**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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Polaris is interesting. At the Utmost North a kingdom of ice and beauty lies in shambles. For what was eternally pure, magnificent and good has been gnawed and melted by the Mistake. What was the Mistake, whether the obsession with the sun that started rising in the East and the sacrilegious sacrifices that were made for it or a simple adultery is now a myth, but now beasts and demons roam the land, possess the weak of heart and the light of the incandescent globe in the sky drives people to madness. In the spring, they sit mesmerized by it, looking from a special window, unmoving, for example. The affairs of the kingdom have grown to a stall. The Knights of the Order of Stars are sworn to fight the Mistake. But this is a tragedy and each knight will succumb to either the wounds of combat or to the treachery of the mind as they join the enemy.

Mechanically , there are three major distinctions.

Polaris is a GMless 4 player game where people take up roles respective of where they are seated at the table in relation to the others. The Mistaken, the antagonist to the Heart, the protagonist, sits at the opposite end. On their sides sit the New Moon and Full Moon, again, opposites, pertaining to the feminine and masculine elements, to the close relationships and institutional elements the knights upholds to. Thus the people who are your Moons, are the Heart and Mistaken to each other. People always sit at the table in the same place as the game starts and you can see how this positions wane from one to the next by table order. The Moons play minor NPCs and act as jury.

Next, the game is a ritual that doubles as a negotiation. It starts and ends with formalized key phrases and ends with them. "Long ago people were dying at the end of the world" introduces the somber tone each time. "But hope was not lost for Character_name still heard the song of the stars." introduces a character for the first time in a session. "And so it was", finally starts the scene. The session end with another key phrase.

But ritual phrases are everywhere, most of all the negotiations. In Polaris, you learn to ask too much and negotiate down. Unlike other games where the defeat of a demon is an exercise of wits, here you lay a claim about your action and your opposition has the role of negotiating the terms down to something softer or where both partners of the dance or fight get hurt.

I could follow the trail of my missing sister but only if a demon in the shape of a monstrous dog was hunting me and attacked me. I allowed it but only if there was a thorn in his paw that caused his to lash out. The negotiation continued, my character got hurt, but in response, I was able to remove the thorn which revealed that it was in fact a possessed direwolf, which was added as an asset to my Blessings as a companion. What in another game would have been cliche, here was intense, because of the collaboratively adversarial nature of the game.

Later, the Heart to which I was the Mistaken was looking for another missing person (look, it's complicated) and I, as the Princess of Spring, a demon who lays a flower trail where she walked, lead him both true and false to the nest of a demon bird with an egg in it. In our negotiation, I was clumsy with the rules, that's fair, but we dealt with three things.

First, the knight would be knocked out but manage to make the bird demon flee and injure the Princess by cutting her sinister hand only for her to escape. Next, the egg would be about to hatch a half-demon half-human fiend who is actually the person he is looking for, but transformed. More negotiations later and it was revealed that what could turn her back was her only one true love and to this the Heart bargained that the one true love was him.

There were times were other phrases were used. I told my Mistaken that he asked too much when for breaking the lyre of a musician that praised the sun he said that in the altercation I would get bashed and a string would cut across my throat. I worried, that would not allowed for me to sing any longer, so I negotiated that my sword arm got hurt instead. Making such bold statements is not a mistake. This is how the rules work. If you don't dare to ask what could be too much, it would lead to a boring game. That is why "It shall not come to pass" and "It was not meant to be" can be used. Although, fair enough, our group liked getting loads of consequences.

Once the negotiation is over, you finish with "And this is how it happened."

But fair enough the gameplay is as of now at session two still somewhat clumsy. We scrambled through our cheat sheet to look for our counter phrases and our group kept forgetting the phrase we were supposed to start the scene with somehow (Idk why this was a thing. I've played Ten Candles with a group that nailed the ritualistic elements perfectly). I also had the problem of asking a set of actions that needed to be negotiated in succession instead of asking for one action, waiting for resolution and then continuing to the next.

We were somewhat confused about how to do scenes with two knights in them and we have avoided them until we will get more familiar. We were also checking the rules a lot to see if the player needed to roll for experience after a scene (the only instance where dice were used). The game uses three stats of which, for new knights Zeal, which goes down as their prowess in the rest increases is most interesting for narrative purposes.

Another problem I had, I didn't know when I should interject as the Moon and if we could create appropriate minor NPCs if they were needed and none of the ones we already had on sheets were useful. At one point they made so much sense, that another player nudged me to create a group of squires, because they were mentioned in the scene, but no one was playing them.

All in all, I am still very excited to play some more as we grow into the game and I feel that if I ever get a second campaign going this would be going so much better, because in that case, there would be a veteran player. Right now we are all newbs and most of us have an OSR/NSR background.

I am surprised that Polaris never created any offshoots and lies as an experiment that is very different from the GMless games that we are familiar now such as Microscope, The Quiet Year or Belonging outside Belonging.

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!

Can't find the perfect mix of setting and system? Is Pathfinder hampering your ability to play a sentient table? Perhaps a universal system is the right cure for your ails! Whether simulationist or narrativ , come tell us how your game (or just any game you really like) tackles being Universal!

Thank you u/Kiliantill, for the suggestion!

As per mod approval, comments here do not count against the Self-Promotion rule (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 "Cyberpunk" and we got some pretty interesting discussions going!

If you want to suggest a topic for future weeks, be sure to include "suggestion" in your comment so I can easily find it!

This week's RPG is Barbarians of Lemuria!

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 Triangle Agency. Join us again next week for Ars Magicka!

I'm planning a scifi heist one-shot next weekend and I'm stuck on picking a system. I was leaning towards Scum and Villainy, but I'm having a dilemma. My players don't have a lot of experience with ttrpgs outside of power fantasy. Reading through it, so far I like a lot of the mechanics of Scum and Villainy but I worry my players will dislike rolling 4-5 for a partial success and 6 for a full success. I've heard that BitD systems are more punishing than dnd/pathfinder and I'm concerned that my players won't enjoy that. I was toying around with the idea of adjusting the success rates: 1-2 fails, 3-4 gives a partial success, and 5-6 gives a full success. But God I'm so undecided. Games need failure. When done right it drives the story forward, creates interesting story beats, and makes successes all the more satisfying.

So I'm looking for advice here, especially from people with experience in a BitD system. How often did you/your players succeed, get partial successes, and flat out fail? Would it have lessened the fun or taken from the experience if you succeeded more often and had less complications? Should I just choose a different system altogether, something less punishing? If so - any rules light scifi systems you'd recommend?

What do you guys play when you're in the mood for a pirate campaign? Something like One Piece, where you sail around, explore different islands and have all kinds of adventures along the way.

Do you think there's a gap for this kind of game, or is there already something that does it really well? Could be a standalone system or some third-party content.

I am so excited, there have been some previews in the discord, the conspiracies are super cool and some are VERY villainous (others aren't) and I've been super excited for the higher tier of power, and more hints at the greater cosmological background of the game world.

This book explores what comes next for those lucky Accursed who managed to weather their initial storm of Damnation, and where they go from here. Curseborne lifted the lid on those most insidious of curses, the ones which bled through the fabric of life before clotting and coagulating to form the Families; this book cuts deeper still, exploring the next stages of their curse and how their rising Entanglement warps and distorts everything around them, increasing the potency of their spells and leading them deeper into damnation. How do these potent creatures choose to spend their time; do they remain invested in their own schemes, or align themselves to something bigger than themselves?

The subject is pretty much the entire question: How long should a typical TTRPG session be?

I am speaking in terms of "real time" spent playing the game rather than "in-game" time elapsed with whatever the characters are doing. And by "session" I mean the day that all the players agree to attend the game, play it, and then eventually pack up and go home after a certain amount of time. I know everybody has their own preferences of what is ideal, but I'm interested in getting everybody's perspective. I'm about to try to start up regular TTRPG sessions at my local gaming store and I'm trying to get an idea how long I should run each session for.

Hey folks,

I'm going to be running a Call of Cthulhu game soon, loosely based around the pre-written adventure The Auction. In this case, we're centering the adventure around the 1891 estate sale of a notable mystic and occultist, and what happens when one of their artifacts actually turns out to be the real deal.

One of my players went with the Big Game Hunter background (from Cthulhu by Gaslight), and that got me thinking. I was already going to have an interdimensional being based on a Hound of Tindalos start hunting the person who ends up the real artifact, skulking and stalking through the hotel they're staying in... but how cool would it be to give this player an opportunity to hunt the extradimensional hound?

I'm not really sure how to set this up, though, so I'd love if anyone could make some suggestions! I know that Tracking rolls will be involved, of course, but I'm not really sure how I'm going to hint to the players that there's even anything there to track; I don't want them to just see the creature, because then tracking it is just as easy as following it.

So how would you set this up? It's an upscale hotel in 1890s London, you've got an aristocrat holding an artifact, an extradimensional creature hunting them, and a big game hunter hunting the hound. How would you hint to the player that there's something to hunt without just showing it to them?

Hi, welcome to Playtonics!

Every episode of Playtonics, Rocky and Jords (me!) take a genre, movie, or show apart at the seams, figure out what actually makes it feel like that thing, and rebuild those pieces into something you can structure, prep, and run at the table. Finally we discuss which systems we'd run it in. This time, the tempest tosses us onto the shores of Greek myth with our Odyssey episode. It's still topical, right?

We start with what "hero" meant before anyone got around to inventing self-sacrifice. We get into gods who are present, capricious and kind of dicks (and what reframing praise to appeasement does to religious characters); what success looks like in a world run by a squabbling divine family; and how to bring fate and prophecy to the table without stripping players of their agency. As always, the focus is on how to build the adventure structure first so that it becomes easy to populate with content that makes your players feel like Greek heroes.

The systems we'd choose to run this game? First place goes to Agon 2e, but there are quite a few honourable mentions:

• Fate Accelerated for its broad approaches
• Risus, where your epithets become clichés with their own dice pools
• Legend in the Mist, where a character is a bundle of tropes

Got takes you want to share with us directly? Our Discord follows the Law of Zeus - come wash ashore and be treated kindly. And as always, we'd also love to hear what you want us to cover next!

It's October which means that the Month of Darkness sales are back!

That means we're talking about 40% off everything WOD and COD on:

Drivethrurpg: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/browse?promo=1000223&src=mod26rpg

Storytellers Vault: https://www.storytellersvault.com/en/browse?promo=1000224&mod26stv=

Demiplane: https://app.demiplane.com/nexus/vampire/sources

Roll 20 (though I personally find their store a challenge to navigate): https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/search

I thought you might all want to know so you can take advantage of the deals, no matter what platform or edition of these games you prefer, or if this might let you try them out for the first time.

I have 0 products on any of these platforms, and will not make any money from this post or any purchases that you choose to make. Therefore I don't think this post should fall under rule 7.