Playtest - Old Skull Publishing

May 22, 2024May 22, 2024

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!

May 16, 2024May 17, 2024

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!

May 14, 2024May 14, 2024

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

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!

May 4, 2024May 4, 2024

Petty Gods & Playthings – Introduction #WIP

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!

August 29, 2023August 29, 2023

Primal Quest – Players as Ancestors

In the mythical primal world of Thaia, the ancestral spirits of the world can sometimes influence the fate of their descendants by interfering with the world and by lending these individuals their talents. Almost like how players do with their characters.

Thus, in Primal Quest, players also act in the role of Ancestors of their characters, watching over them, lending their strength, and granting them benefits from time to time. As their descendants go out into the world and face a myriad of challenges, they grow, change, and earn Ancestral Points (AP). Then, the players can spend these AP either to improve their descendants through Character Improvement or to grant them Ancestral Gifts.