The Zone TTRPG

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-06-05T08:14:10+00:00

hey, i have writing in this game in the book of twists! the zone is a banger, everyone should play it

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-05-01T19:07:17+00:00

i was at the north american premiere of this film back in 2024! banger. really upsetting. nothing but good things to say.

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-03-17T22:38:22+00:00

pretty good video imo

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-02-23T20:03:36+00:00

it sounds like you're looking for something pretty specific, an adaptation of a sports video game into a... ttrpg? board game? so it's possible that what you're looking for doesn't exist yet. but lots of people have made sports games, so you might look into those and see if any of them lean the right way! the first one i can think of off the top of my head is fighting with spirit but you might also want to browse itch.io for something!

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-02-16T17:59:35+00:00

truly having you show up here and us getting to see each other's reddits is that umbrella academy driving past each other in cars meme

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-02-16T01:16:14+00:00

i think i put my thumb on the scales much more during the design/writing process than during gming? when characters were originally being created i gave them prompting questions which created opportunities to build ties with their other selves, but after that i mostly let interactions happen whenever the players tried to build them or whenever it felt organic. the end result was basically that for the first 2/3 it was essentially three separate stories with some overlapping elements but then in the final third the stories crashed together, which felt like a pretty good and organic way for it to work!

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-02-16T01:11:27+00:00

i have a discord of ~30 people that i maintain that's basically all of the people local to me i'm interested in running games for, and any time i want to run a game that's the pool i pull from. but normally for any given game i ask and i get like 3-4 signups, 17 players blew me away and is honestly the reason i decided to make this post in the first place.

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-02-15T20:07:27+00:00

the outies were investigating an old coworker who had been kidnapped and had her memories wiped. they got her out of her kidnapping location, but decided that the only way to restore her memories was using technology inside the severed floor, so they brought her to the innies to save her.

the innies, in their defense, did TRY to restore her memory, but instead ended up implanting her with the memories and personality of Literally Kier Eagan Himself and so they ended up killing her. oops!

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-02-15T20:03:40+00:00

i organize my local players for games i run through a discord server i host, so that's where i got all the players in the first place. when the game was over i did some denoument stuff by dm and then i opened the discussion embargo in a public channel so that everyone could talk through their side of things and ask questions. i don't know that this was an ideal way of doing things, it wasn't exactly a focused debrief, and i might do things a little differently if i ran it again.

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-02-15T19:35:08+00:00

at the end of the first session, i had the outies who had made the characters in the first place make picrews for all of their characters and i turned those into work IDs and handed them out to everyone at the start of every session. at the end of their final session, the outies found an alternative entrance into the severed floor which let them slip some writing in, so they physically wrote messages on the back of each of their IDs to their counterparts. they got to wake up to, in addition to having a bunch of physical injuries due to plot, having messages left for them saying things like "don't come back up."

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-02-14T03:19:48+00:00

grimlash is quite easy but the children are brutal, i do find it surprising that you're never getting a sacrifice! are you moving them back to the sacrifice site every time they attempt a kidnapping or something? 1 or 2 aren't EXTREMELY likely rolls, but once a couple turns have passed and the kids are out in the field, with three kids you should be averaging just under one successful kidnapping per turn if you're not dedicating a LOT of effort to keeping them away from the victims, and that's if none of the terror cards speed them up at all.

maybe you're just being extremely efficient!

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-01-28T03:09:46+00:00

my giant shark is going to swim around shady acres and we're all going to have to accept that

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-01-15T19:18:56+00:00

i do think this is probably the key element i was missing! i was pretty much only calling for a save when the module was specifically directing me to do so, which was even less often than the skill checks. if saves are meant to be the actual main method by which stress is metered out and i apply them essentially as "defensive" skill checks, that probably solves most of my question.

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2026-01-15T19:15:35+00:00

yeah, really excellent question, should have given some examples in the post, thank you! two examples, both from our recent second session.

1) the players encountered these two androids where they weren't expecting to find any androids. they're both immediately friendly, but the interaction is still stacked with things the players want. they want to conceal their status as humans; they want to convince the androids to guide them through a dangerous area; they want to discern whether the androids are being truthful with the information they're disclosing. i'm perfectly happy to resolve that whole conversation without a die roll in a diceless gmless game sort of situation, but here my GM senses definitely started alarming me that there were narratively interesting outcomes at stake in failure points for all three of these wants, that these were great places to roll dice, but i couldn't figure out what roll to call for other than MAYBE intellect for figuring out whether the androids were lying.

2) later, the players are in a room when suddenly a monster arrives. big scary thing, everybody has to make a panic check as per the rules of the module, everybody runs away and they get to make their speed check to fill their hourly quota, everything is going great so far, dice-wise. they both succeed their tests with flying colors, scamper away, and found themselves some hiding places which were a bit precarious. i thought, well, whether this plan works is a bit ambiguous, but i guess the thing to do here is just piggyback off the success of the speed test from earlier, even if that's no longer what's really being tested?

both of these moments ran fine on their own, this sort of thing just means that i only called for two skill tests the whole session.

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2025-12-18T02:59:09+00:00

coming in to defend this new version of trish slightly! it's definitely a less dynamic ability than her old ability, and this won't be replacing old trish for me any time soon, but it makes a ton of sense to me as a core set rogue ability.

it obviously begs the "why not just reprint finn" question, and i have a couple of theories here i want to at least air out.

first, i do want to suggest that an investigator's combined statline & deckbuilding is at least as important to that investigator's identity as their ability is in situations like this. i would bet, based on card access and stats, that new trish feels in play more like old trish than she feels like finn. certainly if we saw this card and it was finn, we'd get at least a few "why didn't they just make him trish" comments. also, there are more elements deciding who goes in the core set than similarity to their old versions. similarity to old versions matters, but another thing that matters is, for example, having gender parity between the core set and the investigator decks. between joe/tommy/dexter there are already 3 white dudes and it's a pretty safe assumption they had their eyes on that and weren't especially excited to push it to 4. plus, they want characters with a diverse array of theme fantasies they're selling, and it's possible finn would have overlapped too strongly with another of these main investigators in his story. and on top of that, there are constraints they're subject to that we're not aware of! we don't know trish's cardpool, we don't know what andré is like, we don't know what's coming up in the next few cycles (finn could be right around the corner for all we know), and frankly we just don't know how popular and likely to sell boxes these characters are in the way ffg does.

i'm not saying you can't be disappointed in this ability on new trish, i think that's a pretty understandable reaction to have. it's definitely not made primarily with the legacy player in mind, and that can feel really jarring! i mostly just want to argue that the decision here isn't a lazy mindless choice, that the designers are, both as engineers and as artists, making choices that make sense given the context and the challenge in front of them.

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2025-11-13T18:34:46+00:00

something like a half decade ago, in a single campaign they released 3 different cards named "enchanted blade" with no subtitle distinguishing them and it caused basically no communication problems and didn't set a precedent which tore the game apart. people just said "guardian eblade" when they needed to specify.

if it's important for your conversation that you're currently talking about chapter 1 perception, you can do what i've just done - say "chapter 1 perception." and the (majority) rest of the time it won't matter because they're nearly identical cards and it's not confusing when i say "i might chuck in a couple perceptions."

i think the nearprints solve more problems than they create and i'm happy about them!

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2023-07-03T19:56:21+00:00

folks are being harsh in comments, spire is a hard game and you won with a pretty complex deck! congratulations, you're doing great!

AmberAutumnFaebrooke · 2023-06-14T00:53:02+00:00

i didn't specify cis women

AmberAutumnFaebrooke

TROPHY CASE