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https://theblackcompanyrpg.com/

Looks pretty cool and very flavorful.

I've been thinking about trying to run a game where all the players are part of the crew of one big vehicle like a tank, mech, possibly aircraft. I've looked into systems like lancer and Fragged Mecha and they seem mostly made with the idea of all the players being the pilot of their own mecha type thing. I have some general ideas for a setting I wanted to use in mind but if the RPG is designed with another setting but can be adapted to a ieselpunk fantasy style setting that could be interesting.

I recently did a post about great games with terrible layouts and I got a lot of traction.

First off, thanks! I was interesting seeing how some games can still be fun to play even if the book makes it hard to do so.

However, this got me curious on what is considered a GOOD book layout then. I have little experience with TTRPGs yet (mostly D&D, PF2e, Tormenta20 and now Daggerheart), so I want to start opening my horizons a bit.

I had the privilege of playing a Liminal Horror one-shot as a player with one of my favourite actual play GMs, and I really loved the simple but meaningful mechanics. So, knowing that Liminal Horror is directly derived from Cairn, and that Cairn is derived from Into the Odd, what are your favourite games that derive from this family of really special NSRs?

What do you think of combat-focused games with encounter-building budget guidelines and the "dragons should be better" phenomenon?

Some combat-focused games have encounter-building budget guidelines. Each monster has a "point cost" (specifics depend on the game). The GM adds up and references these "point costs" to roughly assess how easy or hard the fight will be.

I have noticed that some games like to have dragons break those guidelines. For example, in D&D 3.5, dragons are infamously under-CRed. A fight with a dragon of CR X is, more likely than not, going to be significantly more difficult than a combat with some other monster of CR X.

I have fought the various dragons of Draw Steel. I can safely say that they very much go above and beyond their listed "point costs." For example, I have found that the level 2 solo thorn dragon, brawling down on the ground without ever using its breath or flight, is a significantly more dangerous enemy than the level 4 solo ashen hoarder or the level 4 solo manticore. (The upcoming adventure of Draw Steel, Dark Heart of the Wood, is currently set to culminate in a battle against a thorn dragon... under an open sky, in a vast map, with the PCs starting at least 20+ squares away from the dragon horizontally and at least 12+ squares vertically below.)

13th Age 2e gives dragons significantly better numbers than other monsters of the same "point cost". The bestiary even says:

Freaking tough: We might have gotten the math “wrong” with these guys. Like we said, dragons have reason to believe they are the heroes. Remind the players that we didn’t even try to balance dragons, and their adventurers have the option to retreat.

Justifications for this I see include "Dragons should intentionally break guidelines, because dragons are cool" and "PCs are supposed to fight a dragon super-duper prepared, and should never just randomly encounter one."

To me, it feels like essentially pranking GMs and their players to have a much tougher fight than expected, simply because "Well, obviously, dragons should be cool and scary, right?"

The history of DnD is complicated, and who deserves credit is oft argued. However, Stafford's contributions are clearer. Not trying to start a fight about designers, who started what, or even what is a good game, but I am legit in awe.

I was looking at Stafford's wikipedia page today and was impressed by the amount of games considered classics and influenced our medium. With Pendragon, Ghostbusters, Runequest, BRP, and publishing Call of Cthulhu, the guy had an indelible mark on trad games. However, he also designed Prince Valiant, which was an early arrival to narrativist conventions and has echoes today. Then there is the Great Pendragon Campaign, which still holds up and was incredible to run.

There are designers who maybe made more innovations, but to have one guy design or co-develop so much is wild.

Seriously, here in Brazil we have four original TTRPGs themed around the series, one with two editions (Invasion) and another edition yet to be released (Paranormal Files). They are:

Invasão (Invasion) (Cassaro and Del Debbio): The first ones were released right around the time of The X-Files was on air on the TV. It has several references to the series, such as the Majestic 12, etc. It uses a system that was very successful in the past here in Brazil, the Daemon, but is now forgotten here.

Arquivos Paranormais (Paranormal Files) (Jorge Valpaços): It's more of a broader paranormal investigation approach, potentially extending to Hellboy, Supernatural, Yu Yu Hakusho, etc., but I've been playing a campaign that's very much like The X-Files with Brazilian elements, more "reallistic".

Conspirações (Conspiracies) (Diego Bassinello and Stefano Pelletti): With a more well-structured setting, set after the Brazilian military regime, ended in 1984, and before 2001, right during the first run of The X-Files, you can play as an agent, a conspirator, or an unsuspecting person.

Urbana Bellica (Sergio "O Alquimista" Gomes): Perhaps the one that is furthest from the rest of the list, but which is closest to the series because it is a ttrpg where government forces still operate in the shadows, hiding a dark truth.

As a fan of Chris Carter's series, I don't need to look far to play an RPG as Mulder!

Hi everyone

I'm a science teacher in Italy and I'm planning an RPG related project with a couple of classes. The students are 18/19 y.o. in that school there is a big focus on classic literature (latin and greek) therefore i wanted to focus this project on writing adventure for RPGs, with all their studies they have a big pool of inspiration to draw from.

The problem is that most of them never played any RPG so i was wonder how could i introduce them to the hobby so they can play a couple of one shot and get the general idea of it. What system could i use? Something from the OSR like Cairn/Mork Borg/Mothership? or something more Narrative like Daggerheart? I would avoid rules heavy games like DnD, PF2e or Draw Steel.

Any suggestions?

This year, in my spare time outside of my day job, I set out to publish my first RPG product. I'd done lots of homebrew or more amateur products before, but this time I wanted to go the whole 9 yards: writing, editing, layout, art (3/4 of which I would need to be working with others and they weren't in my skill set).

I started in January, casually, and at some point later I came across the Designing Dungeons Course which helped me organize and coordinate my thoughts. Eventually, I got enough of the writing done that I was able to seek out an editor and start looking at someone for layout & art.

Being Canadian, I started my search inside the country, which led me to Brent Jans who was great to work with. The first professional addition to the project really motivated me, seeing everything cleaned up. After that, I started my artist search which was a little tricky at first (I actually really struggled with Google's search and found discovery of new people was hard). Different factors contributed to the difficulty of it, a lot of artists are out there but they are either busy or not quite what I was looking for.

I was aiming for something in a OSR (but modern) kind of style. I wanted to have a sense of the 80s in the project but not like those "epic fantasy" covers you see on Conan books. After some searching, I found Gordy Higgins, and we began to work together on what would be a cover, a bunch of character art, and then some additions of Gordy's own ideas for a map and other pieces that really took the project the next level.

This was my first time budgeting for a project (since all my previous ones were just my own thing, as I mentioned), and it was cool to learn about pricing and figuring out how much this would cost. The adventure was about 16 pages long, and my tangible costs ended up being a couple thousand CAD. Will I ever see a return on this? I think eventually, but it was also very eye opening what the market is like and how important marketing is. I printed off about 50 copies for local promotion, and while many people in my life have shown an interest and think it's great, figuring out how to replicate that word of mouth on the internet is... a unique challenge as someone who's not a brand themself. Mind you, I worked in the MarTech SaaS space for nearly a decide so at least knew a lot of the theory behind what was going on.

I've always had a lot of respect for anyone who does this more seriously than I do, as a full time job or as a major part of their career, but doing this first hand has really given me a new appreciation for just how much work goes into creating and selling a TTRPG product.

As the art came in, which Gordy was great with updates, the project really started to come to a complete product and the next steps were underway. How do I sell this? How do I distribute it? Physical? Digital?

Well I had thought physical was out of the picture but I'm considering doing a print on demand solution, so I ended up going digital and that's where it's at right now. I've dabbled with both DriveThru and Itch (and looked at some other solutions, like Shopify), but DriveThru ended up winning for this use case. I wanted the discovery that DriveThru offered and knew that itch was more of a expert's favourite but not practical for the discovery I wanted.

So, a whole 9 months later, the project was ready to go live. I knew that doing work outside of my day job was going to be tough, and it was about as tough as I expected. It'd be cool to be able to move faster or work on a team, but the reality of doing a full day of working and then finding the motivation to do more work was often challenging.

I knew the product I had was something I was happy with, and looking back, I was really happy with the folks I got to work with. As well, my partner was very supportive and always kept me motivated and would listen carefully to what I had to share (including when I had a bit of a fixation on mangalica pigs). After that came releasing the adventure.

Now I think creating something and sharing it for others to see is a unique kind of experience. If you haven't created and shared something that gets put on a pedestal for others to see (and judge), I think it's something you really should do to know what it's like. Having others look at what you've created and be judges to it is very vulnerable but also really empowering. Doing this on the internet makes it doubly vulnerable, because people can be asses behind the comfort of their keyboard.

On that note, I do have to laugh whenever someone does come along with some snarky quip or thinks I've created some kind of abomination. I remember one Reddit troll who responded and someone else commented to just ignore them and they were well known as the village idiot (lol). They later deleted their comment which gave me a second laugh. If you're gonna say something, say it with your chest, honey! Don't be shy now :)

I'm still in the process of figuring out how I follow up now that I've finished and release the adventure. Things like sharing it with those that inspired me, or divving out all my promotional physical copies. It turns out I really didn't know how I was going to sell or pitch myself when it came up in day to day conversation, so that took some practice.

Going into this, one goal was to create something fun and after playing it with my friends, it was the fun and silly afternoon I had hoped for. It was never meant to be taken too seriously, and included a bunch of easter eggs to things like The Black Cauldron or a famous chess player I watched a bit.

But a bit of a second goal has come up where I want to make sure my adventure is out there for people who would do want to read it. I don't care if 1,000 people who aren't interested see it if there's 10 people who would really connect with it don't get the chance to see it. Like Edmund Snow Carpenter said, I just wanted to make sure I was an artist who talked out loud and those who liked it would hear it.

As far as monetary returns go, I'm onto the scale of $10s of dollars and I think I can break into the $100s of dollar (which is only one magnitude off from getting a return on what I spent). I'm interested in learning how taxes work and if that impacts me or how I organize my expenses.

To my surprise, tenfootpole picked up a review for my adventure. I wasn't really aware of them before but when I learned about their "old man rants angrily" brand, I took the review with a grain of salt 😅 My favourite comment was the anonymous person who said:

> What the fuck.

Truly a glorious reaction to the adventure. Round of applause 😂 I took comfort in knowing that someone's day was so upended by what they saw that I made.

As I was working through the whole project, I was also thinking a bit about identity. I know that in TTRPGs, queer folk (which includes myself), tend to cordon themselves off to their own kind or active allies. There's a very hateful other side of the spectrum and I would hide my work from them if I could just because it's not meant for them but alas, that's part of the deal with releasing something publicly.

I'd love to be able to do more in the future, I learned a lot from this; first and foremost, though, is that I can make really funny and enjoyable RPG content. It might not be for everyone but it was for my table and I know other tables like the less serious and more fun tone of game and I hope they find the adventure if it interests them.

This was a bit of an impromptu design diary but if y'all have any questions about the process or want to hear more, ask away :)

I recently came across a lot of supplements and adventures designed for OSE/DX.

My go to rules light system for one shots and alike is 'Into the odd' so my question is: How easy is the conversion from one system to another? I know they are in a similar vein and I would love to keep ItO instead of buying a new system just to play one adventure or use a certain bestiary.

I want a Caribbean-style pirate game focused on treasure hunting, but I’m stuck on pacing.

On land you have to pass towns for supplies, rumours, rest — you can’t ignore what you stumble on. At sea, with their own ship, the party could plot a route that sails past every island and goes straight to the treasure (or slowly comb every island until they luck into it).

These are my ideas for setting it up so far, but they all feel bad.

1) Put the treasure on the far side of the map • Treasure is in a region beyond most islands. • Risk: Players can sail straight to the treasure area

2) Tell the PCs the treasure could be on any of these islands • I give a list of candidate islands and say the treasure is on one of them. • Risk: I’d be tempted to wait until the campaign has “gone long enough” then say “yep, this island has it,” which feels artificial/railroady — or players turn it into an island-by-island checklist.

3) Block travel paths with storms / dangerous waters • Risk: railroady

Do I drop the ship and have them travel by sea horses that need rest? Any advice?