Damn I Am Pretty Art Laboratories

 Mutation Nation is my current tabletop role playing game in testing, a Forged in the Dark game borrowing elements from Fate Core and Heart: The City Beneath . Its a game about playing mutants, inspired by the X-men. Extinction in Mutation Nation represents how close your team of mutants are to facing disaster at the hands of your enemies. Extinction replaces stress or hit points you see in other games. Its a shared track, meaning everyone on the team takes some responsibility for it. It also functions a bit like Heat in Blades in the Dark. When a mission ends, the team marks some Extinction. Its always there looming. Whenever a member of our merry mutants decides they want to resist a bad outcome- they don't want to be pinned by a villain, or they don't want to take a hit or they don't want the crowd screaming obscenities to get to them- they roll to see how much their resisting the hit passes it onto the team instead. Extinction is marked based on how bad you roll.  Th...

 It's Lupust so, time for Lupust arts. This year, doing Wally Wood stuff. Maybe I'll post more, we'll see.

The unique thing to a game is its skill list. With Mutation Nation , my first thought for a X-men inspired supers game was the laziest, I'd admit. Eventually though, I would move onto something that felt better for it. I think I found the right list. Things you can spend forever tweaking. The first skills- I should probably call them actions, since Mutation Nation is borrowing so much from Forged in the Dark games, but my brain defaults to "skill." Action is a better term for it, the suggestion that a character is acting or is proactive versus skills, which could be seen as reacting to obstacles in the scene. I get that.  Anyway. The first skills mechanic I devised for Mutation Nation was pretty lazy on my part. They were freeform- borrowing from 13th Age with each being a word or phrase that the player could create to define their character. This is lazy because its me putting the onus on the players, which hey, sometimes is fine. Most of the time, that works. It was...

Mutation Nation is my current ttrpg project- playing mutant superheroes in a world that hates you, yes its inspired by the X-men, and it uses Yahtzee dice rolls to do it. One of the TTRPG designer heroes I have is John Wick. Sometimes he is hit or miss, but often I find myself back at some of his core narrative ideas when I make things. Family Points is very much something inspired by John Wick. In Mutation Nation , your team is your family. Found family is a big part of the inspirations of the game, and this mechanic tries to represent that. Family points reflect the strength of that family, and that strength helps you accomplish more.  Its a simple idea: if a character does something that reinforces their family bonds, the GM adds points to the Family pool for it. Then at anytime, any member of the team can pull from the family pool to modify dice rolls, get additional downtime and other things. Its a resource the players can use, but to earn it their characters have to be a fam...

X-men '97 was not something I was expecting to impact me this past year, yet it did. Not just a nostalgia hit, but something genuinely inspiring to me. Of course, it wasn't the only thing, just the first thing to get the ball rolling for me. Either way, thus was the first brick toward my current project: Mutation Nation . X-men '97 returns back to the X-men 90s cartoon. It clearly uses inspiration from later X-men stories but weaves them to tell stories the old cartoon couldn't ever dream of doing. Here are the X-men at their best to me, stories about them struggling with a world that hates them, facing a threat only at the end to have find a path among mutants forward that isn't continuing the hate. Masterful. Needed it so very much. Makes me want to write a game inspired by it. YAHTZEE The second thing was a silly what if after playing a few games of Yahtzee and King of Tokyo (Yahtzee meets King of the Hill, but with Kaiju). What if the dice rolling mechanic in ...