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I’ve been running a bunch of investigative games lately and something keeps bothering me more than usual about published adventures. A lot of them are good to read and kind of annoying to actually run. Old topic, I know.

I don’t mean that I want everything reduced to bullet points, or that I don’t care about lore. I love lore. I like knowing why an NPC acts the way they do, what happened twenty years ago, what the cult believes, all that stuff but when I’m at the table I need completely different information.

I need to know what the NPC wants, what they know, what they’re doing right now, what they’ll do if the PCs interfere, and what happens if the players ignore them.
That is the stuff I’m actually using. “Actionables”
And I keep finding myself taking published adventures and making the same things over and over again: flowcharts, clue maps, NPC notes, timelines, quick references.
At some point I started wondering why I’m doing that work when it could easily come in the book. It really puzzles me why things are written like ttrpgs were invented yesterday and there are no written things about the difficulties GMs face every time they run a module.

If I change an NPC because I know my group will react better to them, that’s prep. If I add a scene or rewrite the ending, that’s prep too.
But if I’m taking 100+ pages of a published adventure and reorganizing the information so I can find it during play, that feels less like GM prep and more like editing the book after I bought it.
This is especially obvious to me with investigative RPGs.
I’ve run a fair amount of Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green, and the GM already has enough to keep in their head: clues, pacing, who knows what, what the players have missed, what the opposition is doing, whether the mystery still makes sense after the players did something completely unexpected.
So why isn’t the scenario giving me a simple technical view of itself?
I’d love every chapter to start with something like:
- what’s happening right now
- which NPCs/factions are active
- what each one wants
- what happens if the PCs do nothing
- critical clues
- optional clues
- timeline/escalation
- a basic flowchart

Then give me all the prose afterwards.
I will read it. I want it.
I just don’t want to have to mentally compile the prose into a usable scenario before I can run it.

Delta Green is generally better than CoC at giving me situations I can work with, but even DG sometimes falls into dossier mode. Cool to read, very evocative, but I’m still extracting the actual moving parts myself and I think videogames figured some of this out a long time ago.
Good lore usually gives you something to do with it.
In Baldur’s Gate 3, pretty much everyone understands why mind flayers matter because that lore constantly affects the game. Tadpoles matter. Ceremorphosis matters. Psionics matter. The factions around them matter.
Meanwhile the average player probably doesn’t care much about the difference between goblins and hobgoblins unless the game makes that difference relevant.
The lore can exist either way. But if it changes decisions, players actually absorb it.
I think RPG modules should work the same way.
Give me the lore, but give it handles.
One recent book that felt closer to this was Dragon Delves. I don’t think the adventures are necessarily amazing, but I liked that the book seemed to be asking a very basic question that more RPG books should ask:
“What does the DM actually need in front of them while running this?”
That’s really all I want.
A module should work at two speeds.

When I’m prepping, I want the full thing: lore, context, psychology, atmosphere.
When I’m running, I want the machine underneath it.

Note: I might be mixing a little bit the usual topic “actionable pieces” with “modules written as stories”

I’m looking for an rpg specifically for 1930s-1940s mystery men.
1939 Batman, The Shadow, The Spider.
Specifically mystery men operating in a city, not globetrotting pulp stuff.

I recently got my hands on this game, and I’d really love to run it! I know it’s a remaster/remake of the old game and I wanted to know if there was any advice or suggestions for running the game. Is there any of the older content I should seek out? Any replies are appreciated!

This Sunday will mark the epic conclusion to Chronicle 1 of a vampire larp that I've been running with my partner for ~16 weeks, holding gathering every other week. During that time, we've been doing downtime actions between every gathering (a pace I'm told is crazy). We do this so that players have new things to talk about at every gathering. It's been fun since most of the plot stuff happens during downtime actions on the off weeks, and gatherings are a time for sharing information, brokering deals, and sometimes major announcements.

One thing that makes our group interesting is that almost all of the characters are intellectuals rather than fighters or social characters so they've really been engaging with the plot and its associated puzzles. A result of this is that people don't really look for combat solutions to their problems. It's to the point where the first time we called a blood hunt, everyone gave the Prince a thumbs up and returned to what they were doing (he was not the most highly respected Prince).

At our most recent gathering, the new more respected Prince called a blood hunt, and we did the first combat encounter of the chronicle - 7 gatherings into the game. Our group collectively opted to use the optional narrative encounter rules rather than actually playing out the encounter move for move. This let us wrap up the actual combat lightning fast and get back to the plot things that were really more interesting.

All this to say that it has been crazy refreshing to run a mostly pure roleplaying game rather than a nitty gritty combat simulator. Anyone else have similar experiences?

Does anyone have much experience with World Anvil? I have been looking at it, tried to use it a bit and found it to be sort of confusing.

What are other peoples experiences with it as a campaign tracking tool and world building tool?

So I just wrapped up at Fate Con and wanted to write up a review of both the convention and the games that I played.

First off, the convention itself: a solid 10/10 if you happen to live in the DFW Metroplex. If you aren’t a native, I’d still say it’s an 8/10, it just becomes a tougher sell when you have to include travel and hotel stay, but even then… it’s worth at least considering if you see some games that interest you. Admission is cheap and the content… ooh, we’ll get to that.

I will lead off with my one and only complaint about the convention itself: food. The website indicated there would be food trucks for lunch. Now, it is certainly possible that the weather was to blame, as it was raining gently all weekend (nothing torrential, and not windy, but still too wet to want to hang around outside), but there were no food trucks on day one and only one truck on day two… and it was popcorn. I like popcorn, but I don’t really consider it to be a full meal (though I will say, Popcorn Express popcorn is itself a 10/10 snack, albeit a bit pricy). Side note: shout out to the girls running the snack table: I have no idea how (or if) you turned a profit selling snacks and drinks for $1 each, but you were the unsung heroes when the food trucks failed to arrive and saved us from a bunch of hanger induced TPKs in the second gaming session for sure.

That said… pack a sack lunch or bring a meal replacement bar/shake in case the issue repeats and you’ll be fine. I didn’t go there for food, I went there for merch and gaming, and they definitely delivered.

First the merch situation. Fate Con is at just the right size, where there are plenty of tables and most of the games fill up, but it’s not yet large enough to be attracting much in the way of corporate attention. It wasn’t full of booths full of TEMU crap, nor was it hyperfocused on selling one specific system. Almost all of the tables were stocked with content from local artists, many of them being hand-made/painted dice, charms, stickers, pins, minis, towers, etc. Lots of 3D-printed things (I got a great plastic grimoire with a dice tray and rolling space that I quite like, and a treant dice tower that I’ll probably use for displaying some of my more esoteric dice), lots of resin crafting, some soldiered displayables, some HEMA/LARP/cosplay gear, even a guy selling (pretty decent - I bought some) coffee with a (very nice) d20 included in the bag. Do expect to pay "artisanal" prices for things (I paid $30 for the grimoire, $35 for a treant dice tower, $25 for the coffee, and $50 for a set of metal dice), but that’s the tradeoff for not getting cheap crap. Artists gotta eat after all, it’s part of why I buy so many systems and modules I’ll never run - support makers!

Now onto the systems. There were six gaming sessions but I only signed up for four, partially because I had conflicts and partially because oh my god I have not been this tired since I worked nights in college. I figured this would be a great opportunity to try out a number of systems that had piqued my interest over the years (or just when I saw them on the list) but I had not had a chance to play, and while 5e was by far the most popular option at the tables (maybe about twice as many 5e games as all other systems combined) there were plenty of options.

Also, before we begin I want to give major props to all four of the GMs I played games with at the convention. While I have critiques and complaints about the different systems, the people running them did an absolutely fantastic job.

Do note as well that these reviews are entirely my opinion, and as such are objectively correct reflect my own biases and preferences. If they don’t match your experience with the system, by all means don’t let me yuck your yum. Everyone is allowed their own opinion, even if it’s wrong.

Game 1: Daggerheart, Tier 1

Honestly, I’ve been very interested in trying Daggerheart for a while now, and I think I may have overhyped it in my head. And to be fair, a huge chunk of that may be due to the adventure run.

The adventure selected for this session was A Royal Conundrum, and it was… underwhelming. I don’t know if it’s an official module, or if the GM intends to run it again, so I’ll add spoilers here just in case:

It started with a rather ham-fisted attempt to teach the players about cooperative storytelling. The party is running late to deliver a gift and we kept running into obstacles on our way which the players are encouraged to come up with. The problem is, we aren’t really collaboratively creating the world, we’re just coming up with a potential roadblock and then the GM calls for a skill check. And that’s it, apparently we needed x successes before y failures to make it in time or something, but the DCs were set so low we only failed like… once. It’s a learning session so it’s kind of expected, but it also didn’t really feel like collaborative world building, just the usual way I feel when the GM struggles for a description and I throw out a word.

The issues continued in the next scene, when the tiara was stolen under the cover of magical darkness and we were told to interrogate six guests at the princess’s birthday party to figure out who did it. The issue is, the only things we had were very general descriptions of the diplomats and their gifts which the players came up with, which didn’t really give us much to go on in regards to the investigation. We ultimately made an “accusation”, at which point the person we accused turned into a fey who ran off. Side note: I remain convinced that the module calls for whoever the players accuse to turn out to be the thief, as each of them had a motive and there was no real physical evidence. This largely made the investigation really underwhelming, as there were no threads or leads to follow, just question someone until they tell you why they have a reason to do it: wants to look younger, wants to heal his sick wife, broke AF, etc

The final section of the adventure redeemed the system a bit, because Daggerheart combat is quite solid. In fact, if we had done a traditional dungeon crawl or more otherwise combat heavy adventure, I might have come out with a much stronger opinion of the system. Combat moves quickly, the spotlight system actually works quite well so long as your players cooperate (we basically decided everyone gets a turn before the next “round” and encouraged the more shy players to go when they seemed lost), and the Hope/Fear system does a pretty good job of keeping the spotlight flowing back and forth between the GM and players so the combat felt like it had momentum shifting rather than being entirely one sided in either direction.

And this is where my biggest complaint about the adventure comes into play. The tiara the fey stole? Yeah, it granted a wish. Which… of fucking course the players were going to come to blows over it, and of course it’s going to end badly. Why the fuck would they trust level 1 nobodies to deliver what is essentially an epic level item? We got a forever GM who decided to indulge his “that guy” frustrations by using it to give everyone in the world banana fingers. Which is fine enough for a one shot, but really… the tiara should have just been a normal tiara.

Overall, I think Daggerheart really isn’t for me. This adventure highlighted a major mismatch between Daggerheart and my personal preferences - no skill system. There are Experiences that you can invoke by spending a Hope and explaining how your experience is related, but it still apes my least favorite part of 5e - a very small range of modifiers. The difference between a really good skill and a really bad one is a whopping 3. It’s impossible to be bad at anything, but just as impossible to be good at anything either. There’s simply no mechanical expression of your character’s non-class abilities, and I think that’s a major design mistake.

We also had a major problem with all of our abilities being combat focused: no detect magic, no buffing up for skill checks, no reading thoughts or compelling truths. Maybe it gets better at higher levels, but we spent the bulk of the game basically rolling insight to detect lies and talking with NPCs which has nothing to do with the system proper.

Overall: I think it has a lot of potential, and I look forward to Daggerheart 2 when they can shed some of the 5e-isms (similar to how I liked Pathfinder, but think Pathfinder 2e was much more robust when they could ditch the idiosyncrasies of 3e). I could see it being a great off-ramp for a 5e table that loves Critical Roll and wants to do a more narrative style game but is still largely doing dungeon crawls.

Three Raccoons in a Trenchcoat

Now this game was an absolute blast, and I highly recommend it as a palate cleanser between campaigns. You play as either a racoon, a squirrel, a pigeon, or a possum with your goals and skills, to infiltrate a human gathering and steal food from them. It’s a chaotic 1d6 system that works because it’s evocative and requires a good “yes and” kind of mindset, but it’s a great one to pull out when one of your regular players doesn’t make it or when you’ve wrapped up one campaign and want a few very simple games before starting a new one. 10/10 if you go in expecting the kind of chaos you get, highly recommend.

Motive Knight

Ok, this one caught me off guard. It’s a relatively new system as far as I can tell, and was reminiscent of D&D which made me a bit cautious, but I wound up having a great time.

Part of that is on the strength of the module we played, which is their first published adventure Bite the Hand that Feeds. I would honestly give it a solid 9/10 as a one shot starter module. I don’t know how much ad-libbing the GM had to do, or if he made changes ahead of time, but it was a great module that gave us a lot of opportunity to get creative with our abilities.

The module itself has three phases. In the first phase, our characters were asked to steal a few barrels of a special tea from a docked ship. The tea was basically a panacea for a plague that was sweeping the city (and helped explain why the disease wasn’t a mechanic we needed to deal with ourselves - we were protected after the first mission). It provided a lot of different options to get to the tea - attack from the docks, sneak in from the waterline, etc - which worked out great. We snuck in through a cannon port, knocked out the guard, stole a few barrels, and blew up the boat to cover our tracks. The second had us searching for missing doctors on a quarantined island and gave us some opportunities for combat, social, and investigative sessions. The final part saw us infiltrating a masquerade where the nobleman behind the plague turned out to be a demon.

Sort of the polar opposite of Daggerheart, Motive Knight gave characters a much more evocative and mechanically expressive toolkit to work with which I appreciated. While my character’s skills were pretty useless except for Banishment (my other skills were niche like Jeweler or Conjuration which never came up) my main class gimmick was Necromancer, which let me animate random objects. I got a lot of use out of it doing things like triggering explosions (animate a lamp and have it leap onto gunpowder) or automating escapes (animate a boat and have it carry refugees out of quarantine), and it was decent in combat once we found the animated creature statblocks. And TBH, had I actually read the book ahead of time and created my own character, I think I would have been able to get the same special abilities with more useful skills. Overall, I think the biggest thing that will hold Motion Knight back is just that… it’s familiar. It’s too similar to D&D or Pathfinder or any other d20 system. It’s a good d20 system, but it’s really only going to be appealing to someone who is bailing on their existing d20 system but doesn’t want to leave the d20 ecosystem. And it has very steep competition there with PF2, SotWW, Draw Steel, Worlds Without Number… the competition is stacked, and this is literally the first time I’ve heard of Motive Knight.

I think this will be my go to recommendation for people leaving 5e who don’t want Pathfinder 2e though, as I was quite taken with the system itself and the standards are usually covered by others here. I expect it’s destined to be another heartbreaker, but I enjoyed the one shot, and if nothing else I think the worldbuilding is pretty good - age of exploration high fantasy is an underserved niche.

Worlds Without Number

Ok, this was another one that disappointed me, but I think the issue here was largely that I picked a spellcaster for a level 1 one shot. Only getting one spell… kinda sucked.

The adventure was perfectly serviceable, so I won’t really delve into it. It had a twist ending that I saw coming but barreled into anyways because I fucking hate the trope in question (the big bad was holding back an even bigger bad and didn’t bother explaining it to anyone). But it had the same issue I had with Daggerheart - very small modifiers on skills (which is an issue that goes away at higher levels as it does have a skill system you just get very few points at low levels, so I won’t gripe too much), combined with very few abilities that we could do much with. We did, at least, have some decent non-combat abilities, and I can certainly see where my issues with the system would clear up at higher levels so I don’t want to knock the system.

I would say that, unlike with Daggerheart, I actually would be interested in running a short campaign in WWN. I feel like my issues would clear up around level 2 or 3, which should happen pretty quickly. It’s not high on my list of systems I want to try more long term, but it is on the list.

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Overall, my experience at Fate Con was phenomenal, and I will definitely be back next year. And I definitely intend to go to some more conventions down the line… just maybe not for a while. I completely underestimated how exhausting these things are, I am so feckin’ tired.

Hey everyone, I am looking for a rules-light Sci Fi game (I played a lot of Shadowdark recently and fell in love with OSR in general). A game that provides the ruleset for something along the lines of FTL - point crawling through systems, exploring planets and other locations, boarding (hand to hand combat) and ship combat, some spaceship management. Does not have to feature aliens. I like my vibe grimdark and I am a fan of Sci Fantasy and Horror, things like the Warp in Warhammer 40k.

I played some 2400 which is amazing as a Micro - RPG and covers a lot of ground, but for a campaign I would love to have just a bit more rules and room for character development.

Cheers!

It's styled as the in-universe government software an agent's handler would use. You don't pick songs: you pick the scene, then turn its dial as things go wrong, and it crossfades to tenser tracks. Radio static, rain, heartbeats and stingers sit on top, so your eyes stay on the players. Free, runs in a browser tab. Link in the comments. If you run Delta Green or something like it, what scene is missing?

I'm designing battles for a medieval tabletop strategy game and I'm wrestling with an old problem:

If combat is completely deterministic, players can sometimes calculate the result before attacking.

If there's too much randomness, strategic preparation stops feeling important.

Personally I want the player who prepared better to have a meaningful advantage without making the outcome completely certain.

For wargamers:

Where's the sweet spot?

Low randomness?

Dice with modifiers?

Cards?

Completely deterministic?

And which game handles it particularly well?

Blades in the Dark is a big source of inspiration. I like how it splits heists and downtime, but I'm looking for something more traditional, dense, robust.

I'd like something where players can see their domains expand across a map, similar to a 4X game.