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Thanks for the question. It actually says to add a die if you "exploit an advantage." It's not defined because it's not a game mechanics term here (unlike, say, in 5e). It's up to the GM and players to use the fiction established as they play to determine whether how a character is doing something should qualify as exploiting an advantage. Anything that has been set up in the game and invoked in the player's description of their actions that you feel should give them a significant boost in achieving their goal can qualify as an advantage.

I appreciate the tip. TEL always looked interesting, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet. Good to know this can plug in well after that. 

Not a dumb question! Since it's a binary choice, a really strict reading might leave you wondering how to roll sometimes when facing something that isn't literally the Wizard or a Mortal, so I intentionally left it a bit open to interpretation.

My preferred approach is to make the Wizard's minions a mix of mortals convinced to help them for one reason or another and various magical creatures that wouldn't exist if not for the Wizard, and to give the Mortals some problems that come from the Wizard and some that come from other Mortals. That way, the SkelJWs could have a mix of roll high and roll low when both trying to help Mortals and trying to go after the Wizard.

Environmental risks, traps, and other dangers that don't directly come from Mortals or the Wizard can be assessed based on who caused/initiated them, what purpose they caused the danger for, and/or who is aided by the danger's threat being realized.

Before a bullet is even aimed, the wealth hoarded behind the lead sets out to drain the lives of others...

[]CHXMBER] & ()BXRREL) is a TTRPG supplement for Rathayibacter's [BXLLET> that lets the PCs build power and hold sway over a settlement. It was made as part of [BXLLET> JXM 2.

It includes rules for hoarding Barrels of material wealth and different things to spend them on, such as enticing NPCs to act as Agents of your will and building up your personal fortified Chambers.

While these mechanics were designed for [BXLLET>, they could easily be dropped into any rules-light system to bring some more play options to your weird west or post-apocalyptic setting.

Get it now here: https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/chxmber-bxrrel

https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/the-pried-eye

https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/penumbra

https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/born-of-a-bloody-film

A labor dispute at a valuable mine reveals the horrors that preceded it. The fossils of a little-understood ancient plant, glowing the color of a dragon's fruit, are crushed to a fine powder and diluted into a rare, luxurious, and intoxicating spice with unknown consequences. A monastery of a small but influential religious order harbors a dark secret. A hapless group of adventurers will face the potentially far-reaching implications of these intersecting arcs and decide what will remain hidden and the shape of the conflict to come.

ROSEATE GROWTH is a fantasy roleplaying adventure for three-to-five lower-level players, written in a system-neutral style for OSR games. It should last roughly two or three sessions with some ripple effects that could be tied into your broader campaign or ignored.

The book is 35 pages long, and it contains:

• 6 adventure hooks
• 30+ adventure repercussions
• Dungeon map with 23 rooms
• 5 unique monsters
• 6+ unique items

Grab a copy here: https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/roseate-growth-an-osr-adventure

Thanks for the review!

I appreciate the detailed review!

Pulled from a pit of refuse, ever-shadowed corners, a plane of agony, and the fabric of nightmares itself, these terrifying creatures will stalk, scare, torture, and possess any hapless fools who stumble into their realms.

Born of a Bloody Film is a supplement for Mörk Borg and other OSR-inspired RPGs that includes four monsters torn from horror movies and mangled to use in your games. It was made as part of Michael Mars's Slasher Jam. You'll get full art, stats, and some lore for each creature.

Get it now for PWYW, before it gets a proper price: https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/born-of-a-bloody-film

Thanks for the mention! Glad to know it made an impact in your design. And good job going with the GM-less approach too.

Serious Reading is the only game inspired by the brow furrowing and spine shuddering evoked by opinion columns. 

A solo journaling game built with William Lentz's Second Guess System, it allows you to create a columnist character whose writings reveal far more about themselves and why they shouldn't be listened to than what they're supposed to be writing about.

Get it now here: https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/serious-reading

Ten souls that wander the Wastes, that interrupt what is with what could be, whether for better or worse...

⁍⁍⁍⁍⁍TXN SOULS⁌⁌⁌⁌⁌ is a supplement for Rathayibacter's [BXLLET> that provides 10 NPCs to be plugged into your game with a roll table to help you randomly select one. It was made as part of Legendary Vermin's [BXLLET JXM>.

Get it now here: https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/txn-souls

The Sap ran thin. A dozen generations grew up on it and were taught to revere and thank it for powering every light, every engine, every terminal. They probably would have fed it to us if they were slightly less certain about its carcinogenic properties, properties that are shameful to even mention in polite company. Most people chose to ignore the sky getting more gray, the crops getting more brown, and the waters getting more black as long as prosperity and convenience were maintained as the avatars of success.

Now the Regulators are working like mad to keep quiet the fact that the pumps are turning up dry, and sheer panic lies just a single press leak away. As the Khefnari Empire's logistics corps were discussing whether to run the Colony to the last drop or preemptively scorch it to avoid the headache of blackouts, famine, and uprisings, an alert from a new monitoring satellite broke them from their deliberations. The massive asteroid BX-319 is returning on its millennium-long orbit. With contemporary scanners, an unthinkable analysis presents itself: The asteroid’s core might be teeming with Sap.

With just a week before BX-319 slingshots back toward the darkness for many more centuries, and with the Regulators’ best survey teams already busy scouring the oldest pump sites for the last hard-to-find pockets of Sap, they’re dispatching the V-Dailies, a ragtag team with that perfect mix of expertise and expendability, to confirm the site, set the drills, and establish production. You never much liked these fellow roughnecks by your side, but if you can pull this off, you just might be able to retire on the glory of saving the Colony from energy extinction and never have to deal with the rest of these sloggers, or even this backwater planet, again. But if you can’t, well, you know just how little the Khefnari are willing to spend to extract some blue-collars from a piece of rock already set to fling their failure out of the realm of their concern.

Penumbra is a contemplative one-shot adventure for Jesse Ross’s Trophy Dark in which the players, a rag-tag group of burnt-out Sap drillers forced into the role of last-minute heroes, will struggle to cross a desolate asteroid and add a few final grains of sand to the Colony's proverbial hourglass. A bleak and lonely exploration of whether to fight the end, this book contains all of the rules you need to play, including all-new character creation options.

Grab a copy here: https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/penumbra

"The papers and everyone in town said it was a meteorite, but the Johnsons out in the fields said it had a flat, crescent-like shape and shimmered across the sky. Millie’s boy over the river said the same, and that he heard it sing. The farmhand over at Calhoun’s up and disappeared the night after, but not before giddily showing off some rainbow-colored jewels to the cook at Molly’s. If he stayed upright long enough to get past the county line, he’s probably already riding the rails to an appraiser.

"You know these woods better than most. If a seasonal farmhand can find valuables like that, you can do better, a lot better. So you call your trusted few, pack your gear, and wait on the porch, bouncing your knee till daybreak. Only once you’re at the treeline do you hesitate for a moment, gripped by the passing remembrance of the games you played here as a child. Frozen in the thought that these may not be your woods anymore, it’s the warmth of nostalgia and the people by your side that take your first step for you."

The Pried Eye is an incursion (or one-shot adventure) for Jesse Ross's Trophy Dark, a character-driven horror roleplaying game about treasure hunters trying to claim what is not theirs and suffering for it mightily. A tense and eerie descent into body horror, cosmic weirdness, and ego murder focusing on the theme of communion, this book contains all of the rules you need to play, including all-new character creation options.

Grab a copy here: https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/the-pried-eye

Thanks for the ideas. If I do a second edition, I'll consider how to best make it GM-less. That'd probably be a good addition.

Hey, thanks for the feedback! These are all good points, and I'll try to address them individually.

1.) The guidance on when to time handing out tokens is non-specific to help prevent the Strangers from easily deducing what words are poisoned and, about as important, to give the Keeper of Silence at least a little more agency and stuff to do. The Keeper really only has two levers to pull the whole game: decide a word is poisoned and time when to hand out tokens. If the timing was more automatic, they really wouldn't have much to do.

The hope is that the flexibility will both keep the Strangers paying more attention to the Keeper (at least in the back of their mind) as they talk and keep the Keeper invested in the beat-to-beat unfolding of the Strangers' conversation. Allowing another player (the Keeper) to have agency over how tokens are doled out, within reason, keeps the Strangers from off-loading that concern from their considerations during play. Even as they start to figure out a pattern, it can change.

There are other options that could definitely be more thematic, but I also wanted to limit components as much as I could, since Hush is already relatively component-heavy for a micro-RPG. I'm open to other suggestions to maintain the considerations and tensions described above without adding more components, though.

2.) The decision to have multiple community dice was twofold. First, I didn't want to require a whole second set of tokens to track the community progress, and people are much more likely to have a few dice than a second type of tokens. Second, I wanted each Stranger to have their own community die, instead of one singular one that everyone contributes to, to ensure the new community is only formed after every surviving Stranger is able to fulfill others' desires and contribute to the community. Thematically, I didn't want half of the Strangers to reach the goal of "forming a new community" for everyone without the other Strangers contributing.  You need everyone's participation to form a community. Perhaps there's a bit of disconnect with naming them "community dice" and everyone having their own... Perhaps something like "contribution dice" would be a better fit?

3) The paranoia is admittedly more for the characters than the players, so maybe it's not the best for the marketing copy about how the game feels. As a micro-RPG, there aren't really enough stakes or competing interests for much paranoia at the player level.  But I would classify the experience of the Stranger characters, who could drop dead at any time and are gradually coming to the conclusion that it's due to (some) of the words they speak killing them, as fairly paranoia-inducing. I don't know that "paranoiac" is different enough or specific enough to fit, but I'm open to other options.

Sorry if the title seemed to be biting off more than the little game itself does. Hush is just a refinement of a 200-word RPG contest entry that I gave a layout to. I wanted to use the short word limit to make something that tried to balance a need to connect with deadly limitations on one's ability to communicate. I guess, when framing it like that, the metaphor you're looking for is there, but barely. It works more broadly, I think, as an analog for any situation where someone wants to connect but is impeded from doing so, whether from within or without. A project directly addressing the massive ongoing mental health crisis in America is, unfortunately, a task beyond my experience and skills.

To be more precise, the constant march of gun violence in America is a nexus of many interconnected issues, including the lack of accessible mental health services, which itself exacerbates the many other causes, such as extreme social and economic stress and alienation, structural racism and individual prejudice, patriarchy and toxic masculinity, general and specific disenfranchisement, easy access to firearms, gaps in education and empathy, political powerlessness, the dismantling and destruction of community, the devaluation of life in general (and the role that the violence of police and incarceration play in that), etc.  The various and dynamic causes are part of the reason why the issue is so difficult to tackle, second only, maybe, to the complete lack of will among the powerful to actually change anything.

Looking for a new kind of micro-RPG for your tabletop gaming group? Set after a poison in our words themselves has caused society to gradually unravel and fall largely silent, Hush sees the players struggling to forge a new community among strangers while trying to avoid the fate that has already befallen so many.

You can get the game here: https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/hush

I'd have some interest in it. But yeah, so far it just sounds like "rules-light, fiction-heavy vamps." I like the idea of the betting and bonds introduced by Undying, the PbtA VtM remake, but otherwise it's almost the exact same tone and politics as original VtM.