RPG Mar/Apr 24

Read
Daggerheart play test - It looks functional, but not exciting. Reminds me of 13th Age in places. There is a lot of moving pieces in it and while none of them are particularly complicated I think they might want to trim it back slightly.

Monster of the Week/Cthulhu City/The Yellow King/Cthulhu Dark - I'm starting to prepare for my next big game.

Play
One of my Blade Runner players took over GMing for a session. It was fun but a bit incongruent.

I played a session of Microscope. It was fine I guess. Not exactly exciting.

GM
Blade Runner is almost done. Maybe three more sessions to go. I have an investigation to wrap up and then a finale. Still really pleased with it.

a state on the other had feels like it never really got started even after four sessions. The players are having fun I think but I'm not feeling it. The Blades system just isn't working for me. I'd love to return to the setting with a system I do like though.

My issues with the a state rules were thrown into stark clarity when I filled in for a couple weeks by running Into the Odd and Liminal Horror, but of which were fast, eventful, fun and effortless. So I think I'll be wrapping up a state shortly and running some OSR pirates or something.

Read
Also Daggerheart. Full thoughts in the other thread, but I am similarly unexcited by it.

Also still poking at the Moria book for The One Ring. I increasingly want to give running it a proper go, but not sure I have the time and energy, never mind the players.

GM
Dragonbane continues, and I've settled into it pretty well, I think. Still not a big fan of the core box adventure, but I do like the system, and everyone seems to be having fun. I'm not sure how well it would stand up to a multi-year campaign, though.

Read

I've been trying to flip through the Wildsea PDF, but I can never quite grok a new game digitally – works fine for reference, but when I'm learning, nothing beats flipping through actual pages. I got the shipping notification for my book this morning though, so hopefully that'll be here over the weekend or early next week.

Putting the finishing touches on another FoundryVTT implementation, so I've been going through (again, the PDF of) The Land of Eeem RPG to make sure I've not missed anything important. I'm oping to get it submitted to the Foundry library soonish, but I'm waiting to hear back from the writers to make sure they – and their publisher, Exalted Press – are okay with me putting up something unofficial.

My backer copy of Spectres of Brocken arrived, which makes for an interesting read. Once more, I'd skimmed the PDFs, but had somehow missed a lot of the mechanics – or rather, the lack of mechanics. Near as I can tell there are no dice rolls, only player conversations and agreements, which makes it very different from anything I've played or run before, and most of the other stuff on my shelves. I'm kinda fascinated by it, though.

Play

Still digging through a temple and killing its cultist inhabitants in a 5e Eberron game, which I'm really appreciating after a couple years as Forever DM. It's a totally different group than I run for, so there's a slightly different tone but my goblin barbarian is a lot of fun to play.

GM

I ran a one-shot of Land of Eem for the kid a couple weeks back, which he seemed to really enjoy. I had to rebalance a few things on the fly for a one-player party, and running off the Quickstart rules there were a few oversights I had to paper over. He's keen to do it again, so I've got a few more adventure modules for that to read at some point.

The Dragonbane game continues apace, but my Avatar Legends game has been hit by some scheduling difficulties and we've not played in a month or more (and it'll be three weeks before the stars align again).

I'm curious about putting something together in Wildsea (I've already started planning out a Foundry framework for it, God help me), but I reckon I'll have to either finish Avatar or take a break between the Dragonbane box adventures and whatever I end up doing next in that (probably something based on Skies of Arcadia).

Additional Read:
At Bri's recommendation, I've been flipping through Coriolis: The Third Horizon. It seems neat.

I've also been looking at the quickstart for Rapscallion, Magpie's upcoming PBTA pirate game. It's a bit Sea of Thieves and a bit Monkey Island, with a lot of spooky weirdness on an ocean that the players get to fill in themselves.

Nothing new on the Play or GM fronts, but I've started writing another Alien thing that might not go anywhere. I've also (I think?) finished my Dragonbane/Roll20 conversion of Curse of Strahd, though I don't have a party for it (or time to run it, probably).

Sunday's Dragonbane session surprised me a bit – not because of anything in particular, but I felt pretty low-energy going in and didn't really have a whole lot planned as a result.

The party had more or less agreed to draw a line under their exploration of the Riddermound after seeing an orcish expedition getting absolutely wrecked by a barrow wight, so after a brief relitigation of the arguments for and against letting one of the bards go back down the hole, they headed back to the main village in the area.

On the road back, I rolled a random encounter – something I hadn't been doing regularly, and had been using as inspiration more than something that actually happens, but something inspired me to dig out a battle map suitable for this and they found some cultists around a summoning circle.\

The fight was quick and brutal (the mage dropped to 0hp, but the cultists were dispatched with extreme efficiency), but most importantly – and unexpectedly – it seems to have lit a fire under the players with regards to finally figuring out what the cult is up to, something I'd been unsure about pressing them on.

Additionally, they've kinda adopted an NPC goblin they found in the barrow, and have successfully convinced him that the group he'd been travelling with were, in fact, traitors to the Orcish cause. He's keen to get back to his bosses and report in, which is also giving them a direct link to the orc clans and pushing them to engage with that part of the plot as well.

And finally, one of the bards got to flirting with a mysterious paladin type in the tavern, linking them to the third faction in the area.

So we've gone from me worrying about how to manoeuvre the story into their way, to an entirely-accidental personal connection to three of the major questlines.

Did someone on here mention a vampire role playing game, that wasn’t the terrible Masquerade?

@aniki Sounds perfect!

@Smellavision There's Vampire: Requiem which is a different take on Vampire from 2005 or so. It's a little less "immortal politicking" and a little more "monsters among us". I think. Luscan could tell you more.

Urban Shadows does the whole World of Darkness thing in one book with Powered By The Apocalypse rules.

Liminal does urban fantasy in England and is quite light on rules. It has Vampire PCs.

Thanks Brian - maybe I’m misremembering, but I thought it was either very recent , or an upcoming kickstarter.

Eat the Reich? Brinkwood?

Also Masquerade is good.