Business card TTRPGs, You’re Missing The Points Of Dungeons and more Shoegaze music
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Deep forests, giant mountains & weird dungeons. I speak about TTRPGs, video games, music and what I like.
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Summary
💳The Beautiful World Of Business Card TTRPG
🏰You’re Missing The Points Of Dungeons: A Video Analysis Of Our Favorite Places
🎸Live Shows Of The Week: Madeline Goldstein / A Place To Bury Strangers
🧙What I’m up to
💳The Beautiful World Of Business Card TTRPG
If you check on my itch.io page, you’ll see that I love to create TTRPG business cards as I already released three of them.
I love the very minimalistic challenges it offers, the whole aesthetic of having a full game on such tiny things and, of course, the portable design of it.
So here are some I like (and made) for you.
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| Nate Treme’s Wander Front |
Some are full TTRPG, with character creation and resolution tests for you, or any GM to play with. And that’s kind of awesome to see such creativity in so little space to create a whole game that you can master during hours.
🗡️Wander by Nate Treme
Wander is a kind of OSR with a classless system, combat and resolution test, spells and items system, weapons and monsters stats and with a twist on how the leveling system works intertwined with the defense system. It's a pretty known business card TTRPG which inspired a lot of other games including all the games below.💀Borglite by Calen Heydt
Borglite is a full conversion of Mörk Borg on a single business card. It was inspired by Wander and included a 4-4 roll for each ability, a curse system, combat and resolution tests, the Mörk Borg’s broken system, scrolls and items.🚀Free Traders by Lari Assmuth
Free Traders is a minimalist sci-fi RPG also inspired by Wander. It includes a resolution test, a ship system, and some cool generation for planets, worlds, encounters and jobs.⚔️Rise by Sleepdrifter (hey, that’s me!)
Like all the games before, Rise was inspired by Wander to make a more suitable game to play with SilverNightingale’s Solo Toolkit. The whole idea was to get a very tiny game for a solo portable kit. It’s a rule-lite OSR that features character creation, magic powers, combat and tests rules, an enemy system and a twist on backgrounds and traits that modify your character.
Fun fact, Rise is randomly given in a physical edition when you buy a game at Wayne’s Book along with random Dyson Logo’s geomorphic dungeons.
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| JoyPeddler Games’ Whaleship Essex |
Some games are more “Boardy” TTRPG, in the way that they are limited with few rules like any board game. They are still very enjoyable and I had a blast playing them for a coffee break.
👿Devil Must Die! by Lucas TC
Devil Must Die! is a rule-lite RPG that is inspired by Diablo 1 which is fully playable solo. You must delve into the dungeon and kill the devil in a kind of Dark Fort way, with monsters being more and more difficult as you delve deeper.🐋Whaleship Essex by JoyPeddler Games
Whaleship Essex is a kind of hexcrawl game, where you play as 3 shipmates trying to survive on a small boat till you return safely. It’s a very “boardgame” RPG but it’s quite pleasant to play such a small game with a die, a pen and only this card.
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| AwkwardTurtle’s Wallet Station |
If you want to get some very portable generators, the best is to get them in your wallet!
🛸Wallet Station by AwkwardTurtle
Wallet Station is a space station generator. You roll a handful of dice and generate the space station according to the rule, with some twist. It’s pretty organic and useful.🏰Wallet Dungeon by AwkwardTurtle
Well, Wallet Dungeon is pretty much the same as Wallet Station except it generates dungeons. I included it in my solo portable toolkit with Rise.
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| Cover of my game Lost In A Forest, for the 36 Word RPG Jam |
How to be more minimalist when you already are in the most minimalist format possible ? Make each word count!
The 36 Word RPG Jam by W.H. Arthur, Rook And Role, and Steffie de Vaan does that. The rule is simple, make a full game with only 36 words.
☠️Vocabliary by Alfred Valley
Vocabliary is a generator that uses your alphabet and vocabulary, along with a d6 and a d20, to generate monsters and creatures. As usual with Alfred Valley, the whole card screams with an eerie and cryptic aesthetic (and I love that).🪓Lost In A Forest by Sleepdrifter (Oh! It’s me again, shameless add)
and Tunnel Goons by Nate Treme. It’s a survival game, where only one rule makes the whole tests, combats, anything you can think of… You have one skill, 2 items to start and let’s go. It’s winter, you are lost in a forest. Survive.
Yet another system I made just for the sake of trying to make a whole game with such limitations. I was very inspired by Life & Death In The Garden by
🏰You’re Missing The Points Of Dungeons: A Video Analysis Of Our Favorite Places
Last Tuesday, I was watching LegalKimchi’s Youtube video : You’re Missing The Points Of Dungeons and oh boy, it was more than interesting!
The video analyzed the whole “dungeon” thing that obsessed a vast majority of TTRPGs players. It shows how the term is born, what it is based on, and the whole history behind the influences that make dungeons as we know them now.
If you’re not familiar with the history of “dungeons”, note that the term came from the French “Donjon”, which was the highest tower of a medieval castle then the place where the lord lived with his family. Yes, it’s very different from what you had in mind now. Watch the video to see where the whole gloomy and dark dungeon came from 😉
As someone who loves dungeons, and who lived in a place where castles and dungeons are pretty common, it was a delight to watch. Fun fact, the closest castle from my house is at 167 meters (547 feets). It was a small wooden one (a common thing back in the 4th century) and there’s only the moat now.
But there are things that we can extract from this video to bring your dungeons settings / vibes further:
Historical setting: dungeons came from the medieval time, a not so uncommon setting of course, but you can expand it to old stuff like prehistoric caverns, ancient egypt tombs, Paris’ Catacombs and even modern prison and open-space (they are the true labyrinthe of our time)
Video game setting: think of Diablo 1 (I already talked about it last week), Doom with its “dungeon” space-ship / space base, Ultima and Wizardry’s dungeon, Roguelike like Rogue, Nethack etc.
Weird setting: think of Lovecraft’s The Nameless City, where an explorer delves into an ancient city in the Arabian desert full of non-euclidian architectures and eldritch inhabitants. Think of Gary Gygax’s Expedition To The Barrier Peaks and its circular dungeon maps, to represent a flying saucer.
But tl;dr, go check on that amazing video!
🎸Live Shows Of The Week: Madeline Goldstein / A Place To Bury Strangers
Last week, I told you about my live show passion and the 800 bands I’ve seen live. And among all these bands, one that is at the top of it is probably A Place To Bury Strangers.
This is not my favorite band of all time, but their live shows are exceptionally powerful, that's why I’m always happy to see them.
This night takes place in a small venue (198 places), and I’m very cool about it because that’ll be even better for this kind of music.
First, there was the Electronic / New-wave / Pop of Madeline Goldstein. The music was great but I wasn’t in the mood for something like that at the moment. Yet, if you're a fan of stuff like Kate Bush, give it an ear!
Then came the Shoegaze / Noise power band A Place To Bury Strangers. It was the 4th time for me to see them playing live, and I was so hype!
What usually happen in APTBS’ live shows is raw power energy, broken guitars, stroboscopic effects, smoke and more smoke, noisy sounds, electronic / noise songs played in the pit. In short: it’s never boring, and it's for sure the most energetic band I saw live.
This time, it was wiser yet on the top of any other show. No guitars were truly broken (even though some were smashed) but the whole energy makes people dance and scream and we had a blast.
Fun fact, the guitarist glues every broken guitar. So it’s always the same 3 Fender Jaguars that are blasted, with no need to buy a new guitar each time.
Be sure to check on that band, I can’t recommend enough their album Exploding Head and to see them live. For gear nerds, check on the guitarist’s pedal brand Death By Audio who got some excellent stuff!
🧙What I’m up to
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| Activision Blizzard’s Diablo IV |
After playing a lot of Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 last week, we are now playing Diablo 4 with my SO on Xbox Series X.
I was dubious at first, because of various things I’ve heard and read about the game. But I must admit that we are having a blast so far.
Start with what I dislike in the game, but I was warned about it before. The game is really REALLY fast paced. “It’s like playing Vampire Survivors” (a one-button / bullet-hell where you kill thousands of monsters each game session), says a friend of mine. And he is absolutely right. After being used to playing the very slow Diablo 1, where you try to be cautious at each group of monsters you attack, playing Diablo 4 feels like putting your brain off and just smashing the button to kill and kill again.
Also, as the game is now a big open-world, you have a lot of quests and stuff to do, but nothing really matters. You win level very quickly and loot cool stuff every 5 minutes.
But, despite all of this, the mood, the soundtrack and the level design are well thought out and more grim than the previous Diablo 3, making it more like Diablo 1 in that way. Seeing all these new places and beasts makes us want to delve further to see what the game has to offer.
Now, in terms of TTRPG, I started to work on the 1975 Gary Gygax’s Solo Dungeon-Generator and this is really interesting and fun. It’ll be on a separate post than a newsletter, but I’ll need some time as I’m very busy with personal and private stuff these days.
That’s it for this week!
Let me know if you enjoyed this article, if you played/read/watch any of the stuff I mentioned this week 😀
See you next Friday!
Cheers !
Sleepdrifter
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