Leyline Press Blog — ttrpg

Our core design goal with Salvage Union was to create a simple-to-learn mech tabletop role-playing game, which retained the essence of the genre while vastly simplifying its mechanics and learning curve. One key aspect that makes mech games appealing is the ability to customise your own unique mech, fine-tuning its various options to your tastes. In Salvage Union, we wanted to intertwine this customisation with the role of salvagers scouring the wasteland for scrap. This blog explores the challenges myself, Panayiotis Lines  @panny_lines, and Aled Lawlor,@aledlawlor, encountered in developing a salvaging and crafting system for Salvage Union that met these design goals....

We got a chance to ask Samuel Mui some questions on Horse Girl, his other projects and the South East Asia (SEA) tabletop RPG community. 

Horse Girl is a solo tabletop RPG journaling game, based on The Wretched by Chris Bissette,  in which you document your physical and mental transformation into a horse by the love of your life. 

One of the key mechanics that makes Salvage Union works is the numerous Systems, Modules and Abilities that allow players to directly ask The Mediator (GM) questions and get true answers from them. For example the Spectrum Mech, which can be piloted at Tech 1, the starting level of play, has the following Mech Chassis Ability.  Data Scanner: The Spectrum is a mobile data repository that has all manner of information stored within it. It is able to scan objects to both gain information about them and store that data to access at a later time.  Range: Close // Short...

Labyrinth Lord by Goblinoid Games was one of the earliest old school D&D retro clones, released on 2007. Early retroclones such as Labyrinth Lord birthed out of a realisation that the Open Gaming License set out by Wizard's of the Coast could be used to effectively reprint the original editions of Dungeons and Dragons. This was a means to keep these rules sets alive and be able to produce new compatible adventures and content for them. Users on forums such as Dragonsfoot were some of the first to discuss these ideas and this led to systems such as Labyrinth Lord being conceived.  As the foreword of Labyrinth Lord states." This...

This is part of a series of design blogs exploring the development of Salvage Union a post-apocalyptic mech tabletop roleplaying game currently live on Kickstarter here. 

One of the most common pieces of playtest feedback we get for Salvage Union is to add stat modifiers, advantage or additional die bonuses or some variation thereof to the games core d20 mechanic. This article will explore why this is a bad idea for Salvage Union due to its different approach compared to other tabletop roleplaying games that do use such systems.  

Salvage Union runs off of a core d20 variable resolution mechanic. This mechanic is flat for all rolls and both pilot characters and mechs all use this same table with no additional modifiers. There’s 5 different success levels as you can see below.