The Chaparral Roam is the largest shrub steppe on the continent, and home to a wide variety of rare and unusual creatures. Among these, one of the rarest and most elusive is the rose unicorn, colloquially referred to as “the pink pony.” In this Creature Report, we’ll be covering the biology, ecology, and cultural significance of the rose unicorn.

Ever since my first time playing Burning Wheel in college, I’ve loved metacurrencies in tabletop RPGs. Whether you call them Fudge points, Fate points, Plot Points, Inspiration, Artha, Bennies, or what-have-you, I love the effect that these can bring to a story-focused game.[^2] Since I’m apparently on a multi-month tarot obsession bender[^3], it felt natural to explore a way to use tarot cards as a form of metacurrency, and I think I’ve hit on a way to use them that’s evocative (getting them feels like having your fortune told), unique (rank and suit both factor in, so you can’t just replace them with a simple point counter), and fast (necessary for gameplay).

I made some posts today about setting up my Obsidian Vault to automatically add a random tarot pull to my daily note. The documentation on how to do this is all online with just a bit of massaging needed, but I figured it might be nice to have an actual, full step-by-step guide, with assets.

I’ve added microposts to the blog! They show up in RSS and the blog list, but they don’t have their own full pages. I’m planning on using them for things like update notifications or small ideas that I haven’t fully fleshed out into a full blog post yet.

You can also click on the little link emoji next to the time to navigate to the post’s permanent URL.

While working slowly but surely on Unnamed, my new RPG project that will eventually have a proper name, I got to thinking about extended conflict resolution mechanics, and because I’m sick in the head interested in this as a design space, I’ve decided to go the other direction from most other games, and generalize everything into combat rather than generalizing combat out.

I’m going to do something a bit out of the ordinary for this post today, and make a tutorial instead of rules or announcements! If you’ve been working on a game, and you have the rules all done but no character sheet, this can be an easy way to get started with tools you may already have around the house!

I’ve been working on a roll-and-keep variant of Synthetic Dream Machine for a possible upcoming Ultraviolet Grasslands game, because while I like what Synthetic Dream Machine/SEACAT is putting down, I’m less enamoured with the d20 core. In addition, I also wanted to get hit and damage in combat down to a single roll. This is nowhere near done yet, but after I posted about it on Bluesky, people wanted to see it, so here it is. As per usual, comments can be directed towards any of my socials.

This is a completely untested tarot-based initiative system I posted on Mastodon earlier this month. Since my main RPG group is on hiatus for the holidays, leaving me without easy access to victims playtesters, I figured I might as well post it here so I don’t lose track of it! If you end up trying it out, please reach out to me at Mastodon or Bluesky to let me know how it worked for you!

I’ve been spending my free time the past few weeks working on what it might look like if Maze Rats got the AD&D treatment, and while the first playtest was fun, I’m not sure if I’m going to revisit the project. I always hate for things to become abandoned in secrecy, so I’m gonna just dump all the rules and the character sheet here. The rules are really just more notes than anything actually well laid out, so if anything is confusing, feel free to reach out on Mastodon.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about the sun the moon recently. Not the heavenly bodies (well, I always think about those, but not more than usual!), but rather a die mechanic I’ve been noodling on that I’ve been calling “sun and moon dice” or “celestial dice” until I either think of a better name, or, more probably, decide this name is fine and give up on thinking of a new one.

Whew! After a few months of off and on work (mostly off), the first Hespera 2e playtest is here! You can find the rules here, and the character sheet here. I’m super stoked about this edition of the game, but I’m also a little worried because Hespera has always been my lightweight game, and the Ikaros ruleset that it’s based off of now is decidedly middleweight.

While I’ve been spending a lot of time working on the Hespera 2e playtest recently, that hasn’t stopped me from wanting to make an official SRD for the system that I used in You Are Cordially Invited and Labyrinth Break!, an as-yet-and-probably-always-unpublished game about minotaurs trying to escape Crete. So I figured, why not just go ahead and release that official SRD now, as a little palate cleanser? Presenting: the Pine SRD!

I’ve been thinking a lot about different poker variants ever since Balatro came out, and more specifically thinking about how different variants of poker manage public and private information, and how different varieties have differing amounts of player interaction. After noodling on this off and on for a while, I think I’ve come up with a pretty fun variant of five card draw (my favorite game of poker) that works in the public knowledge and shared pool of Texas Hold ‘Em, while also increasing player interaction.

Earlier this month, Prismatic Wasteland put out a blog post challenging people to come up with a new mechanic, give it a name, and post it by the end of the month. I have not done this. Instead, I’m taking this opportunity to post a resolution system I had kicked around for a few days back in 2018, because even though I’ve never ended up using it for anything, I think it’s kinda neat, and if I don’t publish it now then I probably never will. I call it Hand of Exhaustion.

An Ikaros supplement for playing Hunt: Showdown. Hunt: Showdown and like half the enemy names in here are registered trademarks of Crytek and are used here without permission.