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That's an excellent question! There's no sharp delineation, the exact line is gonna vary between groups, but the significance of spending a token is that you're staking a narrative claim: this action I'm taking is important, it matters, it'll continue to matter even when I'm not around. Anyone can be a good artist, but someone with an Artist trait can spend a token to make their art important to the world. That art gets tangled up in the story we're all telling, will sink below the surface of the game and rise up unexpectedly, because the Disparateum itself agrees that it's important and interesting and relevant. Does that make you the best artist in the world? No, it doesn't even necessarily mean you're good (though you can be if you want to be), but you being an artist is always relevant. 

Inviolate spits in the face of that. The Inevitable is a layer that believes, as much as a place can believe anything, that only it matters. The way it's written in the book is the way it is. You can visit, you can talk to people, you can make art here, but it won't change anything. There's no point. You might as well give up. It takes how many artists feel, living under fascism, and nails it to the wall as a law of reality. Your art can't change the world here, it says. It might look nice, it might make someone smile or think, but that's it. It won't go anywhere. It won't change the way things are. 

So, the question now is, how do you feel about that? Are you gonna give up, accept defeat? Water down your art, accept that it won't do anything so you might as well not bother? Will you accept the premise, play by Alexander's rules? Or is there another way?

This is absolutely fantastic!!! Thank you so much for the detailed writeup, and I'm so incredibly happy to see yall having so much fun in my little sandbox! Didn't think I'd see Maggie and the Curator team up like this, but maybe they've got a sultry past together... Absolutely in love with the prop cars too, that's so fucking cool. Just an enormous amount of character oozing out of each and every one.

Send my love to your players, they sound brilliantly creative and a real joy! Loved the bit of them donning masks and playing out the murder, that's exactly the kind of stuff I hoped this game would make space for. Thank you again!

cant wait for this game its gonna be so fucking sick

Thank you so much, this is incredibly kind!! I'm glad this is lighting up your brain, it feels so good to finally have this out in the world!

Thank you so much, this is incredibly lovely to hear! KATABASIS is definitely dense, I'm glad you've found so much to unpack in it! Would you mind if I shared this on tumblr?

Really beautifully haunting, a study of a person-non-person slowly constructing an identity in a world of disorienting information and contradictory rules.

This is awesome! I'm so happy to hear yall had a great time, and looking forward to hearing where it goes! Would you mind if I shared this on tumblr?

Been tinkering with it off and on for a bit! I've had most of the rest of the game planned since the beginning, but I tend to work on several projects in parallel so couldn't tell you the next time I'll be pushing an update. 

Hell yeah hell yeah! Love how creative and unique they all are! Have you considered publishing these?

This is a cursed and vile game. Do not play it.

Fucking fantastic! Been poring through everything here, really really love it. These seem like extremely juicy characters already, and I can't wait to see what they get up to! Love everyone playing against type. Do yall have names for em yet?

Absolutely love that idea! Can't wait to hear more about it!

Thanks for reaching out! Adding more GM support is definitely a goal of mine going forward, as when I wrote this game originally it was very much geared for my personal playstyle as a GM-- that is to say, heavily improvisational and imagery-focused. Most of my planning comes down to coming up with cool concepts and then figuring out ways to throw them in front of my players to see what they do. But hey, that's pretty broad, so let's get into some specific advice!

One, lean on Rituals! The Ritual of Beginning is written to give a broad trajectory for a game that's just getting started, as well as to quickly tangle up the PCs' lives. Playing that out, letting the players explore the Named City for a bit, and then hopping into the Ritual of Sleep will probably eat up a good amount of your first session and give yourself and your players a nice taste of what the game has to offer. Other rituals, like Storytelling or Bloodshed, help to frame significant moments in a way that's not unlike GM moves in a PbtA game. 

Two, pick one or two layers you really like and focus in on them. Pick out a few locations that speak to you, write some NPCs who hang out there, give one of them a knotty problem, and set your players loose. There's a lot of disparate (ha) ideas in this book, you don't have to worry about juggling all of them at once. If you take the advice from point one, just play around in the City and Dreaming for a while, and only expand out once you're comfortable! 

Three, check out small business in the zine titled Seven Plays. It's a little adventure module, just a couple NPCs and story beats, but enough to get a story going if the above isn't cutting it. There's also Apoptosis but it's considerably less new-GM friendly, as instead of a clear goal and some stops along the way it gives you pregen PCs with an insurmountable problem and asks you to play out a bleak tone piece. 

Lastly, remember the game's mantra: If it's interesting, you can do it / If you forget about it, ignore it / The City is wide enough for all of us. Don't sweat the details too much! The GM is a player too, and that means you should have fun with it! Get a bit silly with your friends, bite off more than you can chew, and when you inevitably make mistakes take them in stride and grow from the experience.

Hope you have a lovely time!

AWESOME

Glad yall had a good time!! aaa this is making my day

Watch this space! No promises on the timescale, but I have been working on this again!

Please do, and I'd love if you shared anything you wind up making!

:3c

Traits are something I wanna do another pass over to clarify, so don't feel bad for the confusion. You absolutely can and should create your own! The ones listed on the Traits page are meant to be scattershot examples of the different categories, but you can have anything as a Trait.

I was thinking a while back about adding a big list of hypothetical Traits, with the explicit caveat that it was non-comprehensive. I should really get on that.

The default assumption is that you have exactly three players (as the Knight, Thief, and Seer) and a Tower acting as a traditional GM, but it then goes on to play with that assumption a bit. The first Act has some guidance on messing with the Tower, including playing without one, and later parts will do the same with the player count. You could feasibly play Disparateum solo, it'd just require juggling a lot of hats!

You're all good! That chapter in particular is a bit tricky lmao

Oh this rules, hell yeah!! Great idea for a class, really sharp abilities and gorgeous formatting! Thank you for making this 💚

Ayoooo! Would love to see it!

Disparateum definitely needs a second pass for the mechanics sections to clarify things like this, so don't feel bad for feeling confused!

The idea behind the seven points is that you have seven total ranks across your traits, and no trait has to start at a particular rank. However, as it becomes clear, gaining ranks isn't actually that difficult, and as such it's not too big of a deal if you decide to be flexible with character creation and add a few extra ranks as appropriate. The PCs in Apoptosis, for example, all begin with ten ranks instead of seven, purely just to give the sense that they've been doing stuff before you, the player, showed up.

As for the characters in Small Business, the confusion there comes from a bit of a subtle joke. The record store is a crossroads between worlds, and Pwk, Victoria, and Oliver are meant to be characters from other games crossing over into ours. The "From Another World" trait that they all share lets them borrow a mechanic from their home game to use here; Pwk, as a Warlock from an OSR/D&D-style game, gets an inventory of useful items; Victoria Ashrider, as a character from a Powered By The Apocalypse game, gets a signature 2d6+mod Move she can use when intimidating people; and Oliver, as a Belonging Outside Belonging character, gets a picklist of personality traits. One thing I need to add are a lot more NPC examples, so these three oddballs aren't quite so front and center.

This really means so much to hear! Disparateum's my weird arthouse baby, and it's wonderful to know it's touched your heart like this. I promise I'm still working on it!! Been slowly chipping away at Act 2 between other projects, and it's gonna be even weirder. I also wanna do a quick pass over the mechanics again, cuz I've had some thoughts since.

IP!b2:fK.O.(DE) is the immortal serpent that encircles the world thrice over. It's not that you've just discovered this game, not even that you happened to cross paths with it; it was already all around you, and this is merely the moment it has chosen to reveal itself.

Always happy to help you win arguments 🫡

Oh and this reminds me, I've still gotta answer your correspondence! Haven't forgotten, just been juggling too much lol

it sucks!! its really a sign of the times that i put a ton of painful personal stuff in here and it resonated so consistently with other folks, but its also kinda encouraging, yknow? we've seen the shape of the enemy, even if we're all looking at it from different angles. we know what needs to be changed. all that's left is not giving up.

yaaaaass!!!!

really fantastic work. Adira's made a really fantastically evocative setting where demons and hunters clash and fall in love and mildly annoy each other, with all the stakes heightened to their young-love breaking points. and then Fen comes along and makes sure every page is just bursting at the seams with energy and iconography! seriously phenomenal.

you should add endgame dlc (King Lear, Act I, Scene II)

That's a good question! I tend to lean towards smaller player counts in general, so I think three (one GM and two players) would be what id most recommend. That being said, I've definitely played and enjoyed with more. I think the most I've done was being a player in a group of five, and that was a blast.

Thanks for reaching out! DXMON's an interesting thing, in that it is and isn't a BXLLET system. So, no, you definitely don't need to make a BXLLET character first, though a character running both sounds like a really fun disaster waiting to happen.

We talked about including the dice mechanic stuff, but opted against it. You could definitely use BXLLET's dice system w DXMON, but you could also use a different resolution mechanic, or not use one at all. Very few of the games of BXLLET I've run or played in really even use it, lmao.

As for NPCs and demons using powers, that's a great question! NPCs for sure are paying costs for their powers, but I wouldn't worry about tracking that too much unless it's an important character or a prolonged scene. If someone gives up five years of their life and gets their head taken off seconds later, it doesn't much matter. As for demons, they can essentially do whatever they want. Like with Beasts from BXLLET, they're intentionally a bit abstract, because there's not really any way to know if you'll decisively win against one. That being said, the way we sketched out the demons in DXMON was intended to give a rough idea of what they're capable of, and the ways you could potentially counter or avoid them. The details will come down to the tone at the table, but just like in Chainsaw Man, demons are terrifying and unstoppable up until the moment they're reduced to a pile of gore.

Lemme know if there's anything else you'd like clarification on, and we're really glad to hear you like the game!

weve been talkin a lot about adapting ideas from the dice system into physical play without losing the charm of upgrading, building up, and switching out faces  (lots of discord arguments raging right now about how to do that lmao)

i think its also worth noting that we all did voices while playing, and refused to upgrade Wisdom

owo

For sure, appreciate you asking!

This was an early release, mostly about putting some setting stuff down on paper for a game jam. More specifically, this has early drafts of the City and the Dreaming, which are included in full and expanded on in the main book. The book's also got four more layers, mechanics, rituals, annotations, and more. 

The book's currently unfinished, I'm currently working on Act II and a couple fun supplemental materials, but as it stands it's already much more developed than the Travel Guide. My current plan is to turn this into an archive of sorts, adding other outdated Disparateum material here as I continue to work on the main game.

Thank you, that's much appreciated! I've got more cooking, slowly but surely, and can't wait til you can see it!

Bird & Breakfast can be played solo or with a small group, and while slow-paced also isn't terribly long. Probably 2 hours at most?

you are an earthworm who aspires to kill god has one principal protagonist, but can be played with any number of players cooperating to run them. It lasts somewhere between 15 minutes and until the end of time.

Initiative is more of a tool than a proper game, but in terms of time commitment it's probably a little shorter than your typical combat encounter in any other game. It supports three players and a GM by default.

Explicit Course is a party game, and as such seats as many people as you can convince to tolerate each other, but probably isn't fun with less than four. A round will probably take about 20 minutes, but the fun's in the time spent talking afterwards and it can easily be run a couple times in a row.

Lastly, A17-Q Declassified is a tormentous exercise in boredom, and should not be attempted unless you have way too much time to kill. It supports up to six players, but I suspect there's probably not six people on Earth who would genuinely enjoy this game beyond laughing at the concept. I happen to be one of those people. If you're another, please, please god get in touch with me.

hell yeah, im glad you liked it! 🥺

This was gorgeous, thank you. 💚