R(W)PG(S) May/June

Read
I occasionally run games at cons or in the shop for kids and entirely new players. I've found Offworlders to be pretty perfect for running SF games for this crowd. Character generation has a couple of meaningful but easy to understand decisions for players to make, play is clear with everything being resolved with 2d6+stat, the game only uses d6s so I can bring dice I don't care about to events and I don't have to worry about the player who spends the whole session asking which one is the d20 So that's great, but I've been looking for an equivalent for fantasy sessions. You'd think that that would be simple…

Offworlders is based on World of Dungeons, but its class abilities are not very exciting and its magic system is rubbish

Jared Sinclair's 6e is an expansion on the concept and is actually really close to what I am looking for. Mages and Clerics have actual spell lists, the Fighter and Thief are both interesting. The whole game (all ten pages) is suffused with encouragement to add to or rewrite the rules which I really like. My only issue with this is that it really wants to be used to campaign play. I guess I could just start a one-shot session with each player choosing a couple of level ups.

Tiny Dungeon 2e Is written to fill exactly the needs I outlined above. Simple to use, only d6, minimal rules… The first thing players do when they sit down to play is read through a list of six pages of character traits and choose three for their character. Bin

Write
All of that was a roundabout way to say that I am writing my own game, because none of the other options are quite right. I'm going to bring in my own skill system and all the other little tricks I've found over the last ten years and make what I hope is a game which is effortless for players but still interesting.

Me and a friend just wrote up and submitted a playable RPG/pitch to a contest Chaosium are running. Our game is a game about helping out a community in a weird post apocalypse ten years after the collapse of society. I think we've manage to put our own spin on things. Just setting it in Scotland is a step away from a lot of the usual tropes.

Play
I played in a game of Shadowdark last week. If you don't know it, it is 5e stripped back until is it basically OSR. It's fine. It works. It's a little dull. But then, the fun is supposed to be in the adventures and sure enough I did have fun with the adventure. I died twice.

I think I'll be playing in a Mothership game next week. I love Mothership 1e, so that'll be great.

GM
Trying to run Mothership in the shop and Monster of the Week at a friend's. Two sessions into both and both are going great, but real life means I probably have to take a break. I'm off to France for a few weeks soon anyway.

Shop
The shop where I run most of my games just had its one-year anniversary. We had a fun party to celebrate and it was pretty incredible how many friends were there who I simply didn't know a year ago. If you are in or near Edinburgh at any point, you should pop in: Ancient Robot Games

Read

Because I, apparently, Cannot Help Myself™, I've been putting together a Wildsea system for Foundry, so I've been going over bits of that with fine-tooth comb to make sure we can support everything you need before I try to get a campaign off the ground, post-Avatar. What's also been helpful is listening to an actual play game to see how things flow; it's left me a little concerned that my players aren't as eagerly collaborative as I might want them to be, but hopefully we can build up to that.

I'm also prepping to run a couple of shorter adventures in Land of Eem to put that through its paces, so I'm making sure to re-read the conflict and combat rules there.

Recently took delivery of Mothership 1e, Brindlewood Bay and CBR+PNK as well, but haven't really managed much more than a skim yet.

Play

Nothing, at the moment. Dropped out of my 5e game due to scheduling limitations (on my end), so it's just running stuff for the forseeable.

GM

Avatar continues moving towards the finale; the party are making their way to convince the Earth Kingdom Army to commit the troops necessary for booting the Fire Nation out of their hometown, which is kinda the last big piece of the puzzle. I have a couple plot threads currently lying loose that I'd like to tie up – and an air bison I need to get back in, somehow – but I feel like the players are pretty happy with where things are headed.

I spent most of the week before our most recent Dragonbane reading through the Temple of the Purple Flame part of the boxset adventure, only for the party to spend the entire thing investigating some anonymous ruins they spotted on the region map. What would have been two "nothing happens" random encounters through the forest turned into an attempt to drop breadcrumbs for an NPC they might meet in the Temple and a midnight combat against a group of skeletons. I'm assured that they will try to make it to the Temple next time.

I'm fairly sure that the Mothership 1e Warden manual is the best book of GM advice yet written.

I'm interested to hear what you think of Brindlewood Bay too. I have friends who think it's a work of genius and others who think it's a waste of time and the opposite of fun.

Read
For some reason I'm back on a big LotR kick, so I've been reading through The One Ring 2e's Moria book again. There's so much stuff in there, and it's all very intriguing, even if I can't quite work out why on (Middle-)Earth anyone would want to go there from a character point of view. I'm getting increasingly nerdy on Tolkien minutae, though, so there are a few minor lore inconsistencies that nag at me more than they should.

Write
I have a bunch of stuff I ought to finish; had a Dishonored 2d20 adventure half-finished for about three years that I ought to finish off and run. I have kernels of ideas for Call of Cthulhu and Alien one-shots, plus an adventure for The One Ring and a Vaesen mystery that I could polish up a bit, but are pretty much ready to go.

Play
Nothing lined up or looming on the player side of the table, though my sister-in-law has made vague hints at having something she wants to run at some point. I've got about fifty 5e characters ready to run at a moment's notice, so I'm definitely prepared if that does happen.

GM
5e has been on break for a few weeks due to a confluence of minor but unavoidable scheduling issues, though we should be back be back at the table this week, which will be good.

I was considering running Curse of Strahd again (but in Dragonbane) after my current DB campaign ends, and have even finished a full conversion - but now I think I might want to try and get a group started for The One Ring instead. IRL, ideally, but I don't know if that's a reasonable expectation.

Two more on the Read pile! At UKGE today I picked up a couple of books from a company with the incredible name of SoulMuppet Publishing:

• Orbital Blues, a retrofuturistic '80s galactic western that wears its Firefly/Cowboy Bebop influence proudly on its sleeve. A 2d6(ish) system, pretty simple, and only suffers a little bit from overly-pleased-with-itself Indie Layout Syndrome. The two writers and the artist were at the booth, so I got the book signed, too.

• Inevitable , which is described as "a doomed Arthurian western". Players are a cadre of gunslinging knights errant, wandering the wasteland in service to the sickly boy king of an empire that's prophesied to fall. You can't perevent the apocalypse - but you might delay it long enough to save some folks. It's both kind of a downer (certain death will do that) and bonkers funny, featuring magical, often sentient firearms like a communist rifle, a shotgun possessed by the spirit of a horse, and a revolver that fires trains. Apocalypses ("Dooms", to use the book's term) are similarly varied - you might be battling the fanatical armies of the Cannibal Saint, trying to turn a cabal of wizards against each other, or dealing with a dragon that's currently chained under a mountain but very much wants to escape. Mechanically, it's pretty different to other RPGs I've read - when you come up against a villain, you can pay a cost to get a bonus on your roll - a cost you stake then and there, and can include your reputation, your gear, important locations or allies - thinning out the list of what you have to bargain with until all you've got left to give is your life. The art is great, the layout is very sensible, and the whole thing oozes vibes and style like nobody's business.

I finished up my first Monster of the Week mystery last night. We had fun. I'm not quite sure what my opinion is of PbtA yet, but this game at least works and was good. I'm keen to run more, I've got another two mysteries ready to go and another three sketched out. I think ideally that would be the first half of the campaign. But it's going to have to wait.

While I'm away the rest of the group will be playing Board in the Dark and after that we'll be playing Mothership, Liminal Horror and maybe some other stuff which I'm looking forward to even if I'd rather be running.

Monster of the Week is pretty great. It's also very tonally flexible, depending on the flavour of pop culture your group is into, with room for serious X-Files and Fringe-style investigations, or wackier Scooby Doo hijinx.

The other long-form PbtA game I've run has been Avatar, which (IMO) tries to strap a few too many things onto the framework and loses some mechanical focus as a result.

Orbital Blues, a retrofuturistic '80s galactic western that wears its Firefly/Cowboy Bebop influence proudly on its sleeve. A 2d6(ish) system, pretty simple, and only suffers a little bit from overly-pleased-with-itself Indie Layout Syndrome.

This is on Bundle of Holding at the moment, if anyone is curious to the extent of $7.95.