Hey all, I'm watt, creator of the Ennie-award-winning, Nausicaa-inspired Mothership setting Cloud Empress. I'll be launching a Castle in the Sky/Arcane-inspired TTRPG called Rust Wings for Mausritter next week.

I'll be checking and responding to this post synchronously until about 6 PM CST US.

Happy to answer any questions about indie tabletop roleplaying game publishing, crowdfunding, my designs/design process, worldbuilding, writing literary adventures, Ghibli, etc.

Update: Closing the AMA down. Thanks for all the awesome questions and appreciation for my work!

**Come here and talk about anything!**

​

This post will stay stickied for (at least) the week-end. Please enjoy this space where you can talk about anything: your last game, your current project, your patreon, etc. You can even talk about video games, ask for a group, or post a survey or share a new meme you've just found. This is the place for small talk on /r/rpg.

​

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.

​

----------

​

This submission is generated automatically each Saturday at 00:00 UTC.

Hi! My bf loves Exalted, mainly Dragon Blooded political campaigns, with a cold war between the Great Houses hidden in supposed good relationships, the empire falling down around them since the empress disappeared, the magic past of powerful artifacts from the solars, the unknowns of far realms... I literaly cannot stop him when he starts talking about how amazing all of that is.

The thing is... he loathes the system. All of them. And I was thinking maybe giving him as a present a diferent ruleset he can use with Exalted, or a similar game.

Do you have any advice what's the best similar games? I've heard about Godbound, but he's not interested just in epic powers but in the political relationships between the Houses in the realm and the empire.

Any advice?

What are the greatest picks?

Just curious, I was a big part of the first two Zinequests where I saw TONS of people flocking to one big page of zines (Kickstarter) and I kind of dipped out of the scene after ZQ2.

It seems a lot has changed over the years. Zinemonth split between Kickstarter, Backerkit, Itch io, and private pages honestly feels very overwhelming to me, I find I'm mostly only finding projects by word of mouth this time around.

Have you found it harder to engage with the community making stuff lately? Any wrap up pages or places in general that help you stay on top of whats going on in the RPG space?

So I was reading about the various subsystems that enable settlement building and development in The World Below and the one from the manuscripts in their new crowdfund.

I originally picked the system up to see how freeform magic could work in fellow Storypath Ultra title Curseborne, for a player of mine that likes that kind of thing in mage. But lately I've been getting hooked on reading the system for its own sake and I'm stumbling across some stuff ive really never done in my 16 years of RPGs.

They have a system of "Kalm" where a natural part of the play loop between exploring is building settlements and there's activities for establishing trade, buildings that offer you bonuses to downtime activities anf perks for when you go back to exploring, there's an activity to subvert politics in an area and lots of instability and boons.

Then there's stuff about generation play, passing things down families, playing each other's descendents, and problens that can't be solved in a single generation.

Now I know these are things, I'd heard of Pendragon for Generational play and about early DND domain level play, though I also heard most tables just stopped playing before their game could transition to that.

But reading this stuff, the fantasy really appeals to me, and while my players (and myself) wouldn't go for OSRish worlds normally, World Below is magical and weird and dark enough to both be different enough from our beloved pf2e to justify bothering with, but still appeal.

This part is completely different, its capturing my imagination. Does anyone gave cool stories about domain/generational play I can use to fuel my hype to possibly do some in this system when the books come out? Or has anyone done any settlement stuff in World Below, to tell me about that?

hi, im wanting to run a game where the players are paranormal investigators, set in the 1870s, but I have no idea what a good system would be. I looked into call of cthulu and I dont think the whole lovecraftian thing is for us. looking for a system that would work well for something low combat with rules that aren't too complicated.

I'm new to rpgs and interested in doing campaigns with my family (none yet), I have a therapist that uses basic rpg sets to play with me, I have watched a few non gameplay videos about the overall topic. then I had this cool idea of making it so that the same characters adventure in very different settings, like one campaign being the generic fantasy and the other being some sort of city, or maybe even mixing both. but since sets were built with one specific theme in mind, there are no set stats for elements of another theme (for example: dnd has a set damage range for a dagger, but not for a hyperlaser) and it would be annoying if I wanted to add these stats myself, so is there any set that in any way makes this process easier?

Does anyone know of web-based tools for creating branching story experiences where one person builds the story and assigns it to specific players, kind of like a GM preparing a solo adventure?

I know Twine, Ink and ChoiceScript but they seem more focused on publishing than on tracking who's playing and what they chose. Looking for something with more of a GM/player dynamic.

I know there is someone out there making a fan system, but I want a system to reskin or hack to adapt to the City (but please avoid systems without dices). I'm quite good at homebrewing, so it won't be a problem making equipments, enhancements or similar things (but I still have my limits, hence why I'm not using a system totally converted from it).

It's meant to be a system which I can use to make fixer, syndicate, corp. or other types of characters, and so I want a system which can sustain a power level up to a color fixer or even an Arbiter (so from 9 to 1 grade fixers, and even beyond).

Big issue is to make an E.G.O. work rulewise, so is an issue Shin and Mang, which are supposed to be some kind of progression.

Gameplay adherence isn't necessary, so I won't ask for clashes or similar mechanics.

Any suggestions for known systems I can use or rework?

Basically it's a D&D-meets-Esoterrorists-meets-Outer Wilds-meets-Kult. My players are criminals that were relocated to another kingdom on a large island after their previous prison was consumed by this darkness that's destroying the world from the bottom up. They are then stuck on a 6-day timeloop where in the end a bunch of undead warriors show up and destroy the city they're in, bringing the aforementioned darkness to consume it. To stop the loop they have to investigate the ruins of an ancient megastructure once built for the Archon Gabriel but has turned into a jail for him after a revolution that lead to the death of the Demiurge. By investigating they learn the rules and shortcuts that lead to breaking the seals that trap Gabriel, which in turn concludes the plan of a cult that revives him into this flesh amalgamation made of the undead soldiers, ending the loop into one epic battle against a 5m tall angelic flesh-metal aberration.

The world itself is supposed to be very grounded. The magic is limited and set in stone -- basically it's using some hermetic doodads to manipulate the forms that make the universe and create a bundle of a single "element" for like 5 seconds afterwards it disappears, so I don't think any high fantasy spells list will function. I want non-magic combat to be pretty much just sparring, with series of attacks, parries and counter-attacks until someone hits a blow which could incapacitate lower level players (I already have a homebrew thing for locational damage but maybe another system can do it better), but also the occasional big epic battle wouldn't hurt. It'd also be nice if the game was a bit vaguer so I could fit the homebrewy magic and skills I enjoy.

I tried Ordem Paranormal (it's a brazilian thing) as it's the only one I'm familiar with, but then I got deeper and realised the game was utter unbalanced bullshit. D&D seems cool but I personally dislike the class system and the magic is too high fantasy for my thing. Is there anything that fits something like this? Preferably for free, but I guess I could pay 10 bucks for a pdf (provided there's at least the basics somewhere else for free)