I want to run a multi-session supernatural mystery adventure in my game. Evil forces are trying to learn the forbidden arts of witchcraft, in order to get the attention of a long-lost god who is considered by many to be "the devil." The PCs will have to learn and delve into witchcraft themselves in order to stop this from happening. A mysterious mentor will teach them how to use a Tarot deck (Raider-Waite-Smith, if anyone cares) to learn the lessons required to be able to use witchcraft. Seven cards of the Major Arcana (this is Tarot terminology) will provide the vital clues on how to do this.

I think I've got the mechanics of this down. I know about Justin Alexander's Three Clue Rule, and so on. What I'm struggling with is how to elicit the athmosphere I want. If you've seen the movie The Ninth Gate, read the DaVinci Code, or seen the Netflix show Archive 81, I think you know what I'm talking about; that sense of "What the f--- is going on here? I just have to know how this all connects together and get to the bottom of this!" The TV show Lost is probably another good example, but I haven't seen it myself.

Things that I think will help:

• Thematic music. Every time the topic of the Tarot deck comes up, some mysterious-sounding specific song should be played. This trick is used in Wagner's The Ring opera, as well as in the Lord of the Rings movies (for example, the ring has its own theme which is played when the ring is mentioned).
• Frequently giving the PCs new little bits of information which seem to lead them to the conclusions they're hopefully craving.
• I think personal stakes will probably help to keep the players engaged, which in turn will perhaps contribute to the "I just have to know more" feeling I want to elicit.

One trick I can't really use is what the DaVinci code did - it used a story that in some ways sounded so plausible that the reader could think "Wait, could what's proposed in this book actually be true?" That worked in that story, because it took place in the real world and was about Christianity which many in the western world take very seriously. I can't really do the same with my homebrew world which has very little in common with the real world.

So - does anyone have any ideas or suggestions on how to accomplish this? Again, it's the atmosphere of mystery that I'm primarily concerned with here, although mechanical discussion would be welcomed too.

Hi, I had trouble coming up with a title, sorry.

So I met 2 people in an RPG chatroom and we decided to start a game in the near future. We've moved to a separate chatroom to start preparing. This chatroom had been previously used by another player on a similar campaign, but was empty.

Soon after, another persons joins the chat. Reading the chat history, they appear to have been the GM for that previous campaign. I waved at their entry, making my presence known. This was their only text message:

> Hi ​_<chatroom owner>_. Good to see you back in the game. I'm interested in playing but I'll let you know straight off; I can only play on <schedule>. Is that okay for your other players?

This isn't sitting right with me.

• No introduction.
• Talking about me like I'm not there.
• A certain attitude in setting terms to a game they're not organizing.
• The person they're talking to can't answer the question, and I wasn't addressed, so what now?

Am I reading too much into this? Is this just they trying to communicate efficiently plus a lack of social polish?

Anyway, I'd love some external perspective.

Edit: thanks everyone, I'm glad I took the time to gather your input. I wasn't sure I was reading the situation correctly and it looks like indeed I wasn't.

! Hey guys, we from Internal Rock Studio are back with a Big Development Update of our Squad Based TTRPG. You can check out here.

If you never heard about us, we made a itchio page for the rule set. You can get a rough idea of what the rule set is about there.

If you want to be kept in the loop you can join our patreon for free, we will make public posts about its development there. If you want to go above and beyond you can support us there, we will use the money to improve the project.

InternalRockStudio out.

I don't want to spoil, so won't say much about the plot etc. To me it was a good read. Well written, I went from 16% to 100% in one day. The mystery was delivered nicely, well paced and interesting idea. And I liked the exploration of corp environment at high positions. I think it's not done often at this POV

I guess it might interest someone and haven't seen it mentioned

Year Zero Engine post-apo. Mutants, cyborgs and wasteland

I'm not involved, just got an email about it

A really neat sequel for the UVG!

Saw this on Reddit. Wondering what people think about it here.

> https://i.imgur.com/zUR6PQM.png

> I was surprised there was no mention of it here. This announcement comes from the Dungeon World+ Discord.

> For some context, Luke Crane is most well known as the designer of the Burning Wheel rpg, and used to work at Kickstarter as VP of Community (and some controversies with it).

> He also bought it alongside someone else, who seems to be a friend of Luke and coworker at kickstarter.

> There's now a 2e channel/thread in the Dungeon World+ Discord where he's answering questions.

Any people familiar with Dungeon World here?

Hey lemmings,

I'm an amateur game designer probably best known for creating one of the more popular Feywild setting books for D&D. I’m putting the finishing touches on my far-too-ambitious TTRPG and figured I’d post about it here before forcing myself to do an actual marketing push.

The game is designed for somewhat standard medieval fantasy, which I know isn’t exactly a novel concept. However, it does fill a niche which I personally haven’t been able to fill with any other system. Most fantasy systems seem to either be D&D-alikes with a heavy focus on combat and heroics, OSR games with a heavy focus on dungeon crawling, or PbtA games with a heavy focus on genre emulation. What I wanted (and ended up creating) was a game with a focus on improvisation and shared storytelling without being constrained by genre tropes.^*

My other big issue with a lot of fantasy RPGs is the reliance on mechanics which have no real connection to the fictional world. Things like hit points, experience points, and meta-currencies put the focus on the game part of RPGs and not the roleplaying part. What I wanted was a game where everything a player does has a clear and direct link to the fictional game world.

The result is The World Ahead, a system I’ve been building and playtesting for far too long. It features simple and collaborative character creation rules, a flexible resolution system, and a hell of a lot of resources, tables, tips, and tricks to facilitate play at the table. Everything is in service of making the game run smoothly and making things as collaborative as possible. It tries to be open-ended when zoomed in and streamlined when zoomed out.

The game is currently available for free on Itch:

https://heavenly-spoon.itch.io/theworldahead

People who aren't looking for a new RPG may still find something useful to steal in there. Perhaps the streamlined travel system, the collaborative worldbuilding rules, the tables for making things such as factions, wonders, and strange creatures, the magic items which all have a clear and obvious effect within the fiction, or the unique weather system. While most things are fairly well integrated into the core system, you can definitely rip stuff out without too much damage.

_{*I will give a shoutout to Ryuutama and The One Ring. While they didn’t scratch the itch for me, they both have some excellent mechanics and are more in line with what I wanted to achieve here.}

cross-posted from: https://sffa.community/post/1884876

> A bit of a late post, so most of you have probably seen this already. > > ! > > > ! > > It looks like the cheapest virtual only buy in for the full game is $150, while the cheapest physical full game is $195 (+shipping/import tax!) > > There are some links in there for some early reviews and play-throughs too. These only look to be the Stormlight system though, so I assume the Mistborn/Scadrial (an any other planets) are still in the works. > > >

Hi friends!

I wanted you to know about the City of Arches Kickstarter going on right now!

The City of Arches is a 160 page PDF and hardcover high-fantasy city sourcebook built for Lazy DMs and usable with any version of 5e or other fantasy tabletop RPGs. In this book you’ll find

• a high fantasy city setting surrounded by countless adventure locations.
• a setting easily dropped into any existing published or homebrewed campaign world.
• a setting where any race, species, origin, heritage, and culture makes sense.
• over a dozen adventure “biomes” with hundreds of adventure locations.
• three 1st to 20th level campaign arcs.
• an intro scenario, three adventures, and an adventure toolkit for building your own heist or infiltration adventure.
• beautiful full-color art, dungeon maps, and overland maps.
• a player’s guide with background hooks and setting-specific backgrounds.

Download the free 42 page preview on the Kickstarter page! I hope you’ll back this fantastic new book.

Thank you so much!

About six months ago I talked to @[email protected] about home brewing games set in Ancient China. Last night I finally debuted my game - The Scroll of Hengdian. If you like CDramas the name may be familiar as Hengdian Studios is where many series are filmed. My game is based on the Castles and Crusades game system so I could leverage the Codex Sinarum. The codex goes deeper into the actual history of China than my game does, but it is still very useful for this setting.

My TTRPG is xianxia-based so I created a new 'cultivator' class for all of my players. The differentiation really comes with the clan and domain choices that give access to magic based on elemental aspects and creature choices.

I borrowed heavily from the Codex Sinarum to develop the Qi abilities for my characters since that was the heaviest lift for me in terms of developing a new class that is a blending of fighter + wizard/cleric/illusionist. My players chose a blend of human and spirit based cultivators which gives me plenty of nuggets to develop additional qigong abilities.

In terms of content, my players are starting as young cultivators who have met at a sect that has invited them to cultivate and achieve their first level. I also took a random suggestion I saw a while back about creating a Star Trek TNG "Q" type dragon character (Die Lan Zi - iykyk) that occasionally comes around to mess with the party.

Best Adventure - Short Form

• Gold: Eat The Reich, Rowan, Rook and Decard

• Silver: One-Shot Wonders, Roll & Play Press

Best Adventure - Long Form

• Gold: Delta Green: God's Teeth, Arc Dream Publishing

• Silver: Alone Against the Static, Chaosium Inc

Best Aid/Accessory - Digital

• Gold: LegendKeeper, LegendKeeper / Algorific LLC

• Silver: HEXROLL 2E, Pen, Dice & Paper

Best Aid/Accessory - Non-Digital

• Gold: Arkham Investigator's Wallet, H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society

• Silver: Hexcrawl Toolbox, Games Omnivorous

Best RPG Related Product

• Gold: So You Want to Be a Game Master, Page Street Publishing Co.

• Silver: KOBOLD Guide to Roleplaying, Kobold Press

Best Community Content

• Gold: Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa, Critical Hit Publishing

• Silver: The Well of All Fear (Miskatonic Repository)

Best Art, Cover

• Gold: Eat The Reich, Rowan, Rook and Decard

• Silver: Koriko: A Magical Year, Mousehole Press

Best Art, Interior

• Gold: Eat The Reich, Rowan, Rook and Decard

• Silver: Ultraviolet Grasslands 2E, Exalted Funeral Press

Best Cartography

• Gold: Dragonbane Core Set, Free League Publishing

• Silver: ALIEN RPG – Building Better Worlds, Free League Publishing

Best Monster/Adversary This was a tie.

• Gold: MONSTROUS, Cloud Curio

• Gold: Warhammer 40,000 Wrath & Glory Threat Assessment Xenos, Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd

Best Layout & Design

• Gold: Shadowdark RPG, The Arcane Library

• Silver: CBR+PNK: Augmented, Mythworks

Best Production Values

• Gold: Arkham Investigator's Wallet, H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society

• Silver: Koriko: A Magical Year, Mousehole Press

Best Online Content

• Gold: The Alexandrian, Dream Machine Productions

• Silver: Dave Thaumavore RPG Reviews

Best Streaming Content

• Gold: The Party, Swiss Squared

• Silver: William Bailey’s Haunted Mansion; A Call of Cthulhu Adventure - Ballarat Heritage Festival 2024, Tales from Rat City

Best Supplement

• Gold: ALIEN RPG – Building Better Worlds, Free League Publishing

• Silver: The Griffon’s Saddlebag – Book Two, Hit Point Press

Best Free Product

• Gold: Rivers of London: The Domestic, Chaosium, Inc.

• Silver: Level 1 The Free RPG Day Indie RPG Anthology 2023, 9th Level Games

Best Family Game

• Gold: BREAK!! Tabletop RPG, Grey Wizard Press & Naldobean Games

• Silver: If I Were A Lich, Man, Hit Point Press

Best Rules

• Gold: Shadowdark RPG, The Arcane Library

• Silver: Pathfinder Player Core, Paizo Inc

Best Setting

• Gold: Pathfinder Lost Omens: Tian Xia World Guide, Paizo Inc

• Silver: The Valley of Flowers, Phantom Mill Games

Best Writing

• Gold: Alone Against the Static, Chaosium Inc.

• Silver: Cloud Empress: Land of Cicadas, worlds by watt

Fan Favorite Publisher

• Choice: Free League Publishing

Best Game

• Gold: Shadowdark RPG, The Arcane Library

• Silver: Outgunned, Two Little Mice

Product of the Year

• Gold: Shadowdark RPG, The Arcane Library

• Silver: Outgunned, Two Little Mice

(Copy-pasted from here. Haven't found a blog post yet.)

This book includes:

• 25 new diseases
• 10 parasites
• A new surgery mechanic
• 25 medical-themed items
• New feats and backgrounds

This supplement is brought to you by a registered nurse who also happens to be an avid D&D player for 5 years. Add plagues, pathogens, and medicines to your campaigns with this book. Remember, the greatest enemy lies within!

We will be going live on Kickstarter this week! Sign up to be notified when we launch here.

I bought the physical rulebook and already owned the PDF, so I'm giving away the code.

Here's the link: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/index.php?discount=FLBXDUUC0N1V

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/22572048

> I'm trying out Mythic Game Master Emulator with Dungeon World. I've only done a few sessions of game setup but I'm already very impressed with the GME. I'd love to hear from you if you have thoughts or questions about solo roleplaying in general, Mythic in particular, or even just tabletop roleplaying in general. > > Head over to https://rpg.grapesoda.games/dw for the journal entries so far!

cross-posted from: https://ttrpg.network/post/7946465

> From a blog post by Ben Riggs. I thought it was interesting. > \------------ > > “Damn right I am a sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men… They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care.” > -Gary Gygax, EUROPA 10/11 August-September 1975 > > Do TTRPG Historians Lie? > > The internet has been rending its clothes and gnashing its teeth over the introduction to an instant classic of TTRPG history, The Making of Original D&D 1970-1977. Published by Wizards of the Coast, it details the earliest days of D&D’s creation using amazing primary source materials. > Why then has the response been outrage from various corners of the internet? Well authors Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro mention that early D&D made light of slavery, disparaged women, and gave Hindu deities hit points. They also repeated Wizards of the Coast’s disclaimer for legacy content which states: > > “These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.” > > — Making OD&D > > In response to this, an army of grognards swarmed social media to bite their shields and bellow. Early D&D author Rob Kuntz described Peterson and Tondro’s work as “slanderous.” On his Castle Oldskull blog, Kent David Kelly called it “disparagement.” > These critics are accusing Peterson and Tondro of dishonesty. Lying, not to put too fine a point on it.  > So, are they lying? Are they making stuff up about Gary Gygax and early D&D?  > > Is there misogyny in D&D? > > Well, let's look at a specific example of what Peterson and Tondro describe as “misogyny “ from 1975's Greyhawk. Greyhawk was the first supplement ever produced for D&D. Written by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz, the same Rob Kuntz who claimed slander above, it was a crucial text in the history of the game. For example, it debuted the thief character class.  > It also gave the game new dragons, among them the King of Lawful Dragons and the Queen of Chaotic Dragons. The male dragon is good, and female dragon is evil. (See Appendix 1 below for more.) It is a repetition of the old trope that male power is inherently good, and female power is inherently evil. (Consider the connotations of the words witch and wizard, with witches being evil by definition, for another example.)  > > > > Now so-called defenders of Gygax and Kuntz will say that my reading of the above text makes me a fool who wouldn’t know dragon’s breath from a virtue signal. I am ruining D&D with my woke wokeness. Gygax and Kuntz were just building a fun game, and decades later, Peterson and Tondro come along to crap on their work by screeching about misogyny. (I would also point out that as we are all white men of a certain age talking about misogyny, the worst we can expect is to be flamed online. Women often doing the same thing get rape or death threats.) Critics of their work would say that Peterson and Tondro are reading politics into D&D.   > > Except that when we return to the Greyhawk text, we see that it was actually Gygax and Kuntz who put “politics” into D&D. The text itself comments on the fact that the lawful dragon is male, and the chaotic one is female. Gygax and Kuntz wrote: “Women’s Lib may make whatever they wish from the foregoing.” > > The intent is clear. The female is a realm of chaos and evil, so of course they made their chaotic evil dragon a queen. > Yes, Gygax and Kuntz are making a game, but it is a game whose co-creator explicitly wrote into the rules that feminine power—perhaps even female equality—is by nature evil. There is little room for any other interpretation. > The so-called defenders of Gygax may now say that he was a man of his time, he didn’t know better, or some such. If only someone had told him women were people too in 1975! Well, Gygax was criticized for this fact of D&D at the time. And he left us his response.  > > I can’t believe Gary wrote this > > :( > > Writing in EUROPA, a European fanzine, Gygax said, > > “I have been accused of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female role, more non-gendered names, and so forth. I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in the ‘Raping and Pillaging[’] section, in the ‘Whores and Tavern Wenches’ chapter, the special magical part dealing with ‘Hags and Crones’, and thought perhaps of adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Viking’. Damn right I am sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower in the men’s locker room. They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care. I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.” > > — -Gary Gygax, EUROPA 10/11 August-September 1975 > > > So just to summarize here, Gygax wrote misogyny into the D&D rules. When this was raised with him as an issue at the time, his response was to offer to put rules on rape and sex slavery into D&D.     > > Peterson & Tondro are truth-tellers > > The outrage online directed at Peterson and Tondro is not only entirely misplaced and disproportional, and perhaps even dishonest in certain cases, it is also directly harming the legacies of Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz and the entire first generation of genius game designers our online army of outraged grognards purport to defend.  > How? Let me show you. > > That D&D is for Everyone Proves the Brilliance of its Creators > > The D&D player base is getting more diverse in every measurable way, including age, gender, sexual orientation, and race. To cite a few statistics, 81% of D&D players are Millenials or Gen Z, and 39% are women. This diversity is incredible, and not because the diversity is some blessed goal unto itself. Rather, the increasing diversity of D&D proves the vigor of the TTRPG medium. Like Japanese rap music or Soviet science fiction, the transportation of a medium across cultures, nations, and genders proves that it is an important method for exploring the human condition. And while TTRPGs are a game, they are also clearly an important method for exploring the human condition. The fact the TTRPG fanbase is no longer solely middle-aged Midwestern cis men of middle European descent, the fact that non-binary blerds and Indigenous trans women and fat Polish-American geeks like me and people from every bed of the human vegetable garden find meaning in a game created by two white guys from the Midwest is proof that Gygax and Arneson were geniuses who heaved human civilization forward, even if only by a few feet. > > So, as a community, how do we deal with the ugly prejudices of our hobby’s co-creator who also baked them into the game the world loves?  > > We could pretend there is no problem at all, and say that anyone who mentions the problem is a liar. There is no misogyny to see. There is no shit and there is no stink, and anyone who says there is shit on your sneakers is lying and is just trying to embarrass you. > I wonder how that will go? Will all these new D&D fans decide that maybe D&D isn’t for them? They know the stink of misogyny, just like they know shit when they smell it. To say it isn’t there is an insult to their intelligence. If they left the hobby over this, it would leave our community smaller, poorer, and suggest that the great work of Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz, and the other early luminaries on D&D was perhaps not so great after all… > We could take the route of Disney and Song of the South. Wizards could remove all the PDFs of early D&D from DriveThruRPG. They could refuse to ever reprint this material again. Hide it. Bury it. Erase it all with copyright law and lawyers. Yet no matter how deeply you bury the past, it always tends to come back up to the surface again. Heck, there are whole podcast series about that. And what will all these new D&D fans think when they realize that a corporation tried to hide its own mistakes from them? Again, maybe they decide D&D isn’t the game for them. > > Or maybe when someone tells you there is shit on your shoe, you say thanks, clean it off, and move on.  > > We honor the old books, but when they tell a reader they are a lesser human being, we should acknowledge that is not the D&D of 2024. Something like, “Hey reader, we see you in all your wondrous multiplicity of possibility, and if we were publishing this today, it wouldn’t contain messages and themes telling some of you that you are less than others. So we just want to warn you. That stuff’s in there.” > Y’know, something like that legacy content warning they put on all those old PDFs on DriveThruRPG.  > And when we see something bigoted in old D&D, we talk about it. It lets the new, broad, and deep tribe of D&D know that we do not want bigotry in D&D today. Talking about it welcomes the entire human family into the hobby.    > To do anything less is to damn D&D to darkness. It hobbles its growth, gates its community, denies the world the joy of the game, and denies its creators their due. D&D’s creators were visionary game designers. They were also people, and people are kinda fucked up.   > So a necessary step in making D&D the sort of cultural pillar that it deserves to be is to name its bigotries and prejudices when you see them. Failure to do so hurts the game by shrinking our community and therefore shrinking the legacy of its creators.  > > Appendix 1 > > Yeah, I know Chaos isn’t the same as Evil in OD&D. But I would also point out as nerdily as possible that on pg. 9 of Book 1 of OD&D, under “Character Alignment, Including Various Monsters and Creatures,” Evil High Priests are included under the “Chaos” heading, along with the undead. So I would put to you that Gygax did see a relationship between Evil and Chaos at the time.  > > Page 9 of Book 1 of OD&D. Note that the “Evil High Priests” are also chaotic.

Come and hung out with your own personal demons in Nightbound. New Eden awaits you with intrugues, mystery and horror. Everyone is welcomed here, but you may never leave the madness!

Nightbound just launched on Kickstarter, check it out and support this project if you like what you see!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/creativejamttrpgs/nightbound?ref=55vu4d

The poject just funded, now we start the ladder to unlock new streatch goals!

Nightbound is a PBTA urban fantasy game, that takes inspiration from Hellblazer, Preacher, Lucifer and other media. Like other urban fantasy games it’s a deep dive into modern horror with a focus on personal horror. PCs in Nightbound face supernatural threats while dealing with their own personal hell made of guilt, sin and consequences. As a PC you are capable of almost everything, you can kick that demon down with ease but your real enemy are the choices you make and how you choose to use your powers. Most of the time you’ll fail and you’ll suffer for it, but you will always have a chance to make it right and break the cycle of guilt!

We have have already unlocked 4 of our streatch goals which includes 2 new playbooks and 2 new locations for the main game setting. And there’s many more where they came from!

From the Kickstarter campaing you can download a free copy of the quickstart guide so that you can preview the game and try it out.

Our indie dev group just released our third playable adventure! This is the climax of a four-part set! It is now available for free on DriveThruRPG!

It’s for a free, open-source game system/setting we made that’s like cyberpunk in a post-scarcity society. Check it out! Honest feedback is appreciated.

>A gang of whitehat biohackers suspect they’re being targeted. That threat is about to get very real. > >On a sunny summer day, your help is needed escorting a eccentric researcher to a meeting with their collegues. It’s been six weeks since unknown actors staged a daring armed robbery on their laboratory, and tensions are running high. But when this mysterious adversary puts their plans into action, it’ll take all your skills and judgement to avert a nightmare.

This story continues to build on the previous two in its scope, complexity, and challenges to give diverse player and character types opportunitites to see more places, meet more characters, and find ways to use their specialities to help their communities in a story with around 8 - 10 hours of content.

I'm always on the lookout for run inspirations. But many Shadowrun missions were hit or miss

Has anyone looked at it? How streamlined it really is? Is this overhaul cohesive?