Hello r/rpg! I’m Meric Moir, RPG director on the Plotweaver Roleplaying Game.

I’ve been in writing, marketing, and publishing for 14 years, and I’ve been working directly in TTRPGs for the last 6 years. I’ve been a podcast host and actual play GM (shout out Massive Damage Adventures and Sky Hammer Press!), a freelance writer, and very recently the lead writer on the Cosmere RPG. On Massive Damage Adventures we played one-shots for over 80 unique games in four years!

My freelance writing has included work on The Expanse RPG, Achtung! Cthulhu, Star Trek Adventures, Fantasy AGE, indie projects, the Cosmere RPG, and now, Plotweaver!

As the Plotweaver RPG Director, I’m leading the development of three brand-new setting books using Plotweaver, the game system that powers the Cosmere RPG. I have two cats, four kids, and I play two instruments.

I’m also not alone! For your questions today, I’m joined by our intrepid lead designer!

Hello r/rpg! I’m Andrew Fischer (u/ethereal_fish), lead designer on the Plotweaver Roleplaying Game.

I’ve worked on RPGs and other tabletop games for 17 years. I’ve led development on tabletop games such as the Cosmere RPG, the Star Wars RPG, the Warhammer 40k RPG, and Fallout.

I also worked for many years to pioneer a genre of app-integrated board games that combine physical and digital game systems in products like Mansions of Madness 2nd edition, Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth, and Descent: Legends of the Dark.

When I’m not designing for Plotweaver, I work as the game design director at Earthborne Games, a studio focused on creating conscientious and sustainable games such as our critically-acclaimed debut title Earthborne Rangers.

The Plotweaver RPG

The Plotweaver RPG is a brand new tabletop roleplaying system using the same rules as the Cosmere RPG. While the core mechanic is familiar to lots of gamers (d20 + modifier), the game is full of twists like the plot die, freeform leveling, skill-based magic, meaningful systems for non-combat scenes, and more! Plotweaver is coming to crowdfunding in 2027, but the open alpha starts on August 5th!

Plotweaver isn’t just another game to play, it’s also an open-source system where writers, designers, developers, and studios can take the rules and make their own games. We want Plotweaver to be the game designer’s RPG system. If you’re interested in using Plotweaver for your next project, you should check out Plotweaver Academy, our Patreon that shares sneak peaks, design guidance, and tools for developers and TTRPG aficionados.

Bring on the Questions!

Now, let’s answer your questions! Feel free to ask anything, though we won’t be able to answer everything. We can talk about design, development, writing, and our plans for the future.

Thanks for having us! Let’s go =D

**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.

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This submission is generated automatically each Saturday at 00:00 UTC.

This week's RPG is GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System)!

Have you played it? Have you run/GM'd it? How did it go?

What's your favourite memory from the game?

What's the best thing about the game?

What's the worst? How would you improve it?

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Last week was Savage Worlds Adventure Edition. Join us again next week for Fate!

Specifically looking for a TTRPG where I could set out a blank map, give the players access to a couple fantasy races to choose from, and they could create different kingdoms and polities of different kinds, and have them evolve throughout the timeline.

It could be a game where the country is your character or one where you're playing the rulers of said fictional countries and shaping it for future generations, etc.

It would also be nice if they had good FoundryVTT support too!

Any suggestions?

Sorry for the ramble, I don't know how much context to give.

I am in a group of five players plus GM. Husband is in a separate game with the same GM and one overlapping player. GM hosts games, but lives about 25-45 minutes away (players are kind of spread across a few nearby towns, GM lives in the middle of nowhere.)

My original game schedule was one weekday evening on alternating weeks. Everyone is very busy during the summer and therefore GM typically plans to either end or break all games for summer and runs a VERY casual Merc campaign instead.

Instead of the usual summer break GM asked if we could switch to alternating Sundays. Okay, well I have other events on Sundays and let the group know my availability. I can do sundays, but specifically I am unavailable for the weekends we do not play. Another player is only available on my unavailable weekends. Great. One of the other players told us that they would be leaving the game at the end of the month. GM now wants to play every weekend and an hour earlier so I don't even have time to get dinner ready for my family on those days now. I remind the group that I can't give up essentially five hours every weekend (three hours of game time and an hour of travel as we generally carpool and that makes the drive even longer as we have to stop and pick up two other players). They decide to run every weekend anyway so that the one player that's leaving can get extra play time in, but myself and the other player will be missing every other session so I don't see how it makes that much of a difference if the one getting more time in will be leaving the game anyway.

I guess I just want advice on how to bring this up in a respectful way, without sounding passive aggressive or entitled? Switching from weeknight to weekend, earlier time slot, and then doubling session frequency to cater to a player that's leaving anyway at the expense of more long term players missing half of them? I've been in this group for about five years now through multiple campaigns but all of this shuffling around is really getting frustrating for me.

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!

They're big! They're mechanical! They're all around pretty badass... or extremely traumatizing if you're going the Evangelion route. This week we're focusing on the Mecha genre! So tell us how your game (or just any game you really like) is unique in this setting.

Thank you u/AppropriatelyHare-78 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 "Post-Apocalyptic"

Next week I plan to focus on a mechanic instead of a setting so if you want to suggest a topic for future weeks, be sure to include "-sug-" in your comment so I can easily find it!

What is your favorite genre? Even if you don't play it currently?

Mine is Science-Fantasy. Like Shadowrun, Star Wars, Torg Eternity and so on. It is more versatile than standard fantasy.

Currently I play only fantasy because there is a lack of decent science-fantasy games around or players playing them.

(reposted because I messed up the title)

I have a setting but I'm having trouble finding the right system. Most of the ones I find seem either too vague or geared too much for a specific post apocalyptic setting, basically they all seem too Mad Max for what I'm going for.

My setting takes place in a some what grounded desal punk world mostly at a 1930s/40s tech level with some anachronistic computer technology.

Magic is a learned vocation, some races have an easier time with it but its something anyone can pick up and there are blue collar magic applications and even magic trade unions (A rep for Necromancer's Local 57 is one of the primary NPCs in the first session)

I really want a system where armor is handled in a piecemeal fashion (helmets, chest pieces, leggings, gloves, boots, that kind of thing)

Mostly I just need something flexible.

Alright so I'm not always on the hunt for new games, I'm very fine with my main game (it's the 5th iteration of the D-word that will get me downvoted to oblivion if I dare say it, you can figure it out). But from time to time I'll see other games that seems nice.

Recently I've been especially seeing ads for Wildsea. The art style is really appealing to me, and the themes sound like something I'd enjoy. But would I really? That's the question I'm asking.

Have any of you played Wildsea? Would you recommend it? What are its strength? Its weaknesses? Before I put any money into it I wanna know what I'm getting into.

I remember downloading a ttrpg system wich featured anthropomorphic chibi animals around 2020-2022, the art on it was really good and on level up you'd have a selection of three features to choose from depending on your class. That's all I remember about the system, I've looked everywhere but I can't seem to find it, I also remember that there was an exploding dice mechanic, but that's about it, it surprises me that it's so hard to find anything about it because the art quality of the system was really good, I'd assume it would become more popular, but not outright dissapear from existence. Does anyone know something about it?

I'm not really sure if what I'm looking for exists, and if it does, I must be way off on my keywords because I'm having no luck with Google. I'm hoping someone here might be able to point me in the right direction.

I'm looking for a system or framework that I can use to run a very specific and currrated "one shot" session. For years I've thought it would be cool to run a game that really leans into the physical location of the players. My dnd group and I live in an area that I would consider a bit of an outdoor paradise. Hidden near a secluded shore of our nearby lake is an old mine tunnel. The tunnel is easiest to get to by watercraft. It's safe and only about 50ft long, but it's location is striking and really stirs my imagination.

I would like to run a game for my friends who haven't been there before. I'm just not sure how to handle the logistics. What I have in mind is to gather my friends on the far shore of the lake, handout premade character sheets, and explain the premise. Afterwards I'm imagining running an encounter, rewarding them with a cryptic map to the cave, revealing the rowboat I've hidden nearby, running another encounter on the boat in the middle of the lake, finding the cave, running one final encounter at the cave entrance either before or after retrieving the physical mcguffin that is in the back of the cave, and maybe one final puzzle to unlock the mcguffin.

So I need the system to be simple enough to be played in unorthodox locations far from any tabletop. Easy to pick up for players that have not used it before, and ideally lend itself well to something like a scavenger hunt.

I would like for it to be roll play forward but to still have enough substance to make the encounters fun. I'm hoping to encourage the players to mostly stay in charter, but we will go between live action puzzles / exploration and theater of the mind encounters where something akin to dice and character sheets come into play.

Does anything like this exist?

Wildsea is a setting hard to grasp because it is so unique. But as I grappled with the system to determine what stories I can tell with it outside of relying on players to push the narrative. I found my footing on leaning into the weirdness of it. As I quote from the book, with underlined words that got my imagination going, "It’s a Weird, Weird World The Wildsea setting is designed to be low-magic, high-weirdness. It’s a world of unusual creatures, woken spirits, and unbelievable abilities, but they’re mostly tangibly connected to the waves themselves - there’s very little in the way of wands and spellbooks, or magical study. The practice of twisting the world in mysterious ways is referred to as arconautics, literally a delving into the unknown and uncanny".

The second thing that spurred this is the aspect of whispers in the game. Whispers are basically words of power. The effects of which change depending on how loud you speak these "whispers".

There are stories here in our world, myths, folklore, legends that speak of weird creatures, tales that explain and warn the power of words. I am speaking of fey in particular the unseelie. Since I have started to view Wildsea as a world where fey, unseelie, and nature spirits dominate though not completely lost to or behold to "Fey" physics and sensibilities. I have found it easier to wrap my head around the setting. Words have power, there are sentient nature spirits or beings who trade in whispers. And that's ammunition I can use.

Thank you for reading.