River Ray

River Ray

@nullconstant.bsky.social

River β€’ 29 β€’ πŸ‡΅πŸ‡± β€’ She/he β€’ White β€’ Bigender β€’ Queer β€’ Bisexual β€’ Autistic β€’ ADHD β€’ Plural β€’ TTRPG nerd β€’ ***** ***

429 followers1.9K following220 posts

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After another hard week of work, Gas Dog VAYLANT is out in the wild, ready for playtesting and feedback! riverray.itch.io/gas-dog-vayl... Get in your G.D.s, soldiers. We have a Grand War to win. At over 200 pages, this smokes literally every previous creative endeavor of mine. I'm so proud of it!

riverray.itch.ioGas Dog VAYLANT by River RayDiesel Mecha War Horror, Told by Wild Words
River Ray@nullconstant.bsky.social

I hesitate to Announce anything, but goddamn if I've not been hard at work on revisiting (and maybe finishing???) an old TTRPG project lately... No promises, but maybe look forward to a playtest for Gas Dog VAYLANT, a mecha war and horror game set in a dieselpunk world not quite like our own...

River Ray reposted

Oh, this is cool. I didn't know Grimwild was getting revived, with art by @perjanke.bsky.social too. And Groov is almost certainly the best person to handle this after putting out a lot of material for the game before J.D. Maxwell disappeared already.

Per Janke || Commissions Open@perjanke.bsky.social

I painted this tavern scene for the Grimwild Community Edition. Shoutout again to the amazing #Grimwild Community keeping this game alive and even commissioning me for some more art!

River Ray reposted

The full team was like 1000 people. People outside of the β€œcore team” did some major heavy lifting. This is outsourcing. What you are doing is outsourcing and then downgrading their contributions. There is nothing innovative about this.

GamesIndustry.biz@gibiz.bsky.social

Star Wars: Galactic Racer was made by a core team of 75 people. "What we wanted to do was keep that core small, smaller than perhaps you might have done in the past, and scale capacity and capability with what we call distributed development." https://bit.ly/4hT02qg

River Ray reposted

I'm so interested in this, & so unsurprised. The (modern, Western) world has this myopic idea of what ancient cultural centers of expansive nations were capable of importing/exporting.

Kristina Killgrove@killgrove.bsky.social

A new documentary on the archaeology of Great Zimbabwe airs tonight on PBS. I interviewed the lead archaeologist, Shadreck Chirikure, and if you click through, you can watch an exclusive clip showing the team's discovery of Longquan celadon from eastern China. πŸ§ͺ🏺

River Ray reposted

to help smooth things over a bit i have put my entire itch library on same for the next *year*. consider me very, very available for freelance work. if you need playbooks, stretch goal content, anything, i'm your girl. itch.io/s/204730/fin...

itch.ioFinancially Support Me Please Sale by Briar SovereignA bundle by Briar Sovereign, $30.00 for 7 games
briar, duke of dykes@weregazelle.bsky.social

not exactly how i wanted to end my year, but i'll be looking for new work starting mid-November. if you're looking for a writer, level or game designer with a decade of experience in videogames & tabletop rpgs, get in touch

River Ray reposted

The Israeli political consensus is that it is essential for the State of Israel to continue to deny self-government or self-determination to 33% of its population indefinitely, and virtually no mainstream American analysis will even engage with this.

This post is unavailable.

River Ray reposted

Zoya Gabbro: one of my oldest and fondest TTRPG characters, I miss her all the time!!! Pilot of a very wet mech, career scoundrel, and load-bearing vessel for complexes and insecurities. Oh and also psychic. She was doing a lot.

River Ray reposted

DOOM '98 Imagined what if id Software released an additional entry in the Doom series in 1998, using a technological mix between id Tech 2 and GoldSrc engine. Going for the blend of fantastical and grounded, which would be in vein of Half-Life and System Shock 2.

River Ray reposted

I don't disagree that leftist spaces are prone to ideological hair-splitting, but any time someone is like "we need to focus on material concerns, not ideological bullshit", your first question should always be "is this REALLY a purely ideological concern, or does it just not affect you personally?"

River Ray reposted

Replying to @rockpapershotgun.bsky.social

The headline/lede on this is very misleading, this is an entirely unrelated third-party service which claims to secure Discord servers (... by apparently harvesting their user's information and selling it?...), not a service that is run or used by Discord itself.

Microscope was the first TTRPG I ever played, years before the likes of D&D, and it was instrumental to the genesis of a sci-fi setting our group still plays in six years later. Very excited for this!

The kickstarter for the new Microscope is live! I can't wait to see what you make with the new edition www.kickstarter.com/projects/lam...

River Ray reposted

River Ray reposted

Something AI is responsible for that doesn't get enough talk: How, when it scrapes a website to illegally steal everything on it, it uses up a ton of its bandwidth allotment, crashing it or racking up massive fees for site owners.

Edd Coates | Game UI Database@eddcoates.bsky.social

Yet again, the Game UI Database is being scraped to the point that it's getting knocked offline. Even Cloudflare's "I'm under attack" mode isn't working. I just wanted to create a resource for real designers. I'm getting so fucking sick of this.

River Ray reposted

The Hugging Face story is another example of a tactic we saw back in the spring. Let's call it "Gangster With an Honor Code." So in gangster movies, all the characters are bad people who extort, murder, etc. So you give your main character something he refuses to do, like "he'd never hit a lady."

Gwen C. Katz@gwenckatz.bsky.social

Anthropic theatrically turning down the military is an obvious ploy by AI companies (likely working in concert) to shift public perception from "all of these are bad" to "one of these is the good one."

River Ray reposted

Replying to @keftiu.bsky.social

too lazy to make a pair of "society if" utopian memes: one where the dungeon freaks embrace The Conversation as a core aspect of play they're already doing and another where the storygamers embrace prewritten and procedurally generated content

River Ray reposted

the OSR and PbtA scenes have some real common ground and i'm glad that some of the petty tribalism around both has died out. we get better games when folks take from multiple movements for their designs, imo!

MΓΆrkticia@morkticia.bsky.social

Hit me with your nuanced ttrpg take.

Golden Age Minecraft (alpha/beta) is the video game equivalent of the OSR in tabletop RPGs. The Adventure Update (beta 1.8) was a D&D 3e-esque breakpoint. At one point there was even a Minecraft beta 1.7.3 retroclone (Truecraft, now abandoned). Same with WoW Classic or Old-School Runescape...

River Ray reposted

This is also why KOSA, FOSTA/SESTA and the age verification grift panopticon are socially apocalyptic

Eniko Fox@enikofox.com

i posted an epiphany i had about why i hate AI so much on fedi and i wanna post it here but it won't fit and i don't wanna cut it down to size so fuckit i'm just posting a screenshot

River Ray reposted

I had the lab boys run the numbers on what all is in this book. By Jove, it's loaded... Get this to the front lines

lolt64@lolt64.bsky.social

🚨🚨 WAR-TORN ICE MOON, our 123-page module for FIST, is now out in both print and PDF. I can't describe how it feels to say that after over a year in the ice mines. I'd be honored if you'd take a look. WF. FIST: @claymorerpgs.bsky.social Art: @finnmattfour.bsky.social lolt64.itch.io/wartornicemoon

River Ray reposted

Another thing to remember on this bisexual day is that The Grungler is canonically bi. I do enjoy how it's become a term for "token cis guy who hangs out with a bunch of trans weirdos" but the original post was also about straight women being weird about bi men.

www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/5... War-Torn Ice Moon is now available for sale! It's time for round 2 of the Europa Ice War. #warforever

drivethrurpg.comDriveThruRPG - The Largest RPG Download Store!Your one-stop online shop for new and vintage RPG products from the top publishers, delivered fresh to your desktop in electronic format.
River Ray@nullconstant.bsky.social

War-Torn Ice Moon, the TTRPG book whose development teasers spawned all the Europa Ice War posts in 2025, is finally out to backers digitally! It looks SO good with all the art & layout, but the text itself is really substantial too - and makes me want to run a FIST campaign *so bad*!

River Ray reposted

Share the last 4 TTRPGs you played and expose your gaming habits Blades '68 (GM) CASE & SOUL The Wildsea Gas Dog VAYLANT (GM)

Steph@fistfulofcrits.bsky.social

Share the last 4 TTRPGs you played and expose your gaming habits Doomsong Daggerheart Fomoria Deify (solo)