[image: fanciful lettering in purple, orange and green on a black background. Text: Together We’ll Be UNSTOPPABLE. (And That’s Terrible). A Supervillain RPG by Zoe Maxine.]
So I haven’t been able to draw for a while, so what have I been working on in my spare time? A Supervillain team themed tabletop (or digital) RPG! It’s not out yet, but it’s almost a full rulebook now.
So now that I can draw, here’s a logo.
PLEASE ask me questions!
Please let me know if you’d be interested in gametesting it or know a group who’d be interested in playing it and giving feedback, too!
I took a small break from this project to shake the dust off of Sinister Hovering OrbandTo Serve (the former has been published, and the latter is now in final draft and just needs illustrations and typographic editing), but now it’s time to get back to rotating birds.
Changes in this version:
The “Playing the Game” section as been supplemented with an extended discussion of how to interpret trait symbols as a player.
“Running the Game” now opens with a discussion of the GM’s role in Rotate Bird and how it differs from the GM role in more conventional tabletop RPGs.
“Assessing Fallout” now includes examples of how the various fallout symbols might be interpreted.
“Special Challenges” now opens with a discussion of the types of circumstances that special challenge mechanics are meant to address; this update also introduces perilous tests as a complement to epictests.
“Rewards and Advancement” now actually discusses advancement!
“Variant Rules” has been promoted to its own chapter (as opposed to being a subsection of “Running the Game”), and now includes optional rules for performing multi-character combos with paired DOING traits.
“Appendix 3: Supplementary Tables” has been added; all it contains for now is a lookup table of random DOING trait themes.
At this point, the game is essentially feature-complete, albeit not content-complete; I’d like to see if I can work something out for random scene prompts to complement the random scenario generator, there’s a lot of stuff that could stand for worked examples, and obviously it needs more random tables.
As always, comments and feedback are welcome!
Ok, i promised this post to myself, and i promised this post to my players. Playtest feedback for Rotate Bird in the setting of Sunless Skies.
Iknow there’s a system for SSkies, Skyfarer, i just don’t like it for… a number of reasons (mostly its treatment of captain and my lack of understanding of how to do non-lethal combat), and don’t have enough energy to do a PbtA hack, so, Rotate Bird.
Three of four players knew and played City of Mist, so we mostly treated Being traits as CoM tags and edges as story tags; two of the players also had they character concepts ready before session zero.
These are our character sheets after first session; traits in blue had been chosen rather than rolled, traits in green had been changed as a first minor advance, and the last row isn’t a character, it’s the party’s train.
top to bottom:
The Extravagant Widower, train’s mascot and signaller, played by Earl; had his character concept ready before session zero, got to choose three of his Being traits. His Doing traits are, in order, My treat,When is mid-day tea?andThe temperature is higher than optimal by 0.02 degree Celsius.
The Mandatory Harrower, train’s quartermaster, played by Malavon; rolled all his traits, changed part of his Doing trait as first session advancement. Doing traits, in order: Exactly to the deep end and back,Careful, still waters!andPreserves for the winter.
The Harrower is the only non-human player character, he’s a devil.
The Fragmenting Widow, train’s chief engineer and captain, played by Svyat; had her character concept ready before session zero so got to choose three of her Being traits, and changed part of her Doing trait as first session advancement. Doing traits: Black Widow,Technically a pilotandTeeth collection.
The Non-Suspicious Secretary, train’s first officer, played by Kir; changed one of his Being traits as first session advancement. Doing traits: Cake is not a lie, it is being recycled,Spring cleaning,Phobia refraction.
The Delivering One, the train; Being traits rolled by the players (each rolled one), Doing trait rolled by me and named by us all. Doing trait: FULL STEAM!
The train was added as a something like a team card from CoM — its traits can be used once per session, by any player, in the context that makes sense. We haven’t yet used them, so i’m yet to see how that goes, but i can already say that it willbite me in the ass as soon as the party decides to fight another train. Welp, knew that something like this will happen.
Doing traits in our game migrated to something like social status and/or learned abilities, rather than superpowers; Widower has enough money to buy his (and party’s) way out of almost anything, Harrower is good at practical planning, Widow beats people up, and Secretary… well, Secretary currently tries to understand who is he, exactly.
The two things that i plan to do, but haven’t yet done, is disaster track for tracking damage to the train (enough failures = train is broken in some way and this isa problem) and progress track for main quest.
After the first session it mostly feels like a muppet movie, with the Secretary being the lone human; it sure is fun.
I also used random scenario tool (but without party’s input); our story is about tentative balanse of powers in the Reach, a mcgaffin that can break that balance, and people who try to run and hide. We’ll see how that goes.
The reason tabletop RPGs use polyhedral dice – in spite of them being such an unlikely thing to have on hand in the pre-gaming-store era, and rare even in the roleplaying hobby’s tabletop wargame predecessors – is because there just happened to be an educational supply store where they could easily be sourced near where the designers of Dungeons & Dragonslived.
The reason that D&D dragons are colour-coded is because the game pre-dates the widespread availability of fantasy minifigs, so they represented dragons using plastic dinosaurs from the local five-and-dime, and those are just the colours that the plastic dinosaurs used to represent each type of dragon happened to be.
The reason that iconic D&D monsters like the bulette, the owlbear and the rust monster exist is because one day, a bunch of bootleg Ultraman kaiju figurines just happened to be mixed in with the plastic dinosaurs, and – being unfamiliar with Ultraman, and the bootlegs in question being almost unrecognisably shitty anyway – they statted up what they thought the figurines looked like.
Sometimes I wonder what the history of the tabletop roleplaying hobby would have looked like if any of those coincidences had lined up just a little bit differently.
Art and design challenge, everyone:
Find the cheapest, weirdest, ugliest little toy or bauble you can at a local dollar store or thrift shop. Design a new tabletop monster off of that.
I would LOVE to try and figure out what kaiju ended up being the inspiration for what classic monster
Knock yourself out – the linked page contains numerous photos of what’s believed to be the specific set of plastic “dinosaurs” that served as the original minifigs for monsters in question. Some of the figures that are included in the set are clearly identifiable as classic Ultraman bootlegs, while others are less recognisable; to the best of my knowledge, nobody’s 100% sure what the figure that inspired the owlbear is supposed to be. For reference, it’s this one:
A piece of advice that I THINK comes from the Blades in the Dark rulebook (but I’m not sure because I’ve read so many TTRPG rulebooks in the last year or so) but that I think could be applied to a lot of other TTRPGs is that a roll shouldn’t make a competent character look incompetent.
Like, I think most players and GMs (especially those of us that come from the D&D paradigm) tend to think of the dice roll as representing how well the character does the thing. This seems intuitive, but it tends to make a character’s perceived level of competency at the things they’re supposed to be good at weirdly swingy, which might be undesirable unless you’re aiming for a slapstick tone.
Like, your stats/skills/modifyiers/whatever the hell the game you’re playing has/ already represent how good/bad your character is at doing certain stuff. So the die roll, being a luck-based number unrelated to these skills, probably shouldn’t ALSO represent how well your character does the thing, but instead represent outside factors that influence the outcome of your action, such as something distravting your hero, the enemy jumping away to avoid the swing, or the lock you’re trying to pick having a bit of rust that’s giving you trouble.
In practical terms, what I’m saying is that if your thief with a decent sneak skill is trying to stealthily follow a guard, but you get a disastrous dice roll that causes you to be discovered, that dice roll probably shouldn’t represent your thief suddenly stumbling over and making a lot of noise, but the guard suddenly remembering he left something in his quarters and turning around at the worst possible moment. Mechanically both get you the same result, but one of them doesn’t have the unintended of effect of making it seem like your thief suddenly forgot how to sneak.
Politician:They say running a bar is the same as running a city. Everyone’s drunk, lost, and needs that one silver person to lead them right! Hafgrim, a chronic alcoholic, and king of the Nine Realms: What do you call someone who’s all of those things? Politician: That’s what we in the industry call a mess! Hafgrim:You’re not wrong.
![[southern gay intensifies]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/b7604ee3fd503ad1f4cedfcd216158ad/b264a41dfab98964-de/s30x30u_c1/c73181663ae7fb93976db15d4cfbce731b41fa0b.jpg){kind=small}
