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I've noticed that while PDFs are generally available, the formatting is generally for large screens and often grind my kindle to a freeze state due to internal links and stuff. While there are a good number that are useable, very few seem designed to work well. I'm curious as to why this is the case.

I did a "Jurassic Park" session for fun recently, but it ended up being pretty dissapointing and boring due to the fact that the players were all "average joe park visitors" pitched against literal killing machines.

It ended up with them hiking through the forest and running away every single time. It basically became "Man vs Wild but one dice roll away from death".

We still had fun because of the PCs being comically evil and using the NPCs as bait/dinofood and laughing at how dire the situation was, but apart from that it was clearly mid.

The whole point of the operations was the dinosaurs, but the only way for them not to immediately die was to have as little dinosaurs as possible

I struggle to find ideas on this one

Edit : thanks for the many suggestions, i'll look into dread/mothership /delta green

But in the meantime i think i'm gonna try, as many suggested, to have them use a pool of almost disposable characters (Darkest Dungeon style). I might even make up some crude "random generation" for those potential PCs

Also i'm probably gonna ditch the "one-shot" time frame

So, I just finished Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky and was thinking about how you could run a game based on that.

Premise is that uplifted animals are the essential service workers (plumbers, electricians, garbage collectors, etc.) in human solarpunk cities. They're controlled by early conditioning and a drug that without it, they revert to non-sapient dumb animals.

They're largely on their own and have created their own societies in the interstitial spaces and have a number of rules, but there's Rule One - don't come to the attention of the humans, don't let them find out.

I know about Mutants in the Now (proud kickstarter backer) but was wondering what other games folks would suggest.

Thanks!

___

Edit: Because two kind redditors pointed out what do I want to do in the setting?

I've got a few ideas based on the book.

• Play a uplifted animal that is a freelancer - no guld or corporation - having to scuffle for resources and the drug that let's them keep thinking. They could be an investigator, or a specialist of some stripe, or just a good old fashioned mercenary.
  • Or less excitingly, run a coffee shop or offer other services the uplifts want.
• Another option would be playing a fixer, someone that negotiates and works between the various factions allowing the player or players to explore the city and meet the factions.
• Reporter. The uplifts want to know what's happening around the city and world, particularly what's happening with the other uplifts. Where it gets dicey is that there are humans that want to break Rule One and learn what's going on with the uplifts.

Rule One - basically it boils down to do the job without the humans noticing you. You can get up to whatever mischief you want off the job, but leave no evidence and make sure the humans don't notice. Which is why the Red and Gray squirrels are actively fighting over territory out of the human eye.

I just recently finished a Mothership oneshot and ever since I've been itching to try to get into more horror TTRPGs. In this spree trying to find a good one, I found Mörk Borg (I've now brought the core rulebook for Mörk Borg) and Obscure. I had a look on the website and dug around a bit, and it seems the barely anyone has ever heard of it. If you want a link to the website you can click it here, but I was just wondering if it's worth getting. I'd be so grateful if anyone who's played it could tell me what it's like.

I've created a workflow on my PDF purchases, which I will describe at the end of this bullet list. But here is what I would like to see RPG publishing companies do to PDFs they sell to customers:

• Convert all images in the PDF to RGB. I have a script that does this, and it seems to really speed up image rending, especially on slower hardware. It also makes the images "pop" a little more when viewed on computer devices, since computers display things in RGB and not CMYK.
• Hyperlink your PDFs. The table of contents, the index in back and any references to other sections of the book. If you reference another page in the book, or another chapter in the book, please make the text a hyperlink to that location in the book.
• Please number the page labels in the PDF properly. When I use the Go To Page option in my PDF reader and tell it to go to page 35, it should not go to page 37. Page Labels will let you label PDF Page 1 as the cover, and any front matter pages such as the TOC and copyright pages with i, ii, ii etc. And you can label Page 1 as Page 1. So when I tell it to go to Page 35. It actually goes to Page 35.
• Please include proper metadata in your PDFs. PDFs support 2 types of metadata. Basic metadata is 4 fields: Title, Author, Subject, Keyword. There is also XMPP metadata that will allow you to enter much more such as publication date, description, publisher name, etc. At a minimum, please at least fill in the 4 basic fields. A lot of ebook apps on tablets read these fields and name file using this when you import it instead of the filename.
• If your pages have a background on them, if possible, please include a PDF with just a white background. This is easier for some people to read and is way more printer friendly, if someone wants to print out a few pages from your book to have at the gaming table.

PDFs are just a subset of PostScript. And PostScript is just code that describes a page. You can manipulate a PDF using scripts. That's pretty obvious, since PDF editors exist.

I've actually created Python scripts to do a lot of this stuff for me. When I get a PDF, I do the following with scripts:

1. Convert all images in the PDF to RGB.
2. If it's a Mongoose or GURPS PDF, I have scripts that will hyperlink all page and chapter references as well as the TOC and index,if it's not already hyperlinked.
3. If it's a Castles and Crusades PDF, I have a script to either remove the background completely or move it onto it's own layer.
4. I have script that applies proper page labels to a PDF, so that Page 1 is actually Page 1.
5. I have a script that will pull metadata from DriveThruRPG and tag the PDF and write a Grimmory sidecar file.
6. The conversion to RGB can sometimes really increase the side of the PDF. If it gets way too big, then I have a script that will do light compression on the PDF and can usually cut the file size down as much as 50% with almost no loss in visual quality when reading on an iPad.

The last thing I do is drop the PDF onto my home Grimmory server (https://grimmory.org/). The server reads the sidecar file and properly imports all metadata, and I can access my PDFs from either in the Grimmory Web UI, or use the OPDS feed built in the app to get the files on my iPad, iPhone or computer.

This is all made possible by Bundle of Holding and their insane deals.

I've been theorycrafting a storyline and concept for a game styled after things like Tintin, Blake and Mortimer, with some smaller inspiration from Tomb Raider, Uncharted, and Doc Savage. Outside of generic rulesets is there anything that's more catered to an adventure style game with a smaller focus on direct combat?

Something I noticed across most campaigns I've run: the NPC the table falls in love with is basically never the one I put work into (although I usually put too much work into all my NPCs but that's a me thing).

I'll spend time on the tragic antihero with the layered backstory and the custom voice, and the players will go "cool" and move on. Then some nameless dwarf I invented on the spot to sell them a rope, who I gave a dumb accent because I panicked, becomes the emotional center of the campaign. They name-drop him for months. They plan sessions around visiting him. They tried to get him elected mayor. He lost his campaign because the dice have a story to tell, too

I've mostly stopped fighting it. Now I hold my "important" NPCs a little loosely and pay attention to whichever accident the table decides to adopt, because that's the one they actually care about, and caring is the whole game. I use the backstories like modules to slot in whenever the team decides on what NPC, usually furry, they adopt.

I don't fully get why it happens. Best guess is the prepped ones feel like they belong to me and the accidents feel like the players discovered them, so they get ownership. But I'm curious if it's universal. Who's the throwaway NPC that hijacked your campaign, and did you see it coming?

My mystery is a 2-parter. One is finding the missing woman (no sign that she's dead, just missing). When they do find her, she's dead, has been dead for months. So now, solve her murder.

Would it work if I made this one mystery where the question changes? Should her body be a clue?

Or do I need to make it 2 distinct mysteries with their own clues, solutions, and theorize. There is some concern that the players could eliminate the second mystery (her murder) with whatever their solution to the first one is.

Or do I need to drop the first mystery altogether and start with the found body?

I feel that as long as M1 is framed as "where", that it doesn't matter what they theorize, I can work with it. And if they add stuff that conflicts, she's alive working at Blockbuster, I can kind of ignore that because the question was "where". But, there is potential concerns about them theorizing she's gone in a way I can't recover from. Though, I don't know any. If they say she was lost at sea, I can have the body wash up. Still, there's a potential and maybe I should k.i.s.s.

In this game, you and your friends play a group of aliens who have landed on Earth and have to travel in order to kill "the leader" (usually a single person) in order to rule the world.

In doing so, you will have to don human disguises and travel to various locations in order to see the leader without getting exposed or killed.

There will be a mix of real and fake locations, and the aliens will face threats such as competing aliens, conspiracy theorists and more!

Anyone interested in this idea?

So I've been finding posts about what's the Best campaign/adventure, and it's always the same suspects; The Great pendragon campaign, Impossible landscapes, Curse of Strahd, Masks of Nyarlthotep, pound of flesh etc etc.

I have no doubt these are great but these guys take 20+ sessions, I'm looking for the best ones that are less than 10 sessions long or so, hell even 5 sessions long.

Any system at all, what are the shorter campaigns and adventures that really stuck with you?

I love Nimble. I love how quick it's combat is while having enough meat on its bones for it to still be fun and tactical.

I'm looking to expand my games with a SciFi approach since I never touch this genre. Is there a SciFi rpg that plays like Nimble?