So perfectly tuned to the characters!
timhutchings
Creator of
Recent community posts
There was a short scenario written for the original Dying Earth game. It was based on an ancient air car that is found in one of the Vance stories. Players are given a print out of the control board in the car's cockpit–they point and 'move' levers and push buttons to see what happens.
The absolute glory of the thing is that nothing on the air car controls does anything at all until the 'close canopy' button is pressed. Then, everything happens at once. I pushed that lever up but I didn't push it back down, the car is plowing straight forward as soon as the canopy closes. Etc
An ingenious trick to play on the players and it feels related to your game.
There's a section in there that says "Hey, the vampire needs to hurt people to survive, be functionally immortal, and should be limited in how it can interact with its environment" or something like that. Basically laying out the minimal needed in order to not clash too badly when you answer Prompts.
Now you have me curious... Look on page xiv, there are torn paper inserts titled "What is a vampire?"
In the sequel I've really been enjoying playtesting with vampires who are never clearly identified as -anything-. They're just awful, highly motivated people and you can write their deeds in such a way that you never witness them do anything supernatural. It's a really fun way to play the sequel but wouldn't work for TYOV.
This is one of my favorite games and I'm mad that I only just now found out it was here on itch.io. This is a game that I forced hundreds of students to play over the years and not a single one complained or rolled their eyes or snuck away because the two actions in the game are so absorbing and delightful that anyone will enjoy it.
I am glad my ugly games are there to help!
There are so many good reasons to offer them, but Community copies also do some counterintuitive things:
1. By giving away free copies I can, perversely, charge more for the pay copies. If you can afford $5 but not $15, you take a community copy. If you can afford $15 and I'd priced for $5 people then I'd be getting less money and the people who couldn't afford $5 are still cut out of the loop.
2. About half the angry/threatening contacts I get include some version of "And I'm going to take your PDF and put it on a download site where people can get it for FREE." I can be like, dude, the game is already free for anyone who wants it.
There's an Italian translation by Narrativa... Here you go: https://narrattiva.it/it/shop/libro/1000-anni-da-vampiro/
The rules give a handful of vampire requirements that don't need to be satisfied with traditional vampirey things. You need to be susceptible to something that doesn't affect normal humans, you need to fuck people over to survive, etc. You can go way off book but need to take that into account in your approach to the Prompts.
The Community Copy system was a work around using itch software that was intended for other purposes. I doubt there's another solution except my making the main game free, setting the payment field to automatically fill in a recommended $15, and then letting folks adjust it downward as necessary. But then there are no longer Community Copies and folks might not get that you can pay less or zero?























