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A is for Alleys – City of Adventure Alphabet (Preview)

That’s right, I am making one of those marvelous “cool thing” Alphabet books the magnificent Michael Curtis invented! I wanted to create this for a long while. In fact, I have list and lists of entries of “Alphabet Book” of many types, at least one for each of my games. And since now I wan working on finalizing the edits and revisions on Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells 2e for publication, I wanted to make something to go with it to have some cool urban crawl adventures, and I wanted to have something going on in here, on this blog! Thus, we are here now, as I write the letters of this City of Adventure Alphabet book, I will post previews of those entries here. Not in their entirety, but with a good portion so you can see how it’s turning out.

So let’s start with…

A is for Alleys

Public Domain cute artwork of a city. To be substituted by an artwork of an alley I hope to make someday…

Alleys are everywhere, and they lead to nowhere. Well, unless you really know where you are going. Or you found a secret passage to a hideout, stumbled upon a portal to another dimension, was dragged down to the Abyss by a demon, or any sort of other weird things that often happens at such dark, narrow, smelly, and secretive locations. More common in less savory areas of the city, alleys are often where those that want to remain unseen meet, and hide their affairs. From common bandits, cultists, corrupt guards, to sorcerer cabals, demonologists, alien cats, to things much weirder and more ominous.

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Petty Gods & Playthings – You Are a Petty God – Part III #WIP

Geesh! Part III already and we are only finishing the Divine Domains? How long can I fool you all into following this? Let’s find out!

Anyway, I continue sharing previews of the draft text of a future game of mine called Petty Gods & Playthings. It’s a game about small gods with great ambitions, and the mortals entangled in their machinations. It’s inspired by Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, Terry Pretchet’s Discworld series (especially the Small Gods stories), Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Adult Swim, and a lot more stuff (now I guess I realized I need to make a post about my inspirations and aspirations for the game).

In terms of game design, it’s a RPG I am trying to experiment with a lot of interesting things that will play with the act of playing itself, with collaborative world building, with players as game designers, and a bunch of other cool things I’ve been learning about. But we will get to that. Today I share the rest of the Divine Domain tables as I finished writing the funny bits about them. Again, the idea is coming up with Divine Domains that are uncommon, and quirky. Which would be challenging to use easily to obtain advantage in a normal game but that can be explored creatively by players. And even though players are not necessarily bound by the tables, they should give a pretty good feeling of the kind of gods they normally are in the game.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, this post explains what Petty Gods & Playthings is in a little more detail (I am pretty proud of that post and how it kinda explains how the game works in a pretty fun way). I also begin sharing the Petty God creation process in this post, and Part II can be found here. This you are reading is part III.

Once more, I remind you this is a work in progress. So if you say there is something wrong with it I will pretend to care!

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Petty Gods & Playthings – You Are a Petty God – Part II #WIP

Hello! This is another post on a series I am sharing about the development of Petty Gods & Playthings, The Game about Small Gods, Their Great Ambitions, and The Mortals Entangled in Them! Wow, that’s a mouthful, but it does explain all there’s to it. Well, quite. If you want to understand it a little bit better, I recently made this post with the introduction of the game. I meant, the currently written introduction. Who the hell knows how it’s going to be in the final thing. 

Today’s post is the second in a series I will share about the creation of your Petty God. You can find the first post here.

Below you will find weird, whimsical and kinda silly sphere of the Biosphere, Nature, and Humanity Domains. These what the Petty Gods, the players, will be “Gods of…”. One of my ideas, is that the use of these weird spheres in the game in creative ways, is also a skill players can develop. It’s one of the spaces the game encourages creative thinking, and where player can get better at over time, instead of just buying points of this, or getting more dice here or there.

Also, I loved spending time coming up with little jokes, commentaries, and sometimes philosophical meanings for all those entries. I shouldn’t be concentrating on making these during this initial phase, but I can’t help it.

Again, this is a work in progress. So if you say it’s bad I will pretend I am gonna fix it!

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Petty Gods & Playthings – You Are a Petty God – Part I #WIP

Hello! This is another post on a series I am sharing about the development of Petty Gods & Playthings, The Game about Small Gods, Their Great Ambitions, and The Mortals Entangled in Them! Wow, that’s a mouthful, but it does explain all there’s to it. Well, quite. If you want to understand it a little bit better, I recently made this post with the introduction of the game. I meant, the currently written introduction. Who the hell knows how it’s going to be in the final thing.

Today’s post is the first in a series I will share about the creation of your Petty God, which I tried to turn into a kind of narrative game on it’s on. It’s all randomly generated, but there’s no real imbalance in the process, as the results are not numerical, but subjective. They define the player in qualitative terms, and asks them to participate in the world building. That detail might not be so clear right now, but it will become an integral part of the process as you will see.

My idea is also to play with solving a lot of the prep procedures with a single roll of a set of polyhedral dice. This is me trying to approach this mechanic as a toy. We rarely get to roll all those weird dice at once, so I am creating instance when this is possible and is fun in the game.

Again, this is a work in progress. So if you say it’s bad I will pretend I am gonna fix it!

Continue reading “Petty Gods & Playthings – You Are a Petty God – Part I #WIP”
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Petty Gods & Playthings – Introduction #WIP

Cover by Łukasz Piwiński

I’ve been working on a thing between the various work I do on various other things, and guess what? It’s another TTRPG! Yeah, I just can’t help it. But to be fair, I’ve actually start working on this game around September of 2022, and I even playtested it couple of times. It worked all good and well, but it felt it was missing something. I don’t know. I even commissioned a cover but the talented Łukasz Piwiński, so I would be motivated to finish writing it, but things got in the way. Thankfully.

During my trip to Gen Con I played a game in development by my dear friend Steve Albertson, from Mad Dungeons podcast, and Epic Levels, which inspired me in a way that made everything click. We were playing this very cool and very well thought Horror Game with a well known mechanic used in a very singular way. That made me immediately start thinking into all the things I could explore with that mechanic, and in a few minutes, I wasn’t really at the game anymore. Fortunately/Unfortunately I was having idea, after idea on how to explore this, how this could work with Petty Gods, and I haven’t stepped writing since them. Notes, paragraphs, some fiction, some possibilities, planning, adventure ideas. Anyway. I am living through a phase of high inspiration and creativity, so I intend on taking advantage of it.

Petty Gods & Playthings is a game about small gods with great ambitions and the mortals entangled in their machinations. It’s a game I intend on exploring some new avenues in game design, exploring the limits of the magic circle and the limits of representation in the game. It is also a game that is heavily inspired by Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar stories, and the marvelous world and humor of Terry Pratchet’s Discworld Series. There’s also touches of Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens, and a lot o other stuff. The point is, it’s a game I am exploring another passion of mine. Comedy. And, to complete the mix, it’s a game about gods, religions, beliefs, and the construction of these elements while playing. So it will explore some very interesting things.

I hope you stick with me while I post here on the blog the development of the game, and discover it with me as I create Petty Gods & Playthings!

Today, the Introduction! Or part of it!

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