwan fan translation

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:29:15 GMT

Cardcaptor Sakura raising sim about to be available in English for the first time!

I've been bemoaning how little information is available on this, so it's REALLY exciting to see it get this kind of attention.

comments

made some stuff

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 07:20:59 GMT

I contributed to the Fabula Ultima Jamloween 2025! behold my will o' wisp and zeta gundam reference

I also got an article in Odysssey issue #2, a brief overview of several magical girl TTRPGs

I think I want to get posting here more regularly. Let's see if that can happen

comments

genre fandom vs music fandom

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 18:33:14 GMT

my current hobby of being eaten by horses has brought my attention to overlap between pop music fandom, especially idol fandom, and fiction fandoms memetically descended from sci-fi/fantasy fandom. One Direction RPF shares sites with Supernatural slash, terms from "stan twitter" get imported into manga discussion, and so on. Obviously they don't have a shared origin they diverged from, Lord of the Rings fans weren't the primary fanbase for the Beatles. i think. So I'm curious how this eventual fusion, or at least coexistence happened. Maybe it's as simple as demographic overlap teaching patterns of fandom and fans applying it to their other interests.

idk, save me dreamwidth people

comments

flavoring thoughts

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 18:22:32 GMT

Now and then I run into the take in ttrpg spaces that giant robot tactical combat rpg Lancer is particularly difficult to reflavor, which is interesting to me because that has not been my experience. My feeling is generally that as long as you're in giant robots, you can port the system pretty easily into other settings or write your own, and even if you're doing like, werewolves in grid combat, you're basically fine. But I don't want to just dismiss this other tendency, I want to understand what in particular poses an obstacle.

"Flavor is free" is a popular piece of TTRPG advice bordering on a truisim: if a bit of fictional description is inconsequential, you can replace it with something else (with "inconsequential" typically defined as "easy to replace," so you see how this gets circular). Its popularity can obscure that this is actually a pretty distinct reading strategy: a player who goes into a game assuming that not everything locked into the overall network of mechanics can be homebrewed into something else is going to have a very different experience than one who takes every description as part of the presented scenario.

Back to Lancer. There are a few elements of the setting very closely associated with the mechanics: The mech manufacturer factions, the licenses they provide, and the "printers" that let players repair or recreate their mechs. Major parts of the progression and resource economies have specific in-universe justifications. I think this is where my reading starts to differ: I feel like the in-universe elements exist to enable the desired gameplay, so changing the setting doesn't "matter" as long as you keep the progression and resource economy working like normal. The manufacturers can be rethemed or be completely reduced to upgrade trees without affecting "this changes my mech's numbers."

But if you're seeing the primary goal of the mechanics as expressing a specific setting's assumptions, then that just won't follow. You can't change the manufacturers without coming up with a new set of mechanics to reflect those assumptions, you can't change what the license rules represent without drastically changing the resource economy, etc. This is a much more restrictive reading, which might be part of why I disprefer it.

I have reason to believe Lancer was written with "flavor is free" and the capability to change the setting for your own table as a base assumption of the writers, closer to my own reading. But it turns out that doesn't come through to every reader. funky.

comments