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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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Just started playing Slugblaster with a newish group a month ago. We are about 4ish hours in.

For those that don't know, it's based on Blades in the Dark. There are basically 2 phases . . . a "sesh" where characters jump through a portal into another rhelm and skate, do tricks, and try to look cool without getting eaten by a giant metacentipede.

Then there's the downtime where they go back home, are teenagers, dealing with teenager stuff like parents and school. They also level up their gear.

We started with them on a "sesh" where they were in a different world, skating. I treated it like a tutorial. The did some skate tricks, earned some style, got to play around, got chased by salvage crabs and met a snotty 12 year old.

Today we did their first downtime. We played out two of the home life stuff . . . one character trying to impress his distant dad and the other stranded my his mom over burnt nachos with an annoying little brother.

At the end of the game today, one of my players said, "wow . . . that downtime, the at home stuff, was almost more intense and more fun that the part where we were skating around and doing tricks."

I think we might be hooked. This is a really great game.

A bit more detail?

Sure.

During the sesh, one of the players biffed it during the "disaster roll." He bit his tongue, hard, making is swell and bleed. He has to talk with a lisp and I put a 3 box timer for it to be cured.

Back at another player's house, he got a cup of ice for it to bring the swelling down, but he filled in a box.

At home, when I asked him what was for dinner, I he wasn't sure, so I had him roll a D6 for it.

He rolled a 1.

Dinner was overcooked nachos. He had to take a bite. He had to erase the filled in "tongue healed" box.

Tomorrow is the big party . . . will his tongue be healed?

Who knows.

Been thinking about Bionicle and Xenoblade recently and was wondering if anyone knew some good settings set on or in some giant beast, creature, machine or etc.

Which ttrpg or board game do you have not so much for its rules or to play it, but for the pretty pretty art?
This is NOT a dig on those games, but they happen to be games you have where the art is the main draw for you.

Mine is Vaesen! Utterly gorgeous, tons of lovely and spooky art. The system isn't bad, but it isn't what got me to get the book. I've had friends who have never played RPGs go straight to looking through that one.

I have talked before about how this subreddit seems to recommend the same few dozen games, so I would like to earnestly, genuinely try an experiment to spin things in a different direction.

Recommend an RPG that has not been mentioned in this subreddit (except for this very thread) across the past month: ideally, not even by you yourself.

One way to do this is by using Reddit's built-in search function. Type in the name of the RPG, and sort by new.

Another method is to run a Google search like:

[name of RPG] site:reddit.com/r/rpg

Then, use Google's search filter to set a time for the past month.

This can be any game, preferably one that you have actually played before. Even a small, one- or two-sentence pitch should be fine.

I will start.

Project Rebirth is a gridless tactical combat game about playing not-quite magical girls. I say "not-quite magical girls" because Project Rebirth is a fork of Magical Burst ReWrite, which is a fork of Magical Burst (a game that had other forks, such as the original author's own Magical Fury, which went in an entirely different direction from Magical Burst ReWrite and Project Rebirth).

Sadly, Project Rebirth never made it past its beta phase before its author lost interest. But even in its eternal beta state, it is a perfectly playable RPG.

While there are noncombat rules covering both mundane and magical actions, the focus of the rules is battling "Revenants," monsters of incredible mystical might. The game is calibrated towards three PCs, hence the three combat archetypes of Striker, Guardian, and Tactician, though there are rules for two or four characters. There are no real positioning mechanics; instead, the focus is on juggling resource pools and intelligently applying 1/battle or 2/battle abilities. There is no bestiary, but GMs are given firmly codified rules on how to create Revenants, as well as a menu of special abilities to choose from.

I played and GMed Project Rebirth several decades ago. I do not know what I would think of it now, in 2026, but I remember it being a satisfying tactical combat game.

I play dnd mostly but I have a world I want to build and people tell me that it don’t fit into dnd so I would help if I could get some help finding a TTRPG that fits
“This is going to be a little back ground my world is still very big work in progress. The city is like a 1930s era Gotham very dark. Magic has kind of fallen off as long with most of the other races, except for humans which now populate most of the world. There are still people who can use magic, but they must pull from a living creature and turn that into a magical fuel very similar to the book Dark Son and its magical system.
Now to the main problem/question I don’t know if I should add guns to my world. I was originally planning on doing it and limiting the players HP to give them the feel on how powerful guns are, but as I was talking to one of my friends he bought the idea of just guns, not existing in this world being like skipped over in the history. I would like some peoples ideas and what they would do.” This is the world I would like. Please and Thank you for the help.

It's a Deadly one, but should be useful for a night or two of fun.

https://logen-nein.itch.io/caverns-of-the-shimmering-peak

Does anyone know whether a reskin of Lacuna using Lovecraft's Dreamlands currently exists? I was thinking of what to run at an upcoming convention and had both of those properties in my head and was thinking of writing up a one shot merging them. Figured I'd look into whether it's been done already before reinventing the wheel, but I haven't found anything so far, which seems like it can't be true.

My favourite thing in RPGs is when the players (especially new players) are in a genuine quandary over what to do in a situation.

Some tricky moral or tactical position they've organically found themselves in, they have all the relevant info and they're working out what to do.

I love being in it as a player, and I love watching it as a GM (or in APs).

But I fucking hate it when the PCs are talking in-character, completely purposelessly about nothing that matters. Just incidental filler or a weird mix or chit-chat and "acting" that doesn't go anywhere. It's usually either because the GM had dropped them into a situation with no conflict or obstacle to resolve, or no clear time pressure to move forward, or the PCs don't know what to do.

Just get on with it!

And GMs, if they're floundering, either remind them of their overarching goals, or point out the obstacle (cuz maybe they missed it), or show the time pressure!

Anyway, to end on a positive note, my favourite moment recently was when my PCs realised they could short-cut a problem they had by killing a (chaotic-neutral type) Ettin shepherd in his sleep. It really stressed them out and they still feel guilty about it now. It was great!

I can't think of a clearer, snappier title for this, so forgive me if it's not immediately clear what I'm on about. But fundamentally I've been thinking about the sliding scale between a TTRPG which tries to mechanically copy a different genre versus trying to embody the "feel" of what makes that genre what it is.

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The specific example that got me thinking about this was the many "I want to run a JRPG-inspired/fantasy anime-inspired campaign, how do I do this" and how the go-to systems - Fabula Ultima, Break, etcetera - focus on trying to mechanically reproduce the technical bits of JRPGs like "guys standing in a line" combat, complex job systems and mechanised status effects and elemental weaknesses and a focus on trying to give some form of the video game experience adapted to TTRPG form.

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Whereas when I've run "JRPG inspired" campaigns the focus for me has been embodying the parts I feel best adapt to TTRPGs - the tropes and aesthetics, so perhaps high fantasy with lots of technological progress, a party of generally high status and disparate heroes who all excel in their field in some idiosyncratic way, visual shorthands like airships and floating cities and so on. And in terms of storytelling themes the broad-strokes political allegories, personal rivalries embodying ideological arguments, themes of progress versus preservation, environmentalism, external evils corrupting people and countries, that sort of thing. Those are more important to me if I want to communicate "JRPG" in a campaign than the system having precise mechanics for birds being weak to wind and immune to earth, or a class specifically called Dragoon or whatever.

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It feels a much more PBTA ethos, which does a good thing with your playbook being as much your narrative role in the story and guiding your RP in that direction.

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The other classic for this is mecha - is it more important that you track heat and missiles and radar range and all that on a turn by turn basis (your Lancers and Mechwarrior and so on) or does it matter more that your mech can do *a role* and it does it as well or as inadequately as the story needs to be dramatic and tell a story that *feels* like a mecha anime.

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I'm not judging either approach - personally the very reasons I don't enjoy Fabula Ultima are the very reasons I'll go to Lancer or Battle Century for giant robots (because for me the joy of robot fighting *is* tactics and tinkering with your build, but the joy of JRPGs is the journey and the aesthetics and the outspoken storytelling).

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And I guess it holds true in other genres - I'm less of an expert but, say, Spycraft or Gumshoe versus Brindlewood Bay in terms of how a TTRPG can emulate mystery stories.

Edit: I guess I forgot to add the actual questions here - do some genres work best in TTRPG format as applying themes and aesthetics to a more generic system because their appeal isn't necessarily in the nitty gritty of how they work but more how they make you feel? Is this just a narrow issue for the people who want to emulate video games in tabletop form? Have you tried running games in these sorts of spheres and how did you do it?

Which of the two? Or is there another system I don't know about?