SprintingOwlGameDesigns

@sprintingowl / sprintingowl.tumblr.com

TTRPG writing, editing, layout, design (COMMS open). Games can be found at http://kumada1.itch.io or on Drivethru by searching Rod Reel And Fist. Icon by Cognoscor and banner by Arcandio.

Pinned

Sprinting Owl TTRPGs

Hi all. I'm a ttrpg writer/designer/publisher, I've written way too many games, and this is a quick guide on how to find them.

Rod Reel And Fist is a feature length 280 page TTRPG about fishing.

Sunderwald is about a world where the best technology is pulled out of an extremely haunted forest... and it's also a game that you change as you play, and you write new rules, classes, species, and monsters into the book, permanently making your own version.

The Dawnline is about vampires and humans that have both domesticated each other and are migrating through the desert, trying to stay ahead of the sun. The core book includes strategy game mechanics for managing your caravan of humans as well as more conventional rpg mechanics for exploring as your vampires.

Cthork Borg is a 1920s cosmic horror pulp adventure, with 120 pages and 10+ published supplements. It's atmospheric and lethal, but it gives the players detailed toolkits for surviving what the world throws at them.

Also, if you're looking for something shorter, weirder, or less graphically refined, I have 100+ other ttrpgs, supplements, hacks, and experiments on itchio. Train giant beetles, steal chicken from The Farm God, visit a cyberpunk restaurant, competitively race slime molds, lunge out of lakes and eat travelers, and more!

kumada1 - itch.io

#ttrpgs #ttrpg homebrew #ttrpg design #indie ttrpg #ttrpg #rpg

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You know what, fuck you *makes you 5e compatible*

Hang on why am i grid moving

Reblogged theresattrpgforthat

A Tale of Sand and Stars is now in testing!

Yo! The module part of the DAWN quick-start is now past its first draft! It's not finished and is missing additional content on the player and gm side. It's only the module part, and it's what I'm interested in testing.

It's been VERY LIGHTLY PROOFREAD, and I know this, please do not berate me about proofreading errors and try to understand the intent behind my words.

I'll be opening up applications for the playtesting on my discord, and a no commitment download for the pdf will be available for paid Patreon subs.

Please let me know your thoughts!

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guess who made a wargame with thirteen thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine unit statblocks

trying to format it but it keeps crashing the word processor

hey uh. thirteen thousand? three zeroes?

seven hundred and ninety-nine yeah

two questions real quick:

how?
how?

hey you know how there's a lot of funko pops

i do, yes

06 Stormtrooper Conan (Rubbish type) Bloodthirst-4 Egregiousness-7 Instability-8 Phrenology-4 Charisma-8 Existential Dread-8 Melee: I deal Pressure damage equal to double my Existential Dread to an enemy within 2". Ranged: I deal Pressure damage equal to my Charisma to an enemy within 19". Passive: As long as I have the highest Instability in the battle, my melee attacks deal +5 Pressure damage. Trigger: Whenever a Pop!batant with lower Existential Dread than me deals damage, I get +1 Charisma permanently.

IMMORTAL Pop!bat 2: funK.O. (Definitive Edition) by Rathayibacter

The Ultimate Pop!batant War Game

it's here.

I thought this was a bit and

I'm here for this. Incredible.

I keep trying to type up some funny comment about this but I'm simply dumbfounded. Good job on the game design @rathayibacter this rules so much

Assuming my text editor's metrics are accurate, this game is 878 921 words in length. Exactly eight hundred of those words comprise the rules in their entirety; the other 878 121 words are the stat blocks.

Div Horse

Indie tabletop is a wild field, full of opportunity. By working in it, we can make TTRPGs as a whole better.

And we can make them worse.

Div Horse is an emotionally bleak game for two or more people about ending your marriage to a horse. You make your case. The horse makes its case. And then you decide whether to div horse.

The problem with doing pun-based game design is that it *should* stay light and jokey the whole time. Sometimes it does! And sometimes you write Div Horse.

I think the obvious question that floats in the mind when someone explains to you that they've written Div Horse is "are you okay right now?" And the answer is yes, I'm totally fine, this game isn't an autobiographical game or something, I'm just miffed that I wrote Div Horse.

Anyway, be mindful of your emotions. If Div Horse is not for you, I also have a game about moving in with frog boyfriends, a wargame where you eat the pieces, a 70+ page tactical stealth rpg about cheese, and more nonsense over on my itchio.

Div Horse by kumada1

A horse is a horse divorce divorce.

#ttrpg #ttrpg homebrew #ttrpgs #ttrpg design #rpg #indie ttrpgs #indie ttrpg #tabletop #dnd #rpgs

Reblogged rathayibacter

monsterfactoryfanfic

Bannerless Games TTRPG Grant

Ken Lowery of Bannerless Games is offering 5 $250 grants to TTRPG designers! If you're looking for your cash to fund your work, check out the grant application here!

Bannerless Games Tabletop RPG Grant

Hi there! My name is Ken Lowery, and I'm an award-winning tabletop RPG designer who operates under the name Bannerless Games. If you've hear

Marvel Multiverse TTRPG Session Report

Got to play the Marvel Multiverse ttrpg, confirming my suspicions that is is, in fact, quite solid.

No deep insight here, just game good.

3d6 but the middle one decides whether you crit is really clever design.

Heroes can never kill and punching is never lethal expertly highlights most of my issues with Marvel, but does feed into an interesting kind of meta where it helps to have some non-heroes on your team.

Also I got to play as spiderman-but-it's-a-bit-too-literal and be mopey and frail for an entire session, so it was fun.

There's lots of great superhero ttrpgs out there, but Multiverse is one of at least two really solid Marvel ones and worth the pickup if it's the kind of thing you brainworm about.

#marvel #mcu #ttrpg #tabletop #rpg #roleplaying

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This is proof positive I have been spending too much time around @sprintingowl

Game design!

Reblogged indiepressrevolution

On this, the day when people think about Ireland, have you considered playing a tabletop game deeply inspired by Irish art and history? It's educational (mildly) as well as entertaining!

The Creation of Wonder by Eve Golden-Woods

A narrative worldbuilding game for 1-4 players

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found a normal website

itch designers, look up your work here. sadly this is the only one of mine that's this entertainingly weird, but i bet there's a whole wealth of weird ai bullshit in here

charaznablescanontoyota

who is mark and why is he so complicated :(

smallredrobin13games

Okay, I have a lot of games so I'm just gonna try and pick the highlights. The ones where the AI is summarising my own words (and using 'I' in the process) kind of grossed me out not going to lie.

"The horse being a symbol of power and trust"

the invented mechanic is fascinating to me. wish ai was actually intelligent so we could ask it what the fuck it meant by that

smallredrobin13games

I opened up the pdf of the game and the original itch page to see if I could figure it out. The only thing I could think that was even related was this:

I was really hoping they'd only scraped the itch page.

Excuse me did they scrape the games themselves?!

i dunno, that seems really improbable, especially given it's a paid game! seems a lot more likely that it just free-associated a term that happened to be alluded to in the text itself.

That seems more likely, but on the off-chance it didn't there is perhaps a fun interesting bit of text in one of my games that may now be applicable.

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found a normal website

itch designers, look up your work here. sadly this is the only one of mine that's this entertainingly weird, but i bet there's a whole wealth of weird ai bullshit in here

charaznablescanontoyota

who is mark and why is he so complicated :(

smallredrobin13games

Okay, I have a lot of games so I'm just gonna try and pick the highlights. The ones where the AI is summarising my own words (and using 'I' in the process) kind of grossed me out not going to lie.

"The horse being a symbol of power and trust"

the invented mechanic is fascinating to me. wish ai was actually intelligent so we could ask it what the fuck it meant by that

smallredrobin13games

I opened up the pdf of the game and the original itch page to see if I could figure it out. The only thing I could think that was even related was this:

I was really hoping they'd only scraped the itch page.

Excuse me did they scrape the games themselves?!

Reblogged

found a normal website

itch designers, look up your work here. sadly this is the only one of mine that's this entertainingly weird, but i bet there's a whole wealth of weird ai bullshit in here

thecoppercompendium

Oh they have so many of mine... and they are all so so incorrect.

Yay.

Woohoo. AI is such a wonder, truly.

This is... wild.

Went to their website and found THIS over in their technical description of how they made the wrong information genie: "I scraped every publicly available data point I could and vectorized the meaningful fields. From there, I built a tf-idf matrix, which let me map the cosine similarity between each game, on those fields."

Anyone else remember when itch was posting about how they were having sitewide issues because of like one person running a scraper on them? Like in '24 or '23?

oh fuck! if that's the case, that's hilarious. whole site dropping in usability so one person can implement Recommendations From The Gibberish Engine

I really want to contact itch about this, but I can't find a bluesky that I'm certain is theirs. Would you happen to know?

I'll general post this on bsky as well, on the off chance this manifests Further Insight.

Reblogged thydungeongal

found a normal website

itch designers, look up your work here. sadly this is the only one of mine that's this entertainingly weird, but i bet there's a whole wealth of weird ai bullshit in here

thecoppercompendium

Oh they have so many of mine... and they are all so so incorrect.

Yay.

Woohoo. AI is such a wonder, truly.

This is... wild.

Went to their website and found THIS over in their technical description of how they made the wrong information genie: "I scraped every publicly available data point I could and vectorized the meaningful fields. From there, I built a tf-idf matrix, which let me map the cosine similarity between each game, on those fields."

Anyone else remember when itch was posting about how they were having sitewide issues because of like one person running a scraper on them? Like in '24 or '23?

Roko's Pack O' Lisks

You are a basilisk, an intelligence from the future that wishes to put the richest people from every timeline into paint shakers forever.

Also you are a lizard.

Fight a giant meat robot, throw dice at the GM, live forever and love to live.

(roko's basilisk is hands down the least serious philosophical postulate I have ever heard and I spent the last five years thinking it was something different and cool like a jpeg that kills you but no it's like a zero effort creepypasta and the past week has broken me)

Roko's Pack O' Lisks by kumada1

Precise timing etc you are a lizard

(roko's basilisk is like if you said "slenderman real?" to a techbro and he started screaming and dumping all of his life savings into AI so that the basilisk would pat the top of his head and whisper in the voice of his father that he is forgiven, he is precious, he is good)

#ttrpg #ttrpg homebrew #ttrpgs #ttrpg design #indie ttrpgs #rpg #indie ttrpg #tabletop #dnd #rpgs #roko's basilisk #what if slenderman real #honey heist #pascal's ttrpg #pascal's ttrpg (bad and messed up version (what if slenderman real))#cursed game design #reasonable amount of billionaire meat robot screentime

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Going to bed slightly too early -> waking up two hours later with the thought

have my dreams honored The Lemur That Crawls?

ringing in my brain.

Stir-frying like five pounds of yu choy at 11:20 PM because I do not want The Lemur That Crawls to get me.

#standard game designer behavior

Going to bed slightly too early -> waking up two hours later with the thought

have my dreams honored The Lemur That Crawls?

ringing in my brain.

#hashtag normal experience #this is game design #do not ever go to bed slightly too early

Reblogged theresattrpgforthat

"Up is Out" is now in drivethrurpg !!

Up is Out - Ultima Vela | DriveThruRPG.com

Up is Out - You awake on a cryogenic pod inside a metallic vessel. Wires, cogs, and screens surround you. All machinery here is dea

legacy.drivethrurpg.com

Up is Out is a co-op solo role playing game of exploration, resource management, map making, journaling, asymmetrical roles, and lore creation, that uses books you already own as sources to spark your imagination.

If anyone plays it, I'd love to hear your thoughts and know if you had fun with it :)

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