**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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I see Savage Worlds recommended here a lot when it comes to pulpy action games, whether fantasy, sci-fi, Wild West, whatever. I’m currently playing an Eberron SWADE game and I’m loving it. I appreciate the customizability of the system, and the players do badass stuff without feeling overpowered.

I feel like SWADE could even do Lovecraftian style mysteries and slow-burn horror with the right alternative rules. I guess it doesn’t do gritty survival, but I think it could with the right setting rules.

My question is what can’t Savage Worlds do well? Where does it fall short? And how much customizability and settings rules are too much before you should just switch systems?

My new TTRPG JourneyMon: Monster Trainer Roleplaying is out now on itch.io:

https://ilgingell.itch.io/journeymon

r/rpg in particular has been a wonderful community to talk with and learn from, so after years of seeing other indie designers talk about their project here it's kinda wild to be on the other side of things this time!

To introduce the game to folks that didn't back the Kickstarter...

What is JourneyMon?

JourneyMon is about going on a journey with your friends, recruting monsters, and engaging in exciting monster battles. It's a genre that many will be familiar with in video games, most notably huge franchises like Pokemon and Digimon, plus some recent indie hits like Cassette Beasts and Monster Sanctuary. This isn't the first TTRPG to tackle the genre by far, but I think it has a few unique things going for it...

• Episodic Structure: JourneyMon is intended to emulate saturday morning cartoons about monster training, rather than strictly aiming for the video games themselves. Sessions of the game are structured with procedural Prologue, "main show" and Epilogue that work with one-shot and campaign play.
• Zero Prep Worldbuilding: The Prologue of every JourneyMon episode leads the players and GM through a collaborative world building exercise, during which you'll generate a region for your episode to take place, a key NPC, and a "monster of the week". The GM has a few extra tools to generate plots if they need it, too.
• Battle System: JourneyMon has a zone-based tactical system that's designed to work more or less seamlessly with the narrative framework of other scenes. All you have to do is sketch out a quick layout of your scene with the major narrative elements, and populate each of thoses elements ("fields") with an effect. It can be as simple as certain monster types gaining buffs, or more complex things with conditions and triggers. Overall, though, the system is quick and punchy, and doesn't require any sort of grid or minis.

You can try the free Quick Start Guide to see for yourself, if you don't want to commit to the full handbook.

Or even just check out the free materials to see the full trainer classes.

I hope you enjoy the game, and if you have any questions about the game or the design philosophy, I'd love to hear them!

I was hyped to see Girl Frame, an rpg of trauma and queerness about being forced to pilot half-living mech suits in order to fight eldritch abominations, which I've been eyeing for a while, get recognition. This hits some really hard topics.

As a lover of weird setting and GMless card games, I was also very interested in A Land Once Magic, a setting that describes itself as post-fantasy, a world of molten metal where society exists only on magical powered airships fueled by elemental blood, to mostly quote the devs, because I couldn't have put it better.

Sickest Witch is something I did not know of until yesterday, when some of my friends were going through the nominee list and suddenly got smitten. It's a dark low fantasy game about, obviously, witches that grow stronger by hacking enemy body parts. It's gruesome and claims that people with old school DnD sensibilities will find themselves at home playing it, even though it makes no attempts to appeal to nostalgia. This kind of brutality reminds me of Mork Borg.

Mappa Mundi is a game that I was supposed to try twice, but the GM had to cancel last minute. It's an rpg where you play a Chronicler exploring and documenting the natural world after a calamity that happened a 100 years ago. There is no combat in this game. It uses cards, which a big fan of The Quiet Year, Dialect and For the Queen, I adore.

I am happy to see Midnight Muscadines get some love because while many might find the system somewhat clunky (using both dice and cards), the worldbuilding is top notch. It features a world where people once foolishly broke the sun and the land is kept alive by five of its shards, being otherwise left in eternal twilight. Magic is found in jams and the whole vibe is as darkly cozy as bundling up in a stormy night.

Deadline: A Clockwork Press is also pretty neat for a GMless game, mixing map drawing with worldbuilding in the vein of similar titles. Its pitch is that the story is woven through newspaper headlines and that as press you can both tell the truth or be unreliable narrators. Our group was yellow press.

Painted Wastelands got a Player's Handbook, it seems. This is psychedelic metal science fantasy/post-apocalyptic, just as Ultraviolet Grasslands, Grok and Vaults of Vaarn, with a good dose of inspo from the likes of Moebius. It is weird, surreal, dreamlike, at times horrifying and I really need to get this to a table. I haven't checked but I willing to bet it is NSR, as the previous setting book was for OSE and interestingly enough in comparison with similar titles it is a hexcrawl rather than a point crawl.

Rapscallion, which is kind of a mess of a book got somehow nominated for Best Writing. It's a PBtA Pirate rpg in the tone of Pirates of the Caribbean. I've written a review on it some time ago. Plays well at the table if only the GM can parse the rulebook.

From a cursory glance, there's also an rpg about performing a ballet routine in front of a eldritch abomination, a cooking show and goblin magical girls, which i would think would at least interest someone.

(Of course, there also bigger titles everyone knows about like Daggerheart and Legend of the Mist).

https://forums.giantitp.com/forumdisplay.php?59-D-amp-D-3e-3-5e-d20

I was a little surprised, but I guess I shouldn’t be. I have fond memories of 3.5. It was the first D&D logo I saw. Waxing a bit nostalgic…

Any other people with fond memories or current players here?

hey! I’ve been getting really into pulp fantasy lately and I was wondering what rpgs really capture that vibe? I know these books have been incredibly influential to the medium and of course early dungeons and dragons was created directly to emulate this vibe. i also know a lot of systems are able to emulate this yada yada. i was just wondering what systems really capture that vibe.

I feel like my journey started with d20 based games like Spycraft, Pathfinder, and DnD (3.5 and 4). But over the years I got really tired of the system and in particular for DnD and Pathfinder I didn't like the fantasy settings. Except for Dark Sun because it felt so different.

From there my coworkers recommended Demon: the Descent. And then I fell in love with it so much that I delves into the entire Chronicles of Darkness stuff and games by the same devs.

What about all of you?

So we all know about pirate-borg for the actual setting of pirates of the carribean, but if you where looking to run a game that has the absoluetely insane action set pieces (the sword fight in a wheel over the necklace of course comes to mind). What game would you pull out?

For me the answer is Genesys, thanks to the room the narrative dice and destiny points give for players and gms to escalate situations, but what would you use? obviously any setting game could work!

edit: just to clarify since most of the answers so far are tied to pirates, which is great, but also I mean any setting! Like could be sci-fi, fantasy, steampunk, etc. just other games that facilitate the same kinda tone and major set pieces as pirates of the carribean!

Looking for...

-Good for mostly episodic adventures (don't have to do a multisession dungeon crawl to challenge players)

-Player characters have unique superpowers but aren't so powerful that regular goons aren't a threat

-Fun, hopefully quick to execute combat

-Enough things going on with the rules for out-of-combat stuff that the gameplay isn't just "roll to see if you succeed"

I was thinking of using the Cypher system with their superhero supplement. I'm also open to system that aren't specifically designed with superheroes in mind

yo yo, I'm getting nostalgic for the Dragonlance novels of my youth, and I've started rereading some. They're fun!

...but we all know Dragonlance as "that" setting, one developed basically to sell novels. One doesn't hear about actual play in the setting as often as other official D&D settings.

So, I'm interested in hearing about what people have done with it. We don't need campaign logs here, and GMs and players alike are welcome to contribute. What's a cool thing you did in a campaign? A snippet you remember? A location or encounter you prepped? I'm interested in what system you used, too, just to see what people have done.

Thanks, folks! And don't forget--the black moon is out there.