Photonics Engineer by day, indie RPG writer by night, especially interested in open/CC games.
See my stuff here: http://awkwardturtle.games
Thank you! I have next to nil artistic ability, so I actually really surprised myself by managing to make something I actually liked with these labels.
Yeah, I don’t know if that tracks. Wingspan has sold more than 1.3 million copies (as of September 2021) which is way way way more than the average board game sells.
I’d far more believe that they couldn’t keep up with production than they were intentionally limiting supply.
I will strongly recommend people interested in open licenses look to the existing, more mature licenses, Creative Commons in particular.
The “unresolvable problems” that Paizo ran into with CC are actually very resolvable. If you don’t want a sticky, viral license, use CC-BY. If you do want a sticky license, but not for your whole game, split out a separate SRD and put that under CC-BY-SA.
Ooo, fantastic. I’ve been doing sugar extractions of lemon zest for a mead recently, and we tried drying and blitzing the zests after filtering.
For us the powder was nice (partly because it got a bit candied during the process) but fairly mild in taste. I think it could still absolutely be fun to use to sprinkle on desserts of drinks, for visuals if nothing else.
Also if you use The Estate box set you have a nice, episodic little campaign pre-built for Mausritter. It’s a small hex crawl with a bunch of pamphlet adventures scattered around them, complete with hooks to tie them all together.
Might be a good ongoing structure, especially if you have an inconsistent group, or intend to be swapping GMs periodically.
I’d love to do so, but the price seems to jump up by an order of magnitude and it’s difficult to justify. I’ll probably be trying a combo of filter + sulfites going forward.
Having recently tried the filtering thing, it’s still a roll of the dice unless you’re using the much more expensive professional grade filters.
It does get your mead clear as hell though, and removes a ton of off flavors.
Our kettle actually partially died a few months ago, had a long debate about what we should replace it with before I realized the contacts on the base had just gotten bent out of place.
A buddy of mine printed the robot mittens for me, and even managed to track down a paint that nearly perfectly matches the color. I absolutely love them. How do you like the metal ones?
Nice! A surprising amount of overlap with out own coffee station!
I’ve almost certainly go too many books, but for me RPG books are two things:
Happily the indie RPG scene is very good at making books that cover both of those categies. I will once in a while go through the collection and give away books that I both don’t think I’ll ever use, and also aren’t nice enough as objects to be worth keeping around.
I also have a number of magazine bins filled with zines, which I love but also desperately needs to be pared down.
Also because I will take any opportunity to share a shelfie:
Desk RPG shelf of “close to hand” stuff (and also tall books because they don’t fit on the other shelves).
Ancillary bookshelf of RPG stuff:
When in doubt, age it out!
Alternatively you could consider back sweetening, or oaking, to add some extra flavor that might counterbalance it some.
I used Lalvin 71b, and a couple days after pitching it occurred to me that this would have been a great opportunity to use something more suited to purpose.
Honestly different yeasts is something I haven’t really dug into much yet, although I want to. Currently I just have a big stash of 71b and default to that for every mead.
I guess the question is whether your goal is to make all three stats equally useful, or to make sure the attribute damage mechanic is used equally on all three stats.
If it’s the former then increasing the utility of the other two stats with initiative, magic, dodging, etc. would be a good way to go.
If it’s the latter then making sure enemies have a wide variety of attacks works. Psychic/psionics, poison, ensnaring, soul damage, etc. would all help.
Although I do like applying damage to other stats where appropriate, I don’t actually think you need to if what you’re worried about is balancing them.
STR is the more important attribute if you’re consistently getting into combat. All these games share an ethos that combat shouldn’t be a hugely frequent thing at the table. In that context, the stats are a lot more “balanced”. DEX is by far the most called for Save, in my experience, plus it’s how you go first in combat.
WIS/CHA is a little trickier, depending on your individual campaign. Although in Mausritter specifically casting spells can cause WIL damage.
FWIW this is something I grappled with a bit for my own Odd/Cairn hack (slightly exacerbated by some other rules changes), and I eventually came to the conclusion that I didn’t need rules changes to fix it. The only thing I really plan to do is make sure the included bestiary includes examples of damage to other attributes.
I honestly haven’t really done much stabilizing because I like my meads dry, so I don’t bother backsweetening. From my research KSorb/KMeta is your best as a home brewer, but it has some pitfalls.
Filtering is sorta a huge pain in the ass, and like I said doesn’t even guarantee stabilization unless you go for the professional grade equipment with the “absolute” filter ratings which is pretty dang expensive. Plus you’ll need either pressure, a pump, or gravity and a lot of patience to get it through the smallest sized filters.
My filtering was done with the fairly inexpensive plate filters with “nominal” size ratings, which means it doesn’t promise it’s actually getting everything.
I think fining plus just waiting a very long time for things to settle out gets you about as good of an outcome as filtering, as far as clarity and taste goes, but I’m still experimenting so I can’t say for sure.
I’m no expert, been doing it as a hobby for about five years now, but from my own experience I’ll make a few notes:
Lovely colors.
Rather than a specific system or style, I think the important thing is what gets you and your players excited. Pick a genre or theme that you are your players are into, then find a system that matches that. Once you get into it a bit more you can start digging into different styles of RPGs because you’ll have more context for what it all means and some idea of what you all like.
I like rules light systems because they’ve got a shorter “time to table”, but if everyone is very excited to play DnD, then DnD works because it’ll keep everyone motivated and engaged.
Some ideas:
Sci fi horror game along the lines of Alien: Mothership
Hardscrabble, fools forced to delve into dangerous dungeons and weird woods to make a living: Cairn
Grannies solving murder mysteries a la Miss Marple: Brindlewood Bay
A gang of thieves in a Dishonored-esque whale oil powered city: Blades in the Dark.
A gang of thieves flying a space ship in a star wars or firefly styled galaxy: Scum and Villainy
A doomed world undergoing heavy metal apocalypses: MÖRK BORG, or CY_BORG for the cyberpunk version of that.
Buffy and friends taking down vampire threats, or Mulder trying to find the truth that’s out there: Monster of the Week
Personally I’ve had really good luck introducing new players with Mausritter. The physical version is gives people a tactile card based inventory, the digital version is totally free. It’s super easy for people to get into the head space of tiny mice! There are also tons of fantastic modules to run which makes your job as a DM a lot easier.
This comment got a bit away from me, but I’ve run and played a ton of different systems, so if you have some idea of what you think you and your players will be into I can maybe point you in a more specific direction.
Mausritter is also great at getting people into the “old school” adventuring mindset. It’s easy for people to get that they’re a tiny moues, so they need to be careful, be clever, and run away from dangerous situations.
Plus it’s got fantastic first and third party adventures to run.
Might not be sufficiently fantasy magic for the brief though?
The bochet and berry meads aren’t doing anything super out of the ordinary (well, out of the ordinary if you’re already caramelizing your honey) but the Strawberry Lemonade one is weird enough that I keep meaning to do a full write up about it.
Just gotta actually get around to setting up a blog or website or something so I can host it someplace useful.