itch.io

The art on the 24XX page is by Mike Winkelmann, also known as BEEPLE, offered under a CC BY 4.0 license. Many of Beeple's images are available for download at relatively high resolution from his Behance site. This post explains how to identify which of BEEPLE's images are free to use on Behance, and how to download the highest-quality images.

IDENTIFYING CC-LICENSED IMAGES ON BEHANCE

1. Verify the date: BEEPLE's "everydays" up to November 2016 are CC BY, as are everydays in February 2017.
2. Verify the license icon: Scroll to the bottom of the page … then scroll back up a bit. Check the bottom right, over the carousel of art. 

 Images with the "Attribution" icon (a person in a circle, pictured at left) are free to use. Example: March 2016.

 Some specify "Non-Commercial, No Derivatives" (represented by a dollar sign crossed out and an equal sign, pictured at left)—the images could be shared, but not modified or sold, limiting their use for art in a game. Example: March 2017.

DOWNLOADING HIGH-RES IMAGES FROM BEHANCE

1. Right-click the image.
2. Choose “Inspect” (or your browser's equivalent).
3. A frame with HTML appears, highlighting the line with the image's code—click the triangle (►) on the left of that line.
4. You will see links for different sizes of that image—click the last, which should be the most high-res.
5. Right-click that image and save it to your computer.

POSTSCRIPT

I share this information because people often ask, and I wanted to have one post to reference easily. All of that said, there's a wealth of options for imagery to use in games. 

Aetherway is compatible with Tunnel Goons and Troika!. (Characters can be described the same way according to both rule systems, so Aetherway offers character and setting information that works for both games, and also briefly restates the rules for each game.)

Itch.io also has a number of other Troika!-compatible and Tunnel-Goons compatible games and adventures.

Hope this helps!

Thanks—updated!

Thanks! Wrapping up a long-running playtest soon. Looking forward to sharing more. 

Never heard it, but now I intend to. Thank you for the heads up!

Thanks for sharing! Adding to the collection and linking from the SRD page!

Thank you! This post has alerted me to the fact that I have actually designed more of this game than I have actually posted, so I should rectify that as soon as possible. This month is absurdly busy, but I'll share more ASAP.

Excellent, thanks for sharing! I've added a link to the page!

Thanks for catching this! Just updated it to fix the error.

Thanks for sharing—I've added it to the Itch collection!

Thanks so much for sharing your experience! I really appreciate hearing this, and am honored to have played even a small part in encouraging good-natured familial mayhem. Congratulations for coming out stronger on the other side of it all!

Great, thanks! My players are similarly adept at avoiding combat, especially when they can talk their way out of it. (Last session they put on a concert with a Meat Loaf impersonator and a hand-painted sign to tell a bunch of raiders that they didn’t kill their leader, offering a chance to parley.) Lots of bugs for us too, and took me too long to think of using swarm rules even for larger enemies. 

Thanks so much for sharing! This is really helpful for me to hear—I'm actively working on updates and revisions while running my own campaign right now. 

If you have a moment to field a follow-up question: When you say almost everything they've fought has been owl-bear-ish, have those been lone owl bears? (Still trying to figure out how many HP is okay to make sure fights don't drag. 20 seems to be just about the upper end for a solo for my group, but the "d4 [number appearing]" on the Knave 2e owl bear made me think to ask!)

I'd love to hear how it goes!

Excellent! I've added it to the 24XX collection and the list of translations on the SRD page!

Apologies, I accidentally failed to subscribe to this topic! I've fixed the links to the respective servers and have added a link to the Cauldron Discourse forum as well.

Ah, I failed to subscribe to this topic long ago—so sorry I missed this! I just added it to the collection and added a link to the SRD list!

Scroll down to one of the months of Everydays in the period that’s covered on Behance (like this one—it’s everything until November 2016, plus that one in 2017).  At the bottom of the page, you’ll see a Creative Commons license icon. Most of them only have the “Attribution” icon (which looks like a little person in a circle); some also include the “Non Commercial” icon (which looks like “$” crossed out).

Looks promising! See also the "Wildling" comment on Hit + Die—leaving out the wilderness class in my drive for minimalism is apparently a recurring habit of mine, despite having played rangers across multiple D&D campaigns. 😅 

I'd just advise making sure to choose scenarios actually set in the wilderness and/or give players a heads up about which talents might be most worth taking early. Some of the quest suggestions in Legends (or pre-written scenarios you might adapt for it) might leave a ranger player feeling like they took useless talents. (E.g., they wouldn't get much use out of "Iron Survivor" if the first quest were to attend a fancy gala as a noble's "guests" / bodyguards.)

Congrats! I’ve added it to the 24XX collection!

Thank you for your kind words, and yes—my inspirations are not subtle!

The character creation process in Codebreakers implies everybody in the group starts the game already aware of the truth of the simulation, already members of a cell. The presumed default scenario setup is a contact giving the group the details of an operation, with a nod to either of a couple other contacts the group might hit up next. It makes for easy one-shots and episodic series/campaigns. 

My personal preference is to go much more bonkers, though: Don't start anybody with the "Simulation" skill—and perhaps even make characters in some other 24XX game entirely. Make their entry into Codebreakers feel weird and jarring as they realize they're in a simulation. One adventure I wrote (yet to be transcribed online from a notebook!) transitions from a wizard's tower, trying to open a portal to another world, to an office building with a computer monitor where messages from Mothman urge you to get out right now.

Aw, thanks so much! I appreciate hearing it!

I am not a lawyer! That said: I’ve heard the rights holders for Conan may be a bit more on the litigious side, and  there’s a recent RPG adaptation under official license by Modiphius. So—just to be safe—I personally would use a name other than “Conan” (and say “inspired by 1930s sword and sorcery pulp fiction, including R.E. Howard’s Conan stories” on the page). Then I’d scour public domain art resources (like comics and pulp magazines at Comic Book Plus) for anything at all that screams “Conan” to me, favoring things that match the “feel” of the game. 

Congratulations, and thanks for the notification! I’ve added it to the 24XX Collection!

You’re commenting on 24XX, which is a toolkit of resources for making new games. It includes some of the text from Cosmic Highway, but not all of it. 

Cosmic Highway is part of 2400, a bundle of over a dozen micro-RPGs. After you make up characters and a crew and set up a job, you play using the rules described in the game—you take turns describing things with your friends. In case it’s helpful, there are some “actual play” videos of people playing linked from the 2400 page, and I wrote a series of devlogs to give more context about each game in 2400.

All the games in 2400 are intentionally minimalistic, like playing pretend with a bit of structure. Some people find this freeing (especially those who aren’t fond of arithmetic, or who find short games with little to read very approachable); others prefer games that provide more rules guidance and examples. 

Hope this helps. 

Thanks so much for sharing! I've been working on (and reworking) the wasteland denizen chapter during playtesting. Still trying to to get it to feel like "here are actual guidelines to create interesting things you will use" and not just "roll on this a few times and cross your fingers it might make sense."

Thanks so much! It's been slow going since I can only plug away at it in my spare time and my day job has been keeping me super busy, but I'll update with more info as I'm able!

It's going, thanks! We wrapped up the intro adventure (in a location inspired by a certain major metropolitan city's art museum). That was initially designed as a self-contained thing with a MacGuffin in the adventuring site, but I ended up saying it wasn't in there anymore to give us an excuse to test iterations of the travel, faction, and combat rules, visit other parts of the map, and just generally get into trouble. 

Wastoid has multiple inspirations, but my friends are very much playing it like a Fallout game, which means stopping along the way to do inane "side quests" at every opportunity. Our last session was spent pretty much entirely killing cow-sized "jumbo crabs" at the behest of some random scientist they met on the road because he promised he could inject them with a "serum" if they killed enough of them. Now a couple wastoids have soft shells, another has a claw, and a couple more have gills in their armpits.

Maybe someday they'll find the painting they're looking for. Or one of them will be the new president. That's a thing that might happen, too, apparently. We'll see.

I'm doing much better, thanks! And that's awesome—if you ever feel like sharing how the game works for you, I'd love to hear, warts and all. I'm playtesting and revising myself now!

Thanks for the well wishes—I'm doing much better! 

Long story short: I honestly can't say when the release date will be, but I'm actively playtesting (with another session scheduled tomorrow) and working on it still.

Ah, yeah, Vanda doesn’t exactly have a well stocked trading post so much as a ruined shrine, a rumor mill, and a petrified husband she will sell for 5 souls (or best offer, really). Maybe she’ll get some more in stock when you come back from your next quest, though! 😉

(Edit to add: That’s my way of saying the soul values for enemy drops were calculated based on the assumption they’re used mostly for leveling, split between a party of a few players, and if you happen to have any left over for shopping, that’s swell, but I didn’t count on merchants having reliable stock in what’s effectively a post-apocalyptic setting.)

Thanks so much! I hope to playtest a Dungeon23 adventure I made for an expanded version of the rules I'd love to share. I have some other priorities I need to sort through before I can get to that, though.

Thank you! And EACH and ANY enemy that you can imagine collecting souls for whatever reason could have [roll and sum its ability dice] souls. 

(I meant for this "tutorial adventure" to introduce players to the idea that this world's monsters pretty much all have good reason to be hungry for souls, but I suspect I confused the issue by having the first monsters you encounter already be famous for rummaging around corpses!)

Wow! Thanks for sharing—I’m glad to hear it “clicked” so well for you!

This is so nice to hear—thank you so much!

Thanks for checking in! To be honest, I’ve had so much on my plate that progress on a revised edition has been slow.  I appreciate the nudge, though: I’ve got a draft that’s far enough along that it might be worth tidying up and releasing for playtest feedback, given some free time. 

In the meantime, I encourage you to download a free community copy to take a peek if you’re curious what it’s like. Hellboy annd BPRD were indeed huge influences!

Thanks so much for the kind words! (And for bringing an Elden Ring one-shot to my attention!)

Also, thank you for reminding me to check community copy counts on my other games. Just added another thousand to some that were all out or close to it, including Grave, Exhumed, and Agents of the O.D.D.!

You’re welcome, and thank you so much for this kind message! I really appreciate it.