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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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So first off, I'm not dying. At least, not that I know anyway but I am buying a shit tonne of new books at increasing frequency. I am just hooked on cool mechanics and amazing stories. Having only run a handful of Mork Borg games and being 70% of the way done with CoS, I'm beginning to think that despite being a millenial, I'm doing that boomer thing of filling my house with crap that I value immensly but will be thrown in a skip as soon as I snuff it.

The issue is, that once I read one book of a system that seems exciting, I tend to end up accumilating more and more. Delta Green and Mothership have a shelf almost entirely to themselves at this point because they will not stop producing the paper and ink equivalent of crack.

And since completing campaigns obviously takes longer than reading a book, my eyes have wandered over new areas of interest such as Pendragon, the One Ring and Call of Cthulhu.

I went on holiday to the Netherlands and came back with £250 worth of RPG books ffs. That was a week ago. Masks of Nyarlathotep is currently sitting in an online shopping cart along with the Grey Knight campaign for Pendragon. I have never run CoC or Pendragon. Why am I buying campaigns? Masks of Nyarlathotep takes years at some tables!

I'm not talking about every situation where you are asking players to think creatively or strategically, or about campaign threads that you want your players to work out. What I'm talking about here are situations where the players have to figure out a specific thing to progress in the adventure. Solve a riddle, activate a set of runes in the correct order, place a set of stone figures on the correct spots, ext. Sometimes these are during combat or while there is some other immediate threat, sometimes it's while there is no large time pressure. I get why GMs would want to put these in their campaigns, it's a challenge that is seperate from combat or can be something to make combat feel more original, and doing puzzles can be fun, as can creating them. However, my feeling is that, much of the time, puzzles like this can really hurt the experience. Here are my reasons:

1.Pacing: puzzles have the potential to really grind a session to a hault. If you are putting a puzzle into your campaign you need to ask "what happens if my players are very thick?" Doesn't matter how easy you think it is, there is a chance they just won't get it and what then. Do they just die? Do they sit there staring at the problem unsure what to do or monotonously guessing potential answers? We even have a famous example of this in fantasy from LOTR where the fellowship spends hours sitting outside Moria as Gandalf tries to figure out the way to get in ("Mr brilliant wizard completely missing the obvious answer). This is funny in the book, but would be a slog if this was eating up your session.

1. Railroad vs Cheese: one solution to this is to alow your puzzles to be more open ended, which over all I think is good, but that does increase the chance of parties just cheesing the puzzle in a way you didn't intend, and this can even happen with puzzles that were intended to have a very specific solution. If the solution they find is really crafty and original that can be fun and satisfying, but other times it can be lame and anticlimactic and the GM either has to accept that, or contrive a reason for it not to work which can also feel bad. And if you design the puzzle so strictly to preemptively stop any solutions but the one you intend that can feel very stifling to creativity.

2. They are fundamentally "out of character": this is my biggest issue. One of the great things out RPGs is that you can play a character different from yourself, do things you could never do, and act in ways you wouldn't act. But puzzles tend to break this illusion, they often aren't about your character and their abilities, but about you as a player. Maybe you are playing a wise mage or cunning scoundrel who you would think would do well at puzzles, but if you personally are bad at them it often doesn't matter. The GM could have you roll some type of knowledge check to give you a hint, but that often doesn't feel satisfying. Conversely, if you are playing a big dumb brute who can't read the riddle scrawled on the wall, what should you do if you think you know the answer? Sit out or actively sabotage things? Pass the answer to your party out of character? Come up with ways to plausibly nudge the party towards the answer in character?

I'm not saying puzzles can never fit well into a campaign, but I have run into very few that have felt satisfying as a player and watched them go wrong as a GM. But, many of the people I play with seem to still love them (or at least designing them, which might be the issue). Have you had puzzles in your campaigns that have worked really well? Maybe I have just had a few bad experiences and it's colored my feelings of them. Or, have you had any of your own experiences of puzzles just feeling really bad?

Hi folks. The kickstarter is running on backerkit. I didn't have it on my screen and I'm surprised at how good it looks. The mechanics are nothing revolutionary, but they seem solid, intuitive and allow for surprises and interactions. So - I'm happy. The setting sounds cool. I like it and - unexpectedly - backed it.

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/chaosium/time-without-tide-mirth-misery-in-a-world-of-fog

There's even a free quickstarter for the game. It's funded already climbing up the stretchgoal ladder pretty fast, yet I haven't heard much about it in this sub.

What is the concensus here? Do you like it? Did you even hear of it?

Can anyone give me some good settings that takes place/has a section that's inside a giant human-oid/monster (Dead or alive)? Things like Belly of the Beast, Settlers of a Dead God, and The God Corpse 5e adventure.

I'm not really looking for fleshscapes (There is a ttrpg called Fleshscape, get it because it's free on DriveThruRPG) or biopunk-esk stuff .. But I'll take suggestions for those too.

Edit: Spelling/grammar error corrections

The popularly known origin of the Sword World RPG is that “Record of Lodoss War” starts as a serialized “replay” of a D&D game, the gaming group goes to TSR in the hope of expanding the series with the D&D rules, TSR refuses, so the gaming group creates Sword World as its own Lodoss RPG, which goes on to be the top-selling TRPG in Japan. Unfortunately, there’s been something of a Xerox effect as the story’s been passed around. Here I’d like to set down a relatively definitive record of what happened, and when, that will hopefully be of reference.

The bulk of material comes from three sources:

安田均のゲーム行記1950-2020 Hitoshi Yasuda’s Game Travelogue 1950-2020 (ISBN-13: 978-4775318744)

日本現代卓上遊戯史紀聞［1］安田均 History of Japanese Tabletop Gaming [1] Hitoshi Yasuda (ISBN-13: 978-4908124259

日本現代卓上遊戯史紀聞［1b］安田均補遺 History of Japanese Tabletop Gaming [1b] Hitoshi Yasuda Supplement (ISBN-13: 978-4908124280

These three books were written by Hitoshi Yasuda, the father of Japanese TRPG gaming, and founder and still (as of 2026) president of Group SNE, the game company that developed Sword World. (All Japanese names are given name first, family name second.)

In the late 1970s, Yasuda was a freelance translator and critic of science fiction. He would read English-language science fiction magazines to stay abreast of the latest developments overseas. Starting in 1977, he began seeing advertisements in these magazines for strange looking games such as Dungeons & Dragons, Runequest, and Traveller. Intrigued by these, he ordered two of them in late 1979: Dungeons & Dragons (the Holmes Basic Set), and Traveller. Yasuda and his friends, including his juniors at Kyoto University, became early adopters of TRPGs before one was even translated or released in Japan. Yasuda encouraged the nascent Japanese TRPG market by writing about various games using his platform as a critic for various genre magazines.

TRPGs officially came to Japan in 1983 with the release of Enterprise, an original Star Trek RPG published by Tsukuda Hobby. This was essentially a hack of RuneQuest, one of the favorite games of the early adopters. This was soon followed by Yasuda’s own translation of Traveller in 1984, published by Hobby Japan. That same year, Yasuda and a number of his fellow gamers formed a playgroup called Syntax Error (named after an error message from the BASIC programming language). One of the players so enjoyed their TRPG sessions, she began tape recording them and writing them up in transcript form. Yasuda realized that such a transcript, which he called a “replay,” would be a great way to familiarize the public with how TRPGs worked. When the translation of Traveller was released, he promoted it by publishing a replay of a Syntax Error Traveller game in the Nov. 1984 issue of Tactics, Hobby Japan’s wargaming magazine. This would be built on by other creators, who published their own replays in magazines complete with illustrations.

A publishing company called Shinwa obtained the D&D license and released the Mentzer Red Box in June, 1985. Towards the end of that same year, executives from Kadokawa, a major publishing house, had a meeting with Yasuda. They wanted him to do two things: 1) handle the Japanese translation of the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy, and 2) write an ongoing column in Comptiq, their “media mix” magazine that covered computing, gaming, and cute models. They were trading mostly on Yasuda’s name recognition in genre circles. Yasuda asked if he could publish a TRPG replay, and they agreed.

With Dungeons & Dragons the newest RPG to appear in the Japanese market, and considering it was the first RPG ever, Syntax Error decided to go with that for the Comptiq replay. Ryo Mizuno was chosen by Yasuda to be the DM because he knew Mizuno to be gifted writer, and expected him to be a novelist someday. (In general, replays are written by the GM, so as to provide the GM’s thought process.) Comptiq began serializing the replay, Record of Lodoss War, (literally translated, “War Chronicle of Lodoss Island”) in September of 1986, with the first part lasting until April 1987. Though written by Mizuno, it was credited to Yasuda and “Group SNE” (the Syntax Error gaming group). It was extremely well-received, so a second replay, set in the same world but with different PCs, began in June 1987. Mizuno was tasked with writing a novelization of the first replay.

Group SNE incorporated as a content creation company in October, 1987, releasing its first game, a Japanese translation of Tunnels & Trolls, in December. Meanwhile, Kadokawa’s Fujimi Shobou imprint was launching a new TRPG magazine called “DRAGON”, and asked Group SNE to design a fantasy RPG they could use to promote it. Along their other work, such as the second replay and the Lodoss War novel, Mizuno and fellow Group SNE member Miyuki Kiyomatsu began designing this game.

Mizuno’s novelization, Record of Lodoss War: The Grey Witch, was published in April of 1988, and became an instant bestseller, essentially launching the light novel market in Japan. As the second Comptiq replay was drawing to a close in mid-1988, Kadokawa and Group SNE decided to talk with Shinwa about releasing compilation volumes of the replays, seeking to take advantage of this newfound popularity. This famously did not go well. The Shinwa suits high-handedly told them that TSR would never agree to the planned compilation volumes, and threw shade at Fujimi Shobou’s DRAGON magazine, saying to Yasuda, “Do you know that TSR publishes a magazine called Dragon?” (Yasuda was probably the first subscriber in Japan to the TSR magazine.) The treatment was apparently so bad that afterward Masayuki Onishi, leader of the group hired by Shinwa to translate D&D, followed Yasuda down the hall to apologize. While this is often portrayed as TSR not allowing the compilation volume, per Yasuda’s account they never dealt directly with TSR, and the bad feelings appear to stem entirely from Shinwa. That said, Shinwa was known, like TSR but unlike most Japanese publishers, for going after derivative and fan-created works, and some surmise that their license agreement might have obligated them to police and prevent such works.

The treatment (and lack of possibility of a deal) encouraged Kadokawa vice-president Tsuguhiko Kadokawa (son of the founder) to cut loose of D&D entirely. He told Yasuda to use Group SNE’s own game for the upcoming third replay series, and to replay the first two campaigns with those rules in order to release the compilation volumes. Either because the game Kiyomatsu was designing was not ready, or because they didn’t want the new game to be directly tied to Lodoss, Group SNE decided not to use those rules, but instead whipped up some quick rules with classes and abilities scores that were a hack of D&D, but with a percentile die for task resolution, and used this to play the game for the third Comptiq replay, which ran from September 1988 to September 1989. A Sword World replay began in Fujimi Shobou’s DRAGON magazine in November of 1988, as a preview of the upcoming game.

Group SNE and Kadokawa (through the Fujimi Shobou imprint) finally released Sword World RPG, Group SNE’s first original role-playing game, in April of 1989. The game system was much different from both D&D and the makeshift game designed for the third replay. However, in order to cash in on the still burgeoning popularity of Lodoss, it was set in the same world, but on a different continent. With the completion of the Comptiq replay series, the makeshift rules were given a polish and published as the Record of Lodoss War Companion in October of 1989. The first compilation volume (replaying the first campaign with the Companion rules) was released in December of that same year.

Record of Lodoss War Companion received additional volumes in 1991 and 1994. These rules were further revised into the Lodoss RPG Basic Rules (1995) and Expert Rules (1996). Sword World was never directly tied to Lodoss itself until 1998, when Group SNE released the Sword World RPG Lodoss World Guide.

So, to sum up, neither Group SNE nor Kadokawa ever dealt with TSR, but rather with their licensee in Japan, Shinwa. Sword World was not developed as a result of those dealings, but was developed in parallel at the request of Fujimi Shobou. Sword World was from its conception not intended to be a Lodoss RPG, but rather siloed away from the Lodoss IP, other than ostensibly using the same world. The break has been even more extreme with the release of Sword World 2.0 (released in 2008) and Sword World 2.5 (released in 2018), both of which take place in an entirely different setting.

CMT. 1.1.0 Update is Out! Fame Dice, Narrative and Lucha Rolls, Progress Clocks in Lucha and More!

This is probably the last update for the Free Quickstart before I release the Full Version of the Game. Thank you very much, to all who've checked it out. The game has been receiving a lot of love, and I'm excited for where it can go from here. This update intends to marry the Narrative and the Combat parts of the Game into a solid unit, providing even more problems that can't be out-wrestled.

CMT. A Lucha Libre RPG. is a free D6 system inspired by the likes of CAIN, Troika! and Lancer. Its tone is of magic realism and pulpy urban fantasy with a big dose of surreal Mexican horror and folklore. También hay una versión en español disponible.

The gist of it is that you play as a Luchador, a Mexican Pro Wrestler whose aim is to Level Up in the world by winning Main Events that you'll organize yourself. All your brains and brawn will go towards the horrific tasks of marketing, booking, and also contracting the Rivals you’ll face. And not only are there opponents to defeat, but an Audience to please, and you better please them, lest they ruin your nascent career in this bizarre world of monstrous showbiz.

Wrestle Monsters the Media and the Masses for Free Here:

itch.io - DriveThruRPG - RPGTrader

Versión en español disponible.

No AI was used in the creation of this game.

And we're back with the next episode of our Chuubos Exocolonist actual play:

Season 2 Episode 9 - (YT, Podbean) - Our Exocolonists run for their lives as they are being stalked by a manticore with sapient level intelligence and malevolence. Ren wishes she was gun certified…

Season 2 Episode 10 - (YT, Podbean) - Our Exocolonists eat a worm, get in trouble for sneaking out, and scheme to have a nice family dinner together that totally doesn’t end up being a setup for our local tsundere…

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I will soon be starting a campaign using the outgunned system.

The setting is the setting I used for a science fiction novel I wrote years ago. It is heavily inspired by The Fifth Element, the movie Heavy metal, the movie Heavy Metal 2000, samurai jack, Batman Beyond, Thundarr the Barbarian, Riddick and a little bit of mad Max.

The system seems to fit what I want to go for. However, some of my players want to take abilities from the supers book. I don't want to ban them out right but I don't necessarily want to give them free reign of whatever it is that they may want. I was wondering how it might be plausible to take something from the superbook and allow them to apply that to their character. Something that won't make them too overpowered but allows them to give their character a little bit of interesting power.

This is my first time using the system and I've been wanting to use the system for a few years now so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

As mentioned in the title, I'm looking for a Magical Girl system that works well for longer campaigns.

There are a ton of systems out there, so I really don't know what to go with. The group is veterans to TTRPGs in general. Also, we will likely play via text roleplaying (but synchronously), while using an online client like roll 20 for gameplay.

I'm perfectly willing to homebrew, and again, the system doesn't need to be simple.

This is going to sound stupid, but I get irrationally annoyed when I buy a PDF and it doesn't include the back cover of the book and only has the front cover.

Does anyone here know of any cozy TTRPGs where you play as a fairy? I really wanna run games with a tinker bell-esc setting that's just really cute cozy and fun.

I'm aware you can probably just flavor DnD to be this but I'm so sick of DnD and I wanna try out more systems.