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Before the Worms pulls out the core of horror conspiracy roleplaying. It is the rawest, simplest, most clear-eyed portrayal I've seen of the fear and drama that we try to achieve when playing games like Delta Green, Night's Black Agents, Hunter, or any other game where mortals stand against monsters. It speaks to familiar suffering and gives the best answer a game can give. I want to tell everyone about this game. Even if you never intend to play it, worth reading to think about when designing other horror works.

Game jam achievements unlocked:

Altruist
Release an adventure under an open-source license.

Write what you know.
Set an adventure in either the town where you live or a thinly-disguised copy. (I'm going to call this close enough.)

Heck yeah, that's incredible! Also really fun to see that you went with Zgol. That was a reference to Slav Borg, a Polish RPG about street-racing goblins:
https://slavdom-studio.com/en_US/p/SLAV-BORG-Goblins-choice/108

Hi Kalakauer! This is mostly a ttrpg jam, not a video game jam! While I wouldn't turn down a video game made for the jam, I don't think you're likely to find a composer here. 

Tentacles! Ordinary Office Job is like a faster and more focused Cthulhu Dark with office vibes. I like how the end state is, "enthralled by the tentacles" and not death. Just reading it, I can tell it would be really fun to play.

I like how this lyric game draws out the central dilemma that a lot of vampire games are built around, hitting the key beats of the story.

That's very cool to hear! I'd love to see a picture of the scroll if you feel like posting it anywhere!

Horror that plays with perception and ability is one of my favorites.
Without spoiling anything, the hand minion's special ability is an excellent horror element I'm surprised I don't see more in RPGs.

Thanks, and thank you for catching those! I just fixed them.

Desculpe. Eu te disse a coisa errada. Um link é para o jogo colorido. O outro link é para o jogo preto e branco. A versão em preto e branco é para quem quer imprimir uma cópia em casa e economizar tinta.

Olá! Clique no botão verde que diz "download" para baixar o jogo. É um PDF. Um botão "download" baixa o jogo. O outro baixa a ficha de personagem.  O Medo À Espreita é uma tradução em português do meu jogo "The Lurking Fear". A tradução foi feita por Jeff Donizetti, um fã do Brasil. Eu não falo português, então usei o Google Tradutor para esta mensagem. Peço desculpas se esta mensagem não estiver bem escrita.

Thank you for such a wonderful review!

I'm so glad to hear that! I tried to make the text feel esoteric but actually be very accessible.

I really like that! It's grounded and relatable, but still fantastic.

Now that's what I'm talking about! Would you like to share some of the characters?

These are great questions!

For weapons, I tried to keep it pretty simple and keep all of the numbers low. Weapons that hit harder than an unarmed strike give a bonus to Menace. Weapons that are easy to use give a bonus to Fight rolls, but weapons that are difficult to use or require specialized training don't. Holding a sword or any other weapon that gives some reach does make it easier to hold off an attacker and land blows, giving a bonus to the Fight roll. I can definitely play a little with which weapons fall into which category.

First Aid can be used to remove the conditions Injured and Slowed. I should probably put in some more explicit rules about that.

Panicking and scars are the most experimental part of the game and the part I'm most likely to change. It would be interesting to do a playtest running it that way and see how it plays. It could also make for a nice alternate rule to adjust depending on the type of horror game.

Glad to hear you're still onboard, Mograg!

Two to five players, but if you're used to running games you could probably make it work for six.

Took a lot of tries, but I finally got it! Helped by getting a succubus on turn 2 after building a tier 3 milkman.

One thing I didn't get the hang of was buildings. I thought they were supposed to provide coins or stat buffs each turn, but it didn't seem like they did? It would also be nice if it was clear if buffs like the Mega Milk are permanent or just for one battle.

Hi Mograg,

I'm honored by all of the attention that you've given my game. That attribution is done correctly.

Send me a link to your game when you publish it, I'd like to check it out!

Sincerely,

Lyme
LymeRPG@gmail.com

I am still planning to release it! Since this is a hobby for me, I'm not able to commit to a release date - real life gets in the way as it does.

In most investigative games, a GM should want the players to get their hands on as many clues as possible - the challenge for the players is how they interpret those clues and face the dangers they lead to. Because of that, I try to let skills be wide and have plenty of overlap when used for investigation, but I take a more narrow approach when they're being used to face danger.

Profession skills are intended to overlap, but only in the context of the profession. A race car driver can use their skill instead of drive - if their on the track. If they're trying to get a truck full of explosives up a muddy hill, Profession: Automobile Racer wouldn't be useful, but Profession: Trucker would. The drive skill could be used in either place, but it couldn't be used to understand the business of professional athletics like Profession: Automobile Racer could.

I'm personally opposed to skills that serve as general "lie detectors", like read people or psychology. To me, deciding if you find someone's words believable based on context is a big part of the game. I would allow Profession skills to tell a fake, but only in the context of subjects where they have expertise. For instance, I'd let a musician roll their profession skill to see through a record producer's lies in a business deal, or I'd let a soldier roll to realize someone is faking having military experience. For a private sleuth, I might let them roll their profession skill in the context of catching a cheating spouse or an industrial spy, which tend to be the two sorts of jobs that private detectives end up working.

It's a bit of a weakness of hitpoint systems. A common response is to view HP as representing fatigue and minor injuries that gradually weaken a character until, at zero hp, they finally take a truly dangerous injury. In practice, I've never seen a player or GM resist the temptation to describe attacks that reduce HP as causing serious trauma to the flesh. Still, HP is a feature of most older d100 horror games, so it needs to be a feature for maximum ease of compatibility.

I am working on a more modern horror system that will not use HP at all.

A lot of investigative horror adventures unfold over the course of a few days or weeks. Taking characters out for a realistic six-month hospital stay basically means the player has to make a new character or sit out for the rest of the game, neither of which are fun.

And it's not like being at full HP will help that much against really scary things.

One request - could you credit Nightmare Unleashed as by myself and Plasmophage? On a one-page game like this the art/layout are a big deal and very tied into how the final words came out.

That's really exciting! I'll go check it out.

You can also contact me at lymerpg@gmail.com and at https://dice.camp/@Lyme

Best cover art on any RPG supplement.

Extremely excellent, elegant, a new era of effort for effective 5E entertainment!

Now this is a great supplement - if you've ever wanted to just start with higher stats, ask your GM about "using the optional zodiac sign rules to make our characters more interesting."

5E is a game for everyone, but most of all, 5E is a game for you. Yes, you. The real 5E was in your heart all along, which is a shame because that makes it very hard to read.

I wrote a ttrpg called 5E. It is, undeniably, the world's best fantasy roleplaying game. If you are interested in creating third party content for it under my generous licensing terms, I'm running an itch jam here: https://itch.io/jam/3rd-party-content-for-5e

I'm using this content in my next game of D&D!

This game mentions character levels, an idea that I created when I wrote the world's best roleplaying game, 5E. I know I published 5E under a creative commons license but I changed my mind and would now like 25% of your revenue from this game.

C'mon dude, I gave you 10% off your satanism...

Heck yeah, a Dreadnoughts RPG. I always sing their stuff when I'm drinking cider!

Feel free to hack! All my work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, so you can do anything you like with it, even sell your hack for money, as long as you credit the original.

If you let me know when you release your hack, I'll even share it around my own network. Well, if I like it. But I like a lot of RPGs.

It certainly is!

It looks like I can't have files download from a blog post on itch, only from the main page. I've gone ahead and added the Markdown to the main page after all, since that seems like the only way.

I followed those guides to make both ePub and MD versions of The Lurking Fear. I'm more of a writer than a dev by skill, but it wasn't too difficult and it was fun to learn something new. Thanks for the suggestion!

I've added the ePub version to the main itch page. The MD version is only available on this blog post because I wanted to avoid confusion, but I could put it on the frontpage if I ever had enough demand:

https://lymetime.itch.io/lurkingfear/devlog/456584/epub-and-markdown-versions-of...