Read
I bought myself the Impossible Landscapes campaign for Delta Green. It's a reality warping investigation into Carcosa and the King in Yellow so True Detective/X-Files/Silent Hill. I don't actually run Delta Green but I had read enough praise for this that I had to read it for myself.
I found Offworlders in one of the recent massive itch.io bundles. It's a really fun wee SF game using light PbtA mechanics. I keep on coming up with other things I want to do with it, from running Mothership adventures in a slightly more gung-ho style to JRPG fantasy with ancient tech, blasters and flying boats.
Play
Yeah, nothing. Although one of my players has offered to run something for the group soon and another is slowly bringing together the pieces for a short Mutants&Masterminds game.
GM
13th Age has been cancelled more often than not. The last couple session weregood though so I'm keen to get it back underway.
Traveller continues to be great. Pirates of Drinax is possibly the biggest campaign ever written and after 20 sessions we've barely scratched the surface. Next session the group are going to try and turn all their PCs psionic. Can't see that ending well.
And yesterday I started a new game, Acid Death Fantasy for Troika! ADF has to be one of my favourite ever books, it's not even 50 pages but it's crammed with so much stuff I could run it for years.
Listen
I've been consuming a lot of actual play recently. The latest season of Critical Role really isn't holding my attention whereas D&D is for Nerds is exactly the sort of madcap noise that usually winds me up, but for whatever reason with this group of idiots I'm laughing along instead of turning off.
I'm also enjoying Ninchilla's Natura1s recordings. Fun characters, intriguing setting, leaning into the D&D structures rather than fighting against them, and so many NPC accents! Good stuff. @Ninchilla, I have a spare weather dice if you want it, it's almost the least I can do to support your show.
I know Roll20 isn't the VTT of choice for noise folks here, but they're giving the 5e Starter Set adventure Lost Mine of Phandelver away for free this month.
It's worth grabbing. It's a good (if fairly conventional) adventure and having all the content right there fixes a lot of Roll20's issues.
I would have thought that most people who might have cared will have finished with Phandelver some time ago. It's a shame they didn't put up the adventure from the Essentials Kit.
Phandelver has a lot of narrative issues - why are the villains kidnapping the dwarf for a map if they already know where the mine is? - but I thought Icespire Peak was very piecemeal. Some of the quests are very good, others are kinda aimless, but there's no real central driving story to it.
I wandered into Forbidden Planet at lunchtime, and had a flick through a copy of The One Ring 2e; my word, that's a handsome book.
The Dragon Prince RPG – Tales of Xadia – has had its final version released digitally (and my physical book is on the way); I've had a flip through the PDF, and it's not done much to assuage my sense that Cortex is a much, much heavier system than the source material needs.
It's maybe looking especially crunchy coming this soon after the PbtA Avatar Legends RPG, but the Xadia book recommends against creating your own characters in favour of their pregens, and having tried to follow the char-gen rules myself I can see why. It's not a great advertisement for your highly-personal-stories game, though…
I entered a competition on Twitter a while back to try and win the Alien starter set. I didn't win that, but I did win the PDF of the set. Except that when I got the email with the link to the pdf I've actually been sent the entire Alien RPG line in pdf!
Free League really do make the prettiest games. I love Symbaroum's dark fantasy and Coriolis' SF Arabian Nights. Alien looks incredible!
Their games are pretty fun to play too.
The Alien book looks spectacular, for sure, but I've found its boxout-reliant design less effective as a reference – and more difficult to just read through – than a more traditional layout would be. I'm hoping they take a more restrained approach with the Blade Runner RPG.
Tales of Xadia
It's a massive book, too. I've only very briefly scanned any of it, but I agree about the apparent complexity - no idea how it plays, but it looks very daunting.
Alien
I've started writing a cinematic adventure for Alien, but in my heart I think it's a game I'd rather play than run.
