Tigerbunnies Dream Beautifully

Not quite as broken as l_the_fangirl, perhaps, what with Katawa Stage and all, but still broken.

blackbluesock commented:

I had a kinda silly but I think would be awesome idea after looking at Tigerbunny icon's...a fandom Bliss Stage where we purposely use characters from anime/video games etc. I'm more interested in finishing in the current campaign right now, and building the backstory might be a tad difficult, but I'd think it'd make for awesome oneshot or something, I'm amused by the idea of the strange pairings it'd form.

And like the fool I am, I picked up the gauntlet.
( How about you? )
Not going to make this HAPPEN any time in the immediate future, you understand... other responsibilities call. But....

Bliss Stage has been in the air lately, and that's reminded me that I have something on my hard drive that I keep meaning to put out there for the world at large. Ben, LMK if it's an issue.

I built a couple of "character sheets" for the game back when it was in playtest. They should still be pretty usable. I don't think they're quite as purely functional as the play sheet that's actually out there, but they are v. pretty. And they feel very Gasaraki to me.

Available in delicious color, or elegant (and printer-friendly) B&W.

Please let me know if you use them, and how they work for you!

• I should use the existing Greyhawk list of deities and portfolios, but could feel free to re-imagine their nature and relationships and rearrange them into new groups
• The mythology created should mesh up with a fairly standard “D&D world” – there would be the usual races, classes, monsters, etc., but again I would be free to re-skin (often literally!) and re-imagine them
• I would avoid the common tropes and narratives of Europe in favor of those drawn from Asia, Africa, and pre-Colombian America
• The gods would not be remote, Apollonian incarnations of abstract principles. They would *be* those things, personified. And they would be very much like people – motivated by recognizable emotions of lust, compassion, respect, family, anger, etc.

I had a lot of fun with the project, although I never “completed” it – does one ever really “complete” world-building and myth-making? I hope one day to run another game somewhere in the Dream of Rao – maybe one that delves into a cranny of culture or myth that I haven’t yet touched!

Inspired by this thread at Story Games, I’ve decided to start publishing some of the mythology I created here. Maybe it will serve as inspiration (or at least a warning) to others who want to get away from the “default” D&D concepts and venture off into the wilds. Prepare to meet Pelor and Corellon and all the rest as you’ve never seen them before…

These stories are mostly presented as the sort of thing an entertainer or village elder might haul out for an audience of young men & women over a fire at night. They’re rough-edged, often bawdy or scatological, and not especially subtle. I’m sure theologians tell these stories differently, if at all. I hope you enjoy!

The first few stories behind the 

Beory and Pelor do what comes Natural

Another lesson from MIG rears its head. That game was plagued by a recurring social contract issue – differing levels of rules-savvy and risk tolerance among the group. We ranged from Kathy – who’s at best minimally competent with the rules, and likes to take wild risks in order to make things more exciting, secure in the expectation that I’ll generally make sure that stakes for any action are fun win/lose – to L, who’s an old hand D&D expert whose cleric was a melee powerhouse with carefully chosen feats and spells, but who is quite willing to make suboptimal decisions in service to character – to T, who’s fairly rules-knowledgeable (a bit of a rules-lawyer, even) and extremely risk-averse, preferring to avoid encounters entirely or win through superior planning and resource management and gets quite irked when other people deviate from The Plan.

If I “embrace the hack”, am I also embracing the far end of that spectrum? Risk-averse, rules-mastery-focused, optimization-centered? Am I asking for people like Kathy to be perpetually the “dead weight” at the table?

Well…. I don’t think so. I think that’s a particular manifestation of “hack” D&D – one that’s crunch-focused almost to the exclusion of everything else. I’ve certainly seen plenty of good, crunchy, challenge-driven D&D that didn’t demand perfect builds and perfect execution. Partly, that’s a matter of social contract, partly, of ( culture of play )I want a table full of people more in the moderate level of crunch-focus, and without T’s strong aversion to risk – willing to embrace the gamble as well as the crunch, but also willing – and this is crucial – to embrace stakes that are less extreme. Kathy’s reckless stunts are a lot more fun for the group if social contract accepts the notion she tends to assume: that the stakes of risk are rarely loss-of-character, but more frequently complications, embarrassment, temporary incapacity. On the other hand, she needs to accept the idea that every character must be designed to be able to reliably fulfill a needed role in the party – that a base level of rules-skill and optimization are every player’s responsibility, and that recklessness should be confined to lower-stakes situations.

So… I will need to select for people comfortable with the kind of game I plan to run. They need to be rules-comfortable, but not hardcore optimizers. On the other hand, they need to NOT be rules-averse – I’m not planning on running a talky-talky roleplaying-centric kind of game, so knowing how your Feats work and what your bonuses are is important. They need to be okay with fun taking precedence over “realism”, and they need to find Killing Things and Taking Their Stuff fun.