LaurenTheCorgi
she/her
5.0
(7)
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About LaurenTheCorgi
About Me I have previously worked for Rowan, Rook, and Decard (the publisher of Spire: The City Must Fall, Heart: The City Beneath, and Honey Heist) as a pro GM running Spire at GenCon, and now I want to bring Spire and Heart to the rest of the world as well. I run my online games on Discord and Roll20, and if you live in Minneapolis/St. Paul or their surrounding suburbs, I’m also available to book for in-person games. As stated above, I specialize in running Spire: The City Must Fall and Heart: The City Beneath. Both are roleplay-heavy D10 pool systems, the former featuring revolution and political intrigue a la Arcane and the latter featuring exploration and body horror in the vein of Annihilation and Darkest Dungeon. If you’ve never played them before, don’t let that stop you: I love helping players learn new systems and am happy to be your guide!
At a glance
2 years on StartPlaying
63 games hosted
Highly rated for: Creativity, Storytelling, Sets the Mood
Featured Prompts
I became a GM because
I enjoy portraying settings and NPCs that feature my favorite tropes and themes, I love a good villain and enjoy giving my players fun ones to work against, and I want to help people learn to play other systems besides D&D!
My 3 systems I'd bring to a desert island would be
Spire: The City Must Fall (revolution and political intrigue in a dieselpunk setting,) Heart: The City Beneath (body horror and dungeon crawling reminiscent of Annihilation or Darkest Dungeon,) and MonsterHearts (romance and PVP drama; you play as high schoolers who are secretly monsters.)
My favorite shows/movies are
For drama: Arcane, Hannibal (the TV series,) The Invitation (2021,) Ready or Not, Supernatural For comedy: Blackadder, Death Becomes Her, Glass Onion, The Hustle I’ll also list my favorite video games: Control, Death Stranding, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Resident Evil: Village.
How LaurenTheCorgi runs games
I run very roleplay-focused games and I want to tailor my campaigns to what stories my players are looking for as much as possible. Narrative expectations will be discussed in Session Zero, and to further help with this in Spire specifically, my games use the Beats mechanic from Heart: The City Beneath rather than Spire’s traditional mechanic for gaining class advances. (This means that you will list some things you’d like your character to do in the campaign, and when your character does those things, they gain a new class ability.) I want my tables to be a safe and comfortable space for everyone, so we will be using safety tools (the Palette Grid, X card-like safe signals, etc.) You do not have to pay for Session Zero, as I believe that Session Zero is a time to determine whether a campaign is right for you and I don’t want to make someone pay for the entry point to a campaign they end up not wanting to participate in. My games are also a welcoming space for queer people, POCs, disabled people, mentally ill/neurodivergent people, or people who are otherwise part of marginalized demographics. Spire is a game about rising up against those who seek to oppress you, and the last thing I want is for the message of my games to not be in line with what I support in reality. I reserve the right to remove players who are exhibiting bigoted behavior or are otherwise acting in a way that negatively affects the game for other people involved. All players in my games must be 18 or older, as there may be graphic depictions of violence and/or sexual content.
Featured Prompts
If my games were Movies they'd be directed by...
…Bryan Fuller. I love his eye for making horror beautiful, his ability to write flawed protagonists, and the fact that he’s unabashedly anti-censorship.
My favorite trope is...
Leaders of corrupt institutions as villains. Among other nefarious NPCs, my games have featured a demon-summoning general, a crime lord selling unstable cybernetics, and a hyper-capitalist cult that worships the god of debt.
When it comes to voices
I haven’t had professional voice acting experience, but I love doing character voices and try to differentiate them as much as I can! I have a Rode NT1A microphone specifically for this purpose.
LaurenTheCorgi's ideal table
I want players who are willing to prioritize telling a good story over trying to win. As someone who loves roleplay *and* who runs a lot of systems where characters are meant to burn bright and burn out, I want to know that we’re all along for the same wild ride even if our characters don’t get out completely unscathed. Thematically, if you enjoy intrigue, espionage, horror, glamorous excess, difficult moral choices, getting one over on elitist NPCs, and plot twists, you’ll probably like my games.
Featured Prompts
If you're into ___, you're going to love my table
Social intrigue and mystery! Regardless of genre or system, you’re bound to encounter a web of NPCs and plot elements that you’ll have to navigate as you piece together the bigger picture of what’s going on.
I love it when a player
…Enjoys seeing things go wrong for their character sometimes, even more so if they actively suggest ways to do so. I run a lot of games focused on horror and political intrigue, and those two genres are at their best when the protagonists are faced with unexpected consequences.
My table is not the place for...
…Squeamishness. A lot of the systems I run explore heavy themes (revolution and systemic oppression in Spire, horror in Heart, and sexuality in MonsterHearts,) and I don’t want players to shy away from those. (This is why I find the Palette Grid safety tool so useful.)