**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.

----------

This submission is generated automatically each Saturday at 00:00 UTC.

This was a Call of Cthulhu campaign, and not a very long one (5 sessions). I cooked up everything about it in my head, and it was my first time running a game in 3 years after my last one fizzled out. The ending was fantastic. The dice told such a story and after it ended we all had a group hug and sat in a circle complimenting each other. That was two days ago. In the two days since, my 5 players have made about a dozen really good fanarts of the characters. It's just so surreal to see this thing that I created inspire my players to make art like that. I'm still riding that high after two days because I just feel so proud of all my players and so happy that we came together for this campaign

Rant over, just wanted to share this awesome experience with people!

Side note, one of them stalks my reddit profile sometimes, so if you see this, hi leia! Your art is really cool

I'm surprised this situation hasn't come up for me before, but in my current game the PCs are meeting multiple important NPCs at the same time (multiple vassals have gathered in a rare event to meet at the kings castle) and it would be a great opportunity to:

1. Exposit a bunch of information about the kingdom; who these NPCs are and what their local holdings are like (it's a new campaign and the players don't know much about the area yet)
2. Introduce the personalities of these NPCs
3. Introduce the goals and concerns of each of these NPCs, and to a limited extent, the secondary characters linked to each of them
4. Demonstrate the tensions between them, and what each thinks of the other, etc

A movie would just play all this out in a single scene but at the table that would result in me performing a conversation between five non-player characters, which is awful.

With all these characters in one area and available - what would be a cleaner way to achieve my goals? My best idea so far is "players meet them one by one at a feast" but I'm not crazy about.

Would love to know how you'd handle it or what GM tools can be deployed here.

Thanks!

And by that I mean games where you can buy 1 product and have everything you need to crack the book or box open and start playing.

For example, Mythic Bastionland is little bit of rules followed by dense pages of just stuff to include in your game. Myths, enemies, allies, names, spark tables, items, seers, other knights, and on and on and on. All you need that's not in the book is a hex map, and there's plenty of options for that.

Another good one: Dragonbane. In the box you get the rules, premade characters, plenty of standees, adventures, a solo adventure and accompanying rules, a map, and I think dice too. All for less than the price of many of the popular core books.

As a buyer I really love games that come essentially feature complete out of the box like these. I know pretty much all of Free League's publications are like this to some extent. What else is there?

What are your favorite, single purchase complete games? And what all comes with them?

I've DM'd a decent number of games, ranging from masks, DnD 5e, LotE, mutants and masterminds and a few others, but I'm looking for something more Sci-fi. I would prefer it to have no magic, or at least a kind of magic that can be explained away like "that's not healing, that's nano machines".

Could anyone recommend a game that has space combat, spaceships, maybe rules for cities as well if I need to build them and traditional RPG aspects? Gunfights and nanotech? Preferably no magic or magic-like equivalence?

I ran my copy of the intro box of pirate borg.

And my god what a great experience it was for the players and the gm.

Tons of maps and handouts. And even a kinetic section where the gm is required to rip a treasure map of Physically in half! (Gasp). Even the excellent quality player creation dry erase pads + rip off character sheet pads!

I'm realizing how much this adds to games but I just don't have the time/will to produce my own and am looking for adventures/modules that I can purchase that provide these. I really like these boxed products. Or bundled adventures/modules.

The other closest thing I own is the mother ship deluxe boxed set. Which is also excellent but while plenty of content is not a robust introductory set as far as content as it includes many adventures vs the one that is in pirate borg. I also appreciated that the starter box included a player facing game book. It was really nice having two copies of the rules on the table (more games need to do this!)

I'm also looking forward to the Warhammer old world intro box. Also I enjoyed the starter boxes of 5e but I am moving away from 5e as a whole and firmly into the osr.

Do you guys have any suggestions for products that fit my needs? I'm looking for adventure/modules with great handouts/aids etc.

I'm looking to share some preferences on your favourite TTRPGS, where the mechanical complexity (or absence of it) perfectly matches the theme/setting they try to portray.

I'll give some example of my current favourites. Feel free to add cathegories based on your experience and preference:

- Horror/Investigation: Mothership.
Simple in rules (like all OSR), but has the BEST gm advice ever.
I still use its suggestions as baseline for all my stories in any rpg i gm.
I exclusively run it using its modules as they are probably the best in the market quality wise

- Heroic Fantasy: Draw Steel
This one makes you feel like a true hero.
The closest thematically to DnD (in the sense that it is high fantasy), it plays very differently though, since instead of an "attrition" games (your resources go down until you are forced to rest), it is a "momentum" game (meaning you become more powerful the more "victories" you accumulate, resetting at rest). This means that the players are incentivized to always push themself to the limit until their HP permits it.
Also attacks don't miss ever, which means that they will be forced to rest eventually, no matter what.

- Pulp: Savage Worlds Adventure Edition
This is my personal favourite to gm, because you can literally improvise any encounter on the spot and it will work, and the meta-currency (the "Benny", a poker chip) is fantastic.
Character progression is horizontal: PCs become better at doing more stuff, but no encounter is ever trivial. It is also class-less: you customize you PC with features ("Edges") that you gain almost every level.
The meta-currency is essential to minimize randomness (the dice mechanics can feel very swingy), and I love that it gives a way for the players to influence the story, especially when they are willing to pay (literally) to do some crazy idea they have. It makes it feel earned.
Excellent for homebrews, excellent to fight lots of little guys, requires some house-rules to do solo boss fights (check out this comment it you're interested in doing that)

- Vibes: Blades in the Dark / Mythic Bastionland
These are two heavy hitters on the atmosphere they create.
Blades make you in a band of industrial punk criminals. Perfect heist game, very improvisational: you pay "stress" to have flashbacks that resolve a problem during the heist instead of having to think out a solution before, so you're always in the action.
Also it's Zero prep-time for the GM. The settings does the heavy-lifting (lots of pre-gen factions and locations that react to the players action).
Mythic is great for its random tables. I recommend rolling randomly for your PCs (they are arthurian knights fighting esoteric horror), since all of the option are extremely flavourful. Less improvisational than Blades, but still highly improvisational.

Newbie friendly: Lady Blackbird / The Witch is Dead
Both excellent one-shots for new players, rules-light and quick to the action.
Lady Blackbird is classic steam-punk adventure sillyness. Character are some flavourful pre-gens and the system allows the player to choose some world-building aspect when the GM asks them ("Lady Blackbird, you know magic: do only nobles like you knows it, or is it more commonplace in the Wild Blue?" stuff like this)
The Witch is Dead (or anything else by Grant Howitt, really) is an excellent on-page rpg. Players are the witch's familiars and have to defeat the witch hunter that killed the witch. I like to GM this straight, serious and dramatic, but it is very open to silliness. Very fun for people who are learning the ropes of rpgs

These are my recomendations, what are yours?

Hello, folks. I'm prepping a game to run one on one with my partner and I was wondering if y'all had any recommendations for good campaigns or adventure paths? I'm planning to run the game in Nimble, and we were hoping for more of a science fantasy flavor. I will likely do a lot of reflavoring and rewriting, but I'm hoping to find something with good bones to build around. Thanks in advance!

I’m always on Backerkit checking out new TTRPGS coming through and I just saw the new game Ink Ribbon from Old Oak Games.

It’s advertised as bringing the survival horror aspect of notable video games to the table top.

I read through their quick start that comes for signing up for a notification, and it’s super interesting! I love Resident Evil and other survival horror games, and I also love d6 based games so this is right up my alley. I’m very unfamiliar with Old Oak Games, though.

Anyone else interested in this?

I have a setting where the players will have to travel a lot and i cannot be bogged down by prepping the town/village/settlement and then thinking what situations the party can throw themselves in. I need to be able to have an idea of what they're supposed to do / what dungeons might be there / what the places might want from the party, especially mid session when i have to improvise.

I started making a list of verbs to roll on like "defend, find, save, threaten, kill, steal, influence", then i will make a table with factions/settlements etc, so my end goal is to have something like this: "Wizard wants help killing/threatening rival", "Smith wants to impress love interest with dragon scales shield"

But that got me thinking, do you guys know of any place i could find such tables without making them myself?

Pretty much what the title says. I really want to start playing some ttrpg’s with my friends but none of them are really familiar. I’d definitely have to DM for them which I don’t mind but I’ve never done before. Does anyone have any suggestions for good one shot games that could get some people interested and also be forgiving to a new dm? Thank yall in advance!!

EDIT: For everyone asking what genre I’m looking for I’d say that my friends aren’t super into fantasy like I am, but I think they’d enjoy games with maybe some Supernatural or sci fi elements. Idk, I’m just trying to broaden their horizons and add some whimsy to our lives lmao

Hello, I have gotten back into a Bionicle Hyperfixation, and I have been looking into ttrpgs that could be best used to emulate that franchise. While I am aware of Red Star Games' Doronai Nui, it seems to basically be a Fantasy Heartbreaker, not really what I want or feel is fitting for a Bionicle TTRPG. As such, I want to hear what suggestions people have.