itch.io

I appreciate the praise! 

My initial inspiration came from Meguey & Vincent Baker’s Otherkind Dice concept (https://lumpley.games/2022/03/14/otherkind-dice/). Initially, I thought I'd do a Pacific Rim style Mecha vs. Kaiju treatment, but then I hit upon the pairing of Tarot Card mechanics with knights controlling god-machines to defend a far future earth.

Glad to hear it!

Additionally, I  just finished the update that I mentioned! v0.7 is now live, along with the TRIAL OF STEEL mini-game!

Both approaches, I think, are viable: I will say that the page 9 example is a bit of a relic from a previous draft. Stay tuned for a revision of that, and thanks for bringing it to my attention!

Glad you love it, and hope you enjoy playing it with friends!

A good question!

Currently, drawing and defeating the World scenario can end the game early...but only if the players manage to land a full victory/critical success: otherwise, gameplay continues though the usual Storm/Calm phases as the forces of the dead AI God fight on to avenge its death.

(Last playtest I ran, my players drew the World and Death in the second Storm, and totally defeated both thanks to having some really good starting gear. Could have been anti-climactic, but it won up being a good moment to wrap up the game :P).

"Mech," the pop culture term for giant robots, derives from the Greek word mēkhanḗ, the crane used in Ancient Greek theater to hoist the actors playing gods into the air.

Besides revitalizing the romance of Hades and Persephone with a sleek, transhuman, and very genderqueer cyberpunk setting, you've also brought the mecha genre back to its cultural/lingual roots.

Apò mēkhanês theós. The god from the machine. Machine that are gods. Demigod pilots in the god-machines. God-machines in the demigod pilots.

In short, bravo, and can't wait for the sequel!

Glad you're enjoying the game so far, and glad it all worked out on your end!

Oh dear! Let me check on that!

Edit: I'm not spotting any recent issues with my payment system. I think your best best is to contact itch.io, request a refund, then purchase Armored Bones again.

There's details about how to do that here:

https://itch.io/t/129454/how-are-refunds-handled

Alternately, I can send you the game files directly. When was the specific date you made the purchase?

The tricky part of the mechanics of ARMORED BONES (and my other tarot deck roleplaying  game, LAST CHARGE OF THE SENTRY ARCANES) is that the gameplay requires you to shuffle a Tarot Deck apart into two separate decks: one for the Major Arcana Cards, the other for the Minor Arcana Cards.

One thing you can  do is use this TINY TAROT app (https://raindrinker.itch.io/tiny-tarot), which only lets you draw Major Arcana cards, then use a physical or digital deck of classic playing cards to  stand in for the Minor Arcana deck (Spades are Swords, Clubs are Wands, etc).

His Majesty The Worm,  another tarot-focused dungeon crawling game, also has some interesting alternatives to physical Tarot decks suggested on its website.

Thanks for your interest in my game. Hope you have fun with it!

Alternately, you can use the non-Tarot Deck alternative suggested in the recently released "His Majesty The Worm." Rolling a twenty-sided die to randomly select Major Arcana cards,  using a deck of playing cards for the Minor Arcana, and counting the Joker as the Fool whenever you draw it

Glad to hear you're keen on my game! :)

If you're lacking a good Tarot Deck, one resource you can use is this Tiny Tarot browser app that's hosted here on itch.io:

https://raindrinker.itch.io/tiny-tarot

This app currently only lets you draw and shuffle around Major Arcana cards....which works out nice, since the gameplay mechanics of LAST CHARGE OF THE SENTRY ARCANES use a Tarot deck that's split apart into its Major and Minor Arcana cards.

With the Tiny Tarot app and a normal deck of playing cards, you should be able to play LCotSA with little issue.

Also, I corrected that typo and others as of the most recent game update!

Glad to hear you liked my ttrpg! Hope your friends enjoy Last Charge of the  Sentry Arcanes!

That "11 to 16" gap in the "FOOL' entry of the Threat Dossier is a typo: it should be  "6 to 15" for a partial success result and "16+" for a critical success.

Should be  corrected! If not, give me a heads-up!

Edit: should probably wait a bit for Stripe to process my account update.

Uh-oh!  Gonna  look  into this!

I was in this game! 

Krampus ate all the cookies.

The robot running the toy factory got overthrown by an Luddite elf rebellion. 

The friendly worker elf impersonating Saint Nick was assassinated (by a  penguin?). 

The eldritch entity known as Rudolph escaped from his cyclopean cryo-tomb. 

Comet's understudy took over Christmas and rebranded it to be entirely reindeer  themed.

10/10 would kill Santa again.

I'd personally recommend "The Night Land" retelling by James  Stoddard, which  updates the archaic prose/characterization of the original and really lets the "Far future Earth where  the sun has gone out and horrors swarm around the final fortress cities of humanity" setting shine.

Hmmm...I'm getting vibes  of Dark Souls,  the Night Land, and  that  BLAME! Manga in the description of this setting?

What you described was exactly what I was hoping to make with this game :)

Very glad you liked it!

I sent a friend request on discord!

Fair! I can see how it would be hard for a translated Chinese TRPG to break into the already saturated English TTRPG market.

That said, are there any Chinese-language Open Source TRPGs you'd recommend, coffee_ghost_TW? I've done some Chinese-to-English translation work in the past...

Same here! I've been searching for TTRPGs made by Chinese creators for a while!

Does the "Free Open Source TRPG Chinese Translation Group" translate TRPGs into Chinese, or translate Chinese TRPGs into other languages, or both?

Hearing that you liked this game and its setting warms my heart! I'll continue to play-test and iterate the rules of "Sauropolita" so you can gain even better experiences playing this game in the future. :)

Maybe the name of this game's fictional theme park could be tweaked a bit so it doesn't get conflated with the James Gurney books?