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Hi everyone,

It seems that the trend is to go PDF only. Cheaper, easy to search and reference, you can copy and paste text, etc. And nowadays, with the tariffs and the big delivery fees, it is becoming more of a must than a choice for some people.

I find PDFs much more useful to run and general use, but I like the feel of a good book.

What do you guys prefer, and which do you use the most?

Okay, not very used to Reddit, so I'll do as best as I can:
I'm a long time GM, was the nerd kid that introduced TTRPGs to the only couple of friends I had at the time, and I never stopped playing.
For a long time, I was like many others: when I wanted to create a powerful BBEG, I made it strong and powerful so that my PCs would be afraid... But in a series that I love, there is a speech that offered me another way of conveying the threat, which I find even more effective.

In a French series called Kaamelott, Méléagan, an obviously very dangerous being, has a speech that I love... Allow me to translate it quickly:

CONTEXT: In this series based on Arthurian legend, Méléagan is alienating Lancelot and has asked him to withdraw from everything.

"Losers always retire near a stream, because of thirst. But retirement means retiring from everything, don't you think? When I have nothing left to do here, I will retire... No more water. No more sunshine. I dry up, from head to toe, into a little corpse under a pile of leaves... The seasons pass me by without suspecting me... And then, one day, the crow tells me that she has heard someone crying again in the distance. Guinevere! Guinevere! Then I open one eye, crawl, eating the snow, licking the muddy water... and my enemies flinch, because as they see me drinking, they know that I am back."

Since then, I’ve experimented with different ways to show just how powerful my villains can be.

Recently, for example, I introduced a powerful DMPC with two clear purposes: to be overwhelmingly strong, and to guide the party toward a location where a strange magical anomaly had been detected.

This DMPC was intentionally awful; the classic overpowered, all-knowing type who understood the world far better than the players ever could. But that was the point. My goal was simple: he was meant to die.

The party eventually reached the abandoned camp where the magical surge had been recorded. As they began to investigate, the DMPC suddenly stopped. He had noticed something on the ground.

A human corpse, barely alive, clinging to the last threads of life. As the DMPC approached, he noticed an artifact embedded in the corpse’s head. The moment he recognized it, he froze.

“No… it can’t be… It can’t be you. You... You can’t be alive.”

The corpse smiled.

The DMPC panicked. Completely losing his composure, he turned to the party and screamed at them to run.

The party fled back to the main village. When they arrived, something impossible awaited them. As if he had teleported ahead of them, they found the DMPC there. Dead, burned beyond recognition, his body twisted and scarred as if he had suffered a thousand deaths. Somehow, impossibly, his eyes were still open. With his last breath, he forced out a few broken words:

“Keep… on… running.” Then his body collapsed into ash.

That corpse in the camp? That was the BBEG... at his weakest.

And let’s just say… my players are absolutely terrified now.

So yeah, that show made me reconsider how to make a menace truly menacing... What about you? Any show or books or whatever that is outside of TTRPG that change the way you play/run a game?

TL;DR:
A speech from a show made me rethink how to make villains scary. Instead of raw power, I now show menace through inevitability and fear. I used an overpowered DMPC meant to die, when he utterly panicked and was brutally killed by what turned out to be the BBEG at his weakest, my players were far more terrified than any boss fight ever made them.

Any shows, books, or other media that changed how you run games?

Hey folks. I am a professional illustrator who is writing a sword and sorcery TTRPG. It began as a Mörk Borg hack, but ballooned into it's own thing with it's own aesthetic.

Because it is a rules light OSR indie-game I was designing the physical book to be A5 format. However, I am making a ton of art for it. So it is essentially becoming a TTRPG/Art Book.

The over all flavor is if GWAR, Cannibal Corpse, Korgoth of Barbaria, and the movie Army of Darkness could be combined into a TTRPG.

I am wondering if I should up the size to a standard 8.5x11 inch rule book to let the art breath more so. It would also reduce the over all page count. The trouble is, the rules would constitute about 1/2 of the book and make the whole thing cost a bit more.

I also have lots of ideas for bits of lore and flavor text, but I don't know how important that is to folks who are looking for an indie rules-light game. About 1/3 of the book would be actual rules if I add some lore and world building.

So I am asking you good folks to weigh in with your opinions.
Thanks so much in advance! :-)

My wishlist never ends, I feel like a fool chasing the end of the rainbow.

• Mythic North
• We Deal in Lead
• 13th age 2e
• The Dread Thingonomicon
• Electric Bastionland
• Reavers of Harkenwold
• Genesys
• The vanilla game (Is there a .pdf form of the game? I don't enjoy using the native site, but there's personal preference.)
• The Isle by Luke Gearing
• The Halls of Arden Vul
• Runecairn
• Shadow of the Demon Lord
• Arc: Doom
• Dungeon Crawl Classics
• Mork borg
• Pirate borg
• Frontier Scum
• Wolves of God
• Outgunned

What's on your wishlist?

Recently a friend of mine has been working on a new edition of her game, featuring many bold mechanical and narrative departures from the original; While she's confident in them, apparently several people have suggested that it might be better off being framed as not just a new edition of the same game, but a full numbered sequel in the fashion of a movie or video game followup, which has further helped her confidence in those different design decisions...

...And that has suddenly made me aware of just how weirdly uncommon it is to actually do this for TTRPGs, even though there's plenty that could absolutely be treated this way.

The closest to extant examples would be Monsterhearts 2 (though supposedly it is functionally just a new edition of the same game, in spite of the name) and I believe the upcoming Dungeon World 2 has explicitly been described this way by the developers.

Yet, one could very much argue that the different editions of D&D or Pathfinder are effectively altogether new game with how much they differ from their predecessors; I understand that in traditional non-fiction book publishing, editions are the main paradigm, but TTRPGs are at best only partly like textbooks or manuals (IMO), and while I don't think this would totally kill edition wars (given that people will often still argue about their favorite/best film in a franchise or installment in a long-running video game series), it could set much better expectations for games that employ sweeping system- and setting-level changes that they are not the exact same thing as what came before.

Iunno, am I alone in this?

I have been the forever GM in my group for 5-6 years now. Just recently, a player wanted to run a game, so I gladly became a player. Although there are some GMing I would do differently, overall, the game is good.

But this week, the gm invited someone with a bad reputation in the community. Generally, a trouble player, even sexually harasses NPCs while he was playing an "evil" character at another group, and was also quite disrespectful to others in the community.

I communicated the situation to the GM, but he seems to be having trouble kicking the trouble player who already made a character for the game. Saying maybe the trouble player won't be as bad in this game.

Should I intervene and kick the player from the group, or should I sit back and let the GM handle this?

Ps. Thanks to everyone for your help and advice. I now understand that it is both a good opportunity for everyone involved to be a better player/gm. And it’s not really not my place to kick someone who is not in my game.

Ps2. We do host the game at my place. But I feel since I agreed to let my friend use the place to run his game, I shouldn’t use this as a leverage for this situation.

I didn’t think this person would be a good addition to the group, or the game. But not to the point that I would do kick him out as owner of the place. I would definitely not allow him to be in my place, if problem behavior extends to other players.

My friends and I were reminiscing about our time playing a fan adaptation of the Dark Sun campaign setting in D&D 3.5, and someone joked that we should try running it in another system.

Un/fortunately, we're all the kind of people where that immediately turned into a puzzle we needed to solve, and we actually do want to try it. After a couple of hours, we have it narrowed down to these

• Forbidden Lands: Our experience with FL is that it's pretty much survival adventure fantasy, with a bit of horror on top, so that seems like a great fit, but we do worry that it might be too lethal.
• Shadow of the Demon Lord: the only contender to break our aversion to classes and levels. Dark fantasy that stays pretty dangerous until high levels makes it hard to argue with, and one of us has the desert campaign sourcebook.
• Mythras: d100 systems are a perennial favorite for us, but we don't have much experience with this one outside of one-shots.
• Savage Worlds/Genesys: Currently in last place because of how pulpy they are, but we do have some experience with dialing up the difficulty and dialing down the heroics in each system.

Any other suggestions? We're ideally avoiding class and level systems, but not 100% closed off to them. Bonus points if you've used any if the above and remember any things to watch out for.

So I really love the games Hades and Hades 2, and had the idea of trying to copy some of its homework to make a campaign - the gist being that the players are all mortals who’ve died and been tossed into Tartarus, and the Olympians have made a bet with the Chthonic deities that they can escape the underworld, cue semi-random dungeon crawl.

Originally my thought was DnD, utilizing a bunch of stuff from the Greek-themed Theros book but the more I think on it, the more I feel like DnD’s slow combat system is going to make it become a real slog if we have a lot of fights (which, depending how close I stick to the Hades model, it might) so I was wondering if another system might be better. In particular I’ve looked a bit at Nimble and Draw Steel, but haven’t had much change to play them. Is there anyone who’s played both that can give me some idea of which might be better? Or if there is another system that might be good?

Has anyone put much thought into creative mega dungeons? I just got a table and I thought it'd behoove me to have concepts of a plan.

I know in Delicious Dungeons / Hollow Knight, the mega dungeon is a city of a dead empire.

In the book series The Dark Profit Saga, the mega dungeon has been long since looted older part of the city with cultural significance that got occupied by a dragon; what little treasure is left is put on speculative markets to liquidate the adventure.

There's a weirdly good amount of material written for libraries being good sized dungeons.

In most souls likes, the mega dungeon is a city of the dead.

What else is out there? Has anyone come across some something really creative?

Thank you in advanced.

What's up gamers.

Recently, there have been a fair few new editions, bonus content, or evolutions of some pretty big names in the Powered by the Apocalypse space: Apocalypse World 3e, Dungeon world 2e, Blades in the Dark Deep Cuts (and Blades '68), Masks: a New Generation, as well as a recent murmurings of Ironsworn 2e. E: fellowship 2e, Legend in the Mist (from City of Mist), monster hearts 2e etc.

Maybe that's not an extensive list, but I think 5 is enough to start asking if there's a pattern. Is there a particular reason why these publishers are choosing now (or within the next year or so) to update their games with new rules and such?

It might just be a case of serendipity, but I am curious if there's been any particular innovation across the PbtA space that this the time to reboot.

I wanted to create an intelligent tabletop RPG based on the Backrooms. But not just in any way. I want it to be based on the lore of Liminal Archive, because it’s the only canon of the Backrooms mythology that has remained refined, mature, and smart, unlike the Wikidot version or Kane Pixel’s version.

http://liminal-archives.wikidot.com/

I think the game will be entirely centered on exploration, with a capital E, like in the 1970s, with players doing meticulous mapping, resource management, and methodical, thoughtful, slow exploration.

I’m planning to base the system and rules on AD&D 1E and make it public via the OGL, OSRIC, etc. The Backrooms levels will need to be recreated as faithfully as possible according to their descriptions, on small-grid graph paper, with random encounters and populating elements. Most areas will be empty and repetitive, like the early megadungeons, to maintain relentless exploration and constant tension.

Characters will have very few hit points, and most creatures will be able to kill them in a single attack, so combat will be a last resort. I don’t have a lot of time to work on all my projects at once, but I’m going to try to start on this and share it with you. Does anyone have any thoughts?