benefiction.bsky.social
Just out here indulging an appetite for marvels. Religion scholar & interreligious peacebuilder, part-time professor in NYC & Rome, lifelong musician & outdoorsman, feral tabletop nerd, goofy dad.
175 posts
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82 following
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Well this is so extremely My Shit
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Everything I look at online (admittedly pretty segmented and wholesome these days as don’t have much stomach for anything else) has gone completely feral for Triangle Agency. Is it as great as it seems or are they just incredible at marketing??
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Have not run it YET but it’s one of only a few Candlekeep Mysteries that I’m adapting for a long-running campaign. The hook has been dropped!
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Writing some tasty Reveal History morsels about demonic meddling and economic collapse. Apropos of nothing.
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Uhhhhh incredible. Speaking of which, are you familiar with The Silt Verses…?
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Shhhhhh, we’re busy dissociating
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I bring it up because Wes was looking for two players for an X-files-style TSV game on StartPlaying. The life-and-stuff timing wasn’t ideal but I was and remain verrrrry interested in theory…
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Adam, how do you feel about The Silt Verses…???
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See also the score of Inception (2010)
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Yessssss…! I haven’t kept up with Critical Role since the end of C2, but I have taken to asking my 6 year old “You spice?” every time time he asks for hot red pepper, and it sparks joy every time.
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This absolutely rules. Nails the TSV aesthetic too. How many sessions do these typically run…?
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the world is full of cheap easy shit to turn your brain off to. make sure you also pick up art and really spend time grappling with it too!
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Ok but I would play the heck out of this
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And that's a wrap on 2024's new games!
So happy 2025, tabletoppers. And remember LeGuin's dictum: "The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary."
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--which we play tested exactly once. Absolutely nothing to do with Frozen: It's a haunted house exploration game-- with different problems in each room until you come across the source of the curse that has turned the residents of the house to scary ice ghosts. It's actually... kind of good?!
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Honorable mentions to: Epyllion, for which my kid and I made characters but still haven't had a chance to play a session; Hammer of the Earth, another Micro RPG about apocalyptic train crews, which is next up on the roster, and "Frozen Heart," the wee one's first foray into game design--
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--were squashed anticlimactically by one failed roll after the next, resulting less in high-stakes "things get worse" dynamics and more in daisy-chained attempts to do the thing. It felt less like edgy pitch-black fantasy and more like ineffectual pirate comedy! But here too I'm eager to try again.
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Mixed results for me with this one. I loved the character creation, the random tables, the incredible material quality of the book, the opportunity to deploy sea shanties for mechanical advantage. But... I wonder if d20 systems are just losing their luster for me - so many of our maniac schemes--
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(16) Pirate Borg, from @limithron.bsky.social. The only d20 game in the lineup, notably! I had never had the chance to try a Borg title before, and managed to get onto a table for "Lost in the Locker," a new module featuring - you guessed it - dead sailors trying to escape the afterlife.
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--with a longer campaign giving space to see more of the juxtaposition (narrative and mechanical) between the spirits and their shadows, a kind of representation of their lingering fears or regrets. More than anything Ink reminded me of a dark and dangerous Spiritfarer - high praise.
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(15) Ink, by @mxcollins.bsky.social and @snowbrightstudio.bsky.social. Honestly loved this one, probably my favorite of the three sailing-the-afterlife games. Nailed the cozy-creepy knife-edge, with interesting and surprisingly unforgiving mechanics. Would gladly play more than a demo--
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--themselves hellbound. Also of appreciative note with Hellwhalers was the Sic-Bo board which anchored a sort of gambling minigame, using poker chips and all to wager resources in the hopes of summoning the monstrous whale representing... redemption? Not totally clear. But thematically razor-sharp.
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(14) Hellwhalers, by Brewist Games. Oozing with atmosphere, this was the only one of the three anchored specifically in human history, with lots of Christian religious horror elements baked in. Accordingly the characters were extra gross for being real-world tropes of people who might find
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The other three games I got to try at PAX capped off my year of branching out with a really interesting combination: three games with the same essential concept (doomed souls sailing the afterlife-as-nightmare-ocean) but with radically different tones and mechanics. First up:
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--fail-forward and success-with-consequences mechanics that feel so frustratingly absent in D&D. I'd absolutely give it another chance.
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--too much going on, between the cards and tokens and stress levels, etc; it felt like a lot of good ideas pulled from a lot of different types of games and packed into a single, overburdened experience. I'll say this for Daggerheart - the core mechanic of 2d12 instead of 1d20 elegantly provides--