Tag Archives: role play game

Hopeless inhabitants

Screaming Geese

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Geese are always terrifying, or course, but Screaming Geese are stand-out terrifying. They don’t scream. You will be the one providing all of that. Stood upright, an adult Screaming Goose is about three feet tall to the base of the neck. They can and will bite you in the face, favouring attacks to the ears and nose. They also particularly go for fingers and groins. They have teeth in their beaks. A blow from a wing will inflict pain and can break bones. 

Screaming Geese are a bit paranoid – but with reason. They are tasty. Their large eggs are tasty. They assume everything is a threat and defend themselves by attacking first. While any one bite isn’t that damaging, expect to get a lot of bites from multiple geese if you disturb them. Expect them to chase you for miles – or at least until you have left the woods, or died from the sheer number of wounds. 

Screaming Geese are woodland creatures. They stay off the paths. You should stay on the paths, but you probably won’t.

(Why yes, there is a bestiary on the way to go with the Role Play Game).

Hopeless inhabitants

Skitterlings

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We’ve been designing some new Hopeless, Maine creatures! These are primarily for the role play game, but could turn up other places, too. Skitterlings were initially designed by Dr Abbey.

Skitterlings inhabit caves and tunnels, and make distinctive rustling noises as they move about in the dark. They can see perfectly well in the dark or in light. They tend to frequent walls and ceilings as this makes it easier to attack anything else that happens to be in their tunnels. Skitterlings will cheerfully eat anything smaller than they are, and at full size they can be larger than people. They’re also very protective of objects in their tunnels. That means you can use them to protect your hidden treasures/secrets assuming you can get past them in the first place to drop something off. If you bring a sacrifice, it is entirely possible to leave them an object to protect while they are eating. However, there is no meal tempting enough to stop a Skitterling from protecting its stash. Which might of course be treasure, or a carefully hidden weapon, but might equally be a stick that fell in from a hole in the ground, or a rusty bucket someone abandoned while running away. A Skitterling is best fought off with bladed weapons, and may retreat if you don’t seem to be threatening its precious stash. And yes, they will fight to the death to protect the rusty bucket.

Tom here- This was my interpretation of Dr Abbey’s design sketch. So much fun because he thinks of things that I never would, but there was also enough ambiguity in the design that I had the opportunity to discover how some elements would work in “reality”.

Hopeless Games

Philomena and Simon

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If you’re a regular reader here, you’ll know Philomena Bucket from the Tales from the Squid and Teapot. She actually started life as a character illustrating how you do things in the Hopeless Maine role play game. This is why she’s now gracing the cover of a new book. From which you can safely infer that we are indeed up to something with the role play game.

Also in this image, is Simon. If you’ve been following our adventures in film making, you’ll already know that Simon is an example of the island’s pointy sea life. Look closely at this image and it is evident that there’s more than one Simon. There may have been baby Simons recently. But then, sea life changes gender a lot, and who know how Simons work?

Characters on the island tend to have fairly outlandish names. However, there are a lot of sentient beings who are never named where you can see it. Goblins, demons, sea life and so forth. For purposes of keeping track, many of them do have names – but they tend to be relatively ordinary, so there are goblins called Fred and Geoff, and the sea monster is called Simon.

All of this pertains to a kickstarter we have that should be of particular interest to fans in America. It won’t be so good if you’re in the UK because of the postage. Talk to us if there are things you want and we’ll try and figure out sensible ways of moving things round.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hopelessmaine/hopeless-maine-the-graphic-novel-by-tom-and-nimue-brown

Island News

Hopeless Ghouls

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We’re in the exciting process of developing a Bestiary for the Hopeless Maine role play game. This is work being led on by Keith Healing. We are of course collecting up all the strange things that go by in the background, and working out a bit more about the mechanics of what they do and how/if they might hurt a person.

It means that new discoveries are also being made. Apparently we have ghouls. This isn’t a great surprise on a gothic island with a lot of cemeteries where food is often at a premium.

We’re also experimenting a bit with how art will work for this book. Here we have a ghoul drawn by Tom and inked by me.

Hopeless

Hopeless Role Play

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As a young human, I played a fair few role play systems and it was a significant part of my life. One of the normal features of a role play game is that the world is… well… world sized. The setting you game in is usually as large as your imagination is willing to invest in.

A role play game set on Hopeless Maine is clearly a very different kettle of fish (or tentacles). It is, by any definition, a rather small setting. You could walk across it in a matter of days, and one of the features of the island is that it is very hard to leave it and go elsewhere. It is a tiny reality of its own, full of weirdness, but it is not really how most role play worlds function.

But, small can be beautiful. Small can be really intense and there’s not much scope to run away from the consequences of your actions. Everything you do as a player on Hopeless will stay round to haunt you – probably in a literal sort of way. You can’t just leave town and move on if things don’t go well, or you’ve nabbed the treasure or made an enemy. Outside of town, beyond the farms it is difficult to survive, which is why people mostly aren’t living there.

Hopeless as a role play setting is really good for intense scenarios. It lends itself to mysteries and murder mysteries. If you’re looking for a setting where your characters will have to make long term relationships with NPCs, this is for you. If you’re looking for situations where people have to think and role play rather than dungeon crawl, Hopeless works well. It’s not going to be the right setting for anyone who wants to spend their time slaying monsters, grabbing treasure and hooking up with pretty NPCs. But, if you like your gaming experiences to be weirder, more gothic and with more focus on the role play, this could well be the ideal setting for you.

The Hopeless Maine role play game has been a work in progress – and largely the work of Keith Healing – for some time now. We will have some significant news for you soon, we think, which is why I’m dangling this teaser-tentacle today. Also, the cover above is the old cover, there will be a new cover soon…