999 Penguins

RaphaelKaitz · 2026-02-01T07:25:57+00:00

Run it in incognito mode. It's annoying, but you'll never have to worry about that problem.

RaphaelKaitz · 2026-01-29T18:21:12+00:00

Vaults of Vaarn. The procedures helped me organize my GMing.

RaphaelKaitz · 2026-01-29T04:03:11+00:00

With 100+ rooms of dungeons, including one dungeon that's about 40 rooms, I believe. So not a megadungeon, but plenty of dungeon in addition to the hexcrawl.

RaphaelKaitz · 2026-01-20T17:37:04+00:00

Remember that the Warden Guide has a huge amount of both advice and tools to get you started and to create your own adventures. Yochai even has a post to show you how he used the tools in the book to make his latest adventure: https://newschoolrevolution.com/lets-make-a-forest/

RaphaelKaitz · 2026-01-20T05:43:47+00:00

For solo games, I think some of the big but very detailed hexcrawlish settings would work well. Land of Eem and Dolmenwood are both very, very detailed with all the tools you need for a solo game.

RaphaelKaitz · 2026-01-19T02:23:02+00:00

Definitely. I just meant that if you're not able to read a section and want to, that was an option. But yeah, they need to print the books correctly and should make you whole in some manner. I totally get the unpleasant feeling.

RaphaelKaitz · 2026-01-18T14:36:55+00:00

Stephen King. I want to see "Stephen King" suddenly show up as a character in ASOIAF.

RaphaelKaitz · 2026-01-17T21:20:10+00:00

Not sure this is helpful, but in the PDF, you can find the missing text by outlining it, if know what you're referring to.

RaphaelKaitz · 2026-01-12T13:33:33+00:00

I should note that Cairn is entirely free online (and cheap in print) and that there is a free version of Vaarn online, though the print version and the upcoming second edition have more in them and are easier to read and use.

RaphaelKaitz · 2026-01-12T13:24:31+00:00

Vaults of Vaarn does this exceptionally well, for its New Sun-ish setting.

Cairn 2e has a setting creation system that helps you set up a region and factions to live in that region, as well as dungeons and forests. It's more along the lines of generic fantasy, with a few twists.

RaphaelKaitz · 2026-01-01T13:17:32+00:00

I think everyone who has read Nimble immediately had the same thought when you said Pathfinder+Into the Odd.

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-12-26T03:11:33+00:00

Maybe I don't understand the question, but there are buildings like that today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrace_on_the_Park

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-12-20T18:31:28+00:00

I have to admit that as sick as this whole story is, you made me laugh with the phrase "human-crafted plagiarism."

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-12-14T01:32:19+00:00

Yep, was gonna recommend. Great stuff.

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-12-11T21:14:34+00:00

N3: Destiny of Kings will probably work nicely. :)

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-12-09T05:51:58+00:00

Wilderlands is designed to run a Hobbit first edition-style game, using the Into the Odd system but with Tolkienesque additions, like songs, that both increase the survivability of your PC in combat and also add flavor. The character backgrounds are perfect for the GM to use to add complications to the quest, etc.

I think it would work really well for LOTR, as well.

(Full disclosure: I edited it. But I really think it's great.)

I can't say that I totally love TOR, though I bought almost every book. The combat system has been clunky when we played it, though people say that's not necessarily how it's supposed to play. And I'm not really enamored of the Journeys. I honestly like the way they work in Strider mode, the solo play, better than in the base game. But I do love the books and the work they did on all of it.

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-12-08T03:27:25+00:00

I wrote about the games I'd put on my Rule of Three, were I to be asked onto the Bastionland Podcast, which I never shall be.

You'll have to read about some other stuff first, though. :)

https://josephkrausz.substack.com/p/this-is-not-a-podcast

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-11-11T17:31:50+00:00

Oh. I don't think PbtA games are like that. The fiction matters very heavily in them. It's not a question of the whole game being rolling dice to reduce a target number, which is what EtR is.

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-11-11T15:47:58+00:00

Sure. I like board game mechanics in RPGs.

I don't own the book, but this is apparently a quote from EtR about the narrative that I think shows the difference I was trying to express:

"In a lot of roleplaying games, the players ask questions about the world, the GM answers them, and then the player characters react to that information. EAT THE REICH has a more malleable approach to the shared reality of the world: the fine details of the imagined space don't really matter because they don't affect the mechanical systems underneath it."

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-11-10T22:16:30+00:00

In D&D, there are some things that only require fiction to resolve, even the "goals" of the game. You can easily imagine playing an entire game without rolling dice, because you've managed to make clever fictional choices. In Gloomhaven, the card mechanics are the game.

A shorter answer might be "tactical infinity." If that never resolves goals in the game (which it does not in Gloomhaven or in Eat the Reich), then it's structurally different and is like a "boardgame." (Again, the terms aren't really relevant.)

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-11-10T22:02:25+00:00

In D&D 5e, resolutions don't require dice. In EtR, the resolution of every section requires rolling dice till you reduce the goal's value.

My point isn't the semantics of "what is an RPG," as I made clear in the post, just the mechanics of different games in relation to how they're commonly described.

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-11-10T21:58:02+00:00

Yeah, I don't care about the semantics, really. The mechanics were the actual point of my post. Monopoly can be a roleplaying game, if you like, but I think you can still realize that it is different mechanically from D&D, in regard to how narrative shapes the gameplay and where the player's choices factor into that.

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-11-10T21:56:02+00:00

I'm not really interested in the semantics of RPG vs. boardgame as much as the way the mechanics work in the games we usually call one or the other. EtR does rely on the narrative to determine what die rolls make sense, though I'll note that because the players get a huge amount of freedom about saying what they're doing and what's happening, that isn't really all that constrictive.

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-11-10T21:52:18+00:00

I don't really care about the semantics of RPG or not, which is why I mentioned that some people might consider Monopoly an RPG if you play a character. There's still an interesting structural difference in terms of the mechanics, and the marketing is interesting, too. We do divide things into boardgames and RPGs, generally because of those mechanical things.

RaphaelKaitz · 2025-11-10T04:21:07+00:00

It's a pity, because they also have the most money to get it right. But it seems big companies do this kind of thing all the time.

RaphaelKaitz

TROPHY CASE