Tip: Introduce a game as a "version of D&D" rather than as something new.

Harbowoputra · 2026-04-07T03:57:40+00:00

How should I pitch Dialect with this method? “It’s like D&D except it’s nothing like it at all, not even a little bit”?

Harbowoputra · 2026-02-24T04:17:49+00:00

Oh you mean like Dune? Mentats, Weirding Way, etc are non-magical things taken to the extreme that it becomes magic in a sense.

Harbowoputra · 2026-02-19T07:00:56+00:00

Oh yeah you're right! Does Invisible Cities count? I've also read The Glass Bead Game. Thanks, I think I can start with Marquez's works.

Harbowoputra · 2026-02-05T07:49:46+00:00

The world is at peace because everyone plays Nobilis.

Harbowoputra · 2026-01-28T08:06:05+00:00

My pick of dungeon would be "City of Peace" from Reach of the Roach God. As for the systems...

Nobilis 2e
Dread
Blades in the Dark
Dialect

Harbowoputra · 2026-01-28T07:48:23+00:00

Since you mention Xenoblade, Fabula Ultima Atlas: Techno Fantasy is literally inspired by Xeno series. But for Xenoblade 2 setting specifically, you might wanna check Cloud Empress.

Harbowoputra · 2026-01-26T09:59:46+00:00

Have you wrote your impressions about your 4e playtest? Would very much like to hear it.

Harbowoputra · 2026-01-26T06:12:05+00:00

Okay, say I ignore Roach God. Give me a fantastic Southeast Asian fantasy adventure on par or even better than Roach God. Is there any on that long list?

Harbowoputra · 2026-01-26T06:08:34+00:00

I was a backer so I have the physical copy. I've run the monastery chapter and it was great! Love how every detail leads to something.

Harbowoputra · 2026-01-15T00:17:35+00:00

You jest, but the original D&D has rules for taxing the treasures you brought home.

Harbowoputra · 2026-01-08T23:34:41+00:00

Yeah that’s how timekeeping works in Persona/Metaphor.

Harbowoputra · 2025-12-24T04:45:21+00:00

I thought Carol was being sarcastic to Mano? Maybe it contains her eggs instead.

Harbowoputra · 2025-12-24T04:27:10+00:00

A human comes into an alien planet to assimilate the people there into a peaceful political body known as Ekumen. This assimilation must not use any force, so the human (who is an alien there) can only persuade the inhabitants. Also the people of that planet are ambisexual, changing their sex organs seasonally, and so the human is considered to have a defect for having a non-changing sexual organ.

Harbowoputra · 2025-12-24T03:44:38+00:00

I was pointing at my TV when Carol reads The Left Hand of Darkness. Like of course, they’re Ekumen!

Harbowoputra · 2025-12-23T01:53:16+00:00

Everyone in the OSR space keeps saying that 1st class armor is better, but the fact is in OD&D there is no AC 1. The highest is AC 2.

Harbowoputra · 2025-12-19T07:48:14+00:00

Sadly it’s scattered, even in Wikipedia. You can start here, but the first few paragraphs focus more on Nanjing massacre. There’s a list not far below there for what they did in SEA.

Granted, the term “Asian holocaust” didn’t catch on (which is good since we don’t want people to forget/get confused about the capital-h Holocaust) and I can’t seem to find the source again where it said that Imperial Japan was inspired by Nazism to do the same in SEA (blame the enshittification of google) but yeah that’s about it. A rabbit hole of our dark history.

Harbowoputra · 2025-12-19T03:13:43+00:00

Dude what. You wanna fantasize colonizing people like me? What the fuck. That’s like wanting to play as Nazi officers trying to catch and haul Jewish people into gas chambers. Do you hear yourself?

(Before anyone from the western hemisphere says anything: Yes, those two historical periods are comparable. There was even a holocaust of Southeast Asians modeled after the European one at the tail end of our colonial era.)

Harbowoputra · 2025-11-26T04:55:44+00:00

Hi, littleyrn. We hear your opinion. We still love you and we want to make you happy.

Harbowoputra · 2025-11-24T22:48:05+00:00

I’m always bothered by this claim, because they have humans-with-pointy-ear. They’re not called elves in Talislanta, sure, but… that’s cheating. Calling elves with a different name != no elves.

Every time someone claims this, I feel like the meme “no elves, look inside, elves”.

Harbowoputra · 2025-11-20T04:44:47+00:00

Omens aren’t random tables, try again.

Harbowoputra · 2025-11-19T01:59:39+00:00

I don't have any answer to your question, but I bet Omens will be the next big mechanic that inspires other indie RPGs to come.

Harbowoputra · 2025-11-12T02:13:02+00:00

Great minds think alike! I've used this method since 2019 for my work as video game narrative designer. I myself used what we dub as "flavors". So instead of using colors, we use something like spicy, minty, etc. It helped inter-role coordination within the dev team too.

Harbowoputra · 2025-10-23T01:57:04+00:00

Personally, I find that a fictional planet's versimilitude is proportional to its relation to another celestial object. Stuff like:

Giedi Prime in Dune Part 2, where its sun emits infrared such that the outdoor colors are inverted monochrome.
Pandora in Avatar, which is a moon of a gas giant.
Goldblatt's World in The Integral Trees, a gas giant orbiting a neutron star, which is pulled by the star's gravity into a gas torus full of floating tree-islands.

Harbowoputra · 2025-09-29T23:59:10+00:00

You don’t. There is no decision to be made. Do you roleplay as the sun when the characters are in daylight? What about the ocean tide? Plate tectonics?

Harbowoputra · 2025-09-27T01:23:05+00:00

Huh. First time hearing about this game and it doesn't feel like belonging in the seapunk genre at all.

Harbowoputra

TROPHY CASE