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In video games, “yellow paint” is a distinct visual marker used to highlight the correct path forward in a level. It’s debated and often looked down upon by more “hardcore” gamers. Still, it gives environmental cues that keep players from wasting time on empty exploration and frustration, without resorting to literal arrows or a corridor map design.

When you run TTRPGs, what techniques do you use to guide players toward the most interesting plot points? I know some systems prevent wasted time and momentum loss (i.e., FitD games), but I’m asking veteran GMs for their tricks of the trade.

Hey all! A while back I did a post giving my review of Break!! RPG, and as promised in a comment there I wanted to share my thoughts on Fragged Empire 2e. This is one of those games that falls into the kinda-Indie category - it's not some 5-page effort on Itch, but it's also not a big player in the space. It does some stuff that I find very interesting and I've been running it for about ten sessions now, so I feel equipped to share some thoughts.

What is this game?

Fragged Empire 2e is described as a “post-post-apocalyptic science fiction roleplaying game”. You can see a bunch of the art and get a quick overview of it from the old Kickstarter page, however I’ll try to quickly explain it here. The setting here is set in the aftermath of a ruinous space-war that basically destroyed the setting; in the century since the fighting stopped, the survivors have slowly dragged themselves into a fragile new collection of nations and polities, which have a great need for adventurers to clean out ruins, set up opportunities to expand, and resolve internal disputes. The races are all genetically engineered post-human peoples (like Schismatrix Plus), and there’s a land-grab going on as the new civilisation is established. The setting is designed to give your players about a dozen “good guy factions” that they could be working with, and a dozen “bad guy factions” that they can oppose, without the kind of strong central control that would make adventurers redundant.

The flavour of sci-fi here is interesting. On the one hand it tends to rationalise any magic – psionics is actually nanites, the Bear God is a gestalt psionic entity, etc. – but on the other hand it’s also absolutely not a hard-science-fiction setting. The closest analogy is probably Warhammer 40,000: we’ve got an internal logic and a desire to provide an explanation for the reader of the actual causes of everything, but it’s also mad as a banana in many places. In addition, there are effectively no aliens – so you cannot really do the “explore strange alien artefacts” storyline that in my experience players love – instead it is archaeology of prior civilisations, which is fun but means no opportunity for a Rendezvous with Rama storyline. The setup here also means that there are no humans – they’re all long-extinct – and instead you play transhuman/bio-sculpted successor races that are pretty interesting. If you enjoy PC “monster races” then this is a solid shout for that reason alone.

This is a medium-to-high crunch game, with a significant focus on X-Com style combat. I use this to mean that it gives you two actions a turn, there’s a lot of playing about with trade-offs in moving to better position vs standing still when taking shots, and it’s very focused on making use of cover and overwatch. Battle-maps are absolutely mandatory, in my opinion. The game describes itself as medium crunch, which I think is sort-of true: when you are up and running this is a fairly clean and easy system, however there’s a lot of work to get there, and the book’s layout is a significant element to consider here. Otherwise, we have complicated combats but simple out-of-combat, and I would place this into the Trad category of games, I think.

What’s the Game Line Like?

There are six books here, three hardback core books and three softback supplementals. The hardbacks are Rules [vital], Setting [vital], and Locations [recommended but could be skipped]. The softbacks are two adventures [I can’t speak to these, I never bought them] and a book of pre-gen character archetypes [totally recommend, for reasons I discuss below]. The way the game rules are set out, I would say that the one book of rules is probably equal to three to six ‘normal’ hardback books’ worth of rules, and my players have said that they feel no need for any expansion material to be added.

Finally, there is a rules-lite spin-off, which I mention below as its own thing.

Who is behind this game?

Fragged Empire 2e is a game by Wade Dyer, working via his company Design Ministries. As far as I know, he's a one-man-band, beyond artist commissions. I mention this mainly because these books are a very singular vision - i.e. you are really getting the undiluted Wade Dyer experience, for better or worse. We could tentatively use the term 'auteur', if only so I can look more like a film critic by doing so. I personally think he's done a good job here, however there is also some very obvious preferences that he has which I have seen recur in his other recent game Fragged Kingdom 2e and the samples for his upcoming game Fragged Aeternum 2e. This includes using i.e. when he means e.g., which I will admit is very petty of me to mention - but it does drive me nuts. Also, he chose to not hire any copy-editor, in favour of commissioning more art - that's probably a great decision in the context of strictly-limited funds and highly unusual settings that benefit from visualisation, but there are typos present here. However, more importantly it means that we do not have a design-by-committee approach to either the general design ethos or the setting - these are games with a strong identity, not just a generic rules framework with a common-or-garden variety Tolkienesque/Star Warseqsue setting slapped on top. I think it’s worth mentioning that you cannot really adapt this ruleset to another setting without a simply enormous expenditure of time to rewrite all the abilities.

What Works?

The first thing to mention here is the setting. The one player in my group who hated the rules still really liked the setting and the races in it. The setting is distinctive and the races are really fascinating. Because the books shy away from hard answers, even including a list of “unanswered setting questions”, it gives players and GMs huge space to make things their own or define things how they like (e.g.: Do the Corporation have a police force? Up to you!). I really enjoy this, as I typically struggle to remember fine details on the spot when running games – an attempt to run a Waterdeep campaign collapsed due to information overload – but I operate really well when a setting gives me strong vibes and boundaries and otherwise leaves me alone to be creative.

The room for what is often called build crafting is very high here. The rulebook has sixty pages of dense tables that include a mind-boggling variety of traits and weapon options, designed in such a way that there are very few dead-ends or mandatory choices. We have a Corp character who has made his pistol a weapon to be feared by double-tapping baddies with critical hits. The Neph in the party has a build reliant on marking enemies with spores before unleashing killer bees on them. The Legion moves like a molass, but can shuffle two squares after each attack, making him like a slowly advancing turret. There is genuine angst at the table at the decision of how many traits to assign to the combat and non-combat theatres, as the free-form character progression makes that a genuine choice.

As an aside, the game is also very open to improvisation at the table. There are several “magic” systems – anti-grav technology, innate energy blasts, psionics, etc. – and rather than giving you a spell list, what the game does is provide a very simple framework, then a list of areas that each power works in (e.g. Psionics is Time, Mind, FTL travel), and more or less lets you decide at the table whether a given thing works and is reasonable. I’ve had players ask if their robot character could power an elevator, or if their goo monster can eat their way through a locked door, if they can mind-meld with a spider monster illusionist – and this system gives me an easy mechanic for resolving those things. It really suits my style to have an improv framework for this kind of thing.

The final thing I would note here is that, as I mentioned above, this is a combat-heavy game. I have in the past found that Sci-Fi RPGs struggle with making combat truly tactical – they tend to provide a weapon table and then leave you to it, meaning everyone gravitates to the mathematically best option, and combat rules that are cursory, meaning that the GM is left to inject any tactics into the combats by their encounter design alone. Here, the game is much more natively tactical – with cover rules that promote movement, with actions that force difficult decisions at the table, and with character/NPC abilities that provide way more depth than just static bonuses to hit. Compared to my prior campaigns in Coriolis, Traveller, or Starfinder 1e, this is a much more satisfying combat-tactical-minigame experience, and I would say it is easily on par with Pathfinder 2e in that regard.

What Doesn’t Work?

The thing to understand here is that the game is very dense, and it seeks to present as much information as quickly as possible. Things that in most games would be presented as half a dozen paragraphs of information are here given as one terse line in a table, which then needs to be carefully unpacked by the reader. These are the sixty pages of lists that I mentioned above – and I think the decision to provide 90% of the rules in that format is going to be a make-or-break for some players. The internal logic is generally sound, and it is usually clear when you read something. If you have ever browsed AoNSRD (topical reference!) while looking for a new Feat this will all be very familiar. However, I simply would not even try to present this game to one of my groups, unless I did all the character creation myself – they simply wouldn’t enjoy the process of making a character.

We might in general pair this with layout. These books are dense two-column in text areas, but full-page-width tables for the character creation. The font used is very thin and scrabbly, and the font size is also small. It’s a bit of a nightmare on phones, and accessibility for hard-of-vision is poor. I once found an old RPG.net thread prior to the Kickstarter for this game, where posters there recommended that the author change his font size and layout for readability purposes – but he refused, saying that this allowed him to fit the amount of information into the book size he could sell. That’s another example of the author’s vision that I mentioned about – what you are getting here is his choice to present the entirety of a rules-complex game within one rulebook of 204 pages. This kind of thing is very subjective, but I have seen this complaint a lot - so I’d suggest that you consider checking out a preview on your intended reading device to see if you can jive with it. For the record I’ve no issues really, but I also paint Warhammer, so peering at tiny details is kind of half my hobby time.

What is the GM Experience?

Fairly straightforward, honestly. The game’s systems around advancement are very clear and easy to run. The combat rules are clear and other than trying to decipher the very terse writing the rules do not present especial difficulty. There are two things that I especially like about it as the GM.

Firstly, the game is very explicit on the player advancement side of things. It has heavily gamified player currencies – there is one for “guns and gear”, one for “spaceship upgrades”, and one for “exotic and unusual things”. The book tells you how much and how often to provide these, in a “wealth by level” kind of way. This immediately avoids the Traveller problem of characters exiting character creation as millionaires. It also avoids the issue of having to justify why a group who can afford interstellar fuel cannot afford power armour and miniguns for the whole group – as it just separates the two things out. I’ve generally found the “player economy” to be the biggest issue when running Sci-Fi RPGs – i.e. a lack of guidance or guardrails around the rewards the players receive for doing stuff - and it is basically solved here.

Secondly, making bad guys is fairly painless. I complained in my Break!! review about how annoying it was to make enemies in that game – since it had so many fields to fill, and had such a small bestiary. The bestiary here is comparatively larger, so I’ve had to make far fewer enemies. In addition, the process of making baddies is pretty streamlined. Pick one of four enemy types (horde, mooks, henchmen, bosses), assign a Variation, give them some traits, then build the weapons for them. This is still significantly more work than just rocking up in Blades in the Dark with nothing more than, “maybe they rob the safe on a whaling ship” like I’ve done in the past - however if you enjoy the “lonely fun” of pouring over the rulebook and making bad guys, this is a good system for it, with a clear framework and lots of options to select from. Since the baddies share PC rules for many elements, you also get the fun of discussing a particular build after the fight.

Who Should Play This?

This is probably the easiest thing to answer here. Prior to playing this, my group was playing Pathfinder 2e (which we eventually found a bit too controlled and ‘safe’ – the maths was all-important and nothing was allowed to be fun for fear of disrupting it), and when that campaign ended I offered a few games in the high-complexity and combat-focus side of the pool. This game has proven to be a good fit for them, but even a group of Pathfinder fiends find it to be a complex game to build and advance characters in. I would sincerely recommend this specifically to groups that enjoy pouring over the book to find a “build” for their character. If you have a group that majority just wants to turn up and roll dice, this will be a terrible fit for them. There is the option of the Archetypes booklet to cover up this gap, but it is not a guaranteed fix, since sooner or later they will discover that 60-page Lists section and run screaming. However, what I would emphasise is that if your group likes Sci-Fi and wants tactical combat and character builds to a mid-crunch level (e.g. D&D, not Shadowrun) then this game is likely to be a good fit.

Speaking of genre, that’s also worth noting. If your group wants Sci-Fi, then give this a consideration; it is certainly a Sci-Fi setting (as opposed to Space Fantasy), not just a Space Fantasy one, and it has a very wide range of stories you can tell and characters you can play. I find it a great sandbox to play in, and I’ve a list of potential plots the length of my arm. The setting is distinctive and vibrant, and is not just one of the three standard SF RPG settings (Star Wars, Firefly, Aliens) with some nouns changed.

Another Option

It’s probably worth mentioning as a parting comment that the author made a rules-lite game called Rag-Tag Fragged – this is inspired by Mork Borg and Mothership, and has about 100 times less rules than the main game, while using the same setting. I didn’t like it as much, but it was a way to get this setting in front of my group who would never go for this version, and it’s really suited to convention or one-shot play. You might like it also.

I am currently dming an Achtung! Cthulhu campaign, and one of the villains is Captain Wolfgang Reiter of the Nachtwolfe. He has shown that he will cooperate with the characters if it furthers his own goals (he very much doesn't want the Black Sun to reach their goal) but he's still a nazi, so he will betray the characters with no qualms.

This is exactly what he did. I sent the characters on a mission to retrieve two magic objects that the Nachtwolfe want to give to an American millionaire who wants to use them for his presidential campaign, and Reiter was the courier. This millionair has loaned a lot of cash to the nazi party before the war, and the magic items are his repayment.

The American courier was the son (Lewis) of said millionaire, who went to Switzerland to retrieve the items.

Unbeknownst to all of them, a regular spy of the German secret service was there to kidnap Lewis in order to make his father forgive the loan (she has no idea that there are magic items involved, or that magic exists at all).

In all this, Reiter convinced them that the regular spy was the courier, that she worked for the nachwolfe, and that he'd help them, they never even thought to ask if he was lying or not, they trusted him blindly. This devolved in a very satisfying standoff and later a car chase, and now they hate the guy with a passion.

Hey everyone! Since our whole D&D group often can't make it to every session, we've decided to still meet up and play something different instead of canceling. I'm looking for TTRPGs that work well as 3-hour one-shots, can be prepped in less than a week, and ideally have pregenerated characters or a very fast character creation system. I'm open to any genre—fantasy, horror, sci-fi, mystery, comedy, or anything else—as long as it's easy to get to the table and fun for a single session. What are your favorite recommendations? Thanks in advance!

I'm not affiliated with the project beyond being a big fan of the game, but Mythworks has just launched the crowdfunding campaign for The Wildsea: Sourdown, a new >50-page setting book detailing the namesake region of Sourdown, home to the fan-favorite bloodline of tzelicrae, arachnid hiveminds in bodies of silk and scrap and discarded corpses.

Sourdown is a pale and bleak reach, a far cry from the usual vibrancy and life one might expect from the rest of the Wildsea, but that dearth of color has not prevented its locals from using it as a blank canvas for ambitions projects like large-scale silk-weaving or dreams of reviving the place through the power of alchemy.

^{Out of game, it's also one of the regions that has existed orally since some of the earliest Wildsea playtests, but never made it into actual text until one.}

It's a much more lavish treatment than the 10-page writeups you might see in the core book, with more locations and factions and player options (like the bee-themed tzelicrae offshoot, the hexicrae!), and even an adventure scenario to get players started in the area.

If you're a fan of the Wildsea or just weird and novel settings in general, it's a worthwhile investment for sure! As of the time of writing it's already most of the way towards its main goal, with some fun stretch goals on the way as well.

According to https://rpgmuseum.fandom.com/wiki/Fruitful_void a fruitful void is a part of a game that is not covered by the rules but which the system direct players torwards. I have heard this same concept called negative space. The prime example is Mothership not having rules for hiding. Other examples are D&D 0th edition not having rules for disarming traps, pre 2nd edition not having persuasion rules. I would like to collect more examples.
I think that if you see ttrpgs as conversations, then rules moderate the conversation and the fruitful void is what the game wants you to talk about.

Which TTRPG in your opinion has the most fun character creation? Like it was fun to literally spend hours creating a character, almost like a game on its own or something that had really interesting options that made you like the game more?

What totally fine or even noble player choice ended up burdening the entire campaign? I'm speaking as a GM here but this can definitely be self inflicted or another player.

As an example, in my last campaign, one of my players chose a cute Japanese name for her character. The player isn't Japanese but speaks it at intermediate level. Despite all my efforts and practicing it, I just couldn't pronounce properly. This isn't something I usually struggle with, the sounds in this word just defied my mouth. Some sound between two syllables that I could barely even tell was there but everyone else apparently could. Everytime I had to refer to her character she'd be annoyed or be disappointed. One those ultimately unimportant things that none the less was important to her connection and enjoyment of the character and the game. It was a very small thing, but still, 10 weeks of being punished by it.

I’m slowly getting into this hobby and thoroughly enjoying watching play throughs of a bunch of different games. So far Call of Cthulhu, Dragonbane, Mausritter, and Delta Green have been my favorites.

So here is my question:

Because not every game has online content to watch, what’s the best way to expose myself to new games? Is it best to read core rulebooks, player guides, or some scenarios for games (like see how the game will actually play)?

Interested to hear how your journeys in games start. Now I just need to find some friends to play with!

I really like how RISUS gives you a way to make skills, instead of specific skills, and overall game is very uniform. But I want a bit less basic conflict resolution. And the problem is, most systems instead of just giving you more complex conflict resolution and deeper characters try to lock you in "here we have these specific skills, spells and stuff, learn these 50+ pages to git good"

Closest to what i want is Mini 6, but it still has decent amount of stuff baked in, maybe there is something a bit lighter but still with ways for GM to make different tasks have different differently

TLDR: I want system that is basically a freamework that lets players chose their skills instead of looking ton of stuff up