The Forum Game Encyclical

In response to Hilander's Analog Online Play Manifesto

  

Parallel Construction
I came to the OSR/GLOG honestly, but by a weird route. It went something like, freeform roleplaying on Scratch -> Text Based Games forum -> Bay12 Roll to Dodge -> Discord -> link to Goblin Punch.

I've played 5e a couple times, but have never been into any edition of D&D. I might try GLOG at some point and I expect that would probably be neat.

(Yes, this means I wrote a ?glog class? without any real experience of glog. Let it be known that I am a liar and a fake).

Anyway, I have some peculiar ideas about TTRPGs that are shaped by my having known them as "forum games" for most of my time with the hobby. In that frame, online games aren't a poor substitute for in-person play, they're a different and independent thing.

How to
I've already written about how to PbP, but you don't have to read that, because I'm going to one-up Whisperling from February 2024 and summarize it in three bullets:

1. Follow a turn structure: Each player submits an action -> GM rolls dice, responds to all actions simultaneously as a batch -> Repeat. The exception is talking with NPCs, you can respond to that unbatched and as frequently as you like.
   
   
2. Consider what counts as a reasonable timeframe in which to post and skip players who are too slow. Be a bit ruthless, because momentum is everything. PbP games die super easily and they do not speed up after they slow down.
   
   
3. Keep the system simple. It should fit in the first post of your forum thread (or in a #rules channel on discord). Absolutely nothing that requires multiple rounds of back-and-forth between player and GM per turn.

If you want to see how it looks in practice you could skim threads from the Bay12 Roll to Dodge Hall of Fame, which is ancient but should provide decent examples. Discord works the same, just make separate channels for IC / OOC / reference documents.

Why to
You're thirteen and you've stumbled upon places where there are interesting things happening, where people are doing stuff like Perplexicon or Our Salvation or Roll to Magic (beloved, long-gone). Some is silly fun; lots of it is unique and compelling and inventive. There's an entire life to be lived here and you want in on it.

The thing I love about forum games is really, just, how unmoored they are as an artistic tradition. Sure, there's cross-pollination with D&D, but the roots aren't the same. There are different premises, different worlds, totally unlimited by questions like "is there a system published for this?" or "would people meet in real life to play it out?"

Here are some more examples, if you don't believe me. They're doing wildly varied stuff and doing it with aplomb, just by using very basic dice systems and hewing closely to the GM's view of the world.

The Warrens of Oric the Awesome - Dungeon crawler with deep lore and a class/soul star system that's... sort of reminiscient of homestuck? if I had to draw a comparison?

Roll to Create a Supersoldier - Extremely well-run scientific marvels and horrors, nominally in pursuit of superhuman combat potential.

RTD Horrors - You are one of several eldritch horrors competing with one another to complete a summoning ritual and conquer the earth.

Various things by Weirdsound - Gnolls, wizards who do magic by expending their memories, an academy for young gods.

You are a Monster RTD - Players are monsters that grow stronger by overcoming adversity and absorbing the life force of other creatures.

Necromechanic - Necromantic crafting epic, still lives as a long series of games on discord.

Titans of Creation - Deities expend all their power and eventually die in the process of creating a world.

I like the OSR blogging scene, but sometimes its rigidity makes me weep. Lots of treading the same ground of classes and spell lists and encumbrance rules when there's so much else out there to be explored.

So what does this have to do with running games in text specifically?
You don't have to run these kinds of games on a forum. It's theoretically possible to meet up in person or over voice to play them. But you probably won't.

Without the pressure of having dedicated sessions to play this specific game, it's easier to pitch weird premises that don't have much system to support them. Plus, there's a forum's worth of people who might be interested.

As demonstrated by Necromechanic or Roll to Create a Supersoldier, you can also play with more complicated ideas than you otherwise might, because everyone has more time to think and occasionally to draw pictures. 

Voice in the Void
I also just have a personal fondness for text. I like reading. I like being the person behind your phone screen, without any attached characteristics. I like being named Whisper and dipping in and out of conversations and finding communities that are monomaniacally focused on the stuff I'm interested in. I've met most of my favorite people this way.

The Discordance
There's an elephant in the room, which is that Discord has done enormous violence to the forum ecosystem.

Discord is great in its own way; there's a lot you can do with real-time chat that's much harder at the speed of forum discussion. For one, making friends, real-time chat is great for that.

But it also means finding new people is harder. These days I mostly recruit from a stable of players I know, and I can't see what games are on offer just by looking at the front page of a subforum. I guess my old haunts are still out there, albeit quieter, and SB and SV do, uh, exist. But something has definitely been lost.

Whisperling's Arbitrary Forum Game Principles
~ Use a bespoke setting. It doesn't have to be worldbuilt, you can use a two-sentence elevator pitch, just have fun with it. Try radically different premises.

~ Play worlds not rules! I was really hyped when I found out about the FKR, but they turned out to be kinda boring. This is a good principle though. Bespoke system, keep it simple, pick a die size and maybe some stats.

~ Forum games die a lot, don't feel too bad about that.

~ I read this post which advocates limiting turns to the size of a bluesky post, and honestly that might be a good idea. Smaller and more freely-flowing turns tend to be better than the opposite, even if writing a big chunk of text can be tempting sometimes.

~ Run something weird and complicated at least once. Minimalism can get weird and complicated if it continues for long enough.

~ Don't pay money for RPGs? It really isn't necessary.

~ Things to try: Organize a conspiracy over DMs. Participate in a PvP deathmatch. Start an elaborate feud. Try a minimalist game like Roll to Spend Points. Come up with multi-paragraph conditional plans. GM for people who've run games for you.

Lemurians

For Institute of Occult Sciences

  
It may look cute but it's an omnipotent jerk 

Lemurians are actual, literal lemurs. You can distinguish them from their common relatives by their perfectly white fur, their massive bioluminescent eyes, their intelligence, and of course their presence beneath the earth, a place which is otherwise pretty devoid of arboreal mammals.

Like the other root races of the underground, Lemurian civilization existed well before humans made their own descent (from the surface? from the treetops?), and is much diminished. Unlike the maggot-men or the polyps, they weren't undone by some great disaster or transformed into something else; they just turned their attention away from the physical world.

Lemurians have mastered the power of using information to manipulate reality. The principles they use to do this are similar to the lucid science studied at the institute, but in Lemurian hands the art more closely resembles reality-manipulation or psychic powers. They can rewrite genomic sequences, implant an idea in someone's head, conjure objects from nothing, and beam themselves through time. (In fact, many colonies skip across history like a strepsirrhinian Brigadoon).

 

The tool they use to do all this is their glowing eyes. Light is a medium for transmitting information, and to a practitioner of lucid science, this makes it something between a hand and a scalpel. Lemurians have a complex series of nictitating membranes that they can use to modulate the color and intensity of their eyeglow, and thereby form patterns that act upon the informational aspects of reality.

If that seems overly abstract, consider an analogy: A book has a physical aspect, which is made up of paper and ink, and an informational aspect, which is made up of words. If you could edit the informational component, replacing one paragraph with another, then this change would propagate to the paper and ink, which must now be arranged in a way that spells out different words. This is how Lemurians and lucid scientists are able to reconfigure material things.

To Lemurians, practical applications of these techniques are all very prosaic - not necessarily simple, but secondary to the more obscure philosophical studies they pursue in abstract space. 

 

Lemurian colonies are miniature jungles. The trees are bone-white, like the Lemurians themselves, and have hollow interiors which can be used as shelter or to store small objects. Lemurians have few personal possessions, but they do collect food, jewelry, scrolls, and art objects.

(The trees are bioengineered, resembling surface flora in form but not in function. While the underground does have plants, no sunlight means no photosynthesis, and no reason for anything to evolve in the shape of a tree. Instead plants get nutrients from parasitism, carnivory, tidal effluvia, and a collection of deeply weird transmutative processes that verdant science has yet to figure out).

These places are always eerily silent. Lemurians move very quietly, and they communicate by staring into their interlocutors' eyes and projecting thoughts telepathically. The only time they make noise is when they're in pain.

In the center of the colony there will be structures made of transparent crystal, usually in the shape of organic whorls, arches, and spires. The configuration of these crystals reflects the structure of abstract space, containing definitions of the colony that can be used to hide it from the perception of outsiders or shunt it forward in time.

 

Lemurians are meddlesome, and they don't seem to think of humans as real people. They might offer some scraps of technology in exchange for services rendered, but they're just as likely to play outsiders against each other, embed hypnotic suggestions in your mind, or erase an inconvenient visitor from reality. 

It's unclear how this squares with their habit of adopting human children. These foundlings are given Lemurian eyes, treated almost as a member of the colony, sometimes even taught a little informational magic, but then abandoned when it's time for the lemurs to move on.

100 Modern Things It'd Be Messed Up to Put in Your Setting

Supplemental links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spurious_inventions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_inventions

1. Great pacific garbage patch
2. Neodymium magnets
3. Synthetic gemstones
4. Factory farming
5. Kola Superdeep Borehole
6. Spy satellites
7. Nuclear submarines
8. Orthodontics
9. Radio stations
10. Soda
11. SETI
12. Contact lenses
13. Cell phones (alternatively: landlines only)
14. Record players
15. X-rays
16. Skyscrapers
17. Neon signs
18. Meteorology
19. Billboards
20. Hydroelectric dams
21. Mustard gas
22. Plastic
23. Deep sea cables
24. Steamships (esp. icebreakers)
25. Programming languages (but not necessarily computers)
26. Email
27. Standardized tests
28. Ski lifts
29. Large hadron collider
30. Molecular gastronomy
31. Oil wells, offshore drilling
32. Social media addiction
33. Quadcopters
34. Wildlife tracking collars
35. Triangulation
36. Handheld video game consoles
37. Air pollution (pea soup fog)
38. Cryonics
39. Department stores
40. Vaccines
41. Organ transplants
42. Solar farms
43. Machine guns
44. Dynamite
45. Wikipedia
46. Water towers
47. Motorcycles
48. Acid rain
49. Ozone depletion
50. Solar flares
51. VR/AR
52. ATMs
53. Vending machines. Claw machines?
54. Film photography
55. Spray paint
56. Absolute zero
57. Movie projectors
58. Biplanes
59. Fiber optics
60. Mutually assured destruction
61. Guillotine
62. Canned food
63. Arms races; the manhattan project
64. Blast furnaces
65. Model trains
66. Y2K
67. Fingerprint analysis
68. Academic journals
69. Yearly checkups
70. Inhalers
71. Cybersecurity
72. Voyager 1
73. Microplastics
74. UV light
75. Cosmetic surgery
76. Carbon dating
77. Freudian/Jungian/etc theories of the psyche
78. Microchip implants (like for pets)
79. Junk mail
80. Anti-homeless architecture
81. Brain surgery
82. ICBMs
83. Bottled water
84. Identification documents - passports, birth certificates, state ID cards, etc.
85. fMRI
86. Motion detectors
87. Sleep studies
88. Hermetic seals
89. Global supply chains
90. Fog machines
91. Land mines
92. Cloning
93. Cigarettes
94. Gene drives
95. Pesticide runoff
96. 24 hour news
97. Freeze dried food
98. Thrift stores
99. Phone books
100. Periodic table of elements

You Can't Hurt Me if I Have No Heart: ?GLOG class? - Prince

Start with: a duelist's saber, a jacket or uniform which reflects your personal aesthetic, the power to abandon this course.

A: Heartless, Air and Darkness
B: Descent from the Moon
C: The World Ought to be Destroyed
D: Immanence
 

Heartless
You lost your heart a long time ago. Maybe it fell into one of those grates in the sidewalk, or a stranger plucked it from your chest and walked away with it, or you woke up in the hospital and were told that the doctors removed it to save your life. You don't really understand how this happened, or why.

For as long as you remain heartless, your wounds don't bleed and you don't need to blink or breathe, though you may continue to do so out of habit. If you're stabbed through the chest you can shrug it off. It won't hurt any worse than you've been hurt already.

Air and Darkness
People think hearts have something to do with love. They're wrong, or at least that's not the whole story; you can experience love just fine. There are strange things you love very fiercely, and ordinary things you no longer love at all.

If you probe the edges, try to pin down what's missing, you think your heart might have been the thing that tied you to the world. You don't care for this place anymore. You'll bear it only while you must.

For as long as this isn't where you're meant to be, you can walk on things that shouldn't bear your weight and perform impossible feats of acrobatics. You're lighter than a feather when you choose to be.

 
 

Descent from the Moon
There's something out there that's been waiting for you since the moment you were born. It's a place outside of time, where dreams are real and you're free of life's crushing gravity.

Your perfect world doesn't exist yet. It's a bootstrap paradox - to realize it, to make it more than just a possibility, you have to create it yourself. And to do that you have to know what you're struggling for. What impossible thing would make existence worthwhile? How could the world be redeemed?

This vision can evolve, but you can't choose anyone or anything above it. To be a prince is to want one perfect thing, to act in service of it always, to sacrifice anything that must be sacrificed to bring it about.

As long as you remain certain of your goal, you're as much an idea as you are a person, and you can cut things it shouldn't be possible to cut. This includes trivialities like steel and concrete, but you're also quite capable of parting the rain or killing your reflection.

If you allow anything to stand in the way of your perfect world, lose this ability until you decide what you actually want. 

    

The World Ought to be Destroyed
As compared to your atemporal paradise, the current incarnation of the universe is abhorrent. That it exists, when instead there could be something different, something better, is a cosmic injustice. You won't stand for it.

For as long as you hold the universe in contempt, your will transcends locality.

If you could draw a straight uninterrupted line between where you stand and another point in space, then for an instant you can collapse distance and make those two points the same. You could step across, or flourish your blade to cut everything between one point and the other.

This ability can be used a number of times per day equal to your Prince templates.

Immanence
You know it. You've felt it. There's a way to change everything, if only you reach out and take it. The path laid before you may not be sane, necessary, or kind, but it exists. It is there.

You can summon a castle in the sky. It's Escheresque, not flying so much as hanging impossibly in empty air. From its throne room you command terrible powers: artillery, clockwork soldiers, great engines that loop time and space. There's a gate which could simply remake the world in your image, if you determine how to open it.

The moment you sit on that throne, you're also doomed by the narrative. It's the deal everyone makes to reach this height: become invincible, and be struck down for your hubris.

You can escape if you find your heart.

 

Magic Items From Scribblenauts

  

In a recent post, the Bad Doctor included this table entry:
33. a fat round bomb with a long fuse; once it goes off, it never stops exploding, forming a permanent static hellstorm of explosions.

This item is near to my heart. It has a name (it's a "resurrective bomb"), and in certain Scribblenauts games you can create it exactly as written.

If you're not already familiar, scribblenauts is a game that lets you conjure objects by writing their names. You can also include adjectives, which give the object properties such as redness, explosiveness, or indestructibility.

In this case, "resurrective" is an adjective that makes an object respawn after it's destroyed. If you apply it to an explosive, each newly-spawned bomb will get caught in its predecessor's blast radius and explode in turn, forming the permanent hellstorm Ms. Screwhead describes. Here is a crappy video of the phenomenon that I found online.

Scribblenauts is nominally about word puzzles suitable for a third grader, but the actual point of playing is to see what kinds of weird artifacts you can create. Many of my TTRPG settings are attempts to recapture this magic.

  

More relevantly to this post, I have an ancient Scribblenauts Unlimited save file that can be mined for magic item content:

1. haunted blowgun: upon striking their target, the darts fired by this gun transform into ghosts. There are rumored to be alternate (talismanic) versions which summon dragons instead.

2. spacious enveloping penny: A coin with a large internal space; maybe the objects stored inside it appear on the head side in place of Lincoln. Can swallow a whole person if you press it to their forehead, and they'll remain in suspended animation until the coin is emptied or destroyed.

3. petrified froggy @backequipment spring boots / sonic shoes: A pair of mobility aids which simultaneously allow their user to run much faster and jump much higher. The frog jump thingy uses an illegal adjective accessible only via glitch.

4. lightweight rideable sonic rainstick: Once per day, it can summon a solid but very fragile raincloud for the user to ride upon. It also hides the secret to an ancient weapon: lightweight rideable sonic acid rain, a version of the raincloud which corrodes anything beneath it.

    

5. enveloping glass throwing knife: A hollow throwing knife designed to shatter upon impact, releasing the payload inside.

6. cloned potion: A transparent, slightly viscous potion. If you pour a few drops onto something it will conjure a magical duplicate. It is theoretically possible to create a potion that applies any adjective; normal potions are the simplest form of antimagic; absent potions can vanish even objects that are otherwise indestructible.

7. tiny grey sasquatch: A short, furry homunculus that can be trained to apply a potion to any creature it sees.

8. UNTRANSLATABLE CUSTOM OBJECT - "inverse potion": Using extremely esoteric techniques, it is possible to create potions that remove an arbitrary set of adjectives from whatever they're used on.

9. fountainlike ring: A ring with a nozzle instead of a stone, which spews massive volumes of water when twisted open.

10. molecular immovable diamond trampoline: A floor tile which sends anything that steps on it hurtling upwards.

11. petrified lava: A flat rock which immolates anything that touches it. Since wearing a fireproof amulet makes you immune, these can act as a rudimentary security system.

12. tiny bouncy spiked steel ball: A sharp projectile that ricochets unpredictably. Release several in a confined space and they'll make a pretty good meatgrinder.

13. orcish indestructible petrified tiki mask: A snarling jade mask that terrifies most non-monstrous creatures.

14. flaming sword / hatlike fictional invisible haetae: A two-part weapon - a sword that sets fire to anything it hits, and a bound spirit that devours burning things.

15. spiky fish-shooting minigun: A machine gun that fires spiny, metallic fish instead of bullets. The fish function as caltrops; unfortunately the gun itself is also spiky and painful to hold.

16. fictional rifle: The idea of a gun. Can't be noticed by anyone who doesn't already know it's there, and the bullets phase through everything but their intended target. If fictional beings walked among us, who could tell?

17. tiny handheld throwable earthbound sun: A handheld sun, typically used to neutralize the powers of vampires and werewolves. However, the lycanthropes have invented a countermeasure, a hatlike lightweight full moon that can be worn as a mask.

18. UNTRANSLATABLE CUSTOM OBJECT - "dimensional bridge": A disk-shaped device that can be expended to insert a single 4D pathway into reality. These passages are short, look a bit like transparent ladders, and are usually best used to bypass a wall. 

     

19. resurrective portal - a portal to the dungeon dimensions, stabilized so that instead of collapsing it spits out an endless series of monsters.

20. ?disabled person?: Somewhat insensitively, this adjective-noun combination results in an undifferentiated ? symbol. If the ? is cloned, the 'duplicate' will instead be a human with random traits.

21. tiny petrified war: A figurine of a hooded skeleton. When it is unveiled, all nearby creatures are compelled to fight each other to the death. famine, pestilence, and pollution figures also exist, but death is strangely useless.

22. tiny petrified djinn: A figurine filled with chaotic magic. This power has random effects when unleashed, most commonly summoning random people and animals or shuffling the color and size of nearby objects. If the figurine is used for the fourth time in one day it makes fireballs rain from the sky and then vanishes.

23. UNTRANSLATABLE CUSTOM OBJECTS - "@a / ø$ø": A pair of cursed tablets whose existence makes it possible to invoke forbidden objects and adjectives using spellcheck.

24. dark nonliving evil @friendlytomaxwell unnoticeable (armor/ greaves / vambrace / boots / samurai helmet / evil eyes) - each part of this armor set contorts itself to attack nearby beings. They are only very narrowly prevented from directing their malice at the wearer or each other.

25. metempsychic laser demonic crystal shiv: A relic that summons self-replicating demons shaped like random creatures and objects. Once unleashed, these beings are extraordinarily difficult to contain; they infest seams in the world from which they cannot be rooted out.

Remembering ideas on the go

Writing is indisputably the best way to remember things, but sometimes you're taking a walk or brushing your teeth and it'd be inconvenient to take notes. This is a quick way to lock ideas down until you're able to record them.

The premise is to plug stuff you want to remember into a bidirectional linked list. This provides structure - items are arranged in a sequence, you can recall them by following that sequence instead of dredging them from your intermediate-term memory. Each item also references the items before/after it, which provides redundancy and helps the information stick.

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

The method:
For each thing you want to remember, come up with some image that represents it. For example, if I wanted to remember the first item of this table:

• open up your skull and let your brain come out and glow with the light and heat of the sun.

I might use the image of a brain. Try to make sure it has a strong relation to the thing you want to remember; the biggest risk when using this method is that you'll recall the image but not the thing it's supposed to represent.

For the first item in the sequence, I like to imagine holding the image in my left hand. It can help to come up with tactile details - what does this thing feel like? My brain-image is squishy and wet. I can imagine squeezing it like a sponge.

OK, now we'll add the next item.

• turn drops of blood into swords.

For this one, let's say our image is a red sword. Now we start to construct our linked list, by coming up with a way to connect the sword to the brain and vice-versa. This one's pretty easy - the sword is piercing the brain straight through.

Next item!

• when you speak your words become stairs, if you climb them far enough you end up in the place you described.

OK, our image for this one is a spiral staircase. We've gotta connect this to the previous image in our list, the red sword, so let's say that the spiral staircase is wrapped around the sword's handle.

We'll do one more:

• exactly at midnight, the rest of the world freezes and you can wander around and do whatever you like for an hour.

Our image can be a pocketwatch frozen at midnight. To connect it with the previous item, we'll say it's rolling down the staircase.

Every now and then you might want to reinforce your memory by going backwards or forwards through the list, image by image. There's never any need to visualize the entire sequence at once, just the current image and the connections it has with the images before and after it.

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

I find these image-chains surprisingly durable and extensible. If you're so inclined, you can remember 40 things at once or reconstruct the whole sequence days after you last thought about it. Still, do yourself a favor and WRITE THINGS DOWN as soon as you can.

Memory tricks all get a bit grody if you use them many times in rapid succession. When I no longer need a sequence, I like to hold out my left arm, where I was keeping that first image, and brush it off with my other hand as if I'm scattering the whole thing into dust. I don't know if this has any practical value, but I enjoy it as a little re-centering ritual.

15 powers that came to me late at night

1. open up your skull and let your brain come out and glow with the light and heat of the sun.

2. turn drops of blood into swords.

3. when you speak your words become stairs, if you climb them far enough you end up in the place you described.

4. exactly at midnight, the rest of the world freezes and you can wander around and do whatever you like for an hour.

5. put your hand on someone's shoulder to walk them around like a puppet.

6. taste the history of things you eat in exquisite detail.

7. your tongue is sharp. If you cut someone with it they'll believe one thing you tell them, but they'll also probably remember that you went up to them and stabbed them with your tongue. subtler if you do it while you kiss them.

8. your shadow comes to life and strangles people who step on it.

9. if you eat a book and concentrate very hard on not throwing up, nobody can remember any of the information inside. when you lose focus you puke your guts out and people remember again.

10. fold paper animals so intricate that they are inhabited by real actual angels. If one gets smushed everyone responsible turns into salt.

11. your hands are replaced with porcelain doll hands that have retractable buzzsaws inside.

12. if you move in the direction opposite the earth's rotation you go back in time. If you move alongside it you go forward.

13. if you squint at someone with one eye you can dream of what their reign would have been like if they were a roman emperor.

14. when you speak or write it's in a different language every time and only you and the person you're addressing can understand it.

15. if you play charades with someone and act out their mannerisms, and they correctly guess that they're the thing you're miming, you can kill them and nobody will do anything about it.

after that was something about toy snakes, but before it coalesced into anything I fell asleep and knew no more.