Binary Star Games (aka basically all my stuff)

I make TTRPGs. Well. Mostly.

  • My most recent major release (as part of a collab) is Celestial Bodies! GMless tactical mecha game with a fairly unique resolution method for hits. (The terrestrial edition that’s out is a fraction of the final release, we’re working on expanding it alongside backer content. To my knowledge, Celestial Bodies has the record for highest TTRPG itchfund.)
  • My second most recent major release is Valiant Horizon, a JRPGish crystal fantasy TTRPG (also itchfunded last summer). It’s built on Total//Effect, a framework I wrote! I’m currently releasing a season pass (aka an expansion broken out into 4 parts, released over several months) for it!
  • My first big release, APOCALYPSE FRAME, just got a physical release! I sent out a little less than 50 to buyers directly and I’ll be sending more of the ~200 hardcovers in my closet to distributors soon. (It’s got a few bits of supplementary content too.)
  • I have a billion WIPs and tiny projects lmao

Gonna post stuff here as I write it, release it, talk about it, etc. Feel free to pick at me for any of it/etc!

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HELL YEAH HELL YEAH i’ll have to check some of these oooout

i wanna try them all but valiant horizon most because i liked Fabula Ultima alright but there’s def room for improvement on the “roleplaying” part of the TTRPG haha

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Yeah I can’t say I do a lot on that end - the noncombat stuff is more like, establishing bonds between people and helping you establish your setting - but at least the game is mechanically light enough to get out of your way for the most part.

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I liked what I read of Apocalypse Frame. I backed? Valiant Horizon and need to give that a good look over. You do good work.

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Thank you so much! Yeah if it was during the itchfund it’s backing, it’s like a crowdfund but on itch and with less useful tools.

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As is frequently the case, I blacked out for like a week and came up with an idea. This time it was a solo game based on RUNE and another game based on RUNE, starting with the idea of “how do I do RUNE without Health existing”. Prototype’s theoretically playable if you wanna give it a shot, have at. (It’s in the “demo” section.)

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VH tactics is out for real!

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let’s goooooo!!!

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I completely forgot to update this page because I’ve been too busy putting out bangers.

To match two intersecting different game jams, I put out another scenario for Liminal Void, my hard-ish sci-fi space game that’s in development! This scenario’s about escaping Europa ahead of an oncoming geomagnetic storm. (I also updated the main quickstart and the other two scenarios.)

I’ve also just been continuously at work on the Valiant Horizon season pass! I mentioned it upthread too but didn’t get into details. Each of these is an Age you can insert into your setting’s backstory, complete with 3 classes that heroes can be related to that age. Prior to today I’d released 3 parts:

  • The Age of Darkness. In the past, dark magic almost won. An empire using fragmented souls consumed itself, and almost everything with it, before a handful of heroes drove it back. The Age of Darkness is in the past now, but it could be the future again…
  • The Age of Wonders. In the past, great technological wonders stretched across the land before some great disaster. But historical memory always obscures the downsides of the age from those who would unearth it…
  • The Age of Order. In the past, an empire crushed all before it with an iron fist, inflicting its Order upon the world. A handful of heroes led a resistance that unseated it, but it could just as easily be a picture of the future as the past…

Today I released the 4th and final part of the expansion:

  • The Age of Sorcery. In the past, there was a deeper magic beyond crystals: sorcerous gifts shaped the land, the people, and the nature of the world. That powerful and dangerous magic was suppressed and lost to time, but nothing is ever lost forever…

(I’ve also been chugging through backer content for Celestial Bodies, we’re aiming to have another version out at the end of the summer.)

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ooo these look really cool! a GMless mecha tactics game sounds so awesome, the only person we really have to play TTRPGs with right now is our girlfriend, so a GMless mecha game sounds really appealing, we’ll definitely have to check Celestial Bodies out some day :3.

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Give it a shot! I think we still have like a hundred community copies.

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Been pretty quiet because we’ve just been doing, well, more of the above. But I did manage to get a print run of Valiant Horizon going! And I’m poking at a draft of something about pilgrimages to follow up Valiant Persona as “ideas I’m putting down in article form so I don’t ruin my schedule by trying to make them right now”.

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Here’s that followup.

Celestial Bodies Titan Edition is out! It gained like 200 pages of content! It’s got community copies!

And our kickstarter’s follow page for Titanic Eclipse Edition is LIVE, go give it a follow:

image

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/88544910/celestial-bodies-1

(I don’t know why that one doesn’t have a preview card tbh)

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*just started a mecha TTRPG campaign voice*: I should learn a new mech system

Congrats on the release, I’ll be busy for a while but I posted the link on my main ttrpg server!

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Thank you so much! It’s an easy one to learn.

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Sometimes I get a wild hair and write something that kind of qualifies as a hack of another game but is halfway a test of “what even counts as a hack”. It’s PWYW, enjoy.

Anyway this is for a jam I’m running, which has the format of “use one of these google doc templates or markdown and don’t fuckin’ change anything and write something”, if you’re interested at all in writing TTRPG stuff you should join up:

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Trying to get in the habit of making actual posts direct to my site.

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A Certified True Sicko Post. Featuring one of the most intense design studies I’ve put in an article.

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