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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”

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!

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?

Cycling around the city clears my head but it also gives me way too much time to think about how much mental energy I spend herding my group into actually playing. I’m the one who sends the when2meet links, checks everyone’s calendars, sends reminders, reschedules when someone drops, figures out if we’re doing food or not. Nobody asked me to do it but if I stopped I genuinely think we’d play half as much.

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.

Basically the title. I love the hexcrawl and discovering new things each turn and the random encounters. I love high lethality, I love needing to scrounge for resources, I love it when players find a cannibal gang they can't attack but find a pair of artillery guns in the next hex and shell the location before going down to the river cause they are out of water. Trading a crate of DVDs for three RPG-16 rockets and a package of expired Oreos? Amazing.

I have had an idea for a post apocalyptic scifi setting bouncing around for a while for a campaign on a planet that suffered an alien bombardment and global cooling.

It is hard to believe that someone hasn't done the work of converting Twilight 2000 4E to add laser rifles and power armor but I haven't been able to find anything.

If anyone has a recommendation for other scifi games that might fit the bill or any Twilight conversions I would love to hear it.

So looking back over your weeks/months/years of DMing games, aside from the PHB, MM and DMG of course. What one or two resources do you find yourself returning back to use over and over again? For me it is two third party items:

Ultimate Toolbox of Random Tables-the more I use this one, the more I see how it can be used

Book of Ebon Tide-for some reason, this one keeps popping up as a resource, even though its very specialized.

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?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/matrixghost01/chromatic-shadows-core-rules

Heya folks, just wanted to throw this out there for anyone who might be interested. Chromatic Shadows is a d6 pool occult cyberpunk rpg (more Lovecraft meets Cyberpunk than the Tolkien meets Cyberpunk of Shadowrun). I've had the basic rules for a while and played several games (they are available for free on Drivethru) and it is quite fun. Far less complicated than some view Shadowrun to be, but more robust than Cy_Borg. Simple system of add/subtract dice that is easy to hack in any way you could want, 4s or better are successes, more successes means more better.

The project is already funded with 27 days left as of me posting this (funded in the first 24 hours in fact) so it can only get better with some juicy stretch goals.

I'm not affiliated with Matrix Ghost Games in any way, I have just loved the game since the basic edition dropped a few years ago and want more folks to know about it.

Just wanted to say how much I love RPGtrader. It's like a new competitor to DriveThruRPG but it's so much nicer to use. Even its appearance is so much more pleasant.

There are SO MANY tags for filtering by system, tone, setting, player count and community tags to go even deeper. RPGTrade also does a good job of showing what's recently been posted, what's trending, what's popular. It's fantastic!

I have already uploaded one project myself to it, and I want to finish more just to put them on RPGtrader. It's so much nicer to use as a creator than DriveThru or Itch.io I highly recommend it. Please put everything you have made on RPGtrader so I can buy it there instead, thanks!

I saw this at my local game store and it seemed interesting! I like the concept of playing around with dinosaur toys, and the concept reminds me of the Primal show. Does anyone have any experience with the game? How did it play, what was fun about it if anything?