Rocco Privetera (he/him) 🔜 UnPub

22 Nov 2024

Hi! I'm Rocco Privetera! By day a technologist working on supporting Azure and various Microsoft technologies. Married, 3 cats plus a goblin cat, living in Brooklyn. I do a lot of creative stuff: writing, board game design, storytelling, some music. He/Him, left-leaning pro-science grumpy bear.

13 Mar

I'm at #Unpub @unpub.org ! Testing Yaga, my dexterity/ pick up and deliver/ assymeyric game! The Bone Faction has built an Ossuary which scores as long as no one knocks it over!

13 Mar

I'm at #Unpub @unpub.org ! Testing Yaga, my dexterity/ pick up and deliver game! Here my Chicken Leg faction managed to build a nest. If i return and there's an egg in it they'll hatch and eat all the Reaples for points! So far everyone's first opinion is that it's weird... but fun.

21 Nov 2025

Testing Nekropolis, my Yaga worker placement area control thing. You walk giant city blocks around a city, the buildings on them (dice) rolling by shaking the whole Yaga. Vety toyetic. Testing going very well!

21 Nov 2025

I'm at Unpub in Pax Unplugged! Testing until 8. And then again tomorrow 5-8. Come by and give your Yaga a shake!

13 Nov 2025

Hey folks. Aside from Iron Man plots ands Sphynx pics I also do a little boardgame design and I'll be at PaxUnplugged in a week! I'll be showing off Trinket Trove by @gameheadgames.bsky.social and a few of my new designs I'm testing at @unpub.org!

13 Nov 2025

If you want to test or if you are publisher looking for info, LMK! I have: Nekropolis - an area control/worker placement adjacent thing where you pilot Yagas, giant walking city blocks, around a city of the dead. & possibly Second Line, my New Orleans parade-builder game. & other light games maybe!

13 Nov 2025

Weather getting colder and my co-designer Moxie is bundlin' up.

#freeironmanplots "Brain Broken". There's a been a few storylines where Tony did biomedical hacking. In this one, Tony starts to get panic attacks and attempts to hack himself to fix it but it goes badly. That's it that's the pitch.

I don't really know the ending to this one. My guess is he starts going to therapy, or works with someone with Zen powers to learn how to not allow things to stress him as much.

The fun punch with this one is him fixing it, then getting hit by a new symptom from the same cause. I have a feeling this would be a very long and involved B plot perhaps.

As anybody who has/had panic attacks can tell you (me) that one way of explaining them is the body desperately trying to tell you take it easy before you kill yourself with stress (real or imagined, it doesn't mean beans to your body crew.)

In my case, I corrected the attacks with meds, but the stress then migrated to phantom scalp itch, unexplained other symptoms, etc. I had to remove the actual stressors before things improved. But I can imagine Tony literally hacking his own brain into bits trying to fix the symptoms.

OK a bit more. Once the symptoms start, a friendly doc basically says the only fix now is to relax, destress, and not work as hard but of course... no, it's Tony. He starts to do neurochem hacks to fix it. They don't work - oh they work, in the basic sense of fixing the chemistry, but...

25 Sept 2025

#freeironmanplots "Van Life" After getting attacked in his home(s) a few times, including terrible collateral damage to neighbors, Tony decides screw this and just lives out of a van for a while. Thats it thats the idea.

25 Sept 2025

Sort of a parody of the Van Life trend, but amplified, since he starts in a generic Van with some tools but slowly builds it up until it's an Iron Man suit of its own, plus living space, a lab, etc. Part of me wants to use extradimensional sizing so the inside is bigger than outside, but nah.

25 Sept 2025

It's more fun seeing him build out cramped living space, bring back hookups, find places to park - all of this also happening when he takes the van to Mars, Space, Kree Homeworld, etc.

youtube.comTrinket Trove: My Favorite MechanismYouTube video by Stonemaier Games

12 Sept 2025

Jamey liked some stuff in Trinket Trove! www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WpK...

Rocco Privetera (he/him) 🔜 UnPub reposted

Daniel Newman // New Mill Industries

@dnlnwmn.bsky.social

10 Sept 2025

ok ok sneak peek. here are the covers for the games that will be up for preorder next month. will talk about each of them soon!

#freeironmanplots "Blast From The Past #1". The IRL Meat version of Tony is offline and an AI imposter takes over. So I've read some of the stories where Tony makes an AI out of himself, and each time he builds an AI it seems like a very chaotic process - hold that thought.

You get lots of moments of "I don't agree with Tony" and "wtf this guy why did he do these things" or maybe reveal things about his character. Maybe you get Tony AI walking around in a Life Replica trying to go on dates or have sex. Hijinks ensue!

I really love this, but it can't be a single issue story - it doesn't work without the slow boil of a longer narrative run. You have to show a real paranoid AI at a meeting of the Avengers lying and sweating for it to work and have the stakes you need.

Some protocol goes off and it sticks a Tony AI in a spare suit of armor to go find Tony and provide assistance. And maybe he does and the down suit says "actually, we're good - we'd rather repair where his enemies can't get him. You be Tony until the repairs (medical/scientific) are done."

So basically the AI masquerades as Tony for a real long time. Trying to keep it secret. Trying to explain why no body in the suit. For real serious hijinks, maybe the protocol stuck multiple version of Tony over the years so a group of AI can run things in the hope that they'll police each other.

Tony in a fight gets clobbered, and takes some traumatic injuries. He sinks to the bottom of the sea (or someplace). His suit thankfully is mostly OK, but damaged. Internal repair stuff is busy fixing it. However Tony is in a coma, suit is stuck (with plenty of power.) Meanwhile!

#freeironmanplots This one I call "Girlfriend Enemy". This is more of a regular plot, but I have some ideas to make it an iron man plot. Tony starts dating someone new, and falls head over heels. And she's amazing. Awesome hot smashing. Super smart. Knows more data security & encryption than Tony.

Unfortunately she eventually starts going after someone he likes (or S.I.) He agonizes over it but finally has to step in. The first couple of times he stops her, he does it in a way that just stops the attempt without hurting her... so he can still date her. She doesn't know of course.

Of course things get worse. She finds out, Avengers find out, we get some direct action where she is surprisingly good at hacking his armor so she becomes a threat. He eventually wins but she goes underground. He *could* go after her, but he's heartbroken, so he says he'll do it later. Poor Tony.

Somehow it comes to T's attention that she's actually a hacker villain for hire. She only in the past has gone after "evil" corps and people and Tony catches her hacking Roxxon or Stane or Hammer. He thinks the whole thing is hilarious and doesn't bother to stop her. Maybe even drops hints.

25 Aug 2025

Back after 2 weeks in Japan. Very hot. But awesome. It's nice ot be home, mostly because I missed my cats. But oh how expensive the US is in comparison.

29 July 2025

Well, I'm finally confirmed going to Gencon. It's my first time in 13 years and I'm a little anxious. OT1H I'm going because I have a game doing very well (Trinket Trove) on the BGG Hotness no less, so I'm going to try and sign some copies. OTOH due to family BS and tragedy I didn't do any planning.

29 July 2025

So all very last minute. I got a hotel like a half hour drive away and have to negotiate that, badgered for badges, so it's all a little stressful. Anybody interested in learning about Trinket trove or doing demos let me know!

#freeironmanplots "The Rogue Backup". So one day someone, Could be Stark Inc or someone else, sends a new satellite/probe around the side of the sun opposite Earth and discovers an odd sight: a captured asteroid swarmed with robots, building orbital solar collectors. And using Stark tech to do it.

This could go a few ways. Maybe the backup has deteriorated over time, and Tony has to deal with a bad version of himself. Maybe Tony grows to like the idea of a secret, off-Earth backup, just in case; Tony probably loves the idea of a Dyson swarm in general.

Maybe he's not happy with the reveal, but the backup says he won't even be noticed for hundreds of years, so Tony kicks the can on this one.

Tony goes to investigate and finds a starktech fabricator on a probe remnant on the asteroid, busy making drone copies, factory copies, and solar panels. After hijinks, Tony finds out that a backup of his own mind is the AI running things. Said AI escaped in a probe with the fab.

Trying to protect it's own existence at first, but then came up with an idea that it would start the construction of a Dyson Swarm, sort of like millions of swarm satellites eventually collecting all the sun's energy.

#freeironmanplots This one I call "Tony Makes A Mistake" and it's just that. I can't remember any time (I'm sure there must be?) where Tony was engineering something and made a mistake.

You really want to give it stakes: make it so he has to team up with a villain for a few issues to fix it. He learns a little humility working closely with them. Maybe its their specialty (lasers for the Living Laser for ex).

I've worked tech long enough to see something I built go bad due to an error, and have everybody screaming at you at once to fix it, and knowing it's your own fault, it's the worst - which translates to the best kind of story tension!

#freeironmanplots This one I call "Tony Makes A Mistake" and it's just that. I can't remember any time (I'm sure there must be?) where Tony was engineering something and made a mistake.

He's an inventor, working on sometimes nearly godlike technology. You telling me 100% of the time he gets the math right? He works in nanotech but never had a grey goo scenario? I know there were a few times where the AI's went rogue (either the suit or independently) but this has to be public.

No villain. No bad guys. Just a fucking mistake. How does he handle it? What does it do to his ego? Is it something he can fix, atone for? Is anybody killed? Does it retrigger his alcoholism? See, that's a story with an arc. How is he before and after?

Folks, I need help. I forgot to get #GenCon badges! And didn't know they are non-transferrable. Anybody with a booth who needs help or $ or something, I can do demos or even some game testing and dev/design if you need it. As extra payment, here is Moxie's butthole as she is crazy needy today.

youtube.comTrinket Trove | How to Play | Learn to Play in 5 Minutes!YouTube video by kovray

Trinket Trove How To Play! www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmjJ...

#freeIronManPlots I call this one "Tinker, Surgeon, Psych, Iron Man." Ok, so we all know Tony has no compunctions with doing a little biohacking, self-hacking, etc. And he has the best doctors/scientists/etc in the business on speed dial. Which to someone like Tony, could be bad.

Easy to see where this goes - of course he tries! And we all see why you shouldn't experiment on yourself. Maybe he engineers out his genius accidentally. Or maybe he engineers out remorse, or just loses his humanity tin-woodman style completely.

There have been some similar ideas explored in the comic, but not the way I'd like - over many issues with a lot of creeping dread as things get worse. This is something you set up with a single issue, then you drop hints over other arcs, until you hit some point where you have to deal with it.