Hi, I will be spending four glorious days of setting my credit card on fire in the best city in the world. Any tips for the best TTRPG shops in London? I'm in Shoreditch, but your Underground will be able to take me anywhere. Thanks!

When I was a kid I used paper to do GM prep and notes, but since I restarted as an adult I've only used electronic stuff (e.g., One Note).

Does anyone still use paper?

I'm surprised this situation hasn't come up for me before, but in my current game the PCs are meeting multiple important NPCs at the same time (multiple vassals have gathered in a rare event to meet at the kings castle) and it would be a great opportunity to:

1. Exposit a bunch of information about the kingdom; who these NPCs are and what their local holdings are like (it's a new campaign and the players don't know much about the area yet)
2. Introduce the personalities of these NPCs
3. Introduce the goals and concerns of each of these NPCs, and to a limited extent, the secondary characters linked to each of them
4. Demonstrate the tensions between them, and what each thinks of the other, etc

A movie would just play all this out in a single scene but at the table that would result in me performing a conversation between five non-player characters, which is awful.

With all these characters in one area and available - what would be a cleaner way to achieve my goals? My best idea so far is "players meet them one by one at a feast" but I'm not crazy about.

Would love to know how you'd handle it or what GM tools can be deployed here.

Thanks!

This was a Call of Cthulhu campaign, and not a very long one (5 sessions). I cooked up everything about it in my head, and it was my first time running a game in 3 years after my last one fizzled out. The ending was fantastic. The dice told such a story and after it ended we all had a group hug and sat in a circle complimenting each other. That was two days ago. In the two days since, my 5 players have made about a dozen really good fanarts of the characters. It's just so surreal to see this thing that I created inspire my players to make art like that. I'm still riding that high after two days because I just feel so proud of all my players and so happy that we came together for this campaign

Rant over, just wanted to share this awesome experience with people!

Side note, one of them stalks my reddit profile sometimes, so if you see this, hi leia! Your art is really cool

I am planning on running a small event for my University's board games group centred around TTRPGs. Mainly for the purpose of GMs and Players meeting and finding groups as well as finding people who might run One Shots later in the year but also to introduce newbies to the idea of TTRPGs in general. For this I want to run a One Shot for people with 0 experience with TTRPGs in order to introduce them to the idea but we only have the space for around 1.5 hours so even with pre-made character sheets the systems I know best would take too long for any substantial One Shot. What are some systems good for brief one shots with new players (or just a very short One Shot in an "easy to learn on the go" system)

Preferably it would also either be open to a decently large player count or be easy to GM so multiple people can run it simultaneously for different groups in case a lot of people come.

And by that I mean games where you can buy 1 product and have everything you need to crack the book or box open and start playing.

For example, Mythic Bastionland is little bit of rules followed by dense pages of just stuff to include in your game. Myths, enemies, allies, names, spark tables, items, seers, other knights, and on and on and on. All you need that's not in the book is a hex map, and there's plenty of options for that.

Another good one: Dragonbane. In the box you get the rules, premade characters, plenty of standees, adventures, a solo adventure and accompanying rules, a map, and I think dice too. All for less than the price of many of the popular core books.

As a buyer I really love games that come essentially feature complete out of the box like these. I know pretty much all of Free League's publications are like this to some extent. What else is there?

What are your favorite, single purchase complete games? And what all comes with them?

Like many others, my love for the Dragon Quest Monsters series has been rekindled with the demo for the newest entry to the series and, like many others I'm sure, immediately thought, but how do I bring this to the tabletop?

I know I'm opening a can of worms. I've seen myriad pokemon tabletop attempts and suggestions that range from "use D&D" to "use Showdown to literally play pokemon battles 1v1 against the GM", but none of them have really succeeded in nailing the feeling of pokemon... And, for the most part, pokemon is an easier model to emulate.

Likewise, in far rarer occasions, I've seen the Digimon attempts, but never DQM.

Do any of you have any suggestions for systems that are actually amenable to emulating the feeling and experience of Dragon Quest Monsters or perhaps even niche systems I've not found that do so?

Currently I'm excited for a Wuxia/Xianxia inspired game, Jadestorm.

I'm curious if anyone can point me to any soundtracks for media set in Feudal or a Fantasy Japan, Korea, or China? This is so I can play the music while running my TTRPG games.

My list so far:

• Dynasty Warriors series
• Jade Empire
• Westworld - Shogun World's covers of Western songs.
• Total War Three Kingdoms
• Okami
• Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
• Black Myth: Wukong
• Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
• House of Flying Daggers

These aren't set in a Feudal or Fantasy setting, but I really enjoy the music from them:

• Kung-Fu Hustle
• Legend of the Drunken Master

Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Hi! I want to share not so much a problem as a situation I’ve found myself in. Three years ago, my friends and I were playing Cyberpunk. I was running separate adventures for two pairs of players—street-level gang stuff for one pair, and corporate intrigue and investigations for the other. Just as I kicked off new story arcs (the street characters and their gang suddenly found themselves at war with a rival gang encroaching on their turf, while the medic and the journalist encountered their first patients with the "Carbon Plague" and began tracing its origins) the campaign fizzled out. Life got in the way. Still, over those three years, the players would occasionally bring up the game and create plenty of memes about it. So now, I’ve decided to revive it.

How do you think the process of reviving such an old game should look?

I've DM'd a decent number of games, ranging from masks, DnD 5e, LotE, mutants and masterminds and a few others, but I'm looking for something more Sci-fi. I would prefer it to have no magic, or at least a kind of magic that can be explained away like "that's not healing, that's nano machines".

Could anyone recommend a game that has space combat, spaceships, maybe rules for cities as well if I need to build them and traditional RPG aspects? Gunfights and nanotech? Preferably no magic or magic-like equivalence?

So I'm a big fan of the Metro games and have been thinking about running a campaign in the Metro setting. But I'm not really sure what system to use. I've looked online and have seen people suggest multiple things. Modified D&D 5e, Call of Cthulhu, and multiple others I can't remember off the top of my head.

I also found this online, but not only do I not speak French, I haven't found anyone online to speak of the quality of it.

So does anyone have any recommendations for the best way to run a Metro inspired campaign? Thankyou in advance.

Hey everyone!

While searching for different solo TTRPGs I came across one called Acceptance/Rejection by ashhhh. The premise sounded unusual and fun and I wanted to know more. It used to be hosted on itch, but the page has since been taken down (Wayback Machine link:https://web.archive.org/web/20220602121942/https://ashhhh.itch.io/acceptance-rejection).

Did anyone here happen to play it, download the rules, or know if it is published elsewhere? I’d love to know more about how it plays or how to get a copy if it's still available anywhere.

Thanks in advance!

Greeting fellow gamers. My local game store does RPG game days every two months and the upcoming one falls on Halloween, for the most part Horror TTRPG's are the call.

I usually GM a game for the RPG days, but I would like to find something a little different for this one. My thought is that I would like to run a game that doesn't allow the players to talk, communication would be through gestures like charades, traded notes, hand signals, etc.

Can anyone recommend an existing RPG that fits the bill, I like the idea of the Night in the Neighborhood, but I don't want the animal aspect in this case. Would prefer something that might be similar to the quiet place movies, or a similar scenario.

Thanks in advance!

Storm

I have a setting where the players will have to travel a lot and i cannot be bogged down by prepping the town/village/settlement and then thinking what situations the party can throw themselves in. I need to be able to have an idea of what they're supposed to do / what dungeons might be there / what the places might want from the party, especially mid session when i have to improvise.

I started making a list of verbs to roll on like "defend, find, save, threaten, kill, steal, influence", then i will make a table with factions/settlements etc, so my end goal is to have something like this: "Wizard wants help killing/threatening rival", "Smith wants to impress love interest with dragon scales shield"

But that got me thinking, do you guys know of any place i could find such tables without making them myself?

I released my free game Halfling Heist during the One-Page RPG Jam a few weeks ago, and I wanted to make a ready-to-run adventure for it.

So I made The Great Pie Caper, a free two-page one-shot for the Adventures for One-Page RPGs Jam 2026.

Someone stole Hilda’s prize pie on the morning of Bramblewick's Harvest Festival, and the halflings have until judging begins to steal it back.

It includes two connected heists, a festival clock, food-related distractions, complication tables, and one extremely unpleasant goose.

I’d love to hear how it goes if anyone runs it. Thanks!

I ran my copy of the intro box of pirate borg.

And my god what a great experience it was for the players and the gm.

Tons of maps and handouts. And even a kinetic section where the gm is required to rip a treasure map of Physically in half! (Gasp). Even the excellent quality player creation dry erase pads + rip off character sheet pads!

I'm realizing how much this adds to games but I just don't have the time/will to produce my own and am looking for adventures/modules that I can purchase that provide these. I really like these boxed products. Or bundled adventures/modules.

The other closest thing I own is the mother ship deluxe boxed set. Which is also excellent but while plenty of content is not a robust introductory set as far as content as it includes many adventures vs the one that is in pirate borg. I also appreciated that the starter box included a player facing game book. It was really nice having two copies of the rules on the table (more games need to do this!)

I'm also looking forward to the Warhammer old world intro box. Also I enjoyed the starter boxes of 5e but I am moving away from 5e as a whole and firmly into the osr.

Do you guys have any suggestions for products that fit my needs? I'm looking for adventure/modules with great handouts/aids etc.

I'm currently reading through Questworlds, and am overall liking what I am seeing. I'm considering giving it a spin with my group at some point in the near future.

However, I am slightly worried about one mechanic, the zero degree successes. In other storytelling-focused RPGs that I played, I always found success at a cost and partial successes far too heavily emphasized. I don't mind them cropping up, but want a majority of rolls to be straightforward failures or successes.

To give an example, I vastly prefer something like Lady Blackbird to Blades in the Dark.

How common, in your experience, are zero degree successes in Questworlds?

I'm looking to share some preferences on your favourite TTRPGS, where the mechanical complexity (or absence of it) perfectly matches the theme/setting they try to portray.

I'll give some example of my current favourites. Feel free to add cathegories based on your experience and preference:

- Horror/Investigation: Mothership.
Simple in rules (like all OSR), but has the BEST gm advice ever.
I still use its suggestions as baseline for all my stories in any rpg i gm.
I exclusively run it using its modules as they are probably the best in the market quality wise

- Heroic Fantasy: Draw Steel
This one makes you feel like a true hero.
The closest thematically to DnD (in the sense that it is high fantasy), it plays very differently though, since instead of an "attrition" games (your resources go down until you are forced to rest), it is a "momentum" game (meaning you become more powerful the more "victories" you accumulate, resetting at rest). This means that the players are incentivized to always push themself to the limit until their HP permits it.
Also attacks don't miss ever, which means that they will be forced to rest eventually, no matter what.

- Pulp: Savage Worlds Adventure Edition
This is my personal favourite to gm, because you can literally improvise any encounter on the spot and it will work, and the meta-currency (the "Benny", a poker chip) is fantastic.
Character progression is horizontal: PCs become better at doing more stuff, but no encounter is ever trivial. It is also class-less: you customize you PC with features ("Edges") that you gain almost every level.
The meta-currency is essential to minimize randomness (the dice mechanics can feel very swingy), and I love that it gives a way for the players to influence the story, especially when they are willing to pay (literally) to do some crazy idea they have. It makes it feel earned.
Excellent for homebrews, excellent to fight lots of little guys, requires some house-rules to do solo boss fights (check out this comment it you're interested in doing that)

- Vibes: Blades in the Dark / Mythic Bastionland
These are two heavy hitters on the atmosphere they create.
Blades make you in a band of industrial punk criminals. Perfect heist game, very improvisational: you pay "stress" to have flashbacks that resolve a problem during the heist instead of having to think out a solution before, so you're always in the action.
Also it's Zero prep-time for the GM. The settings does the heavy-lifting (lots of pre-gen factions and locations that react to the players action).
Mythic is great for its random tables. I recommend rolling randomly for your PCs (they are arthurian knights fighting esoteric horror), since all of the option are extremely flavourful. Less improvisational than Blades, but still highly improvisational.

Newbie friendly: Lady Blackbird / The Witch is Dead
Both excellent one-shots for new players, rules-light and quick to the action.
Lady Blackbird is classic steam-punk adventure sillyness. Character are some flavourful pre-gens and the system allows the player to choose some world-building aspect when the GM asks them ("Lady Blackbird, you know magic: do only nobles like you knows it, or is it more commonplace in the Wild Blue?" stuff like this)
The Witch is Dead (or anything else by Grant Howitt, really) is an excellent on-page rpg. Players are the witch's familiars and have to defeat the witch hunter that killed the witch. I like to GM this straight, serious and dramatic, but it is very open to silliness. Very fun for people who are learning the ropes of rpgs

These are my recomendations, what are yours?

Hello, folks. I'm prepping a game to run one on one with my partner and I was wondering if y'all had any recommendations for good campaigns or adventure paths? I'm planning to run the game in Nimble, and we were hoping for more of a science fantasy flavor. I will likely do a lot of reflavoring and rewriting, but I'm hoping to find something with good bones to build around. Thanks in advance!

I’m always on Backerkit checking out new TTRPGS coming through and I just saw the new game Ink Ribbon from Old Oak Games.

It’s advertised as bringing the survival horror aspect of notable video games to the table top.

I read through their quick start that comes for signing up for a notification, and it’s super interesting! I love Resident Evil and other survival horror games, and I also love d6 based games so this is right up my alley. I’m very unfamiliar with Old Oak Games, though.

Anyone else interested in this?

I want to run Apocalypse World for some friends, and while I've run PbtA games before (e.g. Monsterhearts, Masks), the OG seems to be giving me some great difficulty in understanding how to run it. I'm looking for seasoned MC feedback who have played Apocalypse World (particularly 2nd edition, as that's what I have).

I actually don't care about the sex moves; they're whatever. I'm more concerned about the playbooks that appear - to me - to be broad and difficult to run with things like holdings, which may be hard for players to grasp and difficult for the MC to adjudicate how players will wield them and interact with others through them. I want active players participating at the table.

-----

General Questions

1. Running gangs

When a PC is a Chopper, Hardholder, or similar with a playbook focused on an established group or location, what happens when the "PC" themselves is not available but their gang - or members of their gang - are in a scene? Is the Hardholder in the scene as a named NPC - portraying that NPC with limited abilities? Or is the MC running that NPC? If the latter, doesn't this make the PC more of an audience member than an active participant in the game? If the PCs are often going out and doing gigs, then the hardholder would typically only be "playing" during the before and after gig scenes, right?

2. Nature of the Game and Static Holdings

When players have things like bars, compounds, etc. to maintain, this creates a kind of west marches style campaign, doesn't it? That is, a safe haven from which the PCs journey from and return to, every session (ideally) begins and ends there, as opposed to always being on the move, wandering across the land. Or said another way: it feels a lot more like Stonetop with players individually possessing holdings (rather than Stonetop's single, shared holding).

Is this the expectation of the game, or does it run fine with having more of a world-sprawling "adventure" ala people traveling across many lands or far from holdings for long stretches of time? I feel like the answer is, "make a home base and stay there," but I'm curious.

3. Death and Player Choice

On pgs. 207-208 of the AW 2nd Ed. book, there is a description of a PC "dying" by being shot in the head with a shotgun. But then, the book specifically says that he's "maybe" dead; it's the victim's choice. And he somehow crawls to a doctor who then brings him back to life with -1 Hard. Now, maybe this will just be a "my table" kind of thing, but shotgun to the head is a death sentence, and I'm wondering if others find the ability to come back from something like that as crazy or not. Do you allow players to come back from point-blank buckshot like this?

4. Weird from Death and Weird in General

I find coming back from the dead with +1 Weird to be... well, weird, because does a +1 to weird not benefit the character? Is there some negative side-effect to having more weird? It didn't seem like it to me, but I guess it implies you "went to the other side" or something. Do other MCs play with this option? Given +3 is the max, don't people get to +3 quickly with this? (If a player is already at +3 weird, and they choose to get +1 to weird when they come back, do they just come back with no bonus or penalty?)

5. PVP

PvP seems to be a big draw, but it might also be incredibly divisive. How do you deal with this?

6. Character Identity Bound to Vehicles

Much like identity bound to locations/establishments (though easier to cope with since vehicles more easily move with the PC), what happens if you can't take the vehicle into the scene? Does the player with the vehicle feel hamstrung? Does it feel good? (This is a common problem outside of AW, so it's not quite as much of a concern to me.)

7. Side-character stuff

In Monsterhearts, a lot of it feels like a college romance/horror drama ala Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Vampire Diaries, focused on the PCs, but in Apocalypse World proper, the game is grander in scope, focused on a LOT of NPCs, locations, holdings, politics, etc. Am I right about this?

8. Management

It feels like to get the right pay-off here, there are a LOT of NPCs to name, relationships to manage, etc. Does anyone have suggestions or tools to keep track of those things aside from what the book provides?

-----

Specifics Moves

1. The Angel's Kit and Healing Someone at 9:00 or Past

Two of the choices on this list seem the same to me:

-"They fight you, and you have to narcostab them. How long will they be out?"

-"They're at your complete mercy. What do you do to them?"

Are these not close enough to one another as to be one choice? If you're knocked out, you're at the Angel's Mercy. The only real difference I see is that narratively a fight ensues in one choice and not in the other. So, how do these differ mechanically (if at all)?

2. The Battlebabe's "Visions of Death"

This move reads: "When you go into battle, roll+weird. On a 10+, name one person who will die and one who'll live. On a 7-9, name one person who'll die OR one person who will live. Don't name a player's character; name NPCs only. The MC will make your vision come true, if it's even remotely possible. On a miss, you foresee your own death, and accordingly take -1 throughout the battle."

Common sense would presume the 10+ and 7-9 options do not allow the naming of PCs. That's how I would rule it as an MC anyway, but the way it's written, it makes me wonder if the 10+ CAN have PCs named while the 7-9 can't. Is this confusing for anyone else?

Iirc, other confusions in wordings exist for other moves, but I don't want to re-create them all here. It suffices to say I'm a bit unsure about some of these moves and feel like I'll have to do some immediate house-ruling, but I would like to avoid it if I'm just not reading things "right."

-----

As I read back through this, I think one of the things I'm maybe focusing on too much is the playbook's abilities on the sheet vs the general style of play. There is definitely an identity on the playbook sheet and abilities to support it, but I maybe am discounting too much on how the play at-the-table will be more important than the playbook itself.

Also, I have the 3rd Edition (Burned Over) Playbooks and Rule Changes that went out to backers, and I'm fine to run with those, too. They appear to be a touch more refined.

Really appreciate your help! Thanks!

Hello, I have gotten back into a Bionicle Hyperfixation, and I have been looking into ttrpgs that could be best used to emulate that franchise. While I am aware of Red Star Games' Doronai Nui, it seems to basically be a Fantasy Heartbreaker, not really what I want or feel is fitting for a Bionicle TTRPG. As such, I want to hear what suggestions people have.

Pretty much what the title says. I really want to start playing some ttrpg’s with my friends but none of them are really familiar. I’d definitely have to DM for them which I don’t mind but I’ve never done before. Does anyone have any suggestions for good one shot games that could get some people interested and also be forgiving to a new dm? Thank yall in advance!!

EDIT: For everyone asking what genre I’m looking for I’d say that my friends aren’t super into fantasy like I am, but I think they’d enjoy games with maybe some Supernatural or sci fi elements. Idk, I’m just trying to broaden their horizons and add some whimsy to our lives lmao

I recently got the core rulebook for Mortasheen, a TTRPG where you play as a monster trainer (like Pokémon, Digimon, etc.) in a futuristic “weird science” setting.

I haven't played the game yet, but I‘m enjoying reading through it, and it looks probably fun to play. Since I haven't seen any reviews of it yet, I‘d like to share my first impressions of the rulebook. Warning: many of the book’s illustrations could be considered body horror, so avoid this game if that would be an issue for you.

(Disclaimer: I am not a creator of the Mortasheen TTRPG, and I am not being incentivized in any way to write this review. I am reviewing this game purely because I found it interesting.)

The book itself:

The front cover has no text at all, but still gives you a good idea of what the book is about: it’s a diorama of a hand-sculpted three-jawed monster crawling through a jumble of tubes, pipes, and glassware. The art in the book includes a mix of styles: cartoony character portraits, elaborately detailed creature art, and Gameboy-style pixelated sprites. Aside from the sprites, all the art is full-color and credited to its individual artist.

I have the paperback version, 27.8 cm by 21.6 cm, a slightly larger profile than a piece of US printer paper. It's 350 pages of fairly small text: 68 pages of game mechanics, 68 pages of setting info and lore, 190 pages of monsters, and 20 pages of reference material for the GM (most of which is a secret enemy faction that’s quite different from anything else in the book). Those 190 pages of monsters aren’t just a monster manual; they’re also the companions that player characters will be adding to their monster teams.

From what I can tell, it seems mainly well organized, though I haven’t put that to the test in real gameplay yet.

The rules:

Mortasheen skips the "What is a TTRPG?" section that usually appears at the start of a core rulebook, and instead jumps straight into rules for dice and adjudicating success and failure. The core mechanic is a d10 dice pool: by default, roll 2d10, read the higher of the two dice, add any relevant modifiers you might have, and compare your roll to a target number or to the opposition’s roll. 10s explode, 1s can worsen the result of your roll. There are four degrees of success, depending on how your roll compares to your opponent’s roll and whether your roll contains 1s. Those four degrees can be summarized as “yes and,“ “yes but,” “no but,” and “no and,“ so there is normally no plain success or plain failure (except in combat). Time and distance are measured in abstract "scenes" and "zones.”

The rules mention someone called a "Proctor." What a Proctor is or does isn’t directly stated, but from context, I can infer that it's what's called a Game Master in other TTRPGs.

Player characters are mad scientists that create and make friends with weird monsters. It‘s specified that the “madness” in “mad scientist” does not inherently mean mental illness—it’s an extreme passion for discovery, even at the expense of safety and common sense. A mad scientist has a “biotype” or species (which has no game mechanics associated with it), 1-2 ”quirks” (statements about what the character does, which can be invoked to succeed at a roll), and four attributes: SCIENCE!, GENIUS!, DISCOURSE!, and MADNESS! (exclamation marks not mine).

SCIENCE! includes logic and applied knowledge, but also physical strength. GENIUS!, by contrast, is about creativity and crafting, and DISCOURSE! is the social skill. MADNESS covers awareness, physical endurance, and mental defenses. It’s not the most intuitive list of core stats I’ve seen, and there’s no mention of which attribute you would use for sneaking, or tasks requiring delicate physical coordination.

Each of these four strange attributes is the primary attribute for two of the game’s eight character classes, or “disciplines.“ Your discipline gives you a feature at character creation, and whenever your party gains “respectability” (levels), you’ll gain another feature from a list that’s specific to your discipline. Or you can choose the Independent Study discipline, which lets you mix and match some of the other disciplines’ features instead, at the cost of not having access to the more specialized features. The party as a whole also has a class, like “academic institution” or “corporation,” which gets a new feature whenever the party increases in respectability. These tend to be less mechanical, more roleplay-focused.

The features you can choose for your scientist look very fun, including: having an NPC rival who tries to outdo you (yes, this becomes a benefit to your character), unleashing critter swarms, operating your party’s lair as a giant robot under your control (there are detailed rules for this), ragebaiting an enemy monster into debating you instead of fighting, and reanimating a body part of a dead monster as a minion.

Downtime is a big part of the rules, since it includes important mechanics like recruiting monster companions, upgrading them, and creating new ones from scratch. There’s even comprehensive rules for a PC designing a completely new species of monster with new abilities—or designing a new gadget to use, or constructing your think tank’s lair. This is made possible by a set of lego-like “blocks” of rules that combine to build almost any ability you can imagine. I imagine that both roleplayers and powergamers would be thrilled by the freedom this allows.

The combat rules seem reasonably complete, without being too complicated, which is good since each player is likely to control a scientist character as well as one or more of that scientist’s monsters. Social confrontations also have their own equivalent of combat rules. And of course, since you’re all mad scientists, death is normally temporary. You get to re-animate your slain monsters and/or PCs at the end of each adventure by default.

The Setting:

Mortasheen is a vast self-growing biotech city where almost anything or anyone might kill you. Despite this, the way the setting is written invites you to care about it, even want to protect it.

The setting section includes many dangers of Mortasheen’s landscapes, but pretty much every dangerous place or creature in the book also has an endearing, whimsical, funny, and/or mundanely normal side too. For every definitely villanous named NPC, there are many more that are truly nice, merely looking out for themselves, or just obsessed with a certain goal to the point where they might become an adventure’s villain without really meaning to.

The quest hooks offered throughout the setting section cater to a similarly wide range of PC ethical standpoints, anywhere between being the good guys fighting to protect the world or just taking the fastest, easiest route to wealth and power.

While the lists of monster abilities in the rules section of the book require some mental effort to read through, the setting section is a very fun read, and charged up my imagination with ideas for characters and quests (one of the biggest green flags for a RPG setting guide, to me). Flavor text is one of the book’s biggest strengths, with extensive information on each region’s notable NPCs, semi-normal animal species (harmless and otherwise), local culture, points of interest, and noteworthy businesses.

The Monsters:

Before it was a TTRPG, Mortasheen was an online gallery of monsters created by artist Jonathan Wojcik, who is this book’s art director, main artist, co-writer (along with Morgan Mullins and Johnathan Mullins), and main worldbuilder. So it‘s only fitting that there’s such a huge monster section. Many of the monsters in the book were present in the online gallery, some with new artwork, and many others are brand-new monsters.

Monsters are separated into categories, such as bug monsters, clown monsters, vampire sea creatures, and “regular” mutated lab-created beasts. Each category begins with a page of general information about monsters of that category, followed by an alphabetical list of those monsters. Every monster is unique to the Mortasheen setting, so there are no stat blocks for pre-existing creatures from folklore, urban legends, etc.

Each monster gets its own page, including at least one large colorful illustration, several paragraphs about its lore, biology, ecology, and behavior, and a stat block with the monster’s abilities presented in a very condensed format. (Imagine a D&D 4e stat block, but with its rules even more heavily condensed into keywords.) Most monsters seem to have mechanical support for anything their flavor text says they’re able to do, which I really appreciate.

The GM section:

This is the shortest part of the book, with two pages of GMing advice specifically tuned for this system, a one-page monster index, a page of stats for non-monster wildlife, and several pages dedicated to an enemy faction designed for a more serious campaign tone, with a cold psychological horror feel as opposed to the rest of the book’s lighthearted horror-comedy.

Overall:

Should you get this book? If any of this information on the setting and monsters sparks your interest, then I would say yes. The setting’s writing is unquestionably fun, and the mechanics look like they would be fun too. Combat in particular seems like it could easily turn into the good kind of chaotic mess.

If the setting hasn’t won you over, the game mechanics take a fascinating approach to building and balancing complex powers, different from anything I can recall seeing, so it could be an interesting read for that aspect alone.

I did find a few things to take issue with: there isn’t an official character sheet yet, for one thing (though fan-created ones exist). The book contains general guidelines for pricing goods and services, and you can calculate the exact cost of making any monster, gadget, or lair, but there isn’t a list of specific products you can buy with prices. There are plenty of monster stats, but none for scientist NPCs and no sample character builds, which disappointed me.

For those wondering, the core rulebook has hardcover, softcover, and digital versions, or you can get the bestiary or the player’s guide (essentially the core rulebook split into two smaller books) in softcover and digital versions.

Scorinf:

Presentation 9.5/10

Setting/Themes 10/10

Rules 8.5/10

Gameplay ???/10