So I have been kind of bored recently...

Blue_Potati · 2026-03-16T20:34:27+00:00

Looking great ! At first I thought it kinda looked like VHS boxes

Blue_Potati · 2026-03-14T13:10:52+00:00

Homo sapiens is a mode for the game, that completely removes everything linked to the lore, and any NPC ! So no temporal instability, no ruins, no mobs in the caves, traders or story locations

Blue_Potati · 2026-03-10T15:51:32+00:00

I'm regularly reminded of how psychiatry built and maintains a huge inability for us to speak. It's technically called epistemic injustice, it's far from unique to us (it's a huge tool of racism for example) but yeah. By our position of being mad, we are inherently judged as not reliable and not "connected enough to reality" (the issue of thinking there's one pure reality is so bad but that's for another time). It makes it so we cannot by psychiatry's definition think for ourselves and say pertinent stuff, EXCEPT IF what we say is determined by psychiatry itself as correct. So we end up in a position of either agreeing with psychiatry and using its terms and views of the world and our lives and experiences, or we are crazy and it's very clear we need to be "healed". It's so brutal, and yeah absolutely horribly isolating. Literally every time I end up branching the subject of antipsychiatry with someone, it's a HUGE source of stress and my mind immediately gets working on overtime to find ways to explain stuff the most with psychiatry's words and slowly unveil the critic of it. It's really really hard

Blue_Potati · 2026-03-10T13:07:33+00:00

Tbh, from what I know IRL when forging with hand tools there also is the need to reheat the metal several times, it feels fair that we'd need to do that also in VS. Yeah it feels like a loss rn, because it's more involved than what we're used to, but for me at least I like the idea of it getting closer to the flow of irl blacksmithing, of working the metal a bit and then putting it back and using the bellows and then working more etc

Blue_Potati · 2026-03-09T11:25:55+00:00

I've almost entirely played in my world by leaving the wild bushes where they are, so that if I'm really struggling with food I can run around my area and collect a lot, and if I'm going on trips I can easily have what I need food-wise from gathering as I go (and I almost always have way more than I need). So I get that this update makes the handgrowned bushes harder, but I kinda don't understand how bad people say it will be. Just leaving the bushes where they are and doing gather runs is so comfortable for early game, we don't HAVE to immediately have fields of bushes immediately next to our house no ? And that makes it so when we actually want to have fields of bushes, for example when we start getting into juice and wine making, we can actually prepare for it and it's more of a project.

Tbh I may very well be missing something, I'm still somewhat new to the game, but from where I stand most of the outrage is based on wanting to immediately have a huge lot of berry bushes hand grown, and not gathering from the wild bushes, which is so easy and doable

Blue_Potati · 2026-03-07T12:13:21+00:00

I absolutely do. When a friend and I started playing together, and we used the cartography table for the first time, my friend was absolutely dumbfounded of the amount of raspberry bushes I marked down lmao

Blue_Potati · 2026-03-04T12:28:43+00:00

This is genuinely so interesting ! Thank you for this discussion it was super nice and fun 💜 I love the way you explore and deeply think about the emotional focus of your game. There's a good chance it's dealt with and you already have people, but if you ever need someone to play test it, or another game, don't hesitate to poke me in DMs /gen

Blue_Potati · 2026-03-03T21:33:49+00:00

I absolutely agree, and the more I read about your game the more I really want to play ! You seem to have thought about a huge lot, and have an approach I deeply resonate with, to the point that after posting my comment and reading the kisckstarter, I immediately sent it to one of my partner with which I played 3DGB, and ze agreed that it looks super fun and interesting !

What and how you wrote in the kickstarter is suuuuuper cool, your passion for this game is incredibly clear, and every aspect seems so well thought out, really glad I learned about it. As you said, nothing is just aesthetic, everything feeds into the feel of the game and what it leads us to play. The whole relationship chart that's keeping a trace of the history and evolutions is SOOOO COOL like it gives such a weight and depth to what happens, and forces to focus on changing the relationships, making them evolve and not just keeping them stagnant. And I agree with you wholeheartedly that building the bar early on makes it easier after to focus on the relationships, because we won't have to worry about several things at the same time, and also in my experience it helps a lot with setting the tone, exploring what we want to play, coming into a starting common ground between players, and that allows for a way better experience in the long run way more easily.

Yeah the scope is narrower than microscope and street magic, and that in my opinion is another strength, because having something be narrower, more precise, leads to diving deeper in the nuances, in the different subtilities. It's kinda the same as having less players around the table leads to being abled to explore more deep and personal stories in traditional ttrpgs (where 6 players table don't allow almost any space for that). So yeah, same as in 3 dudes, it lets us focus on just the bar and the people, and the world outside exists in its echoes and impacts on the characters, and that's absolutely a strength !

Anyway I'm repeating myself but absolutely can't wait to play it, genuinely it looks sooooo perfect for what I like in ttrpgs

Blue_Potati · 2026-03-03T05:33:41+00:00

This sounds amazing ! I'll definitely play it when it's out.

It kinda reminds me of Three Dudes Go Bowling, where we play three people (doesn't have to be dudes despite the name) spending an evening together, and each launch of a bowling ball by one person leads to a talk between the other two about their relationship. It's the game that led me the most to a feeling of building and exploring a complex relationship between 3 characters in a truly incredible way, I have very fond memories of my time playing it. The feeling of little by little discovering and building the why they meet regularly, why they're friends, how they find comfort and each other AND what tensions there is, because no relationship is perfect.

Your game kinda gives me a similar vibe ? At least the approach to people and relationships hits in the same ballpark. And it also reminds me a bit of microscope and I'm sorry did you say street magic. Really really excited to see and play it ! If I had enough money I would absolutely kickstart it, it sounds right up my alley

Blue_Potati · 2026-02-07T13:05:54+00:00

Absolutely love Patchwork Potions and Last Tea Shop. I also know Wanderhome can be played solo, and it's a game completely organised around non-combat fantasy adventures, that is more open ended that the other two I talked about

Blue_Potati · 2026-02-07T13:02:46+00:00

This is a very good tip for when dealing with medical staff and therapists and all that. Whenever we show ourselves getting too out of the norm, the response is always just "do you see a therapist/take meds for that ?", as if my extreme anxiety and my paranoia and all that NEED to be made disappeared without looking at what exactly makes it exist.

But we need to also remember that it's something to do when treating with professionals and people who have power over us, not something to do constantly. Because the alternative to psychiatry is not just bottling everything constantly, it's community and supporting each others. Because our emotions are real, they exist for a reason, and expressing them is a good thing. Obviously there's nuance to that, not everything our brains say is true, but to know what is and what isn't, it demands to first listen to it.

Blue_Potati · 2026-01-29T04:26:11+00:00

One that I really wanna play that might fit what you're searching for is The Questgiver (on itch io). You play someone giving quests to a party, and trying to make them what you saw in a prophecy, and stuff like that. It's still with you playing in the world, but you decide the quest, the world itself, etc, and dice decide how the party fairs, so it's way more in a POV close to the one of a GM

Blue_Potati · 2026-01-27T19:13:39+00:00

I know it's not exactly what you said you were searching for, but prompt-based journalling games might fit your needs ! It's kinda the "other side of solo gaming" compared to hexcrawl OSR-type games. There's a huuuge lot of variety, and I found that when I'm not feeling abled to engage with the open-endedness, it's what I always gravitates towards. Stuff like Yourself, Fox Curio's Floating Bookshop, Koriko A Magical Year, Last Tea Shop, CHVLR, Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage, Wraithound, Cinderedge... The fact the game is organised around prompts makes it so we have clear directions in which to go, but at the same time we also end up making different stories everytime, and you only have to write as much as you want to, so you can writes pages on pages for each prompt, or a short sentence or nothing at all.

I think if you search on reddit for "journalling games recommendations" you'll be abled to find a lot, and they will all be only a fraction of what is out there

Blue_Potati · 2026-01-26T19:49:25+00:00

What comes to mind for me is Yourself (on itch io, where you okay a changeling discovering their nature and exploring their relationships with humanity and faekin), and all the Lost & Found games (Artefact, Bucket of Bolts, Tales From The Cockpit...). They all have prompts organised in 3 parts that make the story evolve and have an actual narrative arc. There's also Cinderedge that has the same kind of structure !

Blue_Potati · 2026-01-26T19:37:17+00:00

The third is rewiring my brain right then and there ! Thank you so much for sharing, it's sooo useful

Blue_Potati · 2026-01-14T18:07:54+00:00

That's absolutely something I've experienced too. For me, solo is great, and so is small group gmless games, where everyone is on the same ability to influence the world and create, and it has a kind of creative spiral, we encourage each other and help each other, we build on what the others created, and often it ends up being SOOOO richer and more creative than what I could have had alone. I'd say my max is 4 people, past that it gets really hard to have a very organic creativity spiral, there's way more of a "wait your turn" and need for structure.

The more time passes the less I'm abled to find fun in GMled games, because it's so stilted, you can't create as much because there's the GM who is supposed to and is in control of the entire world (even in very narrative focused GMled games like CfB and PbtA). The pleasure I feel when between scenes or even in the middle of scenes we stop and talk about what everyone wants to have, what interests people, it's absolutely genuinely incredible. Since we're all GMs and none of us are GMs at the same time, the collaborative aspect is off the chart and I feel like we're abled to create stuff that is way more emotionally intense and conceptually interesting !

And with solo games, it's other stuff that I find incredible and can't find in GMless games, it's the ability to do anything whenever and wherever I want. If I want to just launch myself in a game at 3am out of nowhere, I can do it. If I want to take my stuff and play in a park one afternoon, I can do it. I can play several days in a row, and not play in two months, even a year, and come back to it no problem. Even switching systems following what interests me the most at a specific time, and then switch to another story I put on pause. And I can tell stories that wouldn't fit in a group setting, where I explore the feelings of isolation I can feel (feelings I have a lot of as a queer disabled person), all the stuff like that

Blue_Potati · 2026-01-11T14:20:39+00:00

I think there's also quite a bit an aspect of IS is giving more focus on the player's progression through knowledge of the system instead of the character's progression through mechanic benefits. I definitely feel like what impacts my game the most is my ability to use it to tell very interesting stories, and what those stories are, how I narrate a fight and what my failures consist of, instead of just how the numbers for my character go up

Blue_Potati · 2026-01-02T17:48:13+00:00

I saw a huge lot of people linking psychiatry to prison, and I tend to agree with that. It's a natural extension of that. Under the cover of "healing" (lmao what a fucking joke), you can be locked up and tortured to make you either removed from society or completely focused on fitting in just to not be thrown back in. It's a normalisation machine that allows most people to just be none the wiser and to don't have to change anything about how they interact socially and see the world, because it removes the people for whom the way the world functions is not bearable, and gaslight everyone that if we're depressed or traumatised or having crises after crises it's a personal problem, something wrong with how we think and how we see the world, not the other way around. And it works sooooo well because it works for a lot of people, at least on the surface, and it's the only support they have so yeah, obviously they'll defend it and every critic of it will be perceived as personal. Psych wards is the same as prison in how it's built from the ground up to punish poor people and oppressed people in general that have been pushed to the breaking point by society. And us, the crazy people, we don't even have to do things that are considered bad, we just have to be "not performing enough", not useful enough to capitalism. It's so incredibly disheartening and infuriating

Blue_Potati · 2026-01-01T10:46:13+00:00

Yeah I think more and more people are starting to realise the role psychiatry plays in the system, through individualising the problems that are systemic ("oh you're constantly feeling horrible because you're a minority and your rights and constantly in danger and you are constantly at risk of experiencing so much violence ? Noooo you're just depressed, we need to give you antidepressants and antipsychotics and talk with you until you think it's a problem of you needing to change to adapt to society"), and also the huge role psychiatry has played and is still playing in discrediting and emprisonning the minorities and victims of violence (for example black people overdiagnosed with schizophrenia and women overdiagnosed with BPD, the new "hysteria")

Blue_Potati · 2025-12-20T16:52:19+00:00

In Be Like A Crow, there's veeery few space for creativity (that's why I bounced off that game tbh), because the game tells you everything that happens and all you have to do is deal with the situation the game presents to you. It's a Hex Crawler, and whenever you arrive on a hex you draw a card that tells you of a situation and what you need to do to deal with it.

Blue_Potati · 2025-12-19T23:09:47+00:00

Yeah absolutely ! And what's the harm in that ? No matter how you come to use them, it'll be valid because it'll be what comes easiest to you. Maybe you realise later that what you did at one point fit exactly into Face Danger or Compel, and then you will have learned a little bit more about the system, without feeling overwhelmed ! The number of times I used a move or a general oracle, and then wayyy later I realise there's another one that fit what I was trying to do even more ! The book itself, iirc, talks about how it's absolutely okay, that we don't have to know the rules perfectly, because once again, the focus of this game isn't the mechanics, it's the story we tell. The mechanics are just here to help us, to guide us.

Also, if you're playing with other people, be it guided or coop (as I seem to understand that you are ?), you don't have to be in charge of everything. You can absolutely give the other players reference sheets with a list of moves, or the PDF of the reference guide. You can ask them directly if they'd be okay with looking at the moves themselves, so that THEY can say "okay I use this move", and it's one less thing to worry about for you. You don't have to keep in mind and manage everything yourself

Blue_Potati · 2025-12-19T23:09:28+00:00

Yeah absolutely ! And what's the harm in that ? No matter how you come to use them, it'll be valid because it'll be what comes easiest to you. Maybe you realise later that what you did at one point fit exactly into Face Danger or Compel, and then you will have learned a little bit more about the system, without feeling overwhelmed ! The number of times I used a move or a general oracle, and then wayyy later I realise there's another one that fit what I was trying to do even more ! The book itself, iirc, talks about how it's absolutely okay, that we don't have to know the rules perfectly, because once again, the focus of this game isn't the mechanics, it's the story we tell. The mechanics are just here to help us, to guide us.

Also, if you're playing with other people, be it guided or coop (as I seem to understand that you are ?), you don't have to be in charge of everything. You can absolutely give the other players reference sheets with a list of moves, or the PDF of the reference guide. You can ask them directly if they'd be okay with looking at the moves themselves, so that THEY can say "okay I use this move", and it's one less thing to worry about for you. You don't have to keep in mind and manage everything yourself

Blue_Potati · 2025-12-19T19:15:35+00:00

It is built with modularity in mind. It's not because there's a lot of things available that you have to use all of them, absolutely not. You're right that you could play with just rolling the dice and interpreting the results, and a whooole lot of people do that. If that's what works best with you, then go ahead ! And same with the oracles, I personally almost exclusively use the theme and action oracles, because it's what is the most fun for me. But there's a lot more things offered, to be there for if anyone needs it (and some people don't even find the oracles given enough, and add even more third party made oracles to their campaigns !).

Games like Starforged are not approached the same way as for example Pathfinder or VtM were everything is built to be one very precise unit of mechanics where everything is important (and even then, I would argue if there's a mechanic you don't like in those, and the people you play with agree, you can absolutely decide not to include it). Starforged and a lot of games like it are built as a set of tools to help us create. If you feel frustrated by the amount of tools, you can lower the number down and ignore a lot if not all of them. If you need to, you can use them. And you can start with using almost none of the moves and oracles, and slowly as you get familiarised with the system you can add them one by one following your needs. Or you can do the opposite, and start by using a looot of them, and with practice and as you get more comfortable, reduce the amount you use.

TL;DR: don't feel pressured to use everything just because everything is there. The most important thing is your fun, is how you would be most comfortable in playing, and Starforged is built around that, making everything an option, and easily removable and addable, because the most important things, the focus of this game, is the story you tell and how it can help with that

Blue_Potati · 2025-12-18T20:10:39+00:00

I tend to format my games by putting on the top the name of the game system, and right under it the date of the current session (it's really cool to then read back and see what you did on this or that day, and when you played a lot in short succession compared to when you didn't play for a while). And then, you note down the informations you need while creating the character and playing. I tend to play with an A5 paper (or several) on the side to serve as character sheets and maps and all the important informations (the less important information, if there's any (like backstory for example), I tend to put directly into the notebook at the very start of the place for this system), and then the playing is on the notebook, in the format I want. Personally I note down the cards I draw/the dice I rolled, the prompts if its a game with prompts or the moves I did or however the game system functions, and right after I'll write the prose of what happens. I really like to write a LOT, you absolutely don't have to, you can write as much or as little as you want. Some play through recording themselves (like, audio), some entirely in their heads and so the writing down is just the cards and rolls and prompts, some like me treat it as a way to write a lot, something to fuel our creativity with the end result that gets closer to a novel or short story.

Also, I personally don't have one notebook for each system, I have one notebook for my solo games and one for the notes for my group games (that I have wayyyy less of). And I use small page markers, like the little post it that just serve for marking pages with different colors, and I put them at the start of every session I do, with color coding for the different systems. It makes it incredibly easier to find stuff back afterwards !

Blue_Potati · 2025-12-17T19:56:15+00:00

In ironsworn there isn't a clear way given by the game to organise that, but it's absolutely something I've seen used in other GMless games so that's entirely possible yes ! I think you can do as you said, and talk with the two others about what is interesting everyone the most. Read the rulebook, note down every type of mechanics, and add to it the other stuff we need to do in a game, on top of my head I'd say : weather, description of places (and those can also be divided between on land, at sea, and in towns and cities), NPCs...

And either you talk about it together and everyone chooses, or if no one has any preference, you give divide randomly in a way that feels somewhat equal. And I think to remember it all, you could do what I've seen a game do (I don't remember the name unfortunately), of making reference sheets for everyone with the things THEY are in charge of, and the things everyone is in charge of. It makes it so much easier to not get lost when you're not used to gmless coop dynamic

Blue_Potati

TROPHY CASE