**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.

I never expected I'd make this question, but I recently been to a Bluebeard's Bride game (one of the alternate modules, where it's modern day, present time) where the players decided they wanted to play Bluebeard's Bride without engaging in feminine horror, so they lined, veiled or just asked about a third to a half of the potential explorable themes, mostly the actually meaningful and juicy ones. Between the GM being awfully unprepared and wtf just happened, we got 20 mins of actual horror and the rest was character creation and players pointing out at various shit and rolling to investigate a mysterious object. Taking stock did almost nothing, because the house wasn't really that dangerous.

The GM only at the end of the session figured out what random horror themes she could inject into a room to make it somehow scary like a surreal scene where we might have just given birth to a rat or maybe we were hallucinating. Before that, not much stuff happened tbh. We didn't even get to experience the horror of the first room because everything in it was lined, so all we were left with was a weird mask we found. Besides that, there was a fire, I suppose.

We also randomly flattened a servant with a taxidermied bear after we gauged the bear's eyes out. The bear didn't move btw. It had human eyes, so that was someone's solution to this conundrum.

Idk how I feel, because I have played this twice before and it can be utterly innerving in a good way. Maybe it's just me, but if you sign up for a specific type of horror, you should want to be terrified and made uncomfortable in certain way. I feel that despite being Halloween month, besides me and my friend every other player wanted to engage in a mystery where you explore a weird mansion.

What's funny was that the session started with "Do you know the fairy tale?" And everyone said yeah.

I've been looking into getting the book and running maybe a campaign after reading the comics but I not really confident so I decided I should listen to others experiences with it. So yeah.

How was it like when you played DIE:RPG and do you recommend getting it?

I know I kinda talked about this before but now I kinda wonder if I'm some kind of coward for wanting to avoid RPGs themed around some inevitable downward spiral for either your character or society. Reflected in the mechanics by sanity, money, corruption, humanity, esc. But also in setting and lore, too. Doesn't a dystopia inherently assume we're all just slaves to history?

I feel like my perspective on life and the world is actually already pessimistic and nhilistic enough. Mildly fatalistic too, I think everything is cause and effect and that if a better world was possible, it would have happened already.

I just recently found Liminal Horror's website and I've been considering buying for my group, except I don't know any of the concepts it's meant to carry. I was thinking to myself that it was like Mothership: a engine made to carry a specific genre (Like how Mothership is made to emulate Sci Fi horror adventures). If anyone could tell me what Liminal Horror is about, the whole shtick of it is or anything else, please do.

I’ve noticed that newer GMs sometimes put a lot of work into figuring out how to connect different adventures into a campaign. One thing that’s easy to overlook is that the adventures don’t actually need to be related.

I’ve been using a simple four adventure structure for this, mostly with published scenarios. Figured I’d share it here in case anyone finds it useful.
I find this works best with one-shots or short adventures that take no more than two sessions. The idea is to have a recurring element show up often enough for the players to remember it and notice how things are changing.

What I do is pick a recurring element and let it develop in the background of otherwise unrelated adventures.
It could be an NPC, a faction, an artifact, a cult, or even an entire kingdom. The important thing is that it doesn’t need to be central to the adventures themselves. Sometimes it’s just a conversation, a piece of information, or something the PCs happen to encounter.
I usually think of it as a short, four adventure arc.

In the first adventure, I introduce the element and give the players a reason to remember it. In the second, I show them another side of it, preferably something that changes how they understood it the first time. By the third, it starts affecting the PCs directly. Then I use a fourth adventure, usually something I write myself, to bring that element to the foreground and give the whole thing some kind of resolution.

For example, in Delta Green (it can also work on any investigation game), I’ve been using a recurring handler (basically the guy giving the PCs their missions).
He starts off as a fairly understanding guy, willing to overlook small mistakes and help the agents when things get complicated.
But as the campaign develops, they begin seeing another side of him. They discover that he has no problem abandoning agents he doesn’t trust when it serves his purposes. At first, those are other agents, people the PCs might not even know.
Then, during a later operation, the PCs find themselves in exactly that position. Suddenly, the guy who’s been helping them all along doesn’t seem quite so reliable.
That gives me enough material to eventually run an adventure centered around this character, where the PCs have to confront what they’ve learned about him and possibly the organization they work for.

For a medieval fantasy game, you could do something similar with an entire kingdom.
Maybe the PCs visit a kingdom that seems like a fairly decent place. In another adventure, they hear about people disappearing near its borders, or villages being abandoned. Later, someone they know ends up fleeing from that same kingdom, and the PCs discover its rulers are doing something pretty terrible.
By the fourth adventure, the kingdom itself becomes the problem. Maybe they get involved in a rebellion, confront whoever is responsible, or even decide that the kingdom has good reasons for what it’s doing.

You could do the same with a quest giver who keeps asking for help, a magical relic that keeps showing up in different places, or pretty much anything you can develop over several adventures.
The nice thing is that none of the published adventures need to be connected. I can run them largely as written, introduce a little information related to the meta plot here and there, and let the players build their own understanding of what’s happening.

It also keeps preparation manageable. PCs might die but the players still know the meta plot. I’m not planning some massive campaign with dozens of interconnected clues. I’m just developing one element across a few adventures until it becomes important enough to deserve its own scenario.
And of course it doesn’t have to be four adventures exactly. You could do it with three or six, or use an existing published adventure as the finale instead of writing your own.

One thing worth mentioning, especially for newer GMs, is that I’m not planning how the players will react to any of this. I’m just developing the element and introducing new information as the campaign goes on. What they decide to do about it is up to them.

Cheat sheet:

Adventure 1: Introduce the element

Adventure 2: Show another side of it. Challenge the players’ initial understanding

Adventure 3: Make its consequences personal. The PCs now have to deal with it directly

Adventure 4: Make the element the central conflict of the adventure

It’s a pretty simple way of building a short campaign out of published and homebrew adventures without forcing them into the same story.

I originally created it for the solo but not alone bundle a while back to benefit suicide prevention and mental health in gamers. It would eventually go on to be a printed deck where you combine some prompts, choices and resource management with a simple PBTA inspired die resolution.

I had a pretty successful Kickstarter last year and now The Game Crafter put it as their deal of the day! It is in the 1% of most sold projects on their site.

Recommend games where there are the following rules(not necessarily all at once, I want to see the example in different systems for inspiration):

1. Rules for combining ordinary opponents into groups - for example, 5 Orcs are combined into 1 token with an increase in their abilities.
2. The rules of where there are any squads - platoons, companies - and the rules of how characters can interact or participate with this.
3. Rules of mass battles in which characters can participate. Big battles, small skirmishes of groups like border conflicts.

Hi r/rpg! I published Under Dimmer Stars, a game inspired by media in the likes of Castlevania, Diablo, Dracula, Elric of Melniboné, Heretic, The Witcher, and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.

It is a skill-based game where you roll a pool of d6s and keep two, aiming for a 10+. You can risk using Luck to reroll 1s, if you need it.

Characters are bound by their past, setting them on paths of redemption, vengeance, deliverance, or forgiveness. These paths may involve the same dark adversary or cross several of them and their lackeys.

The game hints at an implied setting that you can base your adventures on. I may expand this if people like it.

I hope you can check it out and play it! Thanks.

As the title says, anyone know of any actual play videos for Kolbs Neverland book?

Hey looking for some
New universes to explore as me and my friends have played D&D 5E to the point we are kinda losing interest so looking to take a break from it and try something new.

Right now we still want some fantasy themes in the game but maybe a different setting.

One of the ones we looked at is Vampire masquerade as I had played the video game ages ago but not sure how hard books will be to find?

We also considered some up coming ones on like Feral or apocalypse world?

If it matters we have 4 players and I typically DM. I prefer simpler rules as we don’t have tons of time to play each week so I like the story to advance somewhat quickly.

Appreciate any suggestions.

Would love some suggestions on a game for a more unqiue group of players.

I have a friend group of creatives (authors, etc) who want to try a tabletop, but are less interested in the combat aspects and more interested in the roleplaying/story telling aspects. I can obviously just run a story heavy/combat lite oneshot in dnd/pathfinder, but I'm curious if there are any systems that would be accesible to newer players (obviously with me boning up on the rules and helping) that were less combat focused that you would recommend?