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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.

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For the first time today I noticed a section at my local library with core books and box sets for several TTRPGs including:

• Dungeons and Dragons (3e, 3.5e, 4e, 5e, 5.5e)
• Pathfinder (2e)
• Call of Cthulhu (7e)
• Vampire: The Masquerade (5e)
• Blades in the Dark
• Shadowrun
• Dungeon Crawl Classics

And a few more that I didn't recognize, there were even full dice sets available for borrowing. So anyways, don't underestimate your local library for trying out other TTRPGs!

I need to get this out of my system, because I don't really have anyone around me to talk about this with.

Mutant Chronicles is fucking awesome.

I played it obsessively about 20 years ago. Then I grew up, got distracted by other things in life, and eventually Mutant Chronicles became one of those weird things I remembered fondly but hadn't thought about in years.

Until recently.

And now I've fallen down the rabbit hole again.

I've been reading old lore, looking at artwork, remembering old campaigns and generally rediscovering the setting — and I'm honestly amazed at how much I still love it.

What's funny is that I'm not even particularly nostalgic about the rules at this point. It's the setting that grabbed me all over again.

It's this completely bonkers mixture of military sci-fi, space opera, cosmic horror, dystopia, corporate warfare, occultism and gothic aesthetics.

Humanity has colonized the Solar System and instead of building some glorious utopian future, we've created gigantic corporations that rule entire planets and wage wars against each other.

And then there's the Dark Legion.

And the Brotherhood.

And the Dark Symmetry.

And somehow you can put all of that together with trench warfare, corporate espionage, religious fanaticism, mutants, cybernetics and ridiculous amounts of power armour and it just... works.

I think what I appreciate about it much more now is that it's over the top without necessarily being shallow.

You can have absolutely ridiculous aesthetics and pulpy action, but underneath that there's plenty of room for stories about paranoia, fanaticism, corporate exploitation, war, loyalty, trauma and what happens to ordinary people when the universe goes completely to shit.

Basically, I keep looking at it and thinking:

"Holy shit, I could run so many good games in this setting."

And apparently my brain has decided that after 20 years this is what it wants to think about now.

So I'm curious:

Are there any other old Mutant Chronicles players lurking around here?

What edition did you play? What corporation/faction did you gravitate towards? Any particularly memorable campaigns or characters?

Or if you discovered it much later — what was your first impression?

I don't even have a particularly profound point here. I just rediscovered something I loved when I was younger and realized that, apparently, I still fucking love it.

And I desperately need someone to talk about Bauhaus with. 😂

I see lots of discussion about premade vs homebrew settings, and (over on r/RPGdesign) lots of discussion about people making their own systems. But I'm curious to hear from those of you who have finished a system and actually run it to a meaningful degree, whether it's a from-scratch creation or a severe hack of an existing ruleset.

• How long did it take you to make the system?
• How many sessions have you played with it?
• Why did you make it?
• What is your opinion of it after playing it? What did your players think?

I work at a hobby shop and have recently started to run one shots with a variety of systems to let my customers explore different system besides the big names.

This month I am running daggerheart, fabula ultima, soulbound, and outgunned. I went for systems I am at least passingly familiar with.

For next month I am looking to expand out further and would like some recommendations. What is your elevator pitch for your favorite system?​

I know asking which is "Best" is silly for a number of reaosn. From just system preference to the fact that different mechanics and source books fit different types of games.

I'm looking to run a game set right after Return of the Jedi where the players are officers on a small Imperial frigate trying to survive a rapidly imploding Empire.

I'm pretty familiar with star wars d20 and we've played Pathfinder 1e for over a decade so its not a hard system to learn.

Thing is I want scarcity to be a big deal. You've got this ship and a pretty well stocked Armory and a crew but I want to damage the ship, kill crew and troopers, and have gear be lost or broken. I want to so this to force the party to look for jobs and scores or to have to make allies or go and look or buy more gear and hire crew to keep flying.

Do any of the star wars games have things like persistent armor damage you see in systems like Cyberpunk Red where armor just gets damaged from taking hits as opposed to from attacks that specifically aim to damage it? Similar weapon malfunctions that damage the weapon or durability mechanics?

Okay, so my question might be dumb, but seriously, it just so happens that any TTRPG I’ve ever experienced, the GMs/players all played the game the same way (view bottom of post for details). Due to my experience-bias, I had the notion that all games were played like this, but might use different tools (e.g. Roll 20 for maps, etc) or focus more (or less) on certain aspects (e.g. combat, politics, mystery, etc).

Recently I’ve been trying to find games online (e.g. Daggerheart, D&D, VtM), and boy howdy, folk play TTRPGs much differently than what I had come to understand was the “standard”. My bad. Since I was so far out in left field, I’m looking to get a proverbial “lay of the land” regarding TTRPGs and hopefully educate my clueless-ass.

I do wanna note; I had thought “Roleplay-Heavy” would be what I’m looking for, but even games labeled as that don’t match the style/vibe that I am seeking. Is the type of game I’m looking for just incredibly rare? Considered pretentious? Idk??

(And btw, not trying to knock any other style of gameplay or anything! Other ways of playing are totally fine and I get that everyone has their preference, I’m just having trouble finding the style I am used to, is all!)

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Aaaand for those who wish to read a bit more about the game style I am used to/looking for:

Both the GM and the players would act as their characters at the table, roleplay dialogue all the time, describe their characters actions in detail, have their characters react to the goings-on around them according to their character’s personality/backstory/trauma/etc. Avoiding meta-gaming where-possible, with a heavy emphasis on realism (e.g. if your character is in a different room than another, you wouldn’t be able to ask them a question without specifying that you walked over to the room they were in). Things like character consistency, character growth, drama, and even downward spirals were all part of the experience.

I would like to run a game about a group of fantasy criminals that run heists, take territory, etcetera. There is obviously a very widely acclaimed game built for this, but I would be playing with people who've tried and bounced off of FitD, and I want the game to include actually planning and executing the heists instead of jumping into the middle and flashing back.

This is obviously doable in any of a number of D&Dlikes that already assume an interest in sneaking and looting and are full of thief character options. If I had to run this game today I'd use Pathfinder 1e, which has a ton of content written specifically for this, but its prep is more time-consuming than I would like. I could also do this in BRP or Genesys, but I want something ready to run instead of a framework to homebrew

I have Sherwood and like it, but it's made for rural Robin Hood type thievery and I want this in a Paris or Venice kind of city.

Has a non-Blades focused game like this been made?

So our usual DM are busy this weekend. I decided to host a Cairn oneshot. I think i've learn the basic of it (read through the rule and watched a guide video once), but i'm still pretty nervous (and excited) for my first game. Any tips on how to run a Cairn oneshot smoothly?

I'm only human, so some TTRPG books may have slipped under the radar.
This list is for books. For a book to qualify it needed to have around 50 pages worth of content.
This list excludes One Pages, Zines, Supplements, unfinished/in development, AI Slop, etc.

If I forgot a 2026 TTRPG Book that came out during the first half of this year mention it so that I can add it to the list at some point!

Hey all,

In case you skip straight to the suggestion, please no 5e/Pathfinder. Not hate, just not my bag.

Been loving SWADE, and it's what I'm using for my current long-term campaign, but it's better to shorter adventures with advancements every 1-3 sessions. A huge selling point as well was it being class-less and setting agnostic. However, I basically just run low-fantasy, and it seems like characters are built into archetypes anyway.

I'm doing a lot of homebrewing, and credit to SWADE, it's a great foundation for doing that, but I wonder if it would be simpler and more intuitive to use something designed for low-fantasy/medieval horror, which is what I plan to run for the foreseeable future.

Any recommendations are appreciated.

Thanks!

Hello, I'm looking to run my first game, and I really want to do a campaign based on the cartoon series Fillmore, but I'm unsure what system to go with.

For people who don't know what that is, it's a buddy cop show set in a middle school, and the best thing about it is it preserves the exact tone of a police drama, while being about infinitely more mundane things. The first episode is a silence of the lambs parody, where the Hannibal stand in is a graffiti tagger, and it's played totally straight, which sounds awful but it works crazy well.

The 2 rulesets that have caught my eye have been Bubblegumshoe and Kids on Bikes. I'd say the most important things for it would be investigation and chases, there are a LOT of chases. So any advice on which would be better, or even an entirely different system, any advice would be fantastic.