Petty Gods & Playthings – Coming in 2023 (hopefully)

Cover art by Łukasz Piwiński and Title Design by Łukasz Kowalczuk

You are a Petty God, an entity of immense power, great influence, and even deeper sense of self importance.

You want to exert control and influence over mortals and the places they call home. You want to leave your mark in the Mortal Realms. You want to be worshipped. You want champions to fight for you. You want to be more than those other Petty Gods.

But you are bound by the Ancient Laws of Divinehood. So you use your Playthings.

Petty Gods & Playthings is a fantasy role playing game about ambitious gods, their machinations, and the mortals entangled in them.

In this game, players assume the role of a Petty God. A supernatural being with great power, greater responsibilities, even greater ambitions, and very little restraint. Luckily, rules bind these entities in a way they cannot freely unleash havoc on the Mortal Realm. But they found another way to exert their influence.

They control Playthings, mortals whose essence has been infused with a Divine Spark, setting them apart from others around them forever. Promising them a destiny they desire, these gods move them as pieces in a cosmic chess set. Sometimes elevating them to such high stands as kings, archnages, and grandmasters, but other times condemning them to their ultimate doom.

And all of this happens primarily at the grandest city of all: KORGOROTH! The City of the Purple Flame. The City in the Middle. The Hive of Scum, Villainy and, sometimes, Heroes. A city with many titles, many more secrets, and infinite stories to tell.

And you are going to tell them with Petty Gods & Playthings!

I am still developing this, but I am truly excited for the possibilities it will bring to the table. Gameplay in two levels, meta gaming turned into diegetic gameplay, shared world building, and exciting sword and sorcery adventures in a weird and ancient city-state!

More information soon!

May 10, 2022May 10, 2022

Rethinking XP for Gold And Why You Should Too (or not)

I love XP for gold. I especially love the effects this rule has on game play, game design, and theory behind much of what we know of the OSR. I am a firm believer that the way the game rewards play seriously influences the way we play the game (yeah, we play to have fun too, but it’s still there, nudging us in the right direction). Basically, earning XP is like “winning” in an RPG that uses them.

However, I’ve been reading a superb book on Game Design called Theory of Fun by Raph Koster (y’all should totally get it), and one of the insights I had, and one of the big lessons in the book, is that games teach us stuff in a controlled space. That’s mostly its main function. Most of the time we don’t even realize it’s happening, but that’s where the “fun” comes from in games, from learning and figuring out solutions to problems/challenges. And game designers can purposefully create games to change specific things. And that’s what I would like to do.

*Spot art I made for Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea*

XP for gold is great because it teaches us to find better solutions to tough problems. PCs won’t always resort to violence. Violence might very well become the last resort, as we all know our style of play isn’t big on balancing encounters perfectly.

April 28, 2022April 28, 2022

Primal Quest – The Winged People’s Problem – Session Report #01

This week I was back at our friendly local game store, Game of Boards, and was ready to either continue our campaign with the full group venturing into The Tower That Fell, or finish our dreamcrawl at The Cave Our People. Alas, that didn’t happen and only two players showed up (and only one of them was playing on the cave adventure).

So after a quick debate over our options, we decided to make another set of characters and do something else. That way we keep playtesting the game, and develop the campaign in another direction, like those old-school RPG campaigns of yore.

April 24, 2022April 24, 2022

The Primal World of Thaia – OSE – Equipment

We are back with more previews of rules adaptations to play Old-School Essentials in The Primal World of Thaia. We already talked about the core classes in the Rules Tome (here, here, and here), and about Resources and XP here. Today we will take a look at Equipment and Durability.

Equipment

In the mythical stone age of Thaia, characters have access to fewer items and none of them will be made with metal.

April 21, 2022April 21, 2022

The Primal World of Thaia – Resources and XP for Gold

Resources

One of the main themes of The Primal World of Thaia setting is survival, and to emphasize that, we use two Resources: Food and Water.

Food and Water are necessary for any character’s survival, and are used as a form of currency in the sense that almost everything is evaluated in terms of how many units of these resources they are worth.