**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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As the title says.

This, this and another post about a GM creating some handmade letter handouts for his players which I can no longer find recently all followed the same pattern. The posts were made by accounts created days ago, usually with multiple posts in very unconnected but popular subreddits. Usually there were some random comments made on other posts, done in french for some reason.

The posts all had a very similar pattern of complaining about some personal issue that demanded either sympathy or advice from their readers, always written in the most self-hating tone possible. If they described players acting badly, they always ruled out the immediate option of talking it over like adults.

None of these accounts seem to have any interest in responding to comments on their post, despite writing posts that are quite long about deeply personal issues. By the way, they seem to have a lot of deeply personal issues, judging by their other posts on other subreddits.

I might be wrong about some of these, but I would advice people to be skeptical about the stories that get posted here, and not let it distort their view of how other people actually play or interact. Bots like these can make dysfunctional groups seem way more common than they actually are.

Is the game good and what kind of games is it mostly for?

Also, if I buy the physical edition do I get the PDF too or is that separate?

Shadowlands Games have been on the recieving end of frustrated backers accusations of dishonest and even fraudulent communication for quite a while.

Comment sections have been filled with angry backers suggesting that claims about a backlog at their printer is at best dubious.

Especially their campaings of Scions of the Dark Goddess for Call of Cthulhu and the Terraforming Mars ttrpg are suffering from delays.

Up to a point Shadowlands Games has so far cancelled and refunded the most vocal critics, effectively silencing them as they are then unable to participate in the campaign comment section. With the company's suspected financial trouble, this practice appears to have been stopped.

The bio page of Shadowlands Games used to show all their different campaigns, but recently they edited it to remove Scions and TM from it.

The campaign pages still exists, but now you have to search actively for them by name, rather than having acces to them in the company's biography.

Greetings, everyone. Long time lurker... not sure how this is going to come out. Probably a little rant-like, as I find the situation rather frustrating.

I'm a forever GM. I've been GMing for over 25 years at this point. I'd like to think I'm pretty good. I've written in sourcebooks and material for living campaigns...

So, why the hell can I not run a home campaign?

I have had the same group of players for a very long time now, and I think what I want from a game vs. what they want has diverged beyond the point of no return.

I am a very story-driven GM. I love the rule of cool and a good character back story with some juicy threads I can pull on. I'm very clear about this at every session zero. I like characters to have some interconnections between one or more characters, and I always lay out the core concept of the campaign.

And starting on session one, my players discard the core premise of the campaign and actively (by their own admission) work to stymie the plot. They find it amusing. I find it infuriating.

For example, my main game is Shadowrun (not debating editions here). I wanted the characters to be corporate researchers who would eventually be cut off (read: hung out to dry) by the parent company and forced into the shadows. These are Corp citizens who, with the exception of the security guard characters, have no combat training.

Session one, they're murdering people in cold blood, like hardened criminals.

All of my campaigns go this way. I get frustrated, try to get it back on the rails and eventually call the whole thing off. I often get a smattering of apologies, but when I try again, the same thing happens again. I want a story featuring flawed characters. They want a murder simulator.

I've never run D&D, so I've always tried to run a covert Ops style of play... I love running one-offs at conventions, but even organized play in my area goes the same way. The players I enjoy gaming with are driven away by the murder hobos and min-maxxers.

My friends are evidently not my style of player. They have seemingly no interest in my style of game, with a few exceptions (who often get shouted down for trying to stop the chaos). Because I don't run D&D (my games are Shadowrun and 7th Sea), the interested player base here is very few. I've played online, but with one exception (an online campaign that ran well for a year before life made scheduling impossible), scheduling is an even greater nightmare there than in person.

I haven't run a game in over a year that wasn't just an open table at a game store or convention... and even those are getting mired in the same issues. The thing that bothers me is that I've gone from gaming almost every week, to almost never, and I'm not sure I miss it.

Is this just me having bad luck? Is what I want from a game that far-fetched? Are there other GMs out there that reached a point where they look at this hobby they love and just throw up their hands and say "this shit ain't worth it?"

Sorry for the long rambling post. If it's any consolation, I feel better venting about it. :p

Greetings from Brazil, fellow RPG enthusiasts! While exploring the GUMSHOE system—starting with Trail of Cthulhu—I stumbled upon The Esoterrorists, a very intriguing horror and investigation RPG. When I tried to find some content about it on YouTube—like recordings of actual play sessions—all I could find were reviews of the system itself, the rulebook, and so on. Even on Reddit, I’ve seen very few people talking about this TTRPG. Have you played it? What was your experience like? In your opinion, why doesn't anyone talk about it much?

I'm trying to make a list of games that could fit that Gothic horror and violence. I'm thinking

Rippers

Curse of strahd

Maybe Dark Ages vampire

Maybe vaesen if you squint hard enough

Any other I'm missing?

I've got a group of interested players and am intending to GM a first TTRPG, I have not significantly played RPGs before and nor have they, but I'm looking for some game systems beyond my extremely limited view.

My players have expressed interest in a great number of settings, so any recommendations for systems that could work well would be appreciated.

Sci-Fi Fantasy.

Powder and Sail Fantasy (1400s-1600s era).

and most notably and important, late 1800s to early 1900s fantasy, this I've been struggling to find a setting for and seems to be the most popular among the players and myself.

Thank you for any help.

https://stonetop.cc/

Bryan Legend made an interactive web version of Stonetop RPG. I think it is quite nice.

Strandberg put his RPG's text under CC BY-SA 4.0, so this site is legal.

Hello everyone,

In order to play with miniatures, I am looking for game tiles.

By exemple I really like the ones from warhammer Quest, or Zombicide.

Do you know where I could find more? What Boardgames with nice tiles I could buy, or maybe if there is company specialized in this product?

Thank you very much for your help

Please tell me other GMs have had to do this, because I’m sitting in front of my notes right now having a quiet identity crisis.

I have been running a gritty investigative campaign for the past two months. Tonight was supposed to be the session where my players finally pieced together the clues and caught the noble who poisoned the city magistrate. They were sitting around my kitchen table passionately debating the evidence for an hour.

While listening to them, I glanced down at my timeline notes and felt my blood run cold. My timeline was broken. I forgot that three weeks ago, I canonically established that my actual killer was on a military barge eighty miles downriver. My own mystery was completely, mathematically unsolvable.

the players, meanwhile, somehow connected three completely random throwaway descriptions I improvised in session two. They constructed this airtight, emotionally devastating theory accusing the innkeeper. Their logic was so much better than mine that I just put on my best poker face and said, "You solved it." They literally cheered and high-fived. They think I’m teh storytelling god of our friend group, but I'm an illiterate hack who doesn't understand calendar math. Do I take this secret to my grave or am I cheating them by retrofitting their theories?