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I got hit hard by the Quinns Quest sales pitch on Public Access. Hard enough to back the Kickstarter and get a PDF of the original game, despite never having played a system primarily geared towards the "storytelling" and "Play to Find Out" style of play. Lately, I tend towards the OSR scene. My current Shadowdark campaign is on hiatus after 20 sessions, mostly due to me needing a break. I'm pushing my group to explore new systems in the meantime.

Tonight, I ran our first session of Public Access. It won't be our last.

What is It?

For those who aren't aware, Public Access is a game based on the Brindlewood Bay system (it also lists Apocalypse World and The Between as inspirations). The core loop revolves around introducing mysteries to the players which they must discover clues about, eventually culminating in them using the clues to propose an answer to a given mystery's central question. This means that the Keeper (GM) doesn't know the answer to the mystery. There isn't one. The players create the answer through investigation, roleplay, creative input, and rolling well.

If you're like me, a GM (and rare player) that subscribes to a more traditional play experience with very little supported input from the players as far as true facts about the world, you're probably suspicious about the idea of not having something as core as what happened in the mystery not prepped. It flies completely in the face of Blorb principles and the OSR Onion. In Public Access, we ARE gating knowledge behind rolls. We are BARELY prepping situations, let alone anything at all (I did end up prepping for about an hour beyond the time it took to read and grok the core rulebook -- more on that in a second).

I hear the old me querying, "But if nothing is real and there's no one source of truth, how will I manage to generate tension? If the players know we're just making all this up, why will they care?"

And wow... WOW. I'm glad I let the game prove me wrong.

The Prep

The rulebook is about 70 pages, short by the standards I'm used to. I spent 3.5 hours reading, rereading, and printing out materials from the core book, then another ~45 minutes reading/notating my chosen starting mystery and Odyssey Tape ("House on Escondido Street" and "Affirmations 04"). All told, I was ready for my first session in about 4.25 hours. Granted, I've been running games on average about once a month for the past seven years (it took me two weeks from soup to nuts before I thought I was ready for my first session of DnD 5e).

Now, that prep wasn't without its anxieties. The rules state that the game is best with 3 players, works with 4, and you should avoid more than that. From the time I started prep to curtain, I'd gone from 4 interested players to 7. I had faith in my own abilities as a GM to make it happen, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it for anyone new to the hobby.

I also walked in without a full grasp of some aspects of the phases and the character sheet, namely the parts dealing with progress, answering "dawn questions", some special moves, etc. Little bits that I hoped would get ironed out in play (they mostly did).

Beyond reading the rules, prep was a breeze, but I'm still glad I did some.

The Start

There's a fantastic session one guide in the back of the book that gives you step-by-step instructions on how to run the first session. I was exactly what I needed, including all of the necessary "lore", character creation guidelines, short but effective read-aloud text, and advice on where to kick off and end. It's the kind of guide I want to see in every RPG book. Tell me exactly what to do in session one. Perfect.

Maybe the best read-aloud text is the CATS section: Concept, Aim, Tone, and Subject Matter. It's basically a page of setup regarding what the players should expect regarding the game's content and what the game expects from them. Again, every game should have this. I think it's largely responsible for how well my players performed during gameplay.

My only note here is that I found it odd that the TV Odyssey mystery section in the book is before the Session 1 breakdown. You do not need to understand the wider, long-term mystery to run the first session, and I almost overwhelmed myself trying to wrap my head around it before deciding I didn't need it (I was right!).

Character Creation

We only had about 2.5 hours to play, and the rules said character creation would take 15 minutes of that. Knowing how character creation goes in most RPGs and having come in with over double the recommended group size, I banked on going over half an hour, if not more. I was terrified that we'd waste all our time on character creation and not get to the fun.

Character creation was the fun (the start of it).

I run for a group of late 20 somethings and early 30 somethings. They basked in the nostalgia of Public Access. When one of my players described his character as wearing JNCO jeans, I loved getting to tell him that JNCOs are literally mentioned in the text. For them, it was like running wild in their childhood bedrooms, losing themselves in memories of playing Pokemon Emerald under the covers and spending all day on internet forums and dealing with dialup. It made their roleplaying spectacular. None of them played themselves, but they all had a firm grasp on who these people were in a way that no one can ever really nail down in a fantasy or sci-fi game.

Part of character creation is assigning other players items based on their character description. I really think we could've spent the whole night just doing this.

• "Oh, you'd definitely have a pocket knife in those cargo pants."
• "Burnout like you would have a bong as long as California."
• "You're into like energy and stuff. You've always got crystals on hand."
• "If you're obsessed with the Challenger explosion, I feel like you'd have a telescope."

And so on. By the end, I saw more three dimensional characters than I ever have at session 1. And all the players already seemed to know each other's characters. Two of them even started saying that their characters were dating. Everyone cared about who they were playing with, what the situation was, and what could be lost.

Gameplay

The players take moves depending on the current phase and situation. In practice, this works like almost any other RPG. Have a conversation. Honor the fiction. Roll when things get risky. The beauty of it lies in how much input the players have in what's going on. The rule that Quinns admitted to getting slightly wrong, that players decide the consequences of failure before they take a risky action, is wonderful. We all watched in horror as a Ouija Board driven seance fell to disaster as a poltergeisty floating coffee table cracked a character's skull open during her ritual (she said that might happen before she rolled to try and speak with the other side). I narrated the results, and the players watched in horror as that alternate timeline faded away with the turning of her key (the only surefire way to avoid consequences).

It was a wonderful scene, and I only weighed in for like, 20% of the workload? The other 80% being the players deciding to go into the house and use the Ouija Board, and the module detailing all the locations. I acted more like a participant than a referee.

The prewritten mysteries do a great job of letting you know when to prompt the players for input. With the proper debrief from CATS, my players shocked me with how good they were at setting the scene and describing their characters in the fiction. Here's one quick example starting in the Stand of Trees at the House on Escondido Street:

Keeper: "You stand in a copse of tall ponderosa pines outside of the house. You can see the front door and tall windows of the ranch style home. There's a fenced in backyard through more trees. The grass is yellowing. Sticky pine needles cover your shoes. Let's paint the scene. something about the trees makes you think the evil in this place is in the land. What is it? We'll start with you, Katie."
---
Katie: "I think these pines don't smell... piney. They smell like rotten meat."
---
Josephine: "I feel more anxious being here, like something's pressing down on me."
---
Cristal: "Can there be like, a wind? But the leaves don't move."

Like, WHAT. I was stunned. Genuinely. I thought these were fantastic answers--flavorful, true to tone, inspired. All from my players who've never GM'd a session before and weren't used to me giving them the reins. I couldn't have come up with anything better. And then I had my big revelation: I felt more like a player than I ever have running an RPG. I didn't care that I didn't have all the answers. Nobody did. We were all collectively invested in what was going to happen. Everyone was on the edge of their seat waiting to find out what would happen next. It didn't matter that we all knew there was no grand scheme working in the background. That was the fun of it. We were discovering something together. We were playing to find out.

When it came to improv on my end, I felt free. I invented new locations, mannerisms, and character details wholesale. Because I didn't have to adhere to a strict behind-the-scenes story, I could improvise without fear, sprinkling in details without having to worry about whether they'd contradict the written text. And if I forgot them later on, either the players would remember and fold it into their answer to the question, or we'd all forget, and it wouldn't matter anyway.

It was just... magic. We ended after the dusk phase due to time constraints (Rockets vs. Lakers on at 9:40 CT), but I could've gone for three more hours. Since I started GMing, I've always felt exhausted after a session--emotionally numb. Not in a bad way (usually), just in a... spent way, like fatigue after a long workout. After a session of Public Access, I was energized. I talked fast and gesticulated wildly in the car and couldn't wait for the next session. It was so refreshing to feel like I'd played the game rather than spent three hours spinning plates. It didn't just feel rewarding, it felt fun!

Some Notes

A small list of little hiccups I hit during play and prep. Nothing that broke the momentum.

• As written, the clues in "The House on Escondido Street" are heavily implied to be inside the house (could've been a reading problem on my part). When my players split up, I had to do a bit more work parsing out which clues to give those that were doing research away from the house itself.
• I feel pretty in the dark about where the TV Odyssey mystery is going in general after reading the rulebook. It seems like the onus is on me to figure it out, which seems in conflict with how the rest of the game works. I haven't gotten there yet, though, so this could be a non-issue.
• I wish the Latchkey Moves and Keys didn't spoil reveals like the Big Man until I've gotten to actually unlock him. The Keys of Desolation especially spoil some of the deeper iceberg weirdness. I'd prefer if the descriptions on the sheet were more cryptic, and their exact functionality remained tucked away in the Keeper section.

General Advice

If you're going to run a game, here's some tips to keep in mind:

• Read your chosen mystery sheet before you put it in front of the players. It's only two pages. Keep a pencil and highlighter handy and annotate it as you go, highlighting important bits and elaborating on things you're interested in expanding on. I wrote down where I might use events in different locations and expanded on some of the characters. E.g. I renamed the "Gang of Kids" to the "Bubblegum Gang". When the group talked to Debbie Rappaport, she described them as "greasers with skateboards, snapping and spitting wherever they go." The players got a kick out of it.
• Don't stop players that aren't in the current scene from weighing in on what's going on. I rationalized it through the weirdness of the TV Odyssey mystery, that they all held a light psychic connection. It helps keep everyone involved. Just make sure to remind them that they aren't actually there.
• Your NPCs have places to be. The players get a few questions, then the NPC needs to go to work, or their favorite TV show is on, or they get tired of talking. Keep the time pressure up.
• Use the sun to signal the passing of the day and increase the sense of time pressure. When my players entered the haunted house, I remarked that the long shadows of afternoon crawled across the living room floor, and dusk would soon be upon them.
• Trust your players. They're really smart!

Conclusion

This has been an (uncharacteristically, trust me) uncritical, excited breakdown. If you're at all interested, I highly recommend that you give it at least a one shot. Pick House on Escondido Street for your mystery and just get through the day phase. It's great!

Thanks for reading. Have a nice day :)

Finally we are getting more options for Daggerheart on the VTT market. Apparently official release in May.

https://alchemyrpg.com/daggerheart

Hello, I'm a forever DM and I've just finished up a eight session long campaign of the module Another Bug Hunt, for the system Mothership. Obviously, major spoilers for the module, so if you happen to be playing this one, or will be playing it at some point, save yourself!

If you're familiar, you can skip this paragraph! But if you've never heard of mothership or the module, I'll give you brief context. Mothership is a grimy, narrative, horror sci-fi system that can be pulpy or as grounded as your table prefers. This module is about a crew of responders going to Samsa VI, a planet marked for terraformation. Only, the local fauna (and the science team. Most notably the synthetic officer, Hinton) have caused some major issues, causing the whole facility to go quiet. The fauna is question are multi-armed crab-like monsters that can reproduce with sound transmitted by a horrific 'shriek.' The players then have to figure out how to solve the mystery, save the colonists, and hopefully survive. In Mothership, you try hard to accomplish two of those, and many times you can only realistically achieve one. It plays very much like the Alien Franchise, a little bit of Starship Troopers, a little bit of abject eldritch horror, and our story culminates in the titular mothership.

This is a final warning for spoilers! Please enjoy the read:

Deep in the belly of the strange Carcinid ship, the crew had found themselves at the mouth of a tunnel, terminating right next to the jaw of a great slumbering noble. A God.

By this time, there was very little left of them to give. Chuck, the surgeon, and Dr. Edem were run down, covered in cuts from both the infection and too many close calls with the carcs to count. Their minds raced much faster than their mouths for once, and the sight of it left them slack-jawed. LX, the synthetic, didn't even have its own legs to stand on at this point, and was just a wretched torso, carried around like garbage with no where to toss it. Jimmy, the field engineer, was hardly himself. He was crawling on all fours, kept talking about wanting to be 'home.' But that home wasn't with his kids. It was here, in the bosom of the xeno mind, and the rest of them could see it all over the way he out-stretched himself in worship. The Sergeant was put together better than most, and up until this point, his demeanor had cracked the least, but the Thing. Seeing that Thing did him in- spiked his cortisol, and all the stress of the Greta excursion came rushing through his bloodstream, causing him to go into cardiac arrest. Sergeant Lance had a heart attack right there, which did little to steel them for what was below.

Hinton.

He and Dr. Jensen were down there, surrounded by countless carcs at the feet of the thrones. The thing they had been searching for, the logic core of the saboteur, was for the first time within their grasp. Somehow, it couldn't have been further away. As chuck raced over to slam risky painkillers into the marine, and the others scrambled to make sense of it all, a confirmation was made in Lance's mind: they wouldn't be getting out of here.

And so, he let them go. He let them all go. Jimmy didn't ask permission, he just scampered down the strange choraline megaliths to be where he belonged, and Edem and Chuck shuffled down there with LX in tow. They had to get to Hinton, somehow. Lance watched them go, and assured them to do so, as he adjusted the massive payload strapped to his chest. Once out of earshot, Lance took his time, first, lighting a cigar. Second, he changed the deactivation sequence on the bomb. There was no more deliberating, no more arguing, no more escape for them. And so he watched them from his perch, as they clambered down, greeted by a retinue of carcinids. To his surprise, they weren't ripped apart, but rather, escorted to the makeshift lab from where Hinton and Jensen performed whatever diabolical research they wrenched from hell.

In truth, Lance didn't know, nor did he care about the conversation that transpired. All the ideation and deliberation on the nature of the soul, the aspiration that one might hold to supersede their makers, or usurp the fate of the company. Lance did not hear whether androids could possess a soul, or whether a being could remain themselves after undergoing metamorphosis, be it into human-like bodies like LX wished for at Prospero, or like the eruption that would soon befall Jimmy. Lance did not hear of Hinton's betrayal of Monarch, or the failure of the Damocles protocol. He did not hear of the deal struck between Hinton and Chuck, who was chain-smoking throughout, that secured their lives in exchange for the doctor's surgical prowess. He did not hear that the logic core was theirs. He did not hear that they could leave the planet. It did not matter. All that mattered was that the cigar was reaching the end of its burn.

As Chuck, Jensen and Hinton approached the aramid woven noble, and the centurion guard of carcs surrounded them, Lance had nothing left to do. He keyed in forty-five seconds onto the bomb's analogue interface, smearing blood onto the keys, and pushed [CONFIRM]. He hooked onto some of the sinuous fibers that criss-crossed the room, and rode them down the great amphitheatre towards the staircase. With a thud, he crashed into the strange volcanic rock, and strode through the horde, holding up the beeping payload. The carc's brayed and hissed at him as he pressed on, and Edem could do nought but watch in horror, as he rushed the centurion line. LX snapped back to life, laying there on the staircase, to notify her that he had finally worked out the nature of his existence. Jimmy charged Sergeant Lance, as he bounded up the steps, only to meet a stiffened arm that folded him hard against the rock. Edem screamed, when Lance finally met the centurions, who skewered him from all angles. A cascade of limbs beat down against the weathered sergeant, and ripped him apart.

The bomb had already landed on the other side, when Chuck spotted it with fifteen seconds left ticking on the timer. Hinton screamed at him some kind of order. Several, in fact. Jensen, deaf as he was, likely had no clue what was going on. Chuck just stood back from the operating table, and lit his last cigarette. He took a deep pull. The crackle of ash was all he heard in that moment and then ---- lights out.

Been interested in a gridded/tactical game. These two newcomers seem to be interesting.5E and pathfinder have too much baggage for me. I usually play OSR stuff but I’m interested in something more boardgamey/tactical. Or should I just play gloomhaven?

any tips on where to start? Bonus points if the art and layout has at least a little inspiration.

Hello!

My friends and I want to give a present to our dungeon master for his birthday, but we are absolutely clueless about what to give him.

He is kind of rich, so it's even harder to give him something because he hasn't any trouble in buying things he likes, that's why I thought about giving a thoughtful rol-related present.

I would love to hear your suggestions guys, any ideas are welcome!

(Except dices, he's a loot goblin and has tens of pairs already. We could act as a functional party for once as a present, but that's no fun xD).

So I have this idea for a one shot where the players are toys that have adventures in a house and garden. Some ideas from Toy Story, some from Honey, I shrunk the kids and it takes two.

What I’m missing is a reason for the toys to travel through the house? What are they searching? Trying to achieve? Rescuing? Escaping? I’m a bit lost…

I'm looking for ttRPGs to check out that in your opinion have the most coherent and easy to follow/understand layout of information and graphics.

Curious for some suggestions and specifically why you think it's so good.

Thanks in advance...

I don’t think I’m going to be able to convey what I intend to without coming across as a little insulting, so I apologize in advance.

I shifted to playing ttrpgs online during the pandemic, and while I do think there is a human element lost I overall appreciate the wider scope of players and games available as compared to finding a group in-person. Lacking a dedicated group of hobbyists interested in dabbling with different systems, online recruitment becomes the main way I can find people interested in more niche games.

Now there are always going to be more players than GMs. And with people looking for games online there will be people who are socially awkward and reliant on the anonymity of a screen to behave in ways that would be less acceptable in an in-person social setting. That’s a given. But I’ve recently run into a subset of that problem which is that for more niche game systems that have a majority online following, the people staking out LFG threads/channels are those who have developed some strong opinions about the game that they may or may not have experience playing. Games with a strong collaborative component which these people have been chewing over on their own because they don’t have a group, whose opinions have crystalized enough that they cause friction when a discussion with a group doesn’t match what they’ve imagined.

I would like to find players who are interested in specific niche games and care enough about them to be active participants…but not SO invested that they’ve already decided what they want their experience to be. And I don't know where to go to find those players. Any advice?

I'll be moving soon and taking a library of over 1,000 TTRPG books with me. This allows me to reorganize my shelves. I've been thinking about how best to do it. Last time, I organized it by genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, Super-Hero, etc.

This had some benefits, but also split some series that would probably be better together (the Cypher setting books, for example) and didn't work well with some cross-genre books (Over the Edge, for example).

How do you organize your books? Genre? Alphabetically? System? Publisher?

I'm endlessly interested in the manifestos written about different styles of RPG play. I'll link below a collection of blogs and books I think play in this space but I'd love any additional links you have in this genre!

Blorb is a style of game really focused on consistency in the world and the GM not improvising at the table.

Principa Apocrypha is a manifesto for OSR-style play, with focus on rulings over rules and player ability over mechanical ability.

The 4D Handbook is a manifesto on playing games laser focused at keeping players in character for as much of the game as possible.

The Game Master's Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying is a book that pushes for characters to be proactive and motivate the story via explicitly stated goals. This isn't new, off the top of my head it's part of what makes Burning Wheel special, but here it's given as a guide for any game.

Almost what I'm looking for section

The Open Table Manifesto is a about running West Marches style games. This is more a structure for a campaign, though, and assumes play to be happening in an OSR style.

Don't Prep Plots isn't explicitly a manifesto but lays down clearly guidelines for a certain style of play (or in this case, prep). It is more a guide than a manifesto, however.

The Expressionist Games Manifesto is more a manifesto for making games than playing them.

A Dozen Fragments on Playground Theory is a great collection of ideas pointing in a similar direction but, again, is more focused on design and considering the relationship between player and designer than it is prescribing play at the table.

Games that kind of fit the bill section

There are plenty of games that made their point by doing it through a ruleset. Wanderhome had a lot to say about what counted as play, Index Card RPG openly acknowledges that it's a playstyle wrapped in a system, and enough ink has been spilled about PBTA game design to fill the ocean. If you've got a game that explicitly discusses play style and culture, please tell me about it!