DMs of Veeky Forums, what is the most embarrassing homebrew setting or system you've ever designed?
I once made an entire setting in my teens based on the world of Willy Wonka, which included a Vernucious Knid enemy, a fleshed out history and culture for Oompa Loompas, and had a Naughtiness score that was a merit based form of luck.
I created a homebrew universe when I was about 20 years old that was a rip off of Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones for GBA. Main difference was that instead of demons it was spiders and instead of dragons, they were bigger spiders. Lyon was bitten by a spider and was possessed by the Spider King. The main reason I did this was that I was unoriginal, and had a lot of giant spider minis. My players still have PTSD about Con saves.
.... Why?
OP that Willy Wonka setting sounds pretty cool.
Seeing as the second one of the actual books was a spacefaring adventure in the glass elevator, it's not too big a stretch to make a Wonka based campaign.
What made it so embarrassing? Did you force in a blueberry fetish or something?
All the homebrew from that 12-16 range when watching Anime made you hot shit because there was blood and cussing and the girls had huge boobs.
So of course it was all about demon ninjas with brooding pasts and giant robots who were also vampires.
It was a dark time.
It wasn't a magical realm, but the problem stems from me being a retard who couldn't use GURPS, so I elected to run a system that was based on how Pokemon games worked, with ATK, SPA, and a four-move set. However, giving a 10 year old Thunderbolt wouldn't make sense, so I gave the players move sets that focused on running away or raising evasiveness.
The Naughtiness score was probably the worst part because it was not only super subjective on my end, but it was a completely behind the screen thing and I just gave hints when someone was being "naughty". It made no fucking sense and ended up being arbitrary as hell. Eventually my friends got confused as fuck because the rest of the game worked like Pokemon but for some reason certain characters were always getting fucked for no reason. Needless to say, there was high character death.
> High Char Death
Well.. kinda dumb that stemmed from something players weren't aware of, but in the book 4/5 kids got removed from play
I'm seconding , OP, look it up, fix it here and there and post it, It's a nice thing to consider.
Heck, I'd be even down for expanding it. The Dahlverse is pretty grim and whimsical at the same time, allows for lots of threats and adventures - witches, men-eating giants, alien swarms, unborn ghosts, and the occasional mad scientist. Even small, comfy stories could fit.
Damn, I'm getting interested as I write this. Deliver, OP, please.
...
A former group member was working on a homebrew setting that's basically Fallout with Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, and a bit of MLP mashed in.
If you guys are actually interested, I can try to find the binder I kept my notes in. Unfortunately the reason I created this thread was because I happened to find an unfinished stat sheet for Matilda, who was a psionic, that was going to be a DMPC to help the players in Minusland. I'm at work currently but if this thread is still alive by the time I get home, I'll try to find the binder and post some pictures of what I wrote.
Godspeed, OP. This practically writes itself.
You keep saying why is what shitty and it keeps sounding better and better. Would be down to play a short campaign in / 10
Good lord
bump
GIVE IT TO ME!!!
Is anyone else thinking Dahl-verse RPG?
Are we a bad enough Veeky Forums to get shit done?
Would it be a darker, unease style Roald Dahl or true to books?
You bet your arse we are.
As soon as OP delivers, we write this shit down & archive
I found a small folder with a few pieces of paper I did in math class once, haven't found the binder yet but I do have some info on how it worked.
So players had ATK, DEF, SPA, SPD, and SPE. Which roughly correlated to STR, CON, INT, WIS, and DEX respectively in terms of gameplay. You picked a nature for your character, which would give you a bonus in one and minus another.
Instead of levels, you would go up in age, or maturity, and get a bonus based on that. I don't remember how it worked exactly, but I think I just divided your age by 5 and that was your bonus to your rolls. If your nature raised a stat, you would add twice your bonus, and you wouldn't add a bonus at all if your nature lowered it.
I had a hidden score, Naughtiness, which I based on a sliding scale of behavior. Your first one or two "bad" decisions, such as being selfish or mean, would get you only one point or two of naughtiness, and later you'd get higher points because you were already "bad". I think I added a fraction of it to enemy attacks. I also subtracted it from your saves behind the screen which was probably not a good idea because there were a lot of DEF saves in this game. And I handed Naughtiness out like candy. I remember I gave someone's character five points (no insignificant amount) for stealing a decoder ring needed to move the plot forward.
Most of a character's moves were variations of raising your speed in that encounter, or evasiveness (which was just a bonus to subtract from enemy attacks). You could punch enemies but it was usually way too weak to do much except to other kids. You could get weapons or powers, like multiclassing but they were more like boons. If you had high enough scores, you could get these powers (like if you had a high SPA, you could become psychic and use psychic powers which was pretty strong) or some sort of sorcery powers if you had high SPD like the girl in The Magic Finger.
It was kind of a mess but for a 13 year old kid it's decently coherent.
The enemy sheet for A Vermicious Knid was 24 ATK, 15 DEF, 14 SPA, 21 SPD, and 22 SPE. It had some metamorphic power to bend into any shape, telepathy, and a weakness to fire powers. There's some movesets for level progression as well. At level 30 they got Bone Grind (???) which did 50 damage, and it seemed like I didn't work out damage or survivability well, because at that level they would one shot just about anything, including each other.
To attack, you rolled a d20 and had to roll higher than their SPE score. You would roll a 1d100 for damage, and get a bonus for your type of weapon used. The 1d100 was the percentage of your ATK you could do as damage. If you leave someone at 1 health, they are unconscious but stable. Health was just the DEF score, which would go down as they took damage. There was a lot of other things but I'll try to find the binder, which had the combat instructions. You would subtract the difference between max DEF and current DEF from your ATK I think, too.
The other sheets I had in the folder are just adventure notes for a trip into Minusland, where they were following Matilda, because to make a Wonka-Vite you needed a flower that grew there, and the party was going to make a Wonka-Vite to give to the witch hunters from Witches. They would be young again and could keep hunting witches, because they were both close to dying of old age, and could keep the Witch coven at bay while the party looked for a magic mirror. The campaign ended around there because middle school ended and we all went to high school and forgot about it. I'll post the full text in a few.
It's all pretty unbalanced atm but I'd be interested in helping make a real Roald Dahl tabletop game because I had a blast making this way back when.
That sounds like a wonderful clusterfuck, I hope you find the rest!
every single one of these sounds fantastic, i would play all of them
That sounds fucking awesome. You could run it in Monsters and Other Childish Things
bump while OP looks for more of his shit
Man, comparatively my stuff is really lame and tame, as it was mostly really bad attempts at making a D&D setting when a teenager but everything is just really bland, poorly thought out crap.
Granted there WAS that one time I barely vaguely tried writing a setting after Magic of Incarnum had come out and very badly wanted to use the material in it despite how, like most if not all alternate system for D&D 3.5 it was overall not all that great. What made it cringe worthy was the unhealthy, poorly thought out half-baked setting cosmology born of terrible ill-researched attempts at being both simultaneously and edgy and politically relevant while 14 years old. In 2005, no less and I dare not imagine what me at that time would have been liked today. Then this shit got combined with my 14 year old self obsessively thinking stacking templates and snowflake options on a character was good writing so you had this world whose magic (divine, arcane and incarnum and maybe psionic I forgot) was tied to the whole soul thing and the bad guys were a thinly veiled nazi (and, obviously catholic) analogy with the poor oppressed bullshit snowflake half dragons and other shitty overpowered template-fueled being. Whose soul were 'purer'. Somehow. Look I was young, stupid and clearly ill informed about just about everything, okay?
>So of course it was all about demon ninjas with brooding pasts and giant robots who were also vampires.
So your friends got to play through an 80's anime OVA. Lucky bastards.
I'd play that shit in a heartbeat.
>giant robots who were also vampires
Anime could never be this cool.