GREED
A downloadable game
WHAT IS THIS?
A TTRPG like mom used to make, if it got left in a dumpster and auto-fermented. There's a Baron who arbitrates the rules, plays all the NPCs, generally runs the game and such. On the other side, anywhere between 2 and 6 people play an assortment of custom made characters to throw into the meatgrinder. Sixty some-odd pages. Lean and mean. Game first, but we didn't forget the role playing.
TO PLAY YOU NEED:
At least 3 people, a set of dice (but mostly d6s), paper, and pencils. Everything but the people can be substituted by a computer if you're crafty.
Each session tends to last between 2 and 3 hours, which is enough time to play through one whole game play loop (trying to get a lot of money, seeing if you live to tell the tale).
WHERE AM I?
The sun is a bunsen burner and the weather outside ranges from frigid to arctic to kill-on-exposure; usually the latter. The only places that can contain human life are oil taverns: immense interlinked cabins where folks live together and burn oil on a captured Demon to keep warm. Taxes are high. The rules are few, but harshly enforced. You play as an adventurer, one of the living Intravenous Lines of any tavern. Through dimmensional warping, the lowly tavernite adventurer pilfers the new oil nessesary to keep the tavern alight from the Plerorealm.
The Plerorealm is a dimmension that took bad acid. An oil-rich, perpetually-indoor land of monsters and magic that hundreds of thousands of inhuman creatures call home. Fraught with danger and (sometimes worse for the adventurer) reasonable people who don't speak your language, your goal is usually to make enough money not to need to go here anymore.
WHAT AM I BUYING?
A TTRPG called Greed. Keep up. That means:
- 69 pages of fully illustrated prime cut game shit.
- 8 character classes with loads of diversity, from abilities to past misfortunes to starting equipment, built to be fast and fun to cook up.
- 36 unique abilities to gain by drinking angel tears or killing demons or buying them from the store.
- 14 monster templates, able to outfit with abilities and addendums.
- 5 d66 tables throughout the text (the best size of table).
- Novel combat mechanics that fuck you up so bad you'll HAVE to talk it out.
- A 10 page prose/comic short story to give you a tasty morsel of the vibes (available as a demo!)
- Character sheets and player sheets bursting with that bitter, grimy, oily flavor. Both printable and digital (digital: player, character).
- A quick-reference page for tables and rules you'll be referring to often.
- A 26 page module including a pre-made tavern, lots of NPCs, and a big chunk of Plerorealm.
- A bunch of things I'm not going to tell you and you'll just have to find on your own like a big girl (like Psionics, Horses, and poetry).
ADDITIONAL READING
Movies that are Greed Games: a list of movies that either directly inspired this game or otherwise function on Greedlike mechanics.
The official Greed playlist. Do we listen to it? Not fully, no. But that's the price of honesty sometimes.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $15 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Download demo
Development log
- GREED MERCHANDISEFeb 21, 2024
- GREED module: Highway 0Feb 11, 2024
- GREED housekeeping updateOct 09, 2023
Comments
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Maybe I didn't understand the Wheel of the Rotapriests... but what happens when ix=0?
As far as I'm concerned, because the Rotapriest's Concordance starts as a roll of 1d4+1, as a key stat (so it goes from 2 to 5) and it cycles across that range endlessly, there is no legal input which would get you 0 when put to the i. If you somehow get to that result anyways, then how about: the Rotapriest hits a snag in the wheel, whose pressure is cosmically only resolved via the dissolution of the Rotapriest, who resets to 2 Concordance and gains 50 bad luck.
In terms of your confusion with how it works, that makes sense! Here is a blog post about the design ethos behind the Rotapriest, mainly about why it's written like that. Thank you for your interest!!
I am one step further and have understood that Concordance (x) is a key stat and therefore cannot start as a negative value. But I still don't understand what these formulas mean. What does ix mean?
It's this!
I understand to some extent what the page behind the link explains. I even know what the rule is supposed to create: an irregular, cyclic fluctuation of the value for Concordance, so that a Rotapriest has access to all four spokes of the wheel alternately. Nevertheless, I don't understand which game element the imaginary number “i” refers to. Is it not possible to give an example from a real game situation? That would make me happy.
I imagine i as the "Wheel" that the Rotapriests worship, and thus they put their Concordance to the Wheel and the result determines what powers they have. i, in terms of both literal game-mechanism and how a Rotapriest feels it, would be the axis that turns the wheel when the Rotapriest changes around it.
I demand the secret abilities list this moment. OR ELSE. I will be sad.
We need a Greed or Gormengeist Discord!
Great style & great ideas! Also reasonably formatted with just enough info to get the wheels turning without overloading you.
Personally hoping to run this with select few surviving taverns, each representing a different school of thought. (The players' capitalist hellhole may seem sad compared to the commies next door, or even the free-spirited anarchist sect may be enticing, but maybe they all have some dark secrets of their own...)
May even make some especially risky missions to explore abandoned taverns. Maybe the demon got loose in a tavern housing a large weapon manufacturing facility, opting for a high yield stealth mission, albeit one that's unlikely to produce oil (the demon ate it all by now..). Or any other number of ideas that could be respectfully borrowed from the Fallout games' vaults :)
With that said, some typos I noticed:
Couple gameplay questions that cropped up during a session: Does the tattle turn 1 bad luck into 1 Avarice for each bad luck cashed in? And also if you open a door can you hold it open for others to go through and so no one has to cover someone else's cost?
Oh yeah and adding on that there isn't really a lot to guide ppl on what to do when PCs try to muck each other over aside from just rolling. I assume you just let them treat each other like one would treat a regular tavernite?
If I understand your question, the answer is yes. In instances of PVP, there are no particular new rules or considerations.
PCs are just NPCs that the Baron isn't playing.
You got it! Will pull through with that then
1) Tattling only ever gains you 1 Avarice per instance of tattling.
2) It would depend on the door but usually yes, I imagine you can hold doors open, but that the Jawbreakers will beat you up if they see you doing that.
Gotcha!
I LOVE OIL
You heard it here first, folks.
very cruelty squad-esque, will be buying soon
My friend Yackronin made a google sheet for people to copy and use!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1l8ZoDi3eU0CB-hDzNs-hFHtQ4W3BdCA22fPBrlbn...
Contains player sheets and tavern IDs
Endorsed...!
hey ive been reading the pdf over and while, its all pretty cool, im kinda lost on how names work. Like I get the whole idea of names have power sort of thing, but what do you mean by name? like an actual name? or like a title?
Sorry if this sounds weird to ask, but it's kinda throwing me for a loop
as far as I understand it names are actual names, and since their acquisition means you'll probably be referred to by your newest name it is a proper name
Indeed the idea is that they are "proper names," not titles. This specifically would come into play because it's bad luck to equivocate your name. You were Cathy Lynn, but now that you have fire breath, you're Jane Jorick (or whathaveyou).
thank you very much i was so lost
I wrote a review (embedded in an essay) for this game, and it's quite positive. Despite the title, I really loved this game, I recommend it very highly, and I hope to see more from yall in the near future.
https://infohazard.blot.im/the-incompleteness-of-greed-and-the-necessity-of-game...
good news!
I dig this a lot, thanks for sharing
Do you have any adventure scenario you recommend as an introduction to the game?
There is now an adventure module that comes with the base game!
This is hilarious. Post-modern dadaism as a standup comedy routine in RPG format.
this is fucking great. thank you for making this.
Greed is an absurdist osr system about a series of small dimensions burning oil to stay alive. They get this oil by breaking into a dungeon realm. It all reminds me a little bit of Wooden Ocean.
The PDF is 69 pages, with clean, osr style layout and a lot of appropriately weird black and white images. The text is cleanly presented and easy to read, however some headings are split across multiple pages. This is a book you probably want in physical form, but the PDF works fine.
Rules-wise, the core roll is xd6, take highest. A 6 is a clean success. 4--5 is a complication. You have two actions per turn in combat, and the game uses some neat randomized clocks---each clock is a die, and if it rolls 1--2 it decreases in size until it's ultimately used up. Your HP (Ego) is one such die.
Some other basic rules that might seem odd are that you can run multiple characters at the same time, earning XP with any of them and spending XP on any of them. Also, you get XP by spending money or dying. And you can spend money by drawing on a line of credit, which you improve by investing in better homes.
There's also a highly detailed luck, sin, and tattling system, which I don't think I have the space here to fully explain.
Character creation is simple, and the classes are diverse and flavorful. If you like Troika or any of the weirder Mork Borg fan classes, you'll like them.
The book's tone throughout is a little zany, but everything is explained clearly. Like, your stats include Haut Monde and Yare, but you can glance at the section and know immediately how to use them.
There's a lot of worldbuilding in Greed, and everything fits together consistently, but if you like very concrete, very literal settings, you might have trouble with this one.
For GMs, this isn't a hard game to run if you can attune to its setting. It feels like it really needs to be grounded a little bit so that players know what to interact with and what kinds of things to narrate, but if you can do that the game glides. There's plenty of npcs, items, tables, and the like.
Overall, this is an extremely inventive, weird, and exploratory osr game. If you like strange settings, this is one of the best. If you just want to fight a rat in a tavern, Greed might not be for you. I definitely recommend it to groups that are looking for something different, but still enjoy the mechanics and style of play of the osr.
seems to be a typo on the goblin character page (the [Moldvay] example doesn't match the table)
Absolutely incredible game though.
Thank you for letting us know! That will be fixed in the next update. Thanks for the kind words!
Holy shit
the vibes are impeccable. I am intrigued