I tried running Hypertellurians again. I’d run a game online with people I sort-of-knew during COVID, and this time my normal gaming crew had a gap between campaigns. I’ll just drop this in, with only a little prep. I know what happens. It’s a simple system. What could go wrong? Reader, lots. ...
It’s Hypertellurians time again! I ran the Heart of the Atom Isa over two sessions, and it finished with the party sledging down a mountain on a moon, on a wave of alien mucus. So, if you take nothing else away from this, then you can do some very silly sci-fi. The Atom Isa The party’s rocket, the Atom Isa, has its heart stolen from it, and they have to get it back from Argencia, who is seen on the ship’s logs - departing for the tremendostaceans of the Zelteen nomads. The party are: Garmotte, a human-sized Alien amoeba Khepri-the-Rising-Sun, a beetle-man Royal Philomena Dashwood, a young explorer and Ultranaut ...
Hypertellurians is beautiful. It’s a lovely book, with wonderful evocative art, and a bunch of really interesting “features” to stack on top of “archetypes” (like classes but more thematic and less capability-based). I won’t go through the book because other people have done it better. Having prepped and run a single game, though, how was it? ...
Finally, finally, I pulled the trigger and tried running a Hypertellurians game. This was done in Discord, with three players. It took about three hours, including us all learning the game. We used Avrae for rolls and I made a Google sheet character keeper but we ended up using the provided pre-gens on the Mottokrosh website. Unfortunately, this means no pictures. ...
Short post here, here’s the games in my “to-play” pile, sorted by immediacy. I thought it would be a nice way of keeping track of stuff that’s caught my eye. Games I’ve not played yet: Beak, Feather & Bone - An IRL friend bought me this. Not only do I therefore want to report back, but it is a short story-telling game and thus ready for dropping into a blank session. And it has bird-people. Need to import an image into roll20 for a game. Ultraviolet Grasslands - Love Luka’s art, getting ready to start a play-by-post of this. My games always end up a bit grim, so I really want an excuse to make a cheerful gonzo game with a Mad Max bent. Hypertellurians - For some reason I just really want to play this atomic raygun RPG. I’m not even sure why but I have it in PDF and physical and it looks like a laugh and relatively light. Mind you, so does a lot of stuff I already own! DELVE - A solo dungeon-building game. I’m waiting for the physical book for this one. It might be a bit fiddly compared to a pure story-telling game as it involves some light cellular automation of rooms to cover invasions and water flow and stuff. Worst case it would be easier on roll20 or similar where I don’t have to pack it up. Ex Novo - another story-telling map-building game that was in the Racial Equality bundle. It can be played solo and I definitely want to give it a go. Humblewood - a 5e campaign that’s finally arrived across the Atlantic. It’s very beautiful, and I will save running it for post-pandemic. For completeness it’s worth noting it’s available on roll20 now… ...