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The off-topic rules may not apply here, but the other rules still do. This is less the Wild West and more the Mild West. Don't be a jerk.

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Any advice, content etc will be welcome. Basically I want to run game on penal island colony, inspired by Gothic. I will start in prison camp but after gaining some trust with one of groups PC's will be free to explore island and other, bigger factions. How to introduce them and generate some minor quests, characters etc? I am looking for inspiration. Also additional questions: What is your personal (or taken from guide) checklist before Sandbox session? WWN has a lot of useful rules but maybe there is something more How many plot books/adventure seeds per location/city/camp? How to encourage players to find motivation and goals for their characters?

Prewritten adventures: so many empty rooms

Does anyone else feel like lots of dungeons or houses etc have a bunch of empty uninteresting rooms?

How do you navigate that when running games?

I’m fairly new to ttrpg, but I’ve played a couple. I’ve never attempted to dm a campaign before but my friends are wrestling fans and have been wanting to start a wrestling campaign and I volunteered to be the dm. We chose World Wide Wrestling and I just got the book. We’re not starting it anytime soon, so I wanted to be as prepared as possible. Any tips would be highly appreciated.

First time GM introducing 5 complete beginners. How do I make sure their first session goes well?

I'm a completely new GM and I've never actually played a TTRPG before. I'm planning to run The Haunting for five friends, all of whom are also completely new to TTRPGs.

I'm excited about Call of Cthulhu because our group already enjoys mystery and deduction board games. I thought an investigation focused game might be an easier introduction for us than something more combat heavy like D&D.

The group itself is a bit unusual. Three of the players are gamers and we play things like Dota and ESO together, so they understand basic RPG concepts like stats, characters, abilities, etc. But they're not really people who enjoy reading. They tend to skip dialogue, cutscenes and lore in games and just get into the gameplay.

The other two players are complete non gamers. They're the wives of two of the guys and have never really played anything like this. (Except board games.)

There's also a language issue, so I'll be running most of the game in our native language as they are more comfortable with that despite knowing English. I'll translate descriptions and dialogue as naturally as I can, while keeping certain terms in English when translating them would make it awkward.

Honestly, I'm worried about the "theater of the mind" aspect of TTRPGs. These aren't people who read books or naturally spend a lot of time imagining fictional worlds. If I describe an old creepy house for more than maybe 30 seconds, I can already imagine someone thinking when I would get to the point and what they are supposed to do next.

So how do you handle atmosphere with players who aren't naturally imaginative or have a tendency to roleplay? Do you keep descriptions extremely short and immediately give them something to interact with? I feel like pictures, maps, handouts and props would help but they are few in number.

I'm also unsure how much I should guide their choices. For eg, if they arrive at a house, I could give them options on what to do rather than just letting them decide. But then I worry that I'm basically giving them a menu of options rather than actually letting them play. On the other hand, if I just ask five beginners "What do you do?", I can easily imagine five blank faces because they genuinely don't know what they're allowed to do. How do you ease through this?

The other thing making me nervous is that I'm not sure how enthusiastic they actually are. Nobody is saying "Holy shit, let's play a TTRPG!" It's more like "Sure, if you want to try it, we'll give it a shot."

I'm the one who's genuinely excited about this, and they're mostly willing to try it because I'm excited about it. So I'm trying to avoid making their first experience feel like I'm forcing them through something they don't enjoy.

For those of you who have introduced complete beginners to TTRPGs, especially a whole group of beginners at once:

1. What did you actually do during that first session that worked?

2. How much did you guide them? How much description did you use? Did you use pictures, maps or handouts? How did you get people from "What are we supposed to do?" to actually taking initiative?

3. What mistakes did you make that you'd avoid if you were doing it again?

I'm basically trying to learn how to be a Keeper while simultaneously teaching five people how to be players.

So this is a bit of a complaint based on something I observed but also something that needs to be discussed in my opinion.

In a lot of TTRPG shorts I hear about a player overcoming an obstacle by doing something that is later revealed to be part of a master plan. The most classic example is wizard asking to make someone a magical sword and then casting polymorph but there are many examples like a player constantly putting glyphs of warding on something to create a mini nuke and surprising the GM or doing a wordplay with a fae or a devil that the GM fails to see.

These scenarios ignore the fact that the GM has to know a players intent to make their plan part of the game. Yes I the GM missed the cue about the sword but if your character was planning to do that then it would be a deception roll to avoid the NPC feeling something is off. As a GM I may not have realized you built a nuke but a wizard using detect magic definitely will. I as the GM am not well versed with word plays but the devil blocking the way definitely is.

The point here is this. The fact that I'm dumb does not make an NPC dumb and I am going to be pissed if you try to trick me as the person instead of the NPC. As such if you have a master plan then declare what you're going for.

Hello,

Does anyone have some experience with Mazes? I’d like to try it and as I don’t have any players yet, I wanted to run this on a Con.
Are there any good and short introductary adventures that I could leverage?
Any other tips specific to Mazes?

Thanks for any input.

I just finished GMing my first session and it was everything I wanted. Fast character creation, easy to remember rules, fun! I've been dming d&d for so long that this was so refreshing! My players said they loved it too and they had fun, they want to continue. I couldn't be more satisfied... But what does the Stupefied condition do?

Over the last few months, I've become obsessed with a foggy setting inspired by Ravenloft, Silent Hill, and The Mist. Yet I can't seem to come up with anything satisfying. I don't want to make a copy of any of them (although Silent Hill is definitely the biggest inspiration for me). But all I have so far are the following ideas:

• A giant brutalist concrete city that's always covered in fog, filled with monsters and people who don't remember who they are and can't leave the city. There are two possibilities I'm considering: either it's a limbo, or it's the result of an experiment, like the the Arrowhead Project or the teleportation device in Gorky 17 — except that the city is "looped." If you keep going north, you'll eventually end up in the south of the city.
• Something in the center of the city that might act as a magnetic center, but is extremely difficult — or perhaps even impossible — to reach, like the Golden City in the Fade from Dragon Age. Something that can be used as a beacon.
• The city is alive, or perhaps becomes alive at night (like the Third Dimension in Silent Hill or the living dungeon from Heart: The City Beneath).
• The player characters and NPCs are: option 1) people who ended up here because of things they did in the past (if it's a limbo, that's easy to explain as the reason for their memory loss); option 2) or people who lived/worked in the city before the experiment went wrong (if I go with the failed-experiment reason). In the latter case, the memory loss could be explained by the effects of the experiment's breach.

Please help me come up with some ideas, sources of inspiration, or games that do something similar that I could check out.

Just in time for Halloween, I created an adventure with themes from the Silent Hill franchise,

Link: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/498975/Shade-Hollow

Shade Hollow: A Silent Hill-Inspired Horror Adventure for Level 10 Characters

Adventure Length: 20-page adventure designed for 5-6 characters of level 10.

Setting: Shade Hollow can be dropped into any campaign or used as an alternative to Berez in Curse of Strahd.

Theme: Heavily inspired by the Silent Hill franchise, including psychological horror and trauma.

Plot Overview: Characters explore a cursed and isolated village, blending elements of mystery, horror, and survival.

Personalization: The adventure is designed to tie into the personal backstory of one of the characters.

Horror Elements: Psychological and emotional horror with themes of guilt, despair, and isolation.

Monsters and Mechanics: Includes several custom monsters and mechanics to heighten the horror experience.

Maps and Visuals: Comes with high-quality battle maps enhancing your gameplay experience.

Compatibility: Easily adaptable to various settings and campaigns or something to tie into Curse of Strahd.

Playtime: Estimated 6-8 hours of gameplay.

Hello, I am currently looking around for the most outlandish adventures, that most break convention, or try to be outside the norm of the usual "Adventure formula'.

For example, I recently came upon this: https://idraluna-archives.itch.io/orc-dungeon

Even something like Vermis qualifies. I am looking for things that even say they are not to playable.

Or even Putrecent Regnant from Mork Borg which is an LP.

What other examples exist on that?

so

i had a lot of fun running modules, adventure paths, premade adventures and all. they're neat. my players tell me i'm pretty good at them. but they kind of lack the freedom of a proper homebrew campaign, all the cool stuff you can do when the players are fully connected to the world with backstory and hooks, an original story that is truly in everyone's hands rather than just following the book with some small tweaks.

i've been trying for to figure out how to actually run one for years by now.

even the most basic thing just doesn't work out. i tried multiple systems, i tried looking at all the advice possible, all the "prep situations not plots" things, all the gming articles i could find, trying to look all around for any shred of inspiration for ttrpgs. but they all seem to assume you already have some kind of idea at the core, some kind of story you want to tell, some kind of situation to start everything from. and i don't. and i have no idea how the fuck you are even supposed to find that.

even the few times i tried to push ahead and play a basic session 1 with friends with the most barebones "idk kill some bandits" plot to then hopefulyly figure out things later... it immediately stalled trying to figure out where the fuck to go after that again. to the point i'm this close to just giving up on the idea entirely.

so how do you do any of this? how do you all even get ideas for running things in the first place? or am i just not... creative enough to be able to do this at all.