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Hi there !

I am pleased to announce that Shadowrun: Anarchy 2.0 pdf is available for all to purchase on DTRPG (where it's currently the best selling book, thank you all for that <3 ) and CGL online store.

Anarchy 2.0 is an alternate, lighter and more narration driven rule set to play in the world of Shadowrun. Developed by Black Book Edition, the French licensee of CGL, it is a fully official product and an alternate entry to the Sixth World.

The physical version has already been seen in some convention, with a retail date expected in November (I've read November 11th somewhere but I cannot confirm).

Don't miss out the free additional resources:

• Conversion guide from Shadowrun 6.
• Interactive character sheet.
• Shadow Amps expanded list. This fan made document regroup all the Amps from the core book + a lot of additional ones.

Furthermore, new books are on their way! Don't miss the new Kickstarter campaign starting November 3rd for 2 new books:

• Companion: Advanced Magic, Technomancers, Alternate character types, magical and technological threats, bestiary.
• Johnson's Call: New adventures, mission briefs, small campaigns and some detailed location with adventure leads.

If you have any question about the game, the upcoming books or anything else Anarchy 2.0 related, don't hesitate to ping me :-)

Hi, r/rpg! We're Onyx Path Publishing, publishers of your favorite games!

The Curseborne Covenant, the next tier of play for our Curseborne RPG, is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter.

We're here to answer all your burning Curseborne questions!

But of course, Curseborne's not the only game line we publish, and this is an Ask Us Anything, so feel free to ask about any of our other titles:

Onyx Path's games include:

• Curseborne
• The Earthbane Cycle (The World Below, At the Gates, Monster Kingdoms, Jadestorm)
• Scarred Lands
• Scion
• They Came From...
• The Trinity Continuum

The games we've made with partners under license include:

• The Bodhana Group's Branch Riders
• Rose Bailey's Cavaliers of Mars
• White Wolf's Chronicles of Darkness
• Michael Pucci's Dystopia Rising: Evolution
• White Wolf's Exalted
• Caliber Comics' Legendlore
• Pugsteady's Realms of Pugmire
• White Wolf's World of Darkness

As people join in and announce themselves, I'll add their names here so you know who's who:

In-house staff:

• u/richt_op: Rich Thomas, founder and creative director
• u/TheOnyxPath: Ian A. A. Watson, OPP community manager, content lead on the Trinity Continuum
• u/eddyfate: Eddy Webb, executive producer, overseer of the Storypath Ultra system and Realms of Pugmire
• u/MatthewDawkins: Matthew Dawkins, creative strategist, overseer of Curseborne, the Earthbane Cycle, Scarred Lands, Scion, and They Came From...!
• u/chaneyinsaney: Mike Chaney, art director
• u/TravisLegge: Social media manager, production assistant, too many hats to count
• u/DixieCyanide: Editing and more! (Reddit still doesn't let us add her as a co-host but she's legit)

Intrepid freelancers:

• u/fragilebites: Emma Summers: Jadestorm, Curseborne Covenant, Seattle: City of Curses
• u/BoringApartment2408: Chris Jones: Curseborne Covenant
• u/EricZawadzki: Eric Zawadzki: Deviant, Curseborne
• u/PolyamorousNephandus: Jacqueline Bryk: Curseborne, Chronicles of Darkness, Exalted

I’m looking for a BRP, but I want something that still feels like playing D&D. So far, I’ve read the Quickstart and really liked it; it uses almost all the same dice as D&D, and from what I’ve read, it’s easy to add in the d20. I also like how it handles hit points and attack math, it reminds me of the lethality of OSR systems, but I want to know if there’s anything closer to what I’m looking for.

P.S: Sorry for the bad English.

I really wanted to like Blades in the Dark. I became interested in PbtA games after running OSR and DnD for many years. But after running Blades a few times, I just found it a bit tiring. I can explain why in greater detail, but I don't want that to be the focus of this thread.

Long story short: It has an evocative setting and really cool gameplay ideas, but I felt like the narrative system got me further from the roleplay than I wanted. It's like every narrative moment of this game is wrapped up in a clockwork of mechanics, discouraging freeform play. And ultimately, the rules felt equal parts dense and opaque. I was constantly pouring over the handbook trying to keep it in my head, more than any other game, and I got the overwhelming feeling that it made less sense if taken whole. As one Youtuber mentions, the rules feel implicit (and sometimes self-contradictory). It's as though people do not run this game, but they let the philosophy of the rules wash over them and they run their own version. Which is totally fine, make the game work for your table, but I would rather just run a different system if it can't be followed prescriptively.

So I left it thinking "I've actually had better roleplay moments in 5e." Still, I really liked the partial successes, stress/bargain system, the unique playbooks, the evocative setting, and the promise of the faction system. Are there any games that scratch a similar itch outside of Forged in the Dark?

I have read through Spire and really want to run that, but my friends don't really want to roleplay oppressed minorities (a bit too close to home). Does Spire (or Heart) work well if repurposed for a totally different campaign? Or does the advancement system kinda fall apart?

**Edit**

Since people have asked for details on why we bounced off blades so hard, it has nothing to do with being a narrative system or letting players contribute to the story. A big part of it was just specificity in all of the wrong places, leading to awkward play without tweaks.

• The book is just laid out poorly, and that does make your job as a GM way harder as you will be working overtime to clarify the rules.
• This game has a weird way of having several mechanical ways to do the same narrative task, but then giving different bonuses or disadvantages depending on which mechanic you choose. This creates a weird segregation of rules.
  • For instance, you can get information from something called "Gather Information", which is treated in the rulebook like its own special thing even though it's identical to freeplay. But you can also get information from long term projects if getting that information is more involved. Are Hounds good at both? No. They are only good at the first one. They don't get bonuses to project progress for tracking a target. There's no narrative reason this makes sense.
    • Side note, why is Gather Information its own separate mechanic in the first place? That seems like something that should just be freeplay.
• Tier sucks. It feels half baked, and is better replaced with judgement calls from the GM.
  • It modifies some fortune rolls, but outside of that, nearly every mention of Tier in the rulebook is just how to temporarily increase it.
  • Tier is kinda used as a formal way to say "this is harder/easier because these guards are well trained, or this equipment is rusty." In DnD, you would just sprinkle this into different rolls as relevance dictates, often using "Advantage." But being this casual about it in Blades is bad, because there are many features the players can engage with that temporarily increase their tier. So ignoring it half the time means throwing away the players reward for paying attention to their character. By encoding this type of "advantage" system in such roundabout, indirect rules, this makes Tier an annoying bookkeeping system.
  • Furthermore, the few example plays referencing Tier imply it should be consulted in overly convoluted ways. There are several examples in the book of Tier for lockpicking, of all things. Using tier for equipment feels uncharacteristically anal for a game like this. "Arlyn is picking the lock...Her crew is Tier I and she has fine lockpicks—so she’s effectively Tier II. The Circle are Tier III. Arlyn is outclassed in quality, so her effect will be limited on the lock" Are we really expected to be consulting Tier on this level of minutia? This implies we just constantly roll with increased or reduced effect no matter what we're doing.
• Downtime was cool at first, but because it's so rigid and predictable, it feels like horribly paced mechanical paperwork. And it's a huge part of the game. It's like they put an hour of leveling up in each session. Yes, the book encourages you to actually roleplay certain scenes in your Downtime, but it's just inherently duller.
  • In a regular RPG, when you walk into a bar to interrogate somebody, there's a wide swathe of possibilities. You might roll to intimidate, you might have to dodge a punch, combat might start, etc. There's a sense that the momentum could move in multiple directions.
  • But in Blades, you are picking a very specific Downtime action and making a very specific roll, with bounded results. You don't get complications during Downtime, it's separate from regular play. You do not get extra downtime actions or anything from creatively roleplaying it. This creates a disjointed, board game style of progression that makes it more boring to roleplay until Downtime is over. I see people just homebrew this problem away.
• People are going to disagree, but the concept of "Limited effect" is unfun and antithetical to the design of this game. A success with limited effect is one of the dullest things that can happen. In a game that evangelizes fail forward design, what role does success with limited effect play? It's effectively a limp version of "you failed." I don't like it, and I don't think the game even likes it, because example play of limited effect is sometimes indistinguishable from regular effect, which is why people complain online about "effect," as a concept, being poorly described.
• I think having some players in Prison and some roaming free is a fundamentally unfun way to play with friends, no matter how much influence they have, and building a bunch of playbook and crew skills around being in prison feels like a waste.
• The stuff I have listed might not seem like a big deal, but here is the main issue: These things that Blades tries to mechanically formalize (Downtime, Tier, Position/Effect) were not issues I had in RPGs. I felt they could be handled just as easily with a short aside to my players. A desperate roll to push someone could just be "He looks tough, it might be dangerous to get that close to him." In fact, that is usually the sentence you'll be saying anyway when a player asks why the roll is considered desperate. I didn't need a whole formal system for that, and I don't think the rules really add clarity to the conversation, because it is up to each table what controlled/desperate even means anyway. Codifying this into position and effect feels like a semantic muddling that actually gets in the way of the conversation Blades encourages. And it does it all with a big, hard to navigate rulebook.
  • But because Downtime, Tier, and Position/Effect are tightly coupled with playbooks, crew upgrades, engagements, etc. It feels like you can't do away with any of them.

A while back I asked for some good podcasts under 5 people and while I found some good ones, most of seemed to focus on dumb jokes and ooc talk, which I am not into at all. I want to listen to a ttrpg and be invested in a story, not listen to some guys talk about gencon. So, any suggestions for me?

Earlier this year I had an idea for a convention game: two people who don't know each other sit down together, play two criminals who don't know each other, rob a place, and leave the game changed for the next pair. No GM, no dice, not a whole lot of trust.

That became We've Never Met and We're Robbing This Place, a short GM-less heist game for two players.

One is the Architect, the other is the Operator. You alternate between playing your character and GMing for the other person across three scenes – the Approach, the Job, and the Getaway. The characters are competent, so the GM doesn't block actions but instead introduces costs, danger, fallout and hard choices.

Each player also has hidden goals, and the GM role has its own goals. Fulfilling those while GMing earns tokens that become leverage when you're back on the other side of the table. After the third scene, everything comes to a head in a final moment of truth.

I originally made it to run continuously at Ropecon at my booth with strangers cycling through the table. People played it, people had fun. Now I've cleaned it up into something other people can run. Diceless game, one run takes around 20 minutes.

It’s free: https://mesolitgames.com/wnm

If you want to hear about future Mesolit Games releases, there’s also a mailing list on the site.

I can usually tell what a game expects us to do when somebody draws a sword. I'm much less sure what it expects us to do the morning after.

A few sessions into a recent campaign, our group helped evacuate a flooded town. Great session. Next week we wanted to know whether people had come back, who was running things now, how far word of what we'd done had spread, and whether the damaged bridge would be repaired before winter.

We had very specific rules for what happens if you fall off that bridge. Almost nothing to help us figure out what happens to the town when its only bridge is gone.

And sure, we could improvise all of that. We did. But it made me realize how much of the actual experience of running a campaign lives in the gaps between the procedures the book gives you.

I'm not asking for a tax return minigame. I just wish more core books showed what an ordinary week looks like in their game. Who decides what changes offscreen? How much time passes? What happens to relationships, obligations, factions, livelihoods?

Blades in the Dark's downtime and Pendragon's winter phase are two examples that come to mind. Even a game whose answer is "skip that stuff and start the next job" is telling me something useful about how it's meant to be played.

I don't need every game to simulate daily life. I just want to understand its rhythm without having to invent that part myself.

Which RPGs do you think handle the time between adventures particularly well?

Hey everyone,

I picked up Mothership a bit ago because I really liked their skill tree. However, every time I propose it to my table there is a bit of a meh response due to it being a little thin on skills while also having some oddly specific ones. We play games that are skill heavy typically so it's a point of discussion.

Are there other ttRPGs with similar skill set up that have more depth? We've played Cyberpunk Red which has skill trees but they're not interconnected which was the interesting part of the Mothership skills to me.

Any and all suggestions are welcome but a modern day/sci-fi setting would be preferable for the game I want to run.

Welcome one and all to a post where we can freely discuss the games that we have released or the games that we are making. Stop on by and maybe you'll find your new favourite RPG!

A bunch of us make cool shit, but the Indie RPG space is crowded and it can often be difficult to get the word out about why people should try out your game. That's why every week we try to focus on a different mechanic or setting to see how new RPGs can solve decades old problems or put new spins on old greivances!

Don't like an outcome? Throw a benny at it! Want to ratchet up the tension? Spend some fear! Whether player or GM-facing, integral or optional, come tell us how your game (or just any game you really like) tackles Meta-Currency!

Thank you... me, for the suggestion!

As per mod approval, comments here do not count against rule 7 - comment as much as you want, answer as many questions as you need and discuss to your hearts content!

All that I would ask is that anyone who comments about their own system takes the time to look at the minimum at one other game in the comments and ask a question or provide feedback. Lively discussions are what get people interested and what keep people engaged!

Last week was "Horror" and we got some pretty interesting discussions going even if the post was misnamed!

If you want to suggest a topic for future weeks, be sure to include "suggestion" in your comment so I can easily find it!