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Truly I am haunted by the Magical Horse College books.

Heck yeah! Thank you!

Ball Game is a Blaseball-styled storytelling ttrpg with a baseball card visual style and some good heft.

The PDF is 40-ish pages, with a clean and well organized layout. There's art or graphics on most pages, and the illustrations pack a ton of charm. They definitely understand Blaseball, but they're also not bound by it and their riffs on its style are interesting.

In terms of contents, Ball Game is a self-professed look at baseball from the outside. Whereas ttrpgs like Dead Ball are born from a passion for the sport, Ball Game talks in its intro about how it had to figure out that passion for itself. And I don't think this is a bad thing. It gives Ball Game a different angle, and it means you get lines like "Baseball is a constant to me. As constant as the moon. As summer. As death."

Speaking of, Ball Game's writing is great. It knows how to pivot from one idea into another. It gets Blaseball's dire and surreal humor at a bone-deep level. The team descriptions are fun to read, which I think might be the bedrock of a good Blaseball-like.

Mechanically, Ball Game is pretty straightforward on its baseline level. It's GMless, 3d6 pool, any 4+ is a success. Contested rolls are highest number instead. You can appoint a coach as a kind of pseudo GM who's more of an expert on the rules and a tiebreaker, which is interesting. 

However, Ball Game also builds on that structure by having you play seasons of baseball, and on different teams, which you can switch between during drafts. Teams give you an aesthetic and a mechanical effect, which when combined with your playbook sets you apart from the other PCs. 

Playbooks are structured as always, sometimes, never. Which is a neat format. The vibe is Belonging Outside Belonging, but a little more informal and with dice instead of tokens. The "never" also isn't a hard ban. It's just you succeed freely when you use your always, and you take consequences when you use your never.

In terms of GM tools, the game is a little light. There are clearly defined events you can choose to drop into play, but the narrative heart of Blaseball is a kind of freestyle, and so Ball Game doesn't have a set scenario to get in the way of that.

Overall, if you like narrative games, eldritch sports stories, collaborative worldbuilding, and solid mechanical choices I think you'll like Ball Game. It wants a few sessions of play, maybe a mini campaign, and shouldn't be hard at all to add to your gaming rotation. It's also as friendly to baseball fans as it is to baseball outsiders, and is a solid introduction to telling stories with the sport.

Oh, you could definitely change that to "after X fishing attempts" where X is the number of PCs. I playtested the adventure with 4--5 people and did some solo testing, but didn't check larger group sizes.

The big advantage of a large group size is that it gives you more freedom to absorb exhaustion, tag in, use the right fisher for the job, etc, but this is counterbalanced by some fish and animals (and specifically the Great Dreamer Challu) scaling off of the party size. A large enough group might make Challu very very difficult without everyone getting more time to fish.

Good catch!

Whoah, thanks! Always happy when a game resonates.

And the re-edited edition sounds cool! Definitely happy to check it out when it's ready!

No worries! It's a really cool game. Thank you for writing it!

Workhorses No More is an Uma Musume with a bit (a lot!) more intentionality behind what it wants to say. Uma has some thoughts about loneliness, friendship, competition, the meaning of success, etc, meanwhile Workhorses is screaming, firing an uzi, and doing donuts on your lawn. If you've ever thought for more than a minute about that throwaway line about how an uma's body is basically a lethal weapon, you are in the right headspace to begin reading Workhorses.

If not, other plausible touchstones are Revolutionary Girl Utena and Madoka Magica. No I'm not kidding.

The PDF is 20 pages, with a banger cover and a plain but entirely readable interior layout. This has a side effect of highlighting how (positive connotation) batshit the text is willing to get. There's a surreal, hotblooded dreaminess that runs through Workhorses like a spinal column. It's a *fantastic* read, but you'll also be kinda clinging by your fingernails to where you think the setting is going---and I think to vibe with it at all, you've gotta be able to understand destruction as an act of transformation.

"This horsegirl game examines hegemony" is a thing you can say about Workhorses and it will be true. It's also implicit and deft in how it talks about the topic. Your character has traits like Yoke (your primary obstacle) and Truth (a thing you believe unquestioningly) and you are a student at the Sisters Of Mount Sinai Academy For Young Girls which forces you to race---and also you rebel from it by racing in secret. There is a lot you could unpack about this.

There's also a good light crunch to character creation. Everything is small numbers, but there's a lot of unilateral powers and bonuses that create a complex game environment. Workhorses' dice are simple but also weird and smart in a way I haven't seen before---2d6, drop highest, add stat, and one die is negative while the other is positive. This means you'll usually get a stat modified by a low amount. Even a total of 1 is a success, but higher numbers translate into more effect. Plus you have a spendable resource called boons, which come back on high rolls, so you can kinda combo high roll into high roll or rescue yourself from bad failures.

Added to this light crunch are some good, quick rules for contests, combat, and a thematic mechanic about speaking in red that is heavily intertwined with the lore and allows you to reverse bad failures into heroic successes. Essentially, red is the color of absolute reality, and if you speak in it, your words are truths stronger than your environment.

For GMs, there's some story seeds and NPCs, but I think the real secret sauce is the writing. Workhorses is a game you have to feel, and reading it does a great job of putting you in the right headspace.

Overall, if you like hotblooded indie ttrpgs and have an even passing interest in umas, this is a strong recommend. This is a stellar game to read and I think will be even more memorable at the table. 10/10 I enjoyed it immensely.

Minor Issues:

-p 8, Social Studies, "a breast" should be "abreast"

-p 8--9, Abilities, the Favorite Subject and Club and Lineage subheadings blend into the rest of the list. It could be worth centering / underlining the text to make the subheadings pop a bit more.

-p 10, I think you can just freely boon every roll that's 0 or better and get the boon back. This might not be intended play. Restoring boons on sufficiently negative rolls instead of positive ones might add some more dynamism.

-p 11, this talks about "rolling on an appropriate stat" such as "Might" but I couldn't find either of these things in the book. Are these holdovers from the core system?

I've been using "this is a ttrpg" in increasingly outlandish circumstances to see when I finally get pushback. Also yeah, the physical dictionary is a bit of a limitation and I couldn't figure out how to adapt it gracefully to wikipedia. Although, I do kinda like that it uses archaic tech. Maybe my next game will require a rotary phone.

Thanks! This one isn't really by me, but I'm happy if it's liked.

This is the kindest thing anyone could have said about my nonsense.

Thanks! I think there's other larpish stuff out there that uses this mechanic, but I wanted to keep it kinda lighthearted while still meeting the technical definition of survival horror.

I was a playtester on this, and can speak pretty roundly in favor of it.

Haghorse Run is a classical style train adventure that is complicated by the fact that it's running in Footfall, so when the turn does come and Things Happen, everyone involved is a physics-ninja.

This both means that Haghorse Run can go more literally and metaphorically off the rails without imploding, and also that the suspense leading up to that moment feels more interesting. There's a real sense of tempo as the PCs and NPCs start exerting more and more influence as they get a sense for the social and physical landscape of the train, and there's a lot of little mysteries to solve or entirely miss. Genuinely, this is one of those adventures where it'll never run the same way twice.

In terms of polish, the version I playtested was pretty full of features but there's been a lot of small stuff added since then. My favorite bit of enrichment for a train scenarios is a period appropriate menu, and Haghorse has one. For maximum immersion, you can try to cook it yourself.

In terms of who this adventure will resonate the most with, I think people who play Footfall like it's Outlast might not vibe as much with the more gradual pace, but if you like mysteries and pseudo-historical RP and stuff like Horror On The Orient Express you'll have an excellent time.

A friend asked specifically for a class about eating gods. I wasn't working on a class pack at the time, which is why it ended up as a small standalone.

You can also use it when you're not being attacked, but during an attack the teleport is slightly slower than the attack, so you still get partially got.

The problem here might be that I called it blink, which implies it's a lot faster of a process than it is. 'Fade' might've been a better word choice.

It doesn't fully evade the attack, you're blinking out as you get hit.

This is incredible!

Thanks!

Thank you! Happy to have made something cool.

All effects are intended to stack, so if you take multiple Specialties that affect your Social Standing, they should all apply. If you take multiple Specialties that randomize your Social Standing, you choose which of them applies last.

The Woods Mother's Mother's Care tokens are not meant to last past the end of combat. If a Complicit copies the passive, those tokens are discarded when combat ends.

The Rabid and Soldier can be effective in limited situations, but struggle a bit outside of them. The Fiveacre just does a lot, and can leverage their powers in unusual ways. Having a mob of followers is already plenty strong, but they can do a lot more than that without too many downsides.

Thank you! Hope you enjoy!

More Cthork is planned for the year! I have a handful of ideas I want to get onto the page.

These are really good mechanical additions! Progressing the time to sunrise in particular is a really good way to keep tempo during a scenario's finale.

Guaranteed damage I assumed would have a place in a meta, but I did my testing individually for this game, so I might've missed how good it is on a team. I'm not sure I have an idea for how I want to calibrate it yet, but I'll do some thinking about a patch.

Also a saber salute to Viney Vinnsauce! His memory shall remain!

Feel free to hack or do whatever with this! Glad you liked it!

EepEepRPGs

Happy to enable!

Heck yeah. Thank you! Good luck with the campaign!

Thank you for writing the game! It's phenomenal.

I think even a cicada molt meets the technical definition, but the further you get from a regular cardboard delivery box the more the game's meaning mutates.

Impressed by everyone's willpower!

A bag could work too. Any piece of packaging that can remain and be modified after its contents are removed is fine for this.

Oh no good luck.

Reincarnated As The Unloveable Villainess?! is a mini otome isekai solo rpg with splendid presentation and maybe one of the best banners I've seen on itchio; laser guided precision old-school shoujo, a Glass Mask panel backlit by lovely sherbet colors.

Reincarnated's PDF is actually three PDFs, at 8 pages each, plus three Chinese translations of the same. They're all standalone, you don't have to read all three, and they have the same broad structure. However they're different in their specifics, letting you choose between traditional otome fantasy, supernatural, and wuxia flavors.

Mechanically, Reincarnated does a strong job of replicating the traditional gameflow of a otome. You generate the villainess you've reincarnated as, you generate the ostensible protagonist of the story, and you generate the love interests the protagonist is supposed to be romancing. And then you have encounters with these characters, slowly raising their affection with you.

This is a game you can lose, and there's a round structure with pre-set bad ends you can qualify for.  You can also romance all of the love interests, date and progress your relationships, and get bonuses when they fall in love with you.

Dice-wise, you have a two stat split---Lore and Love---and you roll d6s under each to pass checks. Checks are randomly generated, and you get a small bonus if you can leverage bits from your character creation in a situation. Rolling a stat exactly is a crit, and rolling a 6 is a crit fail. You always use your best die, so when you can bring in your background you have good odds of doing decently. Succeeding checks brings your Bad End meter down, and failing them brings it up, and if it isn't at zero when you reach a Bad End checkpoint you game over.

If you do make it through thirty rounds, the end scoring system takes into account both your relationships with the love interests and how much you've buffed your stats. In kind of a surprising progression fantasy twist, if you're rocking maximum Love/Lore you can choose to wave all of this dating aside and pursue ultimate power. It's charming, and there's a lot of variation both here and throughout the game. Lots of journaling ttrpg systems are deliberately loose mechanically, but Reincarnated kind of builds a cage of rules to force you into interesting scenes. It's neat.

In terms of writing, the roll tables are precise, confident, and fine tuned to duplicate the feel of the source medium. There's metaplot, drama with the protagonist, backstory for the love interests, galas and duels and the love interests getting into situations and uh oh the love interests are injured on your doorstep and there's only one bed. The plot twists that you get on a critical failure are especially interesting, and a lot of them start straying into high octane metafiction. Metafiction itself is pretty comfortable isekai territory, but "a love interest is aware of the heart meter"---we have now passed the border into very good and interesting horror.

In fact, the deeper you push into the PDF, the more it seems like that is an extremely intentional sublayer to the game. There's player support tools for things like timelooping and adding new love interests and expanding the upper and lower bounds of the affection meter, as well as for dating the protagonist (in true Katarina Claes fashion), but the game pushes back and distorts the more you interact with it on this fundamental level. If love interests really hate you, they automatically induce new critical failure twists, and their hatred for you "transcends the storyline." And if love interests love you beyond the normal cap of the hearts meter, they erase themselves from existence across all timelines to clear obstacles from your way.

And the more you timeloop, the more the game around you starts to degrade.

The easy bad ends and replayability push you towards running into this part of the game eventually---one "but wait, I can fix it" and suddenly you're doing a Re: Zero.

I don't think it is incorrect to say that this is a masterpiece.

Reincarnated is an excellent replication of genre that then has a second type of game lurking inside it like a xenomorph. You can play it for a fun cozy otome time, or you can play it to fall into a spiral of melodrama and clutching at the fading threads of a happy ending that may have never been possible or that may have been changed irreversibly by your mere observation of it. Or you can date three princes and a plucky country girl!

If you're on the fence about this one, or about solo games, or about otome, or really about anything in general you should get it. 10/10. Went in with expectations high and it still completely surpassed them.

Minor Issues:

-On page 1 of all three PDFs, on a roll of a 6 on the 10 Hearts event, "roll an additioanl"

-On page 2 of all three PDFs, if you roll lower than the related attribute, "how the action has helped you stalled your death" this should be stall

-On page 3, in just the fantasy PDF, "if you reach 10 Hearts with an LI" is missing pink on the I 

-In this font, it's pretty hard to visually discern + and - from each other. This isn't a huge deal, it's usually clear from context, but sometimes I had to squint at the page.

-Can the Bad End counter go negative? If not, it seems like you can kinda get torpedoed by bad luck if you're at 0 but roll a failure right before the bad end round. Granted, sudden bad end for no reason is kinda standard visual novel territory, and you can just timeloop yourself out of it, but I couldn't figure out if this was intended.

Yeah, it was an experiment but I think I need to stick to  more utilitarian fonts for body text. I was hoping the font size would offset, but it didn't completely.

Still the GM. But, like, tenuously.

It now goes to the correct place.

Oh goodness and I linked my Library Wing entry on the game page to a random bluesky post. Errors all around.

+250 Archivist Points! This rules!

Thank you! These were all fun to write, so I'm glad folks are enjoying them!

+38 Archivist Points! +250 Archivist Points when the supplement comes out!

Also combining the mechanics here with OPSE is interesting! I hadn't thought there would be an appetite for a lot of narrative expansion here, but it's very cool to see.

I'm glad this game is resonating with folks, and let me know whenever the supplement is live. I'd love to link it from the page.

Vintage 2020s Ohio documentation!