Hi there. Thank you for reading my thoughts about ttrpg design and my project Grass & Rubble....
Grass & Rubble was once named Automatic Wasteland and it came out of a playtest right at the height of 2020 covid. The concept changed over the years but the core persisted. My goal isn't to create a original lore, my goal is to capture the tones from some of my favourite media and try to create a game that let's me explore it further. The setting of Grass & Rubble has four and a half major…
In the beginning Grass & Rubble was named Automatic Wasteland and it came out of a ruleset playtest right at the height of 2020 covid. The concept changed over the years but the core persisted. My goal isn't to create a original lore, my goal is to capture the tones from some of my favourite media and try to create a game that let's me explore it further. Let's get to the point. Grass & Rubble is…
Probably not, but at least I try! Crafting mechanics mostly suck. To be honest, I have very limited experience with them and as soon as I read them I don't care about them. Even in Blades in the Dark I found free-form crafting as a downtime project to be boring. The only time I find crafting interesting is when it comes as improvisational, diegetic and with minimal mechanics: The Chemist…
I'm obsessed with HP (or the lack of it) for a while now. I know from my experience with Blades in the Dark, Trophy and Slugblaster that I prefer harm to be narrative and that I don't want it to be its own sub-system. Don't get me wrong, I do play games with numerical HP and it's not always bothering me, but I never love it. But getting rid of it is suprisingly difficult. My favourite example of…
At its core Grass & Rubble is a horror game. To be more specific, I see it as a exploration focused cosmic horror game. When it comes to stress mechanics, I want my system to support high player agency but still push players to explore their characters personal abysses. I like Stress (see Blades in the Dark), I like Ruin (see Trophy), I like Fallout (Liminal Horror) and I like Panic (see…
With my core resolution mechanics in Grass & Rubble , I have two main goals: I want actions and their impact to be firmly based in the fiction. I want to minimize negotiation between players and the GM. You can read about my game in a previous article . Similar to Into the Odd , Ghost/Echo , and 24XX , actions in Grass & Rubble aren't directly resolved by a roll. Instead, you roll only when…
Grass & Rubble is a lo-fi cosmic horror game about desperate fortune-seekers risking their lives on incursions into the reality-warped Exclusion Zone of the Flicker. Their personal Drives compel them ever deeper into the Zone to complete illegal jobs or recover valuable artifacts. They return to the Belt, just outside the heavily protected border, to recover, carouse, and advance their personal…