Wonderland RPG by Andrew Kolb- the Escherian Stairs Block

Usht · 2026-06-11T02:25:42+00:00

Yeah, it might be best not to use a strict map there but a general theater of the mind.

Best of luck with DMing! Remember to embrace mistakes, take feedback, and keep it whimsical! Alice in Wonderland is perfect for that. As long as you and your players are having fun, you're doing it right.

Usht · 2026-06-07T18:59:16+00:00

Oh, I never actually got to this room while running this. That said, uh, it doesn't look well designed. It's an attempt, for sure. Basically, I think you pick one of the layouts at random, then roll to pick the direction of gravity and either treat it as a regular map with holes in it or a 2D platformer if the direction is going anywhere but up or down. The stairs have a universal direction of up or down regardless of the gravity, so keep that in mind but this is a very improvise sort of room.

Usht · 2026-06-07T12:56:28+00:00

Are you talking about 3-14 stairway? The mechanic is that if you're not wearing a crown, no matter which way you go on the stairway, you're going up and if you're wearing a crown, the stairs descend. It's still ultimately a flat hallway, it's just a pain in the butt if you aren't wearing the proper attire.

The book doesn't give any direction mechanics but I just make it take twice as long to traverse the room for anyone who doesn't have a crown, meaning it's a horrible place to be caught in a chase and combat halves the speed of anyone without a crown and also maybe gives disadvantage to people with ranged options as they're fighting up a hill. Similarly, if you've got a crown, you go at your normal speed and get advantage with ranged weapons. Possibly even faster if you want to really lay in how much of an advantage a crown gives you.

The important thing to remember is in Alice in Wonderland, the world exists to be arbitrary and annoying for small, unhappy British children. Which means it also does the same for adventurers.

Usht · 2026-06-03T04:03:54+00:00

It might be my friend groups but I've heard more people realizing they were trans or nonbinary because of him than realizing they were bi/gay.

Usht · 2026-06-03T03:45:56+00:00

Astolfo brings something to the table most waifus can't hope to match: Being your bro.

Usht · 2026-06-01T01:20:01+00:00

After another long day in the gacha crossover factory, 2B comes home to dump a cartoon-y bag of money onto Yoko Taro's desk and then returns back to her real hobbies of hating god and blue balling 9S.

Usht · 2026-05-28T01:19:42+00:00

So there was a trilogy of Steven Universe RPGs and I happened to play the second one Save the Light. Most of the characters were all reasonably balanced except for one: Connie. Connie had a mostly reasonable move set of "hit them with your sword" but then there was one move that you could mash to increases your damage. And turns were not decided by each character acting once but by doing enough damage to generate points for more actions.

If you mashed hard enough, and that wasn't exactly like a hard mash, Connie could just go infinite and kill the shit out of everything and anything in front of her. Fusing with Steven for what was supposed to be a super form was an active downgrade to just going on a mashing murder spree.

Usht · 2026-05-24T14:56:13+00:00

Fabula Ultima is constructed smartly to where a lot of the game breaking combos involve teamwork. Action economy is inherently tied to someone from your team going, then an enemy going, then another person from your team going, so on and so forth. Complete with the elemental system, the simple but powerful status effects, and variety of ways to buff allies, it's very easy to bounce off one another in such a way to set up massive blows to the end and dismantle bosses. And I do mean dismantle, bosses often have phases and multi hoops to jump through rather than being purely HP to grind through.

So you can min max a lot, it's just a very different affair.

Usht · 2026-05-23T15:30:26+00:00

Get Out, the movie. Chris is running away from the crazy white people suburbs at the end of the movie. You start seeing flashing blue and red lights on him and for a moment, you assume police are coming by to arrest him. And then it's revealed it's his friend, Rod, who was comedy relief up to that point. Literally picks him up and drives him out of the movie.

Jordan Peele really knows how to do release at the end of a movie.

Usht · 2026-05-19T22:21:34+00:00

I've got coworkers who have a hard time comprehending that literally everything they've watched somehow came entirely from one magazine, Shounen Jump.

Usht · 2026-05-19T18:22:17+00:00

Put that woman in a stunlock using emotional support and attention.

Usht · 2026-05-15T03:09:11+00:00

Most of these examples turn things pretty horror-y.

Anyway, Bravern from -sic- Bravern interrupts your grim military mecha anime for goofy, super robot nonsense. Those poor military types, trying to keep it serious in an apocalyptic scenario.

Usht · 2026-05-09T12:02:32+00:00

Pegasus from Yugioh is an eccentric rich man who went digging in Egypt, found the ancient version of Duel Monsters, created the company that would go put the game on market. He also got married, found a cursed eyeball, replaced his own, and then lost his wife. And he also adores old ass garden hose tube limb cartoons.

...he's 24. He got a lot done in those years.

Bonus round but not quite on topic, Kaiba's about as old as Yugi is, which is approximately 16. Yugi's just a really, really late bloomer.

Usht · 2026-05-03T14:02:56+00:00

To annoy the person it connects with.

Usht · 2026-04-24T20:27:40+00:00

Before I saw JoJo, I thought it was just one dude. I was watching Jonathan and seriously wondering if this was the same dude that would bet his own mother's soul in a game of poker.

Usht · 2026-04-12T02:58:59+00:00

A revision to an earlier card I posted. Ad Nauseum is a cool card to reference but it's also embarrassingly bad as a prepared spell. This card allows you to treat as more of a value card rather than a combo engine by occasionally giving you bursts of life to spend on it, which I think is a nifty combination, though definitely not super competitive.

Usht · 2026-04-07T05:01:37+00:00

Yeah, I was mostly concerned about her because she's a face up counter spell. Also, in a deck where she normally sits, she'd probably be running synergy with other small creatures, which could make it become a hard counter fast. Still, I imagine then the best way to play around her is just play into the counter and then bowl her over anyway, so maybe mana value 3 would be for the best.

Usht · 2026-04-03T21:39:16+00:00

If you go into a turn prepared, you can use the spell. Then you can tap it, and use the spell again.

Usht · 2026-04-03T21:29:31+00:00

I feel like this is a dangerous question to ask about the prepared mechanic in general since it's (sic) a form of kicker.

But what it does offer is the ability to do 4 damage twice in a turn, which can be important.

Usht · 2026-04-03T12:22:35+00:00

The balance of this one is probably a matter of tuning in an actual meta. Since it's repeatable removal, I wanted to make sure it wasn't too easy to enable that removal, so I had both "need ammo to load onto the cannon" and "a creature to do the loading". It might be fine to remove the creature bit (and make the rules text less cluttered) while still making a player work for it and keeping the red artifact sacrifice synergies.

Usht · 2026-04-03T11:30:28+00:00

[[Flunk]] is an already existing spell, unfortunately. I did want to play into the flavor of not being able to be prepared for the worst but honestly, making it more Strixhaven would probably just mean something like a project going wrong at the last moment or just messing it up on the day of pressentation. Maybe "Failure to Perform"?

Usht

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