iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

After messing around with Caves of Qud and Jupiter Hell (and Tales of Maj'Eyal, and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and ADOM, further back...), I've had a funny realization with regards to 'traditional' versus 'modern' roguelikes (or roguelites, or whatever the lingo is these days).

Discord messages that say:
You know
As I've been playing and thinking on some traditional roguelikes recently
I've realized a common distinction between them and most of their more modern kin
Which is that like
Trad roguelikes have a much more set character advancement
As in like
You level up and you pick abilities from a skill tree or whatever
But it's not like a randomized choice, just a straight freeform RPG type of thing
So you can always choose to go for a specific perk in ways that you couldn't in "pick one of 3-4 random options" type of games

Which is Interesting
Puts them closer to their TTRPG ancestors in a way
Where the equipment that you find and buy is more out of your hands but where the character advancement is more controllable

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

War-Torn Ice Moon, the TTRPG book whose development teasers spawned all the Europa Ice War posts in 2025, is finally out to backers digitally! It looks SO good with all the art & layout, but the text itself is really substantial too - and makes me want to run a FIST campaign *so bad*!

Cover art for War-Torn Ice Moon, a supplement for the FIST roleplaying game

Table of contents, credits, and introduction pages for War-Torn Ice Moon

A page describing an alien energy called Xenoplasm, and the intro page and art for the Factions chapter

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Commenting on your own promotional posts does not - or at least, should not - suddenly give you a massive quota of non-promo posting to fulfill, though.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

In GDV, you too can eschew the sniper rifle and go the way of the bow and arrow.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

My other longest finished TTRPGs to date were 4 pages. And now I'm into the triple digits on this one, and it's not even ready for a first alpha. What shackles of game designer power have come undone in my brain in the past week??? (I also wrote like 3 different Wildsea character options lmao.)

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

I've never been on this much of a game design roll, it's genuinely scary how real it's making this project seem. Anyway here is a tiny ass mech carrier. Might be fun for a solo or duet game!

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

At long last, the VAYLANT is real. 😌

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

I hesitate to Announce anything, but goddamn if I've not been hard at work on revisiting (and maybe finishing???) an old TTRPG project lately... No promises, but maybe look forward to a playtest for Gas Dog VAYLANT, a mecha war and horror game set in a dieselpunk world not quite like our own...

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

There's a lot to like about @level2janitor.bsky.social's Tactiquest TTRPG, but I especially appreciate the game having this section early in the book about "load-bearing" rules, ones that might seem auxillary, but are actually really important to the intended experience. More games need to do this!

A screenshot from the rulebook for the Tactiquest roleplaying game, talking about "load-bearing rules" - rules that might not seem significant at first glance based on one's prior experiences in other games, but which are actually core to the intended gameplay of Tactiquest. These include travel and craftnig, treasure and reward sizes, inventory limits, and others.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

There's also rules for NPC squads, both as ways of grouping enemy mooks into more dangerous groups as well as giving your PCs bigger batches of underlings to command. They can even serve as sources of replacement PCs in an ongoing game!

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

The new FIST rules alone look very fun - Assets are an alternative resource to XP (a representation of scavenged goods, contacts, intel, favors, and so on) that can be cashed in for increasingly cool toys... ...Like the new and expanded base upgrades! Six categories with 6 cool options each.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

There's this idea of the different types of Energies that swirl around the moon - the unnatural cold, the holy light of Jupiter, psychic emanations from the sea under the ice, spacetime ripples from the destruction of the orbital FTL station... They're dangerous but can be leveraged, too. Very fun.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Beyond being a really evocative setting in its own right (given how feverishly people would Post in it), I think it helps with one of my biggest personal hurdles with FIST, which is setting up and managing a campaign - the tools and procedures do a lot to provide a nice, actionable runway!

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Excuse you, it's 35 - 48 if you also count the citizenry of the 13 city districts. (It is, in fact, glorious.)

A screenshot of a Blades '68 faction sheet on Roll20, featuring all-custom factions

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Put me in that one post collection or whatever.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Already doing numbers on Reddit's r/gaming (in the top 10 hottest at the time of posting)!

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

@tylerglaiel.com Dunno who to send this to, but there's some broken formatting on the Polish version of the Mewgenics Steam store page (even if the game isn't getting a Polish translation immediately), with the text being all bold from the Breeding Creates Your Future point onwards.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

Tactiquest does do a tiny bit of the former but moreso tries to do the latter, by maintaining a rather tight reward economy of silver that goes into your party's Supply (for rests and other uses out in the wild) and for Safe Rests in town, with a cool economic failure state, the adventure loss.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

The crew in Blades in the Dark, the squad in Beam Saber, the haven in Trespasser, the ship in the Wildsea... But hell, it's not just indies! People go crazy for kingdom-building in Pathfinder's Kingmaker AP, and even 5e has those really good Group Patrons thing (and Bastions, now).

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

My latest obsession in this space is actually partially of ahead of me in this regard - Trespasser has you roll for your character's starting stats and such, but also lets you roll for your calling (class that you get at level 2) advancements, as well as for the combat powers you get from crafts.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

Very fun to use @legendkeeper.com's new Timelines feature to see where all these games took place within our in-universe calendar relative to one another, too.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

We've been playing in our shared sci-fi TTRPG mythos for over five years now, leading to all of these campaigns (top) and oneshots (bottom) across a whole bunch of rulesets, many modified or hacked to various degrees. It's been a joyous half a decade of roleplaying with my cool friends & partners.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

What a strange take I've just been hit with, on a month-old Reddit comment of mine at that.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

In addition to the expected parts of a reach like ports and settlements and encounter tables, this also includes an optional subsystem for tracking your sailors' wealth, some new plants you can cultivate aboard your ship-garden if you have that expansion, and some new aspects!

A sidebar discussing an optional set of rules for tracking character wealth for The Wildsea RPG

A sidebar excerpt featuring two special character aspects for The Wildsea RPG

A sidebar featuring a new plant that can be grown in a ship garden in The Wildsea RPG

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Though the ruleset is often compared to being Forged in the Dark, the SRD itself has more in common presentation-wise with something like The Resistance Toolkit (as seen in Spire and Heart) than anything.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

It doesn't have a whole lot of plain rules text you can simply copy-paste into your own project (a downside to some perhaps), and it won't Make you into a game designer, but I think it can totally ease someone into that mindset quite well.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

The Told by Wild Words SRD (the rules framework based on The Wildsea) has an interesting structure to it compared to most other system reference documents: advice and examples using both real & made-up games (The Sword Spiral isn't real), and ways you can alter the systems (if you even need them).

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

A normal spread of inspirations.

Some things that inspired Gas Dog VAYLANT include: Ace of Spades, Armour Astir: Advent, Band of Blades, Beam Saber, CASE & SOUL, Diesel Knights, Foxhole, Mobile Suit Gundam, music of Sabaton, Scythe, and Trench Crusade

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

A crew of soldiers in an endless dieselpunk war. With giant mechs. And horror shit.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Been working on something this week and it's scary how well it's coming together...

Gas Doy VAYLANT; Diesel Mecha Horror Roleplaying; Told by Wild Words; Created by River Ray

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Starting a tightly-themed playlist.

Image of a partial YouTube history, featuring two songs - Walkin' on the Sun by Smash Mouth, and Walk Into the Sun by The March Violets.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

In a wild twist, the Europa Ice War thing over on TOS is not exactly a spontaneous Goncharov-type thing, but marketing for a (WIP?) tabletop RPG zine that got wildly out of hand, per the guy who started it all. (I'm OK w/ this, I was starting to make an RPG thing and now I don't need to lmao.)

A post on Twitter from user lolt64 in which he explains the original context of the Europa Ice War posts that people joined in on

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

Artist's impression of Phaethon.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

Here we go - everything from the shattered ruins of once-undead-ruled Mars to the merger of Jupiter and Saturn into an even bigger gas giant, to a rebel base in the asteroid belt on Ceres, to mysterious hypertech ruins in Neptune's rings, to extrasolar horrors on Orcus and Vanth. Pick your poison!

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

I'm still hashing out the general vibes for every planet, and tossing in some moons and dwarf planets and space stations, for variety - but as an example, Mercury (or Mirqur, rather) has been eaten by the hyperspace demon, but you can still go there, if you dare.

An excerpt describing the planet Mirqur (née Mercury) in BLOODVESSEL, pulled into the demonic guts of the Leviathan hyperspace.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

No such thing as a good-guy faction here, really - not unless the players go and found one, at least.

An excerpt describing the three main factions of BLOODVESSEL, none of them noble - the undead of Algor, the cyber-angels of Sacra, and the extradimensional daemons.

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River Ray @nullconstant.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

Revisiting this after nearly half a year of struggling with it - the trick was to narrow down the scope (for sci-fi standards, anyhow) down to just our Solar System, however little it may resemble it now. I guess it's a little bit like a really edgy Warframe or Destiny now, too.

A one-page description of BLOODVESSEL, a Savage Worlds setting mixing sci-fi, fantasy, and horror elements, describing its six key features.

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