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I'd made a thread last year asking if anyone knew what was up with Cartel, the PbtA game Magpie crowdfunded back in 2018, and backers finally got some news today. Unfortunately, it's the bad news we'd all expected for a while. A few excerpts below (emphasis NOT my own, it's in the original text):

I’ve got some tough news to deliver today. I am officially canceling the remaining Cartel stretch goals, namely Amigos y Enemigos and Sin Fronteras. We will still be releasing the CD of narcocorridos (Corridos de Durango)—read below for more—but that will be the last release for the Cartel Kickstarter.

Over the past few years, I’ve been slowly chipping away at the remaining work needed to release these stretch goal materials. I was able to collaborate with some amazing creators on them…but there’s still so much to be done—editing, graphic design, etc—and the financial headwinds have only gotten worse with the tariffs, the war in Iran, etc. [...] At some point, I have to admit that these remaining pieces are no longer viable on any reasonable timeline. And more importantly, you all deserve to have a definitive resolution instead of an open-ended project that never actually finishes.

For everyone who supported the now canceled books—either through a pledge level or via add-ons—I would very much like to make this right for you. While all the money for this project has long been spent bringing it to life, we are offering the following options for every backer affected by the cancellation of the physical books: 100% refund, delivered via Paypal (or other electronic method) or 150% refund, delivered via credit to the Magpie Games webstore.

If you backed at a level that included either of these supplements in print—or added one/both of them to your pledge at any level—please fill out this form to claim your refund/credit[...]

This is the final update for the Cartel Kickstarter. From this point forward, we consider this project to be closed—we won’t be updating it, and we won’t respond to comments. If you need something that’s not addressed by the above, please email us at [info@magpiegames.com](mailto:info@magpiegames.com).

The last update before this had been all the way back in October 2024, and that was after no updates in 2023 at all, so this isn't terribly shocking... but backers *did* previously receive several playbooks from Amigos y Enemigos and a playtest playset for Sin Fronteras' Berlin spinoff, which seem like they'll now never see a public release.

At least the story's over now, I suppose. Woof. My condolences to all my fellow backers; the whole reason I backed this initially was for the Aztlan playset in Sin Fronteras that we never saw any previews for.

You've heard the usual complaint before. That DnD asks too much of GM while not providing them with the necessary tools (which is true), but sometimes you hear a variant. DnD players are called lazy and blamed for not clicking with a narrative game, normally a PbtA, because they do not want to put in the effort.

My confusion stems from having had the opposite experience. As a player, I found DnD fairly crunchy and having a somewhat harsh onboarding as I had to take my time learning my entire spell list and reading everything over and over to make sure I didn't misunderstand the fine print when rolling my first two characters (a Circle of Stars Druid and a Divination Wizard, respectively). And even before that, I spent days researching builds because I knew DnD games are a time commitment and I didn't want to chose the wrong and be stuck with it.

After the game started I continued thinking of how to use my spells creatively (and I don't mean TikTok meme crap) and looking for any synergies with the rest of my team (yeah, I know DnD isn't the best game for this). In combat, I was a controller and, outside, utility caster and I took my roles very seriously. I enjoyed it, but I felt that it was a decent amount of effort.

On the other hand, I took to narrative games like water. A lot of what is claimed to take more effort on the player's side I found to be simple, such building the world collaboratively. That's kinda' just using your imagination and reading the room to see if your suggestion is appropriate.

Similarly, I heard that you need players to be taking a more active role and being prepared for their characters to have more agency, but I've never had a problem figuring out what to do next. I suppose, I do not like games where backgrounds are extremely important in guiding the plot (such as trying to enact revenge) and prefer to have a character that starts with simple goals and connections and build from there, basically playing to find out (which is what you're supposed to do in these games anyway). But that's not hard.

I feel that most narrative games there are mechanics that create drama and conflict and playing into the archetype of the playbook makes the story kinda' write itself. Even when there's no clear archetype, character creation generally guides you to making a cohesive character with goals and personality, not just a bag of stats and you go from there.

Most of the time the world is flavourful or emulating a genre and that helps. If you signed up to play Masks you should want to do things like being angsty and struggling with the responsibilities of being a superhero while your brain isn't fully developed, similarly to how in DnD you should want kill shit and probably explore dungeons while doing so.

I'm growing tired of your typical pseudo medieval/Renaissance fantasy stuff and I want to run something set in an antiquity like setting. Ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt, that kind of thing. Easily my favorite historical period.

I'm still (after decades) terrible at inventing my own content and I'm busy so I like to run pre-made campaigns.

75% of the campaigns have something that annoy me and I have trouble getting past them, usually in terms of why the party is doing the things.

Some recent examples, all of which have great core ideas/plots

• Deadlands Horror on Headstone Hill. Players are members of the "Twilight Legion", an unofficial organization of people who hunt the supernatural. The setting has two funded, professional, resourced organizations, the Agency and the Rangers, who handle this sort of thing. Why are the players who are just rando unlicensed people, handling this. There are people who are paid, trained, and have the authority to handle this kind of thing
• (new system) Winter King. Your players participate in the campaign because they receive a vision from Merlin. This seems flimsy. Why the players? This kind of "you're chosen" thing seems really common in campaigns.
• (WFRP 4e) The Enemy Within. Completely unclear why the players are doing any of this stuff, and pursuing this great conspiracy to protect the Empire.
• (Gumshoe) Pillars Built on Sand. The only thing that would get the players involved in all of the scenarios is if they're a group of guys that do random stuff for money, and randomly somehow they're hired at all of the key points. Also, they have to do super heroic stuff beyond what their paid for, even though they're guys that just do stuff for money. If you want to make a group that would actually try to handle the core issue of the plot (some supernatural bad stuff), it's hard to see how you'd rework the campaign so they'd interact w/ all the scenarios.
• A shadow of the demon lord campaign i just bought, where the players are kind of directed to go to places that happen to be part of the overall plot.

I don't have this issue with:

• Vampire the Masquerade, since its usually a sandbox and the players are just interacting with stuff or they're ordered to do stuff by their clan
• Werewolf the Apocalypse. It's explicitly your job to handle a segment of supernatural problems.
• Delta Green. Again, it's your job. The organization knows about stuff and can tell you to do stuff.
• One Ring. You have a company and you're agents of a patron. patron tells you what to do, and you like the patron. Patron knows stuff and can send you to it.

Given that campaigns whose setup annoys me are popular, that means that either

• players and GMs don't care about the weird setup;
• I'm deranged and this shouldn't annoy me (possibility). If so how do I stop being annoyed.
• GMs rework the campaign somehow;

How do you all think about it?

I've been thinking about character advancement and how most systems handle two separate things: how you improve abilities, and how you acquire new ones.

For improvement, many games already do interesting things. Use-based systems like Mythras or Burning Wheel let you advance a skill by actually using it, which feels grounded and natural.

But acquisition is where I think most games still fall short. The most common models are:

1. Class/level-based (D&D, Pathfinder): you hit a threshold and become eligible to learn things, largely independent of what happened in the story. In D&D you reach 5th level and can take Fireball, justified by "personal research", even if your character has never encountered another spellcaster and lives in a world where nobody throws fireballs.
2. Menu-based (GURPS, Call of Cthulhu): you pick a new skill from a list and start improving it through use. More flexible, but the acquisition itself is still disconnected from the fiction.

What I'm curious about is a third model for acquisition: you can only learn something if the fiction provides a source for it.

Examples of what I mean:

• You can only learn a spell if you find a grimoire, a teacher, or witness it being cast
• You can only learn a fighting technique if someone trains you in it
• If nobody in the world knows how to do X, then no PC can learn X

Once you acquire it that way, you could still improve it through use, like any other skill. The two things are separate.

This would make the world feel like it actually contains knowledge rather than knowledge being an abstraction tied to character sheets. It creates natural adventure hooks too, want to learn something? Go find where that knowledge lives.

I know some games already move in this direction. Forbidden Lands, Torchbearer, Burning Wheel (among others) require a teacher to instruct you before you can learn something new. Thie feels much more alive to me than a level-up screen.

I'd also add one twist to the model: maybe you could invent or reinvent an ability from scratch, but only by beating a very high difficulty check? You spent in-game and out-of-game resources experimenting, you failed a dozen times, and then you rolled well enough to crack it. That way the door isn't completely shut, it's just genuinely hard, and the story of how you got there becomes part of your character.

How do you feel about this as a player? Does it add meaningful weight to your character's growth, or does it just feel like gatekeeping? And are there other games that handle this well that I should know about?

I’m sure this has asked before but after running a lot of D&D and Runequest, and I’d love a system with little to no prep. I’ve played a lot of PF2e and am about to run some Daggerheart, and don’t get me wrong I like picking fun monsters etc. but are there systems with little to no prep?

I’ve heard a lot about the Cypher system, how does that play out?

In terms of crunch, myself and my players like customisable characters compares to something like the OSR.

To add I’m also not after the typical fantasy aesthetics. Instead I’m after something that can run settings with firearms and some magic, think steampunk adventures (Disney’s Atlantis or Arcane), pirates in the sea or sky or even something crazy like Kill Six Billion Demons (specifically the huge inter planar city, with martial arts, not the hugely powerful main characters)

The 2026 ENNIE Award Judge self nomination form is now open! https://ennie-awards.com/judge-application/

Be sure to read the instructions at the top fully and review the eligibility requirements. https://ennie-awards.com/mission-statement-and.../

If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them! Applications due by July 7th, voting is July 10th through 19th.

Eligibility

• Must be at least 18 years of age as of start of the ENNIES Judging period and able to enter into a legal contract.
• Thoroughly complete self nomination with legal name and provide a clear photograph.
• Not have any professional relationship with any RPG publisher during the period for the six month prior and 12 months post becoming a judge.
• Must declare any relationship with any publisher in which they receive money, product, or special consideration in exchange for their services.
• Must be able to read English and communicate clearly therein.
• While campaigning and if voted in as judge, must in no way, shape, or form promise favors to fans or publishers in exchange for votes.
• This must not be the third consecutive year for judgeship.
• The ENNIE Awards reserves the right to reject candidates who have failed to meet the above requirements or have displayed significant disregard for the ENNIES Organization or an inability to work cohesively with a team as determined by the Submissions Coordinator and Director.

Hello. I've starting to work on a new campaign for an online table of 5 players, and I'm getting stuck on what system to use.

Before I get too much into it, the idea can be summed up to be a middle ground between Galactic Football and Blood Bowl.

This would be a Dark Fantasy Campaign, I have not decided the level of magic/technology available yet, but unless it helps with making a system work, I'm leaning towards low-ish magic renaissance tech. I will be building the world.

The narrative would be centered on a sports team (players being athletes and/or coaching staff). The system would need to handle the bigger roleplay parts aswell as the recurring sports games (in a somewhat tactical way). The campaigns we do are usually around 50-60 sessions.

The players are quite experienced, here are the games we played the most: DnD, City of Mist, Eclipse Phase, Fate, Daggerheart.

Daggerheart feels like a good exemple of the amount of rules I'd like: light mechanics with some tactical room. A nice character progression system is a welcome addition too.

For the sport played, the main thing I want is for it to be a team sport that is coherent with the fantasy setting. None of us are big sports fan, so needing to know the in-depth rules of an IRL Sport might also be a big of an issue.

I'm already building the world up, so I'm not particularily afraid of having to reskin or adapt a few parts, but I don't want to remake the whole game.

Hope I was concise and clear, thanks in advance for reading and for your suggestions, feel free to ask for informations.

I love OSR vibes, into the odd, electric bastion land, troika and mythic bastionland And they strike that balance very well. but I’m not a dungeon crawl guy, at least not for a full campaign. what OSR games have a good mix of combat and Roleplaying or non combat problem solving?

Sorry for the clickbaity title, not sure how else to explain it in 300 characters or less.

Over the last several years, I've gotten really into the Essence20 RPG (E20) by Renegade Games. It's a d20-ish set of rules that they've used for several of their licensed RPGs, including Power Rangers, Transformers, GI Joe, Welcome to Night Vale, and, my personal favorite, My Little Pony.

The system isn't always a perfect fit for the IPs it's using, but it works well enough, and made some very clever choices: for example, it's designed so that the most complicated math you will ever need to do is add two dice together, usually a d20 and a d4-6--even bonuses to rolls are handled by changing the size of the dice, rather than plusses or minuses to the numbers. Character creation was fun and interesting, and offered lots of possibilities for customization. I particularly admired the MLP RPG because it did a pretty darn good job of making non-combat roles interesting and viable in a d20-ish RPG.

E20 isn't as big as the other RPGs that people are into these days, but its fans are dedicated. One of my favorite parts of the game is the tight-knit community, especially the dedicated homebrewers who were finding ways to make the various IPs work together. Want to make an evil sorceress in Power Rangers? Steal the spellcasting rules from MLP. Want to run a post-apocalyptic MLP game, a la Fallout Equestria? Mix the weapons and classes from GI Joe with the race options from MLP. One idea I've wanted to experiment with, but was never brave enough to try: do Captain Planet by giving the teens from Power Rangers the classes and magic rules from MLP.

I've been using the present tense so far in this post, but, if you read the title, you already know the punchline: the game got unceremoniously cancelled last Friday. There's lots of anger, frustration, and grief in the community right now, and, on my part, I know that thinking about it was making me feel almost physically ill.

Here's what happened, more or less:

To some extent, we should have seen the writing on the wall. Despite the fact that E20 had appeared in several Humble Bundles over the last couple years--sometimes even having entire bundles all their own--it felt like the output of E20 content had slowed dramatically. My Little Pony hadn't seen a new sourcebook since early 2025--which was wierd, because Renegade had announced a new book about once every six months. Still, fans were clamoring for more: every couple months, there was a rash of discussion on what content we wanted to see next, how we would write it, all that jazz.

Last Friday, Renegade held their twice-annual RenegadeCon, where they announce all their upcoming products. This time around, Renegade surprise-announced that they would be reprinting the E20 RPG books--but as D&D 5.5 hacks. Essence20 had been shitcanned without warning. Even worse, the announcement didn't mention the MLP RPG book at all, which fans have taken as a sign that they're not interested in producing further MLP content--possibly, says the speculation, due to low sales.

To some extent, I get it. I know that RPGs are a tricky business, and that an MLP RPG probably didn't sell terribly well even for an RPG. But I've been pulling hard for this system since the MLP book was first announced in 2023(?), and have been running games steadily since I first got the MLP book. The Renegade Games Discord has become one of my main hangouts online, and I was always impressed by the creativity and dedication of the fans.

And yet. The way it ended, so suddenly and so definitively, has not been... pleasant. I'll live, and my group will probably end up continuing to play E20 for some time to come. But even so: all my hopes and dreams for what this game could become, given the time, care, and marketing it needed, have come to naught.

If you're interested in taking a look at what E20 has to offer, the CRBs for Power Rangers, Transformers, GI Joe, and MLP (sorry Night Vale) are currently in the "Roll Big Or Go Home 2" bundle over on Humble Bundle. Additionally, most of the books and all of the dice are on, like, 80% off closeout sale over on the Renegade Games store. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but if you can overlook some level of jank, it's a great time, IMO.

Thanks for reading, everyone.

Fanatical has a Warhammer Fantasy bundle; anyone know what version it is and have a general review of the bundle?