Tabletop: world building, homebrew, and design

Gaming is gaming, and all posts are welcome; that's my understanding, anyway. It's been years since I homebrewed anything for a tabletop game, though. I created a couple of regions-- not whole worlds, just sub-continents-- that were designed for political intrigue. Accepting quests from one local leader would impact your reputation with their rivals, and throwing your support behind a single leader would lead to a variety of crises mid-campaign, depending on their agenda. For example, Alder Goldflagon was a dwarven merchant and aggressive expansionist. Backing his policies would piss off the wood elf faction, and they would respond by refusing to give traders safe passage through the region's dangerous forests.

Unfortunately, I got a group of players who just wanted to do hack & slash dungeon crawling, so the intrigue was completely wasted on them. That's why, most of the time, I stick with pre-written materials and just improvise a bunch to suit the group's play style.

I prefer Oldhammer to modern 40k tonally, so have created shall we think of it as a fork from the 40k universe. The conceit is a sector that has been cut off from the outside galaxy by constant almost nearly impenetrable warp storms for the last several thousand years.

Within this bubble my personal Space Marine and Imperial Guard forces exist, as do Ork forces run by a friend. They have history and fluff. I make fluff for the planets and major figures in this sector, creating a personal canon with 40k’s canon being a foundation that I feel comfortable being loose with.

So far most actual gaming has been done with the OnePageRules systems, though I am trying to drum up interest in playing 2e or 3e games for novelty.

I've been working on a D6 based RPG set around the Mediterranean, with establishing trade routes to the east as the main objective. It's currently a mass of ideas and world building and a random splatter of the actual game mechanics. It's something I only get to work on every couple of months for a handful of hours so it's slow going, but it's really fulfilling to work on.

I've got a Knave (OSR) hack I've been working on for a long time. Been through a few iterations and currently working on a rather crunchy magic + martial arts system for my setting.

I still haven't named my setting, probably should at some point. It originated out of being hyperliteral with the idea of planeswalking. You know, if you could literally walk to other worlds. Along the way it picked up a bunch of concepts I thought would be neat divergences from standard fantasy tropes. For instance, the world is monadic animistic. Which means that every object has a spirit and also every spirit is an object with neither the physical or the spiritual description being more true (they're one and the same.)

I'm working on and off on writing new content for Opus Anima (only available in German) which has an amazing steampunk horror setting and a very simple but flexible D2 pool system but sadly got abandoned by the publisher after only the core rulebook and a softcover book with an alternate subsetting.

The world that Opus Anima is set in used to be an outer space colony, so aside from humans, we get several other sentient species such as the Brunad (spider centaurs), Abara (genetically engineered humanoids with four insect-like arms on their backs), Sanherib (somewhere between frogs and flightless birds) and Tel'Pathar (hybrids between humans and an unknown humanoid alien race that can read other peoples' feelings). A few centuries ago, the planet almost got destroyed and now people live on huge shards that float around what's left of the planet's core. In the post-war charos and because of the dense cloud of dust and debris (called the aether) around those shards, all outside contact was lost and most technology regressed to about the late 19th/early 20th century. The setting draws a lot from Victorian England and the German Empire. Technology is mostly driven by steam, scientists constantly (re)discover the secrets of the world, aethership captains explore and colonize the world beyond their home shard and engineers have built a huge steel scaffold that connects several shards to form a thriving empire. What used to be lower layers of the planet's crust is now just the underside of a shard and can be mined for fibrite, a metal that seems to be able to react to emotions and occasionally change its form on its own. A broken tool made out of fibrite might mend itself if its owner has always treated it with respect. Fibrite has become an important resource for all sorts of technology from cameras to steampowered robots that have reached almost human-like sentience and are currently protesting in the streets to be accepted as first class citizens.

But the planet's destruction has also caused some less obvious changes. In some areas, the laws of physics are just ever so slightly off. Mirrors show images with subtle differences from reality, shadows fall in the wrong direction and solid rocks gently float downwards when dropped. In other places, it's more extreme: trees start growing human organs and words disappear from books after someone reads them. There are even rumors about people being able to conciously manipulate these phenomena to become invisible, heal mortal wounds, shapeshift into other faces or absorb the knowledge of a whole library within seconds. Scientists are currently investigating this so-called "distortion" and theories range from a side effect of the use of fibrite to some property of the aether dust to outright supernatural causes.

The main setting lets you play as a "soulless" who got most of their soul stolen by an ancient cult. Most people die from this procedure but the soulless got saved by a godlike entity who filled the void where the soul once was with a tiny bit of their supernatural essence. While this costs them most of what made them human, they slowly learn to use this essence to unlock supernatural powers that aid them in the search for their lost souls.

I'm mainly writing campaign modules for the spinoff setting Opus Anima Investigation which lets you play as members of the "Investigation Group for Bizarromancy and Occult matters" of the local police force. Imagine something between X Files, Fringe, Warehouse 13 and SCP. Their job is to uncover, investigate and contain instances of distortion that could pose a danger to the general public. So far I've written six modules, some inspired by SCP entries, some entirely my own.

Edit: I'm in contact with one of the original authors and there's a chance that if OA ever gets a second edition or an English translation, some of my works might get included.

i'm running a fabula ultima campaign and it's been a lot of fun. very lightweight, JRPG-esque ruleset. I have barely DMed before so it's a new experience for me, but I'm enjoying it despite the challenges.

RPG design is a lot of fun! Glad to hear you're working on one.

I'm working on a D&D homebrew campaign with 11 to 12 planned adventures. It's planned to take the players on adventures to the inner planes (the elemental planes). I've planned the overarching plot for the most part already, but I just need to design the contents of the individual adventures, their locations, goals etc.

I'm not doing anything other than character building for my current DnD game. At one point, I was playing both Pathfinder and 5e at the same time and realized just how bad 5e defined grappling. I spent a couple of weeks in my free time coming up with a way to define what you can do while grappled/grappling in 5e. I tried to make it more viable of a playstyle while not making it too broken. Sadly, I never got to actually playtest it with a group as we were swapping people around for DMing so they could all get a taste of it and none were experienced enough to allow for the playtest.

I would be more than happy to share some about what I had done, I would just need to find the document. I would really love the idea of a character that is a bar brawler that just grapples and throws people around!

I am creating a combat-focused TTRPG based on Turkic mythology, for two months now. It's d10 based. My main design goal is to make character building very choice-based. I'm trying to achieve this by making almost everything quickly branch out at least once.

For example, when you spend a point in an "attribute", you then have to choose to give that point to either potency or precision for that attribute.

Debuff durations, damage, healing and more increase with the relevant potency stat. To-hit rolls increase with the relevant precision stat. Since "attributes" are capped, these compete with each other.

It's currently in early stages so there are no character classes yet, but from the play-testing I've done, it's already fun without classes lol.

Currently I've been reading Witchburner as a side plot line in my current Pathfinder world. I'm using the Midgard setting as a base. Right now I'm trying to write a vampire world takeover that involves them trying to kill Baba Yaga while the PCs attempt to find out this plan and stop it. I'm also working on implementing mechs into it because I've been bitten by the Xenogears bug.

**CONTENT WARNING FOR CYBERPUNK Sexual Abuse, Drugs and Murder **

Additionally I'm writing a Cyberpunk Red homebrew campaign that discusses topics such as parasocial relationships, the dangers and downsides of becoming too involved in them, and porn addiction. The players have stumbled upon a terrible human trafficking ring, funded by SovOil's CEO after killing his daughter due to her mind being taken over by a relic which contained an anticorporate revolutionary hell bent on freeing Neo-Soveit Russia. It's really dark but I felt like CBP was the world to tell this in

I'm working on and off on writing new content for Opus Anima (only available in German) which has an amazing steampunk horror setting and a very simple but flexible D2 pool system but sadly got abandoned by the publisher after only the core rulebook and a softcover book with an alternate subsetting.

*The world that Opus Anima is set in used to be an outer space colony, so aside from humans, we get several other sentient species such as the Brunad (spider centaurs), Abara (genetically engineered humanoids with four insect-like arms on their backs), Sanherib (somewhere between frogs and flightless birds) and Tel'Pathar (hybrids between humans and an unknown humanoid alien race that can read other peoples' feelings). A few centuries ago, the planet almost got destroyed and now people live on huge shards that float around what's left of the planet's core. In the post-war charos and because of the dense cloud of dust and debris (called the aether) around those shards, all outside contact was lost and most technology regressed to about the late 19th/early 20th century. The setting draws a lot from Victorian England and the German Empire. Technology is mostly driven by steam, scientists constantly (re)discover the secrets of the world, aethership captains explore and colonize the world beyond their home shard and engineers have built a huge steel scaffold that connects several shards to form a thriving empire.

But the planet's destruction has also caused some less obvious changes. What used to be lower layers of the planet's crust is now just the underside of a shard and can be mined for fibrite, a metal that seems to be able to react to emotions and occasionally change its form on its own. A broken tool made out of fibrite might mend itself if its owner has always treated it with respect. Fibrite has become an important resource for all sorts of technology from cameras to steampowered robots that have reached almost human-like sentience and are currently protesting in the streets to be accepted as first class citizens. *