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James Introcaso (lead designer of Draw Steel) just released this video announcing an open alpha playtest for MCDM's next game. This came is called Crows and is designed to be the exact opposite of Draw Steel in many ways. Where Draw Steel is about epic heroes solving world ending problems with badass abilities, Crows is about nobodies risking it all to venture into the dungeons of a magical post apocalypse and hopefully bring back loot to improve lives back in their home town.

The playtest materials can be accessed here in a free Patreon post. Here's what's inside:

• A booklet containing the game's core rules
• A booklet containing character creation and advancement options, rules for gear, and rules for creating and advancing the PCs' village
• An adventure to, in, and from the Blood Library, a flesh-covered ruin containing spellbooks and other treasures
• A booklet containing the statistics of creatures used in the Blood Library
• Maps and art needed for the dungeon. The art is from the great Nick De Spain!

This is playtest material and so has not been fully laid out or edited. Feedback on these materials can be provided here through Monday June 29th at 8AM Eastern Pacific time.

For more details on Crows you can check out this intro post and this playlist on YouTube. MCDM is planning on crowdfunding this game in August and you can sign up for more details on that here.

I've been wanting to write and run a campaign I've been contemplating for a while now, a Vampire game set in London during the Blitz. I played the original VtM back in the 90s as my first foray into RPGs, and I've got a copy of the latest (5th ed?) that I've read but haven't played. And I've played in a one shot of what was possibly 4th ed.

I love the lore of VtM, but I've always been a little underwhelemd with the mechanics, and I know my players would start to get annoyed and/or disengaged with it, so I'm looking for guidance:

• what other Vampire systems are out there?
• What other Vampire systems are GOOD?
• If VtM is the main event, which version is the best?

Thanks!

I am running a year of short S&S games before jumping into Stonetop. Anyone have an opinion on which is the better game for short action and adventure scenarios? I know S&S games don't lean toward long campaigns, but what about three to five sessions?

We have been playing in a campaing for more than 7 months, and our story is very close to it's end. Despite that few sessions left, we cannot take anymore the attitude of our DM as players. Since the start there were minor red flags that were barely noticeable in comaprison with joy and excitement we had in our games. The quality of the characters and story used to be higher. Then there were problems with balancing, intercations with NPCs and open use of AI during the games.

Before I start, let me say that these are little elements that felt always dealable and we can get through it. But it turned out to be that we were wrong to ignore it, now the probelms as so many it literally paralyzed us.

The setting of our campaing is Underdark, drows, intrigues between houses, conflict between Lolth and Eilistraee, written by the DM. Majority of our pack is House Baenre's slaves and few ones are drows from noble houses. We played once a week and payed for each session to our DM.

Let's start with the fact that our DM cannot take any criticism, immidiate reaction to any feedback is denial and gaslighting. So, that was the main reason we kept taking all the issues quiet untill we all snaped. I understand that it also makes us guilty for sinking that badly deep into problems that cannot be solved peacefully now.

Our DM set several bans from the begining, we were okay with at the session zero, but the list kept growing as our characters leveled up and got naturally stronger. She gets genuenlly pissed when we come up with good plans and destroy the enemies. It led to more complex combat, more units in the encounters, and endless amount of counterspells. DM would get confused in many status effects and the list of initiative and got even more frustrated. Even at that pont we didn't see any major issues. And then she introduced a "death mark", which means that in the fights she would focus only one strong player. That player more likely would be at 0 hp by the end of first turn or disabled by spells. It was nerly impossible to play normally under that mark. She focued our Bard first, then the mark shifted to our Druid. For the fist time it felt like stakes went higher. After all, it just killed all the motivation for those players. So, I baited our DM into putting that mark on me, my Gloom Stalker Ranger also wasn't a favored class of hers, "I should have banned that sub-class" she told me and I became her beating toy. Fortunatly, my high HP and high saving throws would not let me die on the first turn. Then it moved to our Wizard.

It was okay for her to say at the start of the session "I've had a bad week. so you all gonna suffer today" with a dead serious face. Maybe she though that it made her look cool. As players we sticked to each other cheering up, and helping through tough times. Our DM never felt like she fitted into our vibe. At some point there was a feeling like "finally, she's becaming our friend!" and then something gonna switch and she's again felt like an different hostile figure. The setting of the campaing also made us tolerant to her bad attitude, drows, viloence, slaves and so on.

Half of the campaing passed. We loved it despite ocsional miscommunication with DM, turning each seed of a conflict into a joke and cooling down. And then, one day, I noticed that our DM is generating the text for the session during the game itself. Player interacted with an NPC and I saw DM quickly typing into Grok, waiting for it's response, and reading the generated text. Once, my character looted a letter from her sister, DM also generated the content of the letter after I looted it. Moreover, she read the text outlound and then said "oh, wait there is a mistake", she edited her promt and read me new generated text. I was so shoked at the moment, I don't think it is okay to do so, but I kept quiet. Starting this point the quality of the story dropped. For the last 2 months DM uses AI generation almost every game. Yesterday it turned out that other players didn't know that she actively used AI during the games, they had a feeling, but no proofs. While I saw everything every game because I sit near DM and can see what's on her screen.

Characters that PCs romanced suddenly became very flat and appeared only as a meme material. The depht of intractions and developing relationships faded. The story itself overall started to feel flat, unplanned and very predictable. A lot of cliche.

Our DM used to hint that we are just a work for her, a way to earn some extra money. She had tough days at work, tired, physically and emotionally, but she would never cancel a game or share her feelings. We really wanted to be friends with her outside of the game and help her irl. Later we found out that she has mental disorders like PTSD and some hints towards scizophrenia. We kept going to the games to make extra money for her as the way of supporting. Because she would be pissed to us if we didn't come, offers to take a break were declined.

The number of problems only kept growing, players started to lose motivation to come very week. The only movitation for us was to see each other. On the outside we knew about all the problems, but once the game starts it always felt like we are back to our good old times.

Recently or pack started to really fall aparat. Our Bard skipped 3-4 games due to personal reasons. First time it felt real, but slowly we realized that the problem is the conflicts she had with the DM privately about the story development of her character. Our Bard didn't share any of it willing to do not ruin our mood and enthusiasm. She decided just to dissappear. Death Mark returned to me, but to the love interest of my character. Who also became a meme material flat character I started to hate intercating with. In the last session there was a wedding planned of my character and her love interest. I wrote down the vision of the event I had in my mind, she seemed excited too and we agreed for a meeting the next day in Discord to plan the session.

As a character I should have know what's and how gonna happen. I arrived at time (9PM), texted her "I'm on my PC, online, call anytime", she was also online playing Marvel Rivals with her friends. I waited until the match ended, she just started a new match, didn't write me back or explained why the call didn't happen. I waited for her 2-3 hours, nothing from her side. The next day was a game day, I didn't want to go for another AI slop session. My messege about the meeting left unanswered which pissed me off even more in the morning. For me it became the last drop of my patience and I snapped, dumped all my thought and feelings to Druid player. Druid shared the similar frustrating intreactions with her too. So now it snowballed into other remaining players. We all found out that we were just forcing ourselves to the games because we were used to, and because only few games left until the end. But I already could not overcome my feelings to make myself go. We as players cancelled the game, explaining due to bad feelings and personal reasons. DM texted: "I'm also feeing bad, but I've always kept coming despite everything".

Another nail on top of the coffin was her statement on the last session: "Congrats! You are offically on a bad ending of the campaing". Because we did a quest for a archimage on a railwayed plot, we didn't want to do it, but the DM gave us no other choice. Straight up saying that we cannot defeat him and there is no point in it. So it totally was not in our hands to influence.

So, now, we are stuck. We didn't tell her yet that we don't want to continue the campaing. We know it's gonna hurt her a lot knowing her mentail disorders. On the other side we cannot force ourselves into games anymore knowing that we all went through. Our DM does not appreciate us and she will not admit any criticizm going to the full denieal mode and blaming us for everything.

I don't know if anybody gonna read it fully, but I needed to dump my feelings. Like somehting I have been supressing for months just exploding like volcano and I can stop it yet.

Thank you for your time! Sorry if there are mistakes in the text, it's an emotinal writing and English it not my first language.

It’s a bit of a dream of mine to eventually GM a long, evolving campaign set in a world I’ve been slowly fleshing out over the past couple years. I’m very much inspired by those who’ve run campaigns lasting decades.

Lately, though, I’ve mostly been running 6-9 session campaigns, because trying out new systems and settings is a lot of fun for me too.

At the same time, I’d like to start something more lasting eventually.

For those of you who have run long, sprawling campaigns, any tips for success? Did you set out to run a game for the long term, or did things just naturally move in that direction? Did you take breaks for other games and life, or did you mostly stick to your campaign and schedule?

What do you think about the idea of players not knowing their exact hit points during combat?

I once ran an entire campaign like this. During fights I described wounds, pain, blood spraying, exhaustion, and the characters getting into worse and worse shape, but I never said things like “you lost 8 HP.” I kept track of everything myself behind the screen.

To my surprise, the players absolutely loved it. They became much more cautious, more creative, and started making decisions based on the situation and their characters’ emotions instead of pure math.

The typical RPG mindset disappeared:
“I still have enough HP to survive two more hits, so I charge.”
or:
“I’m low on health, so mechanically it makes sense to retreat.”

Instead, there was constant uncertainty. Would the next hit be the last one? Is the character barely standing, or can they still keep fighting? Is it worth taking the risk?

Because of that, combat felt far more brutal and much more real. A character knows they are badly wounded, but there is no health bar or percentage floating above their head. They do not know how much longer they can hold on or whether the next attack will kill them.

For me, it created incredible tension and atmosphere. I’m curious if any of you have ever run combat this way and how your players reacted to it.

I've recently picked up doomsong and lord have mercy by caeser ink, so far I'm loving it, and the first session went so well, but with both books being so dense I worry if I'm missing anything.

Have any of you tried this system/the campaign? If so we're there any problems/or especially good bits that you came across, whilst I can always improvise in the moment, I try to head off or prepare for any issues or really fun moments in advance if I can

If you haven't already I'd really recommend you take a look at the books, even just the art and setting are great

Getting people to read books can be tough and is probably the biggest problem when getting folks to try out other TTRPGs.

However if you could just tell them how to play yourself, I imagine that would be a lot more digestible to a number of players. I know I've met at least one person that preferred to listen to a video on it rather than read it, even though a video could be 40 minutes long.

It doesn't have to be completely material free. For example I think Fate would be a good example of one you could keep in your head, and for that you'd still need a character sheet and a list of skills for players to choose from. But that's two sheets of paper. I'd also think RemiNES would also be a good example, if only because I myself could probably explain how to play off the top of my had, sans the specific lists of personality quirks or example specials, though those can also be made up on their own.

Compared to something crunchier like D&D where, sure you can probably remember most of the core rules of movement and resolution and stuff, but you're probably not going to remember all the weapon lists and their money prices, or the exact details of all the spells. Or even if you had memorized all the spells it'd be a bit much to vocally describe each of them in turn while players try to pick which ones they want their character to have.

You might still need the book yourself to remind yourself of this or that little rule, but mainly the idea is something you could teach relatively easy without players having the book themselves.

I am currently mulling a big sandbox campaign, that i already had played with people in parts. Basically, its a Fantasy Oregon Trail Campaign. Players are called in / get paid to protect/support (among a lot other of such characters) a complete Trek with lots of families with Prairie Schooners, Vardos (Gypsy Wagons), the poor ones have only Mormon Style Handcarts and so on.

I was thinking of a Trail that only takes 40 days through unknown, yet unclaimed Land at the edge of a Kingdom, at a speed of around 10-15 miles a day and then founding, building up a village. Again, much inspiration taken from classical Western Stories.

The thing is:

When is such a trek too big? Or too small? To give the players choice. To have enough redshirt-settlers to die in attacks, or to fight in the background?

I dived into the real world history... saw that most Treks had only around 20-30 Wagons (if even), like, a 100 people, often less. The biggest reported had 300 people. 85 Wagons/Carts.

They stretched for miles. And the logistics... that is... gigantic.

Like, calculations and some book sources told me that most of those schooners hat 4 Oxen +2 spare. Vardos had even more. And Horses, with the exception of a tiny few for the scouts and protectors are scarce, need too much special food.

With Milk Cows, Goat Herds and Sheep Herds we are talking about 300 big Animals that need to graze in the evening and night.

Is that too big to play with a kind of moving village of 300 NPCs? But if i tone it down, like, down to 50-80 people (Norm of a lot of Trail Treks), would you think such a small amount of people would create this "village" feel? That amounts of "choices" they could make?

GR has deeply discounted most of the print books offered via Drive-Thru*. Blue Rose, Fantasy Age 1e/2e, Cthulhu Awakens, Modern Age, M&M 3e, Pathfinder/Freeport, etc.

“Green Ronin Warehouse Clearance Sale!
We have so many new products coming our way this year that we literally have to make room in the warehouse. If you are willing to do your part to help, we are willing to cut you a great deal: 65% off specific print products through the end of June, 2026!
Not only is this a limited time offer, stocks of these products is not infinite. When the print versions of these books are gone, they’re gone! So get yours today!”

*Not PoDs, retail versions available through DriveThru.

I'm a big history nerd and lately I've been thinking about running a tabletop rpg set in the actual middle ages (not just a medieval fantasy world). Probably the Viking age, or the first Crusade give or take. I've been looking into a few systems and I was curious if anybody has tried doing this before. What system did you use and how did the game go? I appreciate any advice here!