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Into the Ninth World: Converting Numenera to Into the Odd

Featured image artwork is by Bear Weiter and is TM and © 2019 Monte Cook Games, LLC. Monte Cook Games updated their fan use license to specifically prohibit use of their materials in Google Docs, so...

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MinimalD6 Numenera

As long as I’m posting a bunch of Numenera hacks all at once, I might as well be thorough. Here’s how you can make use of a bunch of the ideas in your Numenera books with the much looser MinimalD6 rule...

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Knaves of the Ninth World: A Numenera conversion

Featured image artwork is TM and © 2019 Monte Cook Games, LLC. I’ve been kicking around ideas for a far-future adventure and exploration game lately, along the lines of Numenera and In the Light of a...

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Whitehacking Numenera

As we’ve established, I can’t stop hacking Numenera. The more I try to figure out how to mine the parts I like best, though, the more I feel like the most sensible thing is not to house rule the Cypher...

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This giant, immortal bug wizard seems like an OK dude

Mind control is tricky business. As a player in a D&D-descended game, you understand that you have limited control over the world at large, but you are the final arbiter on how your character...

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Advanced Let’s Play Pretend 2nd Edition

I submitted something to a game jam for the first time this week: Advanced Let’s Play Pretend 2nd Edition, for OnRamp Jam by Paul Beakley of The Indie Game Reading Club. The purpose of the jam was to...

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Aetherway: Tunnel Goons meets Troika!

My second game jam submission in a week (and, well, ever) is Aetherway, for the delightful Goon Jam featuring hacks of Nate Treme’s Tunnel Goons . It’s meant to be a companion and/or conversion for...

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Grave 1.0 release notes & alternate rules

After five months of playtesting, I’m finally calling Grave (more or less) done. This game offers a minimalist D&D-inspired rule set for soulslike fantasy adventures, built on Ben Milton’s...

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Hit + Die: A 1 page, 1 HP RPG

I found out about the One Hit Point jam pretty late, but I loved the concept: All characters in your game must only have one hit point, and must never gain any more. So, with only a few hours here and...

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Gauge: A diceless RPG about survival

The Your Move Jam posed a challenge: Design a “Powered by the Apocalypse” (a.k.a. “PbtA”) game with only a single move. I’d been sitting on an idea for just such a game for a long time: Gauge, a...

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Agents of the O.D.D. now out in the field

Late last night, I uploaded my Cryptid Jam submission, Agents of the O.D.D., a game of (paranormal) paranormal investigators. The implied setting is something of a mashup of Hellboy, Planetary, and...

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Metatopia Design Diary: Nighttide

Last weekend, I ran my first playtest of Nighttide (and the Gauge​ system on which it’s based), a diceless gothic horror game inspired by Bloodborne and Castlevania. It was a lot of fun! Also, it...

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Metatopia Design Diary: Agents of the O.D.D.

​I ran two sessions of ​Agents of the O.D.D. ​at Metatopia, a convention geared toward playtesting games in development. The feedback was a mix of things that made me go, “Great, I was planning on...

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Fonts of wisdom

​Please pardon me while I take a break from obsessing over game design long enough to obsess over graphic design. Specifically, typefaces. If one of my students had turned in a 40-page book in a...

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The more you know

I like RPGs to move fast. I only have a few hours per session, only once every month or two. I want stuff to happen. I don’t want to get bogged down too much in exposition or referencing, so I tend to...

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When does it make sense for a hobbyist to publish?

I love making games, and I’ve been happier and more productive than ever before since realizing it’s “just” a hobby for me. After switching career tracks out of the game industry, however, I felt a...

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Down Town draft: Into the Odd meets Blue Blazes

Awhile back, I blogged about a work-in-progress RPG tentatively titled “Down Town,” a hack of Into the Odd about modern-day urban spelunkers delving into the weird underworld far beneath the streets....

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Pretendo's first 4 months self-publishing on Itch.io

In September of this year, after much hemming and hawing about where (or even whether) to share my games, I started publishing games on Itch.io. For the benefit of anybody out there wondering what...

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(Un)written rules of play

I tend to design relatively short RPGs because I’m more likely to get them done, and because the intended audience (myself, my personal friends, and fellow longtime hobbyists) doesn’t need much more...

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Change Agents of the O.D.D.

I’m running Agents of the O.D.D. tonight for the first time since Metatopia, and looking to playtest some changes. (Please feel free to grab a free “community copy” of the earlier edition if you’re...

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