Death and Dying in Myth and Folk Let's start at the End, shall we? Death is a strange thing. In TTRPGs we fling our creations into the waiting jaws of death, but are still somehow surprised when those jaws snap closed. Games in the space have wildly different levels of guidance for how to handle death. Many give you mechanics around dying, but few talk about what comes next. They assume you know to roll up another character and wait patiently for the GM to introduce them. Unless the GM has a plan, maybe not a whole plan, per se, but the outline of a plan. The P, L, and N, surely. In Myth and Folk, specifically on the disc world of Pelagie, death is full time job. Long ago, something went wrong, the cycle of rebirth threw a piston and a race of psychopomps, known as Shades, have been playing catch-up ever since. For characters in the world, what this means is that there is often a slight pause between when a creature expires and when their soul is collected. In that pause, there is...
Hello There My name is Vid, a chronically ill TTRPG designer with a hyperfixation on faerie tales. You can tell by the way I spell "Faerie." I am roughly a year into designing a game known as Myth and Folk, influenced by Kids on Bikes, Year Zero, World of Darkness, Index Card RPG, the various Borgs, and of course D&D. It utilizes small pools of exploding dice to satisfy the inner dice goblin and make the impossible never truly out of reach. So, if I've been working on this for a year, why start yapping about it now? Well, firstly, because my friends and partner are tired of hearing about game design. Secondly, folks in the TTRPG Design Space are starting to collaborate on challenges known as the Tabletop Community Spotlight. Entries must be in video or blog form, and a blog feels more doable at the moment. For now it's little more than a nail to hang submissions on, but I'm certain I'll become more loquacious as time goes on.