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Hello!

To crack down on debt my wife and I are moving into to a home of a friend who had a major life change so all 3 of us can annihilate debt.

The issue? He doesn't have a spot in his house for my book shelf of over 200 TTRPG books that I have been collecting over the past 15+ years.

My plan - Store these in a closet upstairs for the two years we plan to be there. But what is the best way?

Websites and articles I am reading on book storage is typically catered to paper backs or hardcover novels that are half the size of a standard 8x11 TTRPG core book. So most of their recommendations cant handle the pure weight of it.

Does anyone in the community have tips that can help me? I am specifically asking for tips of containers that can stack and hold my books long term.

To pre-emptively respond to suggestions I have seen on other (outside rpg) posts of other users asking the same.

1. Im trying not to pay for a storage unit. We are moving into this house to crack down on expenses and make large payments on loans and CC debt that we can be debt free by 30. (The two year mark)

2. I have thought about selling some of the books to lighten the load, but my wife and my 10+ players have dissuade me from that idea. Since im not going to realistically make money on selling these, id be removing books from my collection that may be harder to acquire after the dust settles. Hence the long term storage.

I know this is not ideal, but i appreciate all advice.

I hope this is on-topic enough to not get removed?

Excuse poor grammar, im typing this on my phone.

Hello all

Two approaches to characters I have always been fond of are Lifepaths (as found in games like Artesia, Mythras, and Cyberpunk) and playbooks (as found in games like monster of the week, Beyond the wall.)

While I am fond of them, I also have only a small bit of experience with these systems and that lack of experience leaves me with two desires.

First, I'd love to hear which games others like that make use of one or both of these methods. I wanna see a broader range of games with lifepaths and/or playbooks.

Secondly, for those who've played or adjusted a game that manages to use both. How did that prospect go? OR how would you want such a combination handled if at all.?

I'd love to see your reccomendstions and thoughts!

Looking for some study materials.

For moodboard, take Escaflowne and the Xeno series where the meat of the media is centered around the mechs, but the pilot themselves are too notable fighters capable of facing armies and monsters on foot. I want to set a large armies game where the players tends to play more as squad leaders than Lancer's "the mech is just a DnD character with a cool cosplay armor" general tendencies.

Exalted comes close, but the rules for warstriders are almost footnotes so the weight pulls almost entirely towards the heroes on land. I hear positively about Wares Blade but basically any and all information about the rules themselves is so scant that makes study impossible.

So between various other bundles and Free RPG day, I know have books or PDFs for over 200 unique RPG product, 90% of which I have not played or even heard of. So my question is, out of all the stuff from yesterday’s free offerings, what is the most worth trying out?

A few I recognized were Root, a Pirate Borg starter set, I got the itch.io bundle, the most of the physical offerings, and the RPG Trader bundle as well, so loads of indie games too.

Edit 1 to add context for me and my play group:

I have mostly played fantasy games (with a bit of sci fi with Star Wars 5e), I like games that have at least some connecting story components, even if it’s somewhat loose. As for story types, I would love to dip into more intrigue/mystery at some point, maybe horror as well?

I am probably going to run most of these games as one-shots first and foremost. I would be playing most of these with people I already know, maybe a couple of friends of friends.

Normally I can count on getting 4-5 friends to play via Discord and Owlbear Rodeo.

If you didn't know, today, June 27th, is the 20th annual Free RPG Day. Go to the official site to see sneak peeks of the available free modules and merch, as well as all of the participating locations. There are also those of us celebrating online today. Be sure to check out digital RPG storefronts like itch.io and drive-thru-rpg for games on sale or bundles (like this one). Happy Free RPG Day to everyone who celebrates!

I actually want to run a Necron-focused game, where players would be Necron nobles doing the bidding of the overlord and maybe scheming, but since there are no official Necron games that I know of, I am thinking about tinkering with some existing game about "skeletal" undead.

Do you have any recommendations?

Just curious what everyone enjoyed this year.

You're seated at the head of the table, pages of half-scrawled notes in disarray around you. Your players have latched onto a tiny fragment you said once, half an hour ago, and their investigation into the disappearance of Brynn the baker has ground to a halt. It was only one bad assumption, but now the fun is draining from the room as everyone slowly stops speaking, turns to face you, and sits silently waiting for the next breadcrumb.

This is the worst. The absolute worst. In this essay, I will...

... extend on the work from other designers before me in designing robust, fun mystery scenarios with some easy to follow and transferable rules. Using this method allows you to turn all your worldbuilding lore into actionable moments of player agency at the table.

Let's begin with the Three Clue Rule Three Types of Clues.

Clue Descriptions

No, this is not the foundational text that you can find on the Alexandrian, but we will be using that. First, let's define three different types of clues that can be used in a mystery scenario. I'm going to focus on the verbs that these clue imply.

1. Pointer Clues

These are the structural elements of your mystery. In the Gumshoe family of games, these are referred to as core clues. When the party arrives at the scene, the core clues are given out to anyone with the corresponding ability, no roll required. This is an excellent way to ensure that the players are getting the information they need to make an informed decision. They function by giving the players something tangible to follow up on, like a location, an NPC, or an event. It's somewhere the players can go and investigate. If you've ever experienced your session come to a grinding halt, it could be because the players didn't have enough pointers to follow. A mystery could be composed entirely with only these nodes, but in play that looks like the players get told to go over there, then over here, now over there, oh look it's the end. Relying on only pointers gets you from start to finish, but it doesn't give any texture to the adventure.

Examples: the tavernkeep tells you that the alchemist was acting furtively; a journal entry mentions a hidden grove outside town; the militia captain says they're worried about a gang of thieves hitting the Festival of the Moon tomorrow night; a scrawled map on the back of a napkin found in the trousers of the deceased.

2. Outcome Clues

Speaking of texture, that's where these bad boys come in. Outcome clues don't point towards a place, person, or event. They don't even make sense in isolation. Instead, they provide snippets of circumstantial evidence that allow players to deduce a conclusion once they have gathered a few pieces. These are the dots that the players get to draw a line between and feel all Sherlock. When the players have made a deduction, they get a dopamine hit that keeps them engaged with the mystery at hand, and sometimes you get to hear them literally go "aha!" When multiple outcome clues are combined, they can act as a pointer. Phrased the opposite way: you can start with a pointer, then break it up into two or more outcome clues. Learning one piece of information gets the players thinking proactively about how to find the others. Finding the complementary parts might then send them off to a new scene. Conversely, the outcome might instead convey an important fact about the mystery, such as proving that someone is lying, or placing an NPC at a location at a critical time. This is just as valuable because it adds depth to your mystery by allowing your players to reinterrogate a place or person they've already investigated, only now they're armed with more knowledge. Outcome clues might be given out freely to a player who looks, or you might gate them behind good investigation or a roll depending on how crucial the conclusion is to the mystery.

Examples: an unusual boot print left at the scene + a fashionable NPC; a leaf from a rare tree stuck in an NPC's hair + a noble that is known for their garden of rare plants; an alibi from an NPC for the time of the crime + the journal entry from their friend who mentions seeing them elsewhere.

3. Foreshadowing Clues

Finally, we have the Foreshadowing clue. Technically it's just an Outcome clue with the context dialled down to zero, and a very specific conclusion: the reveal at the end of the mystery. These are the perfect garnish to spread liberally over your mystery scenario. These clues are so stripped of context that your players won't recognise them for what they are until after the big reveal happens. If the deduction from the outcome clues make them go "aha!", then a well-foreshadowed conclusion makes them go "oooh." Generating these is harder than Pointers and Outcomes. First, you have to know the reveal they pertain to, then you have to contextualise them in your game world, then you have to strip them of that context so that they players don't know what they mean. Start by taking a unique feature of the reveal, then brainstorm out how that feature might have left behind traces in each of your mystery nodes. How did it affect this place, that person, this thing? Then remove anything that could make it easily understood. The goal here is make these little things that seem out of place, but with too little information to know why. If your players glom together enough Foreshadowing clues, they might make a correct conclusion about the reveal. This is an absolutely fantastic outcome, not a failure state. If your party's reaction to the reveal isn't "oooh" but "I knew it!" then you've just had an indication that your mystery was highly engaging, with just the right amount of obfuscation to make your players feel clever for solving it.

Example: Bruce Willis never engages in dialogue with another character except for the boy who can talk to ghosts; the boy explicitly says that the ghosts don't know they're dead; the audience never sees Bruce recover from the bullet wound; Bruce only wears the clothes he died in.

Nodes

We're going to use these clues in a node-based structure. Plenty has already been written about the virtues of node-based design, so I'll give only a brief recap. Nodes are structural containers for all types of worldbuilding information. They're an abstract tool that make scenario design faults easy to recognise and rectify. A node could contain an NPC, a location, an event, an organisation, or any combination of these. Nodes can also be fractal: zoom into a node and find other nodes. Zoom out and gather together multiple nodes together into an umbrella node. They are such an incredibly versatile mental model that I use them for many different contexts in my life, from martial arts to systems engineering.

Proactive Nodes

Also called kicks, these are the ace up your sleeve for when the players start to lose momentum. Before the session comes to a halt, you introduce the proactive node to add some more spice, have a burst of action, and most crucially, drop new Pointer clues for your players to latch on to. It's your press button, mystery go brrr device.

Examples: a man with a gun bursts into the room; a new crime scene emerges; a trusted NPC is killed or abducted.

Vectors

Alright, now we've got the types of clues down, and we know we're using a node structure, all we have to do is connect them together. The last building block for this puzzle is the vector. Vectors are very simple. They are the delivery mechanisms, the vehicles, the how of giving information about the game world to your players. They're the propulsion, the clue is the payload. Typically the start point of a vector is a node, the end point is another node or conclusion, and a clue is the payload inside the box that connects those two elements together. Another way to think about vectors is that they give context to your clues.

Start Node >> Pointer >> End Node

Start Node >> Outcome >> Conclusion

Mapping out where your vectors point from and to is an easy way to discover holes in your mystery scenario design.

Floating Vectors

There is one special case of vector: the type that knows where it is going and what information is contains, but not where it comes from. This vector has a floating origin, meaning that you can assign it to anywhere that makes sense in the middle of running the game, and it can contain any of the three clue types. While these aren't strictly necessary, having a couple of these prepped ahead of time makes it seamless to react to players investigating things in ways you didn't anticipate, or as rewards for going the extra mile in a scene. You can even whip up these types of vectors in the moment, assuming you know what you want them to achieve. Sly Flourish refers to these as Secrets and Clues in his Lazy GM prep guide.

Examples: a fragment of a map with the cove entrance; a rumour about the local lord and his predilections; a loose flyer describing the parade at noon two days from now.

Putting it all Together

At last, our typology is complete. The three types of clues, the nodes, and the vectors can be combined into these three statements:

• Pointer = vector whose destination is a node

• Outcome = vector whose destination is a conclusion

• Foreshadowing = vector whose destination is the reveal

Scenario Design

For the sake of this example, we're going to take the simplest mystery scenario that provides enough depth and texture for a single 3-4 hour play session: the five node mystery. In this structure, we have one initial node that provides the hook to the players, three intermediate nodes that are where the heart of the emergent story takes place, and one finale node, where the reveal or showdown happens.

Following the standard Three Clue Rule, we need to have at least three clues originating from each of the intermediate nodes and the initial node. Looking backwards from the finale, the Inverted Three Clue says that we should have three clues pointing towards each of the intermediate nodes and the finale node.

Now, we get to zoom in and pick which types of clues we should use to make sure our mystery is robust, by which I mean, the players will always have something to do or somewhere to go to progress the story.

The initial node should contain at least three clues, which must be Pointers. The players need solid directions on where to go to start engaging in investigation work. One unambiguous clue should be pointing to each of the intermediate nodes.

The intermediate nodes should point to each other, and also to the finale. Only, we don't want our players to go from Initial >> Intermediate A >> Finale, because that shortcuts our session, wastes a bunch of prep, and feels cheap and abbreviated from the player side. So let's do something clever here and make the clues pointing to the finale be Outcome clues. That way the players need to go to at least one other intermediate node to build the puzzle that gives a pointer to the final node. If they go to both, fantastic, it reinforces their conviction. This technically breaks the redundancy of the Three Clue pointer rule, but we'll build that back in by...

Prepping a proactive node (or kick) in case the players get stuck. We'll stock it with three Pointer clues that go to the intermediate nodes (there's that redundancy), but when it interacts with the players, we'll only give out a one or two clues to send them somewhere they haven't gone yet.

Next, it's time to sprinkle some Foreshadowing into each of our nodes. All of these will point to something in the Finale. When the players do some solid investigating, or get a great result on a roll, they earn one of these. There's no hard and fast rule for the number of this type of clue.

Finally, we're gonna make two or three Floating Vectors that contain extra Outcome or Foreshadowing clues. These provide further opportunities to reward your players for buying in to the mystery with solid investigation. Having them prepped ahead of time allows you improv seamlessly in the moment.

That's it. That's all you need. This scenario is structurally sound and won't falter, is responsive to player agency, and rarely wastes prep time. Best of all, this all fits on a single page of notes.

Following on

Having a framework is all fine and dandy, but I often find a couple of worked examples help with the implementation layer. If you're made it this far and are interested in seeing some, let me know. I've got some thoughts for the following genres: police procedural, urban fantasy, noir, and classic fantasy.

Wanting to branch out from dnd and was curious about other rpgs. I'm kind of wanting to know which version is considered the best/more popular to play. Specifically I'm wondering about

-shadowrun

-the warhammer 40k rpgs

-cyberpunk

-call of cthulu

Iam a fan of shadowrun lore and am playing sr since 3rd edition. I have to say iam curious about a thing if other sr fans thought the same thing here:
When i backed invincible and tested it i cane for the first time ever into contact with the mutant zero engine.
My first thought was a comparison to sr‘s engine. And i noticed a stray thought: it feels like it would be a superb core engine for sr. Way better than the latest editions.

Combat feels hard but fair. It can handle magic and tech if needs be and dice resplution and how skils xan be handled is similar and all with typical chsr creation rules that allow for as many options as in sr but way faster and without so many calcs needed.

As said iam curious if other sr fans had similar tjoughts that it would be a good core for sr or if its more of a dislike towards it,…

I've been running D&D 5e for about four years now and honestly I've hit a wall. My players are great but I keep feeling like the system is fighting me whenever I try to run anything that isn't a dungeon crawl or combatheavy adventure. Social encounters feel bolted on, exploration is basically just asking people to roll Perception, and I spend more time patching rules than actually prepping stories.

I've been lurking here for a while and keep seeing people talk about games like Blades in the Dark, Savage Worlds, Forbidden Lands, and a bunch of Free League stuff. Every time I read about them I get curious but there's a real intimidation factor around convincing my group to learn something new when they're already comfortable with what they know.

So I guess my questions are these. For those of you who made the switch, what finally pushed you over the edge? Was it a specific moment at the table where the system just couldn't do what you needed? Did your group resist at first and then come around? And practically speaking, what system did you move to and did it actually solve the problems you were having?

Looking for honest experiences here, not just system recommendations. I want to know what the actual transition felt like for you and your group