RPG July/August

Read
I'm in France just now and I'm taking a break from GMing so the closest if gotten to reading any RPGs recently is reading Kieron Gillen's Die comics and downloading a bunch of RuneQuest books from the current Humble Bundle

Play
While I'm away my usual group are playing Blades in the Dark. They might still be playing that in a couple weeks when I get back, if so I'll probably join in.

Another friend is running the classic OSR megadungeon Stonehell, I'm hoping to join in for a few sessions.

GM
Looking forward to getting back into Monster of the Week. Thinking of running The Valley of Flowers after that.

Read

I'm converting a bunch of stuff (that I probably don't need to) for use in Foundry ahead of my Land of Eem game, so I've been going through the rules pretty closely. All three players have their characters lined up now, so I'm very much looking forward to getting it started once Avatar wraps up.

Speaking of, there's a new Avatar sourcebook out (Uncle Iroh's Adventure Guide) which I've been flipping through, but I kinda feel like I'm done with the system and setting for now.

Picked up Knave 2e recently, mostly for its random tables, but I haven't had much chance to look through it in detail – nor the new Wildsea expansion, Storm & Root, which introduces submarine and airship build options for the setting's tree-surfing chainsaw ships.

Play

Nothing, nada, zilch, rien, 何も. Not even sure what I'd like to play.

If we take a more liberal definition of the word "play" to include playing audio files, I've been listening to a couple of new (to me) RPG podcasts/let's plays:

Spout Lore is a Dungeon World game that's been going since 2018 and is on the wackier side without being too offensive. I'm only a handful of episodes in, but it was recommended by another lets-play GM whose stuff I really like (Improv Tabletop) so I reckon it's probably gonna be fine.

Dimension 20's Never Stop Blowing Up is using a modified Kids on Bikes system to tell an over-the-top 80s action movie isekai; I've bounced off every one of their D&D games after an episode or two, but this and Mentopolis both got me good.

And after listening to My First Dungeon's 8-episode Wildsea campaign I also went back to catch their Orbital Blues game, which were both excellent and really raise the bar for audio production in these things.

GM

Avatar only has a session or two left, which will make it the first campaign I've ever actually finished, as a player or GM. Everything else has fallen victim to scheduling, and I'm suddenly very aware that I've got to bring this thing in for a satisfying landing.

There's a been a little bit of drama in the Dragonbane game, as it turns out one of the PCs' annoyance with another PC hasn't been as much roleplay as everyone had been assuming. Last night's session turned into basically a big conversation about how we can make sure everyone's having fun without needing to drop (or at least massively truncate) one character's whole personal arc. It was a bit awkward in places but I'm kinda glad it all got aired out and everyone was very understanding and supportive in a way that made me pretty proud of the group.

August Update!

Read
I've been reading through a bunch of Kevin Crawford games. Stars Without Number is a fantastic SF toolkit. Godbound is his take on Exalted which looks good but it harder to read. I really like Exemplars & Eidolons which is only 50 pages but presents a full fantasy adventure game where every PC gets their own collection of rule-breaking abilities. It's free too, recommended!

Today I read the adventure Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine where a demon forces the PCs into fantasy MasterChef.

Play
We just played a short campaign of Liminal Horror which was a lot of fun. I also managed to get to one session of my friend's Stonehell game.

GM
Nothing just yet. Maybe next week though?

The One Ring

My players are trying to get Imre to the West.

They spectacularly failed in getting her to Rivendell in the 1st edition 5e version we were playing years ago, and I thought I’d let them roll new characters and try again!

All they had to do was convince Ciardan to build a ship, but the pirates attacking the coast were distracting him.

He sent them off to find an artefact that enhances a Palantir by adding in voice communication.

Sauraman has one part, but they didn’t want to give him a ring to hand it over.

The Numenorian pirates have a part, and they’ve only just realised.

They tried to recruit Aragorn (as Thorongil) who just as he was about to lead them to sea on a fleet of ranger war ships, gets called away by Gandalf to find someone in Moria.

I’ve spent two years leading these guys a merry dance around Middle-earth, and have to leave them hanging for six months - my Thursday nights have become busy!

However, they’ve decided to captain the fleet themselves!

Now to roll up some doozy sea creatures, flooded wrecks, underwater caverns and sirens!

Read

• The One Ring
  I'm currently going through all of the (2e) books, trying to combine the various bits of Ruins of the Lost Realm, Tales From the Lone-lands, and (eventually) Moria in my head into a single campaign idea; there are a lot of hints and hooks connecting each of the books, which is pretty cool, but unfortunately also requires you to basically read each of the things cover to cover to pick up on. At least they're nice books! Next, I just find a group to play it with…

• Inevitable
  I've been copying swathes of this into a Notion site, so I can cross-reference everything properly - the book is impeccable vibes, but there are a lot of places where a character, place, or object is referenced offhand without much help in finding out if they're A Thing or just impeccable vibes.

Play/GM

• Mausritter
  We spent last week in a caravan in Devon, and I brought this with me to play again with the kids. They're really enjoying it, and have no idea I'm just stealing adventures from the D&D starter sets…

• Dragonbane
  My online group are a session or two away from finishing Secret of the Dragon Emperor. It's been fun, but I don't know if I'm sad to see the back of it - the system is pretty good, though it feels suited more to one-shots or short adventures instead of long campaigns.
  Having said that, I don't know how much of that feeling is down to the fact that the campaign itself is quite bad, with poorly-written, largely-unconnected adventures, and maps that are scaled completely wrong for the type of combat the game seems designed to encourage. I've still got my Curse of Strahd conversion sitting here, though…

• D&D
  The party have just gone back to the druid's home city, and I've got some stuff on the horizon that I'm very excited to get to. Scheduling has suffered from summer, but hopefully things will settle down soon and we'll be back to regular sessions again.
  I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the 2024 books (hot take: 2024 D&D is good, actually), but while we're definitely going to adopt parts of it right out of the gate, we haven't decided yet whether to try and transition to it fully mid-campaign. Also not helping is the delay to the alt-cover PHB outside the US.

@Ninchilla - come and join our group in the new year!

I've hardly been on the outside of the DM/GM/LM screen for about a year; I don't even know if I remember how to only play a single character.

I had to have a conversation/argument with myself in our Avatar session the other night. I would quite like to only play one character for a bit.

Is anyone coming to tabletop Scotland this year? The Royal Highland Center is a pretty massive venue and it looks like they'll be filling it. Should be fun!

I might swing down on the Saturday - don't know that I have it in me to do a full-weekend event.

I've got a ticket through the shop, but the shop don't actually need me to do anything, also it's only a tram ride for me so I might be there at any point. I'll definitely be there in the Saturday morning to have a dig through the bring & buy.

Picked up a few things at TTS over the weekend that are now in the Read pile - Spire, Cairn 2e, and Eat the Reich, which has the best three -sentence introduction I've ever seen.

Also grabbed physical copies of the Salvage Union modules and Mew-tants from Leyline Press, but managed to resist buying any dice, boardgames, or that really cool magnetic physical terrain I was very taken by.

The magnetic terrain is awesome, I was playing with it in the shop last week. You can build a reasonable size of dungeon map with the bigger set too. Still not cheap though.

If anyone is curious: https://www.modularrealms.com/

My weekend was pretty good. I went with £100, made another £100 in the bring & buy, and came home skint.

I bought an excellent little two-player RPG called Pitcrawler which does a really impressive job of recapturing the feel and grim comedy of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

I bought a solo or co-op RPG called For Small Creatures Such As We which is somewhere between Star Trek and Mass Effect and A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet. You get a ship and a crew off aliens and you go explore a galaxy using dice and cards. It looks great but I haven't read much yet.

I also bought a couple of 13th Age books to add to my collection and a couple of solo gamebooks and a ton of cute dice (with bees, stars, pandas, mushrooms…)

Best of all someone gifted me a bizarre, ugly, useless d7 which I've wanted for many years!

I thought, "Wait, that doesn't add up to £200" but I also bought a little gelatinous cube dice holder and a mug and a t-shirt for my kid. Add on food and coffee and I think that's the lot.

There was a stand outside making fresh donuts. They were pretty excellent.