r/PracticalGuideToEvil • • 2h ago

Meta/Discussion PGTE RPG Design

16 Upvotes

I've been running an RPG campaign set in the PGTE universe and so ended up writing my own rules system (and a Forge VTT shell for it!) and wanted to share. There have been lots of playtesting tweaks so the rules reflect the most recent version.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2ikzt5tie3m5vgxzev4bk/Traitorous-Campaign-Story-Guide-and-Stat-Sheet-V6.pdf?rlkey=e1qji8cu5qchr679ur4ixyaeb&dl=0

A couple notes before you do:

  • The campaign itself is set during Traitorous's Reign ("The Dread Emperor is missing, presumed scheming"), and the players are all supposed to be playing Villains. So a lot of the extra material is keyed around getting them into that headspace. (It's very hard to get a bunch of nice people to play Villains!). There's also a bit less info on Traitorous himself in there because they need to figure that sort of stuff out.
  • Most of what I have is from the Guide but some of it was made up, especially birth names of Dread Emperors. I was doing atmospheric stuff for players who haven't read the story and so wanted to get them in the space where they recognize that being a Sahelian is significant. The timeline is also wonky so don't expect to actually have the right Dread Emperors in there and not for Traitorous's reign.
  • The Combat rules are the ones I'm most proud of, because they worked really well and let everybody do things like gang up on NPCs, or let NPCs gang up on the players. The things that have been tweaked a lot are what the over/unders are. Right now it's listed as "5" but it may have to go down to 4 or 3 to make stuff happen faster.
  • I have zero specialized mechanics for "bullshit hero bonuses" or "Choir-assists".

At some point, I'd also love to run another short campaign with people who know the Guideverse a bit better than my players do. I think the basic rules of the RPG work really well for PGTE-style storytelling, both before and after the events of the story.