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Convincing Her:

When we first started dating I walked her through making a D&D character, but I was already disenchanted with D&D around that time so I never got a game off the ground. At the time she was willing to try, but as our relationship continued we defined some clear "this is your hobby", "this is my hobby", and "this is OUR hobby" spaces.

It wasn't until we were talking about Fallout recently that I convinced her to give Fallout 2d20 a shot. We bonded early on in our relationship playing Fallout 4 together, her playing it on her own as I watched. We tried Fallout 76 this year, but it wasn't for us.

I asked her if she'd be fine with trying a TTRPG set in the Fallout universe and she agreed. Mainly because she knew about the setting and wouldn't be as caught off guard with the setting material.

The Leadup:

I set it in the Fallout 4 universe as my wife was most familiar with that setting. I kept flip flopping through potential plot hooks based on the system:

• Establishing a settlement.
• Clearing out a Super Duper Mart of enemies.
• Dungeon delving into a vault

But all these options felt very "combat" focused with little in the way of interesting social aspects. I settled on:

• Negotiating trade with another settlement who then ask for the group to take out a Raider gang.

This was after a lot of talking with people on Discords and Subreddits. My wife also said she didn't want to play a 100% serious game which was good because my games typically lean into humorous moments to contrast with the serious moments.

The Game:

We took sometime to get started but we got there in the end. My wife played a Ghoul Trader (Elle), my sister played a Vault Dweller (Leslie), and my friend played a Nightkin Supermutant (Mary) using standard Supermutant rules since I didn't have the supplement with it. And their Pack Brahmin Moolan.

They started off in a Post-Fallout 4 Sanctuary Hills where the Vault Tec Rep was leading the settlement after the Sole Survivor left. They were charged with establishing a trade route with the Starlight Drive In)'s new leader, a free Synth named Top Dog.

To finalize the deal they needed to take out a raider gang called the Black Claws in Bedford Train Station. They scouted it out and figured out that their leader was also a synth. And they assumed the two leaders were sisters or synthsters.

Leslie volunteered to try to establish a dialogue with the raider leader to see if the situation could be resolved diplomatically. But had her face scratched by the leader who was in the middle of a cat nap. It was at this point the Elle theorized that the Synth had a cat cyber brain installed. They bloodily killed a few raiders causing them to flee and the vault dweller knocked out the cat synth with a laser pistol shot.

It was at this point the Elle theorized the synth leader of Starlight Drive In had a cyber dog brain. Which was confirmed when the leader executed the cat synth by tearing out her neck with her teeth.

Other Stuff that Happened:

• They mentioned scavenging on the way to the Starlight Drive In, so I had them come across a partially scavenged house with a few traps inside. Mary tried to sneak in, but ended up getting a complication which I ruled had her stepping in a bear trap and taking 1 damage. It wasn't plot relevant, but it was a way to get them used to the die rolling in a less high stress environment like a combat.
• Moolan was a party favorite and my wife enjoyed that Moolan was a sweetheart because I had the Brahmin boop them with her snoot when she was hungry and stuff. Even though she didn't do much except acting as the party inventory.
• "Behind the scenes" we established my sister's character as Vault Dweller Leslie because she knew nothing of the Fallout universe which meant I got to give her a fish out of water character with no strings attached.
  • The background for her was she was in Cryo sleep during a radiation leak that led to her entire vault being killed. And the vault experiment was designed to create the ultimate killing machine, which when only 1 vault dweller was left she was deemed the most deadly canidate to assassinate the Chinese leadership post-Great War, which given the state of the world wasn't going to happen.
  • I based her backstory on Lister from Red Dwarf.
• My friend was really into playing her Nightkin as a mutated woman, Mary. I had given her character a necklace of junk per the random story item table and wrote down "molerat teeth necklace". And she called it her supermutant's closest way to make a pearl necklace in the Post-Apocalypse.
• Through out the entire session, the players were trying to figure out what the twist was going to be. The main thought was that the settlers were going to be the actual raiders. Top Dog's reaction to them was "New people? I love new people!" and that immediately made them convinced she was a good person. 😅
• The moral choice of whether to let the cat synth stay alive wasn't as much of a moral choice because they recognized that cats are mean. But also they came up with a secondary way to complete the game by trading Brahmin milk to the cat to get her to stop attacking the settler's supply lines.

How I modified the system

The biggest thing was that I reduced the enemy health points to like 1 or 2. I did have an issue with timing in the end which left me with 45 mins to run the boss fight which wasn't ideal.

End Result

All and all a fun game, my wife enjoyed it (SUCCESS!) but wasn't sold on TTRPGs becoming a frequent thing for her. Her positives was the group of players she was with. And that it was fun to have my sister and our friend as it was a really fun group of people to hangout with.

Her main issue was how long it took me to look up rules and calculating dice rolls. This was the first time I ran Fallout 2d20 so I was flipping through my notes and rules on a few things. Additionally the 2d20 dice bot hadn't sync'd with my server when I added it, which meant we had to rely on rolling using google's die roller or a website die roller that didn't store die results (i.e. they'd roll, but then the numbers would disappear).

She's up for playing in one-shots in the future, but not anything long term. Which I call a win! My other players also had fun which I'd call a win as well!

Do you know any tabletop RPG systems with a setting (or a separate setting) that has:

1. A tech level analogous to modern-ish times or maybe even higher.
2. Magic that isn't hidden and is intertwined with the society. It doesn't matter what form or name this magic takes: be it just magic, eldritch horror pets or something else.
3. Magic (or horrors) is either built into technology and/or societal structures use it in everyday life.

?

It's totally fine that parts of "magical" are hidden. But an average Joe should have some, even tangential, access.

What I already know that fits (mostly):

• Shadowrun checks all the boxes. But I'm gluttonous for more :).
• Blades in the Dark. Outside the tech level, it's a good example. This is the earliest technology level I'm fine with for this itch.

What almost fits:

• Mage: the Ascension and Mage: the Awakening. Very cool worlds, but magic hides itself basically.
• Warhammer 40k. Some factions fit while others are a total miss.
• Eberron. If I understand correctly, large parts of the setting are still stuck in medieval or renaissance times, so it doesn't really fit. General vibes are exactly what I'm looking for, though.

What doesn't fit:

• Most Superheroes. 95% of times supers and society at large are "separated". Outside of teen drama and a random company here and there, there's usually zero interplay. Superhero Registration Act is an exception in this genre.
• Starfinder. As with most D&D-adjacent settings, magic and technology feel very separated.

Inspirations outside of TTRPG space:

• Library of Ruina. Main inspiration.
• Deadlock.
• Lord of the Mysteries.
• To be Hero X.
• Fullmetal Alchemist.

Thank you to everyone who reads this post or responds to it!

Hello!

So I just ran my second game ever the other day, I used the wonderful Vagabond. I was originally the best way to practice GM'ing, was to do improv sessions. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and I also had a blast!

I would like to start actually "planning" adventures, and using some of the wonderful adventures the community has made.

Buuuut I have never prepped before or anything. I was wondering.....are there good videos or books I could get that could help me create and plan sessions? To be a better GM?

What are the suggestions you all have, because I definitely see the appeal of running games now! 🙏

As time goes by, I find that managing my PDF collection is getting cumbersome. I have over 1K files in my library (some of them duplicates, of course) and I only download the "Single File" option.

My question is, how do you keep track of what you've purchased?

How do you store your PDFs on your local hard drive, NAS, flash drive?

Especially given the difficulties with the new web store, it's hard and/or time consuming to find out what you have purchased.

https://mouseborn.com/

I didn't succeed at finding any real information about this upcoming rpg and wanted to know if anyone knew anything and if it was a scam or legit?

It was of course a Facebook ad so I'm wary. But it looks cute and has nice art.

So after 5 years of playing TTRPGs and 4 years of DMing, I have finally completed a campaign. The game system I ran was Mythic Bastionland, and our campaign lasted 6 sessions. Ive run many, other systems before but they were mostly regulated to one shots, or fell apart due to various reasons. When I went into this I really didn't have many expectations except that it would last 4-6 sessions. The people I was playing with I met over a local hobby store discord and it was my first time meeting them but they were both so cool! Anyways not gonna get into every little detail of the campaign, but I do think I learned a lot from this experience.

My players had a lot of fun, and we only had one death and that was at the very end via the final boss. My players has chosen classes that were both really good at combat and that did make making difficult encounters for them hard. I had to bend the rules a lot for the last fight. But roleplaying is where they had a lot of fun. In our first session there wasn't even a combat. I have found that Im actually pretty good at improv.

Overall it was a very pleasant experience and there were multiple times where me and my players would just break down laughing. I think i've found my way of DMing, and while I don't follow the rules to a tee, I think that's ok because it's for the enjoyment of everyone

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Im putting together a Zombie campaign in GURPS and I was curious about how I should treat side quests. I don't really have too many ideas to be honest, I was thinking about breaking the campaign up into smaller sections that would allow the world to advance and change somewhat.

The first portion is going to take place 20 months after the outbreak rocked the globe, and 8 months after the military withdrew from the land west of the Mississippi River. Im thinking that a major focus will be on bringing a few settlements together to watch each other's back. Im trying to come up with the quests for the small settlements though.

I've never really been a fan of running games online, I've done it a couple of times, Call of Cthulu and D&D, but I generally don't enjoy it.

That being in some of the friend group it is increasingly a reality that playing in person is perhaps not viable for the forseeable future and so there's been a reluctant push to perhaps do something online in the meantime.

My instinct for online play would be something like Call of Cthulhu, Mothership or maybe Delta Green, there's a world of potential out there.

But what I'm thinking is that I don't want to run scenarios online that I would run in person, if that makes sense. I want to find things that would actually benefit from being run online and potential ways to run them that actually take advantage of the online medium rather than being constrained by it. So I'm curious to hear ideas and experiences from people on the subject, do you know any particular scenarios or adventures that are uniquely designed for an online medium? Any particular games that take advantage of that or interesting venues towards that beyond just the usual VTT's?

I'm preparing a game in which the first stretch takes place on a raft drifting down a river, in what is effectively a long escort quest. There's more to that, but I'm keeping it concise.

What sorts of troubles/obstacles do you think could be interesting to run into now and again? There's no urgency to this river ride, so I think things with "wait it out" as a possible solution are out of the questions. I'm thinking in the vein of trade conflicts and other local or political matters. They don't have to be diplomatic challenges, though. I welcome potential for physical conflicts as well. The party will have a bit of a game loop that takes them off the raft somewhat frequently, but I want to break that up with something interesting and unexpected once in a while.

*I intend to handle the specifics, etc., but it's worth noting that I prefer that encounters like these show new things and perspectives about the world to the players. This river ride is a consequence of changing politics in the region, for example.