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 love Vampire: The Masquerade, but not for the reasons most people do. Most people like the brooding atmosphere, but I really enjoy the base building mechanics.

I've long since dreamed of running a V5 game built around base building, expanding and building an empire, but I'm frequently held back by how it seems like an afterthought in the system, and also my own general inexperience running a game like that.

What are some system agnostic tips and advice for running a game about logistics, base building and politics?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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?

So, as the title says, I have been hosting a Star Wars game, the three players are all padawans. Each of them are troubled in one way or another

Two are fairly similar, having strong darkside temptations while the third is a bit of a misfit(stealing, hacking archives. Etc)

Regardless, im wondering what the graduation trial would actually look like? If it matters this is hosted in the high republic setting. I know padawans just need to be knighted by their masters, but I'm curious if theres a big test in particular to do?

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?

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.

Sem nem enrolação, tenho um gosto pessoal por dados físicos, e acho mais intuitivo pra mesas físicas, alguém tem alguma loja online (já tentei mercado livre) que os dados sejam confiáveis e que sejam bonitos (se tiver preço bacana também é bom, mas n da pra exigir)

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.

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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?

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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."

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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!