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Long time player and game master here, but Ive recently been on the hunt for a new game system to scratch that itch for narrative play like PbtA and exploration like OSR.

I stumbled across The Land of Eem, but I can barely find any reviews or talk about it. My first impression after reading the SRD is that while this game looks a little strange, the mechanics seem pretty good.

Can anyone share their experience with this game before I pick it up?

Otherwise, are there other suggestions for a narrative first, fantasy game system?

As huge fans of Winx Club , with my friends , we are planning to play a Winx Club themed ttrpg (taking place in Winx universe). I will be the game master for it but we don't have any custom systems for that. Can anybody recommend us a system/ttrpg that is pretty balanced between being crunchy (for combat mostly) and giving players freedom (i want this especially when it comes to spells and magic to solve problems)?

I've been GMing for forever but this is my first time running a game with a VTT.

It seems the battlemaps take some pre-planning and time to set up. This seems fine if one is running a dungeon crawl but how do you handle situations where you just don't know in advance where or if a combat might start? Eg: my players may be assassinating a guy, I don't know if they'll want to jump him at his house, in an alleyway, at his evil cult meeting, etc. They may also not fight him at all. I expect many similar situations in the future since I don't expect this game to have much in the way of traditional dungeon crawls.

Do you prep multiple battlemaps for everything you can anticipate possibly being a combat situation in advance? Do you have a library of generic ass "sure, this could be an urban road" maps that you whip out when necessary? What's the best way to handle this with the least wasted work?

Hello everyone.

Two of our players in a group of four (excluding me) recently broke up. Let's call them Kim and Alex. I'm unsure as to how to move forward with the situation.

If I had the impression that it was a friendly breakup where they remained on good terms, I'd be less concerned. However, Alex doesn't even acknowledge it as a breakup while Kim does, and they have blocked each other on Discord. During a conflict with Alex, Kim insulted the group and nearly left it at one point. There's more I could say, but I'm not sure how much the specifics matter here. The main point is that the entire dynamic is... rather questionable to me.

What's difficult about it is that I shouldn't even know of these things (except for the blocking on Discord), but other players passed them along to me. We haven't played since their breakup, they haven't even communicated that they did break up, but before then they weren't actively hostile towards each other during the actual sessions, only outside of our group. While I didn't sense animosity between them, I have to say that both of them often seemed fairly... restrained and perhaps cautious during play. Of course, I can't say why.

One of the core tenets of TTRPGs, I believe, is that the players need to trust each other. I feel that this trust was already lost some time ago, perhaps as soon as their relationship troubles escaped "containment". Right now I don't trust them to trust each other, or that they'll be on good terms again. Even if they were, how long would that last? From a healthy couple I'd hope that they support and enable each other to play the game well and have fun together, but what I've heard is more toxic than anything else.

I also don't feel like they can really trust me or the others, since while I didn't spread any of that information myself (excluding this post, I guess), Kim doesn't know Alex tells these things to other players, and Alex doesn't know other players share them further. This secret-mongering is tiring, and not the kind of make-believe I want from a TTRPG.

However, how do I even resolve this situation? I'm not particularly keen on airing all of this, or on throwing other players under the bus. Perhaps I'm overreacting? I'm genuinely unsure whether this table is salvageable, or if I should step back from it.

TLDR: Two of my four players broke up messily (blocked each other, one insulted the group in private with their ex), but they haven't told me. I only know through other players passing secrets around. Trust at the table feels broken and I don't know if it's salvageable.

• Would you keep running this table, pause it, or stop?
• If you'd stop. how would you frame that without stirring things up even more?

These three systems are very popular and have great reviews, they all have pros and cons but they all promise to be cleaner, easier and faster to run than 5E or PF while still supporting a wide gamut of fantasy games. Have you tried any of them?

Which of these three systems do you prefer for campaigns that might have different tones: arcs with more survival, others with more epic and heroism, other campaign chapters with more grim-dark horror and mystery, some leaning more towards dungeon crawling while others more to social interaction and intrigue.

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Dragonbane is very flexible and it seems to easily cover and adapt to more OSRish and precarious themes (danger, high stakes combat, dungeon procedures) while also being excellent for heroic fantasy (high damage, and HAs than can give that feel as well as to bump up HP/WP), and being a BRP descendant game it’s also extremely versatile and can cover mysteries and horror exceedingly well. Also it has a great and large community and 3PP of amazing quality.

Vagabond is OSR adjacent as well but more pulpy, and I believe more versatile than OSE or DCC. Easy to grasp. Not so much content for it, and the community is smaller.

Nimble seems to orient more to high fantasy and might be the least versatile but keeps the dopamine-hits of character customisation and heroism that 5E is characterised with.

Title. 8 year old wants to try tabletop RPG as a family, we are looking for a system that we can play together, preferably 3 players and no GM.

8 year old is a good reader with a big imagination, but pretty sensitive so nothing too gruesome. They like traditional fantasy and magical girl genres if there’s anything in either of those.

Hi, I sincerely am looking for something very specific for a very specific mood my group asked me about:

We were talking about how "gods of old" were people with superpower and dominions, and in that talking we laugh about synchretism and how some religions make their gods mingle between them.

So we wanted to do a game about different (fantasy) gods meeting in a court event, like a coronation, marriage or birthday. And basically play out the drama and intrigue, very Good Society coded but more focused in nobility and having things like "winter has arrive as the god of gardens got rejected by their lover and so they are now sad"

So, wanting to see if something like this exist.

I'm looking for what other fantasy ttrpg games out there use PF2e's mindset to the design. Very clear understanding of impacts of various abilities, categorized into something like rarity rankings to bring a GMs attention to high impact abilities, and it's balancing system is fairly reliable to deliver the promised experience.

Only they are simpler than pathfinder. I find that even after all this time we are missing rules and details and correcting fiddly bits which are part of what helps the balancing aspect work. So basically it's 95% of the way there to being my ideal system just a bit too complex.

I'm open to pathfinder 2e hacks as well.

So this may seem like a stupid question but I'm genuinely curious and puzzled. The Barbarians of Lemuria Mythic+ edition book - what's the deal with the cover flaps? What are they supposed to be for? It's bugging me because I've never seen a book with this lol. Thank you in advance.

And while I want the actual true answer, I'll entertain wrong answers for fun 😊