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Supplements!
🕑 Added 2019-02-13 18:33:44 +0000 UTCIn the world of RPGs, supplements are simultaneously totally natural and kind of weird. It’s natural that when a game gives you some cool bits and pieces to mess with, you’ll want some more of those. It’s weird because there are weird economic incentives involved.
Back when The Forge was going strong, the indie RPG scene was concerned about the “supplement treadmill” that larger publishers kept falling into. D&D 3.5 alone (not counting D&D 3rd Edition or third-party d20 material) got about 160 official published books from Wizards of the Coast, and while D&D has usually been the RPG with the most prolific product line, games from (for example) White Wolf, Palladium, and Pinnacle with dozens of supplements were a Thing in the industry. Tabletop RPGs are in a weird spot in that regard because it’s the most obvious way to further monetize the hobby, but can become detrimental to the gameplay experience itself.
Working on the “All That Glitters is Palladium” zine about Palladium Books, one of the things I found really striking about Rifts was that it started out with low-powered characters fighting to preserve knowledge and civilization during dark times as a major part of the game (if one with minimal mechanical support because it was still a Palladium game), and for the most part the supplements fell deeper and deeper into giving you cool new robots and guns.
I don’t want to be shoveling out low-quality supplements of course, but I do have some games that are so fun to play and fun to work on that I naturally want to come up with more stuff for them. So, here’s a look at the major supplements I’m working on.
Dragon World Settings
Dragon World is my anime comedy fantasy RPG, a Powered by the Apocalypse game for tales in the vein of Slayers and Dragon Half (I’m hoping to launch a Kickstarter soon!), and I have far too many ideas for setting books for the game.
- Were You Reincarnated Here Or Summoned Or What? (ReSummon): Basically a supplement aimed at isekai stuff, with new classes for various kinds of people from earth winding up in the fantasy world by various means, plus some story moves and info on gods and whatnot that get involved in moving earth people to fantasy worlds.
- Strange Corners of Easteros: A collection of additional stuff in the game’s default setting of Easteros, including monsters, ancient artifacts, and the underground realm of Underros, home to subelves, dirtomancers, and the dreaded Invincible Underlord.
- The Hoary Lands of El Kazad: Where Easteros is more standard (anime-ized) Western fantasy, El Kazad is a weirder fantasy setting, drawing on stuff like the Elric stories and the stranger fantasy anime and manga (Orion, El Hazard, Bastard!!, 3x3 Eyes, etc.). There’s a decadent, sorcerous empire called Malatronné, the sky empire of Soarrah, the triclops land of Trayah, and so on. Also ninjas. A clan of ninjas from another continent summoned a giant frog, which put them all in his mouth and jumped to the other side of the world. Those ninjas promptly abandoned summoning magic.
- Untitled Sorta-Asian Setting: I’m not super-confident about my ability to pull it off how I want to, but I want to do an Asian setting for Dragon World that manages to be silly and fantastical while feeling authentic, which is definitely going to be a tricky needle to thread. I’m imagining it being something like Fantasy Three Kingdoms China sitting near Fantasy Edo Era Japan, with some kind of Fantasy Korea (I don’t know enough about Korea to confidently say what it would be like) and rough fantasy analogues of some other Asian countries as well. I want to have fun with it and do some silly things without letting it turn into Legend of the Five Rings type inauthentic weirdness.
The Dungeon Zone Supplement I: Forgotten Hawklance
The Dungeon Zone is going to be an odd game to try to create new material for because the game itself has a way of reducing the stuff that would fill an actual D&D supplement down to bits of flavor text, but I’m working on some new tables (of course), character options, and (once I figure out how exactly to go about writing them) some adventure modules.
Kageshima Declassified
This is a supplement for Kagegami High, kind of a miscellany of the same kinds of weirdness that the core book has, plus some new rules (powers, character advancement, etc.) and guidelines for running the game. New elements include rituals (strange rites that can have bonkers effects), artifacts (a.k.a. special items), rogue clubs (Pillow Battalion, Reality Club, Reptiloid Friendship Club, and the Ωchan image board), and strange gods (Ayane the Allschoolgirl, the Eye of Providence, the Immortal Frog God, Manos, etc.). There is of course going to be a whole chapter of random tables, including Additional Weird Names (Corpseflower Boogalow, Reizoko Typewriter, Enimee Crumbum, etc.), Alternate GM Titles (Dice Puppeteer, Table Tyrant, Whimsy Lord, etc.), and Opening Remarks (“Life is like a roll cake: it’s been rolled into an unnatural shape, and holds a secret at its center.”).
For my more ambitious games I have a vague notion of eventually doing 2nd Editions with more of basically everything that would launch with full Kickstarters and such, and a Kagegami High 2E would definitely include most if not all of the new material from Kageshima Declassified.
Magical Fury: Dagashi
With Magical Fury I did two mini-expansions, the Magical Fury Companion and Magical Fury Appendix. I’m planning to eventually do a book compiling Magical Fury, its expansions, and Angel Project, called “Weird Little Games Vol. 2: Powered by Fury.” I might come up with something later, but as things stand, I don’t have any plans to do more supplements for Magical Fury per se—the sorts of ideas I might have for that will mostly be going into Magical Burst—but I am working on something new.
If you’re not familiar, replays are a big thing in the Japanese TRPG scene. In Japan the scene is smaller and there’s less ability to learn purely from word of mouth, so “replays,” written transcripts of game sessions, became an important teaching tool and later something people would read as entertainment as well. Record of the Lodoss War famously started as a series of replays (if I’ve got it right, the campaign originally use a heavily hacked D&D, and later Sword World), and today most RPGs that come out in Japan get published replays as well, sometimes dozens of volumes of them. The whole concept of replays got established in Japan well before podcasts were technically feasible, while in the English-speaking world AP podcasts (and video streams) have become the preferred way to experience other peoples’ RPG campaigns. The really popular ones like The Adventure Zone and Critical Role even have fandoms that extend beyond the people who play the games in question.
While some of the Japanese RPGs that have come out in English have included replays (some translated by yours truly) and Fiasco included a short introductory replay to help teach the game, as far as I know no one’s tried publishing a replay as a standalone book in English. I wanted to give it a try, and doing it with one of my own games would be the path of least resistance in terms of licensing concerns. Magical Fury is easily my most popular self-published game, so it was the natural choice. The folks at Role Playing Public Radio did a great four-part Magical Fury campaign called Dagashi, so I approached them about the possibility of making it into a replay book. They’ve been enthusiastic about the book and generally great to work with, though since I’ve set myself the task of transcribing a novel worth of audio (a short novel rather than like a George R.R. Martin book, but still) it’s taking a while, especially with all the other stuff I have making demands of my time.
Raspberry Heaven Expansions
When I finally finished and published Raspberry Heaven it was a relief to finally be able to realize a concept I’d been struggling with for so long. I have some ideas for expansions for the game, though they’ve been kind of sitting there for a while now. The expansions would consist of 12 new Scene Cards and one or two new Character Cards. In particular I’m thinking of having the new characters include a Japanese exchange student and an older sister to one of the other characters.
Everyday Fun would be more everyday, normal Scene Cards, while Holiday Special would have Scene Cards for various holidays and other special events. I’ve also been thinking about a “Boys’ Side” version with all male characters, and thanks to Hatoful Boyfriend I also had the idea to do a version where all of the characters are pigeons.
Spookstravaganza
I’m thinking I’ll divide it into a few different PDFs, but I’m working on a collection of new stuff for Spooktacular, including new archetypes, gear, and ghosts, plus new stuff like containment grid variants, human NPCs, places, paranormal organizations, and non-ghost supernatural monsters.
Excerpts!
I’ll leave you with a PDF with some excerpts of the supplement stuff I’m working on. Needless to say, there are tables.
