Tabletop RPG Catch All

Yeah, there are a lot of one-page RPGs out there. It's become kind of a thing recently.

Cthulhu Dark. Three (small) pages.

Other fun small games:
Ghost Lines: What do you do when your Dungeon World campaign ends with your players failing to save the world? Make in into a three-page RPG!

On the Ghost Lines
It is the year 891 of the Imperium that united the shattered isles of the cataclysm under one rule — all glory to his majesty the Immortal Emperor.
You work the ghost lines—the electro-railroad that passes through the ink-dark deadlands between cities. Spirits of the dead, drawn to the vital essence of the living, often get entangled in the powerful electrical field generated by the trains. Line bulls like you walk the length of the cars, magnetized boots clanking and breather-mask hissing, to clear the offending spirits with your lightning-hooks before they do too much damage.

Metrofinál: Bodhisattvas on the subway at the end of the world (6 pages).

I have a mate who fancies giving roleplaying a go. I'm just going to go with Call of Cthulhu on the account that a) I have so much stuff for it, I can just do a published game without effected my prep for my Shadowrun game b) D100 is super easy to understand - just roll under that number

My introduction to table top roleplay was Warhammer Fantasy 2ed, another D100 system, really takes the pressure off the player and allows the game to happen instead of having to explain things like mods or dicepools. Just 2 dice, roll under a number. Boom simples.

onewild wrote:

I have a mate who fancies giving roleplaying a go. I'm just going to go with Call of Cthulhu on the account that a) I have so much stuff for it, I can just do a published game without effected my prep for my Shadowrun game b) D100 is super easy to understand - just roll under that number

My introduction to table top roleplay was Warhammer Fantasy 2ed, another D100 system, really takes the pressure off the player and allows the game to happen instead of having to explain things like mods or dicepools. Just 2 dice, roll under a number. Boom simples.

My suggestion for Call of Cthulhu is to spend a few minutes and do your own play through of combat. Everything else is pretty easy in D100, but when I GM'd a year ago, combat is where things fell apart.

And if you want really short rules, try One Tweet RPGs:

One PC w/ no rolls; all others are GMs. If GMs disagree, roll 1d6 VS each other. PC may gift GMs permanent, extra d6(s) from a pool of 3.
All set their own music library/playlist to shuffle. GM takes direction from the next song title; players get one-use abilities from theirs.
Watch sports w/ sound off or low. One person does play-by-play; 1-2 do color commentary. Extras are sideline reporters, halftime hosts, etc.

Also, speaking of free indie RPGs, it looks like the Indie RPG Awards web site went down a shile ago. That's really sad. I loved finding new and interesting free games to read on my phone and never play.
There's a very short free steam-punk/sky pirate game called Lady Blackbird that the rules-light criwd would love. Ghost Lines and Ghost/Echo are both great in the "build a weird world as you go" sort of way.

I have a new group starting! I found another immigrant who was LFG and who, it appears, is a dedicated GM. He's got a nicely detailed "Game of Thrones meets The French Revolution" campaign world set up that we'll be playing through with the Castles and Crusades system.

So far we've found 2 random gamers who haven't done a lot of PnP but are keen to give it a try, and my cousin-in-law who played a homebrew campaign for 5 years that seemed mostly focussed on having the female players disrobe. Weirdo.

I miss my old group but, hey, it's a start.

Now that I have a color printer again, I'd love some recommendations for papercraft terrain.

I have some really old WorldWorks dungeon stuff, and some E-Z Dungeons and e-Adventure Tiles, but nothing for wilderness/outdoors. And given that my collection of this sort of thing is about ten years old now(!), I've probably missed out on all sort of cool developments.

misplacedbravado wrote:

Now that I have a color printer again, I'd love some recommendations for papercraft terrain.

I have some really old WorldWorks dungeon stuff, and some E-Z Dungeons and e-Adventure Tiles, but nothing for wilderness/outdoors. And given that my collection of this sort of thing is about ten years old now(!), I've probably missed out on all sort of cool developments.

I think Fat Dragon just Kickstarted a bunch of wilderness themed stuff. Don't know if it's been released yet though.

Trail of Cthulhu is one of the Bag of Holding sets this week. I remember hearing very good things about it before; went ahead and yoinked it.

I'd totally be interested in checking that out - we should definitely make a tabletop day happen!

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

I'd totally be interested in checking that out - we should definitely make a tabletop day happen!

For sure! Btw, bad news on the Malazan book front - I don't think they survived the move-related purge. Sorry!

No worries at all, the kindle shall feast on a new series!

If anyone wants to be on the other side of a Call of Cthulhu style game, check out Soth by Steve Hickey (a friend, plus editor of both editions of Monster of the Week).

You play cultists in a small town, trying to perform the rituals to summon your dark god Soth. It's fun (but very black humour - you'll need to murder several people to conduct the rituals and stop any investigators who get in your way).

Last summer, my in-laws came up for a visit and I ran We Be Goblins! for them, using the Variable Players Mod. It was a great success.

They're going to come up again for the first weekend in August, and there is a very good chance I will end up running another one-shot.

We Be Goblins Too! is a strong possibility (did the author of the Variable Players Mod do one for the second adventure? If so, I haven't been able to find it).

But I'd also love to run some 5e. Any good short, stand-alone 5e adventures out there? Or tips for converting adventures from Pathfinder to 5e?

(Cross-posted from the Kickstarter thread)

Undying is a tabletop vampire roleplaying game, based on a very radical hack of the Apocalypse World system. Looks really cool (I've been waiting for this one, after seeing bits and pieces while it's been in development.

My Shadowrun game should be coming to an end this week. For everything that is right with a setting, man that rulebook is a terrible written piece of rubbish. Anyway we have all enjoyed it and will be returning later on.

However the most exciting thing about this is my mate is going to start gming WHFRP2ed again! which is the first game I ever played in and we are returning to our characters. I understand why he stopped (he was pretty much the only gm for best part of 3 years with the exception of the odd one off) but so good to be going back. Be the first fantasy based game we have played for a long while (unless you count Qin)

Some thoughts on alignment in a low-fantasy setting I wrote up for our group:

Some GMs tend not to use alignment in their games and I can see why - they're often used simplistically and with little nuance. Quite often they're used simply to put Lawful Good in the good guy camp and Chaotic Evil in the bad guy camp. People aren't like that though - 'Evil' people rarely think they're being evil, even in a fantasy setting where someone is clearly the villain. Even in the real world everyone has perfectly decent rationalizations for their own behaviour.

I'm a PolSci graduate so I often think of alignments in a manner similar to the political compass (http://www.politicalcompass.org/). It maps out like this:

The Law/Chaos axis becomes Authoritarian/Anarchist: You believe either that people should be told what to do (Lawful) or people should be unconstrained in their behaviour (Chaotic).

The Good/Evil axis becomes the Socialism/Liberalism axis: You either believe in the common good (Good) or individual liberty (Evil).
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What I like about this approach is it doesn't ringfence anyone into being on the side of the angels or the devils. Lawful Good, in this approach, is a Maoist/Leninist viewpoint that believes in the rule of law to enforce the common good. A Chaotic Evil viewpoint, by contrast, is an Liberal Capitalist alignment having more in common with Milton Friedman. Put two players like that in a party and have them interact with a gay, drug addicted prostitute NPC and the "Chaotic Evil" character is going to be more sympathetic to their rights than the "Lawful Good" character.

Here's how I see the breakdown in broad terms:

Lawful Good = Authoritarian left. Believes in the rule of the State for the good of all. Mao. Stalin.
Lawful Neutral = Authoritarian. My country right or wrong. This can range from the moderate centrism of Obama all the way to the extremes of Fascism at the far end of the scale.
Lawful Evil = Classic Neocon. This is the hallmark of modern capitalism and almost every european country has governments falling on this side of the axis. A strong state supporting a free economy.
Neutral Good = Social Democrat. The good of all is your primary concern and the role of the state, to you, is to ensure the basic needs of all are met.
Neutral Evil = Economic liberalism. You believe the state is there to provide the enough law and order that individuals can pursue wealth and happiness. This is the alignment of the entrepreneur.
Chaotic Good ​= Revolutionary Socialist. This is the alignment of the socialist radical, or the crusading journalist. You resist the abuses of the state whom you believe to only serve entrenched interests.
Chaotic Neutral = The Minarchist/Moralist. You believe in small government or that government should get out of the way entirely and leave people to get on with what their own morality dictates. A good alignment for the pious conservative.
Chaotic Evil = The Libertarian. You prize individual liberty above all else. This covers everything from free market capitalism to the libertarianism of the Tea Party.

I find this a useful approach to take that allows alignment to bring nuance to a character in a low fantasy setting and helps illustrate their responses to certain situations.

Maq wrote:

Some thoughts on alignment in a low-fantasy setting I wrote up for our group:

Some GMs tend not to use alignment in their games and I can see why - they're often used simplistically and with little nuance. Quite often they're used simply to put Lawful Good in the good guy camp and Chaotic Evil in the bad guy camp. People aren't like that though - 'Evil' people rarely think they're being evil, even in a fantasy setting where someone is clearly the villain. Even in the real world everyone has perfectly decent rationalizations for their own behaviour.

Here to be that guy.

In DnD and Pathfinder the concepts of Law, Chaos, Good, and Evil are absolutes. There is literally a plane of existence which defines each of these things in turn. There are all powerful, all knowing gods who speak directly to their mortal followers and tell them what good and evil are. Spells like "Detect Chaos" and "Protection from Evil" provide distinct litmus tests for individual beings.

I'm not saying that all Chaotic Evil characters need to be Snidely Whiplash, but morality in Standard Assumption DnD isn't really compatible with the way it works in the real world.

As usual, this all comes with the caveat that if you're not playing the Standard Assumption then you should feel free to do whatever you like.

Yeah, the problem is when you start mapping hunamoids from the Prime Material to these platonic ideals of morality. Casting "protection from evil" should logically protect you from basically every bad guy the typical party faces, while the intent is clearly to protect from extra-planar evil specifically. Or if you go the other direction and say morality is relative or whatever, what happens when your LG Paladin walks into an LG society with a completely different moral structure? I think most D&D players just try to ignore alignment whenever possible. Oh well. At least they ditched the idea of alignment languages. What does it even mean to speak "chaotic"?

Disclaimer - I have never played DnD nor Pathfinder (aside from a one hour taster session at a UKExpo) and that is all I needed to experience the system to know it's a bit pants

In a world where Fate with its aspects and Burning Wheel/Mouse Guard with it's beliefs, goals and instincts then from a mechanical aiding role play point of view, the alignment system seems terribly outdated and restrictive.

Odd historical note: the classic two-axis D&D alignment actually comes after the first printing of D&D. Chainmail had the Law/Chaos/Neutral division, likely borrowed from Poul Anderson and Moorcock. The earliest printed version of D&D follows this division, vaguely associating Law with good and Chaos with evil. About a year and a half later, the February 1976 issue of Strategy Review has an article by Gygax that lays out a more nuanced system, connecting the axes with the somewhat sketchy cosmology of the planes that Gygax was starting to work out.1

1. Peterson, John. Playing at the World, p.548

onewild wrote:

Disclaimer - I have never played DnD nor Pathfinder (aside from a one hour taster session at a UKExpo) and that is all I needed to experience the system to know it's a bit pants

In a world where Fate with its aspects and Burning Wheel/Mouse Guard with it's beliefs, goals and instincts then from a mechanical aiding role play point of view, the alignment system seems terribly outdated and restrictive.

Having played in almost all of the systems mentioned here (skipped Mouse Guard), I by far prefer Pathfinder/DnD.

Zudz wrote:

Having played in almost all of the systems mentioned here (skipped Mouse Guard), I by far prefer Pathfinder/DnD.

I have other problems with Fate (really needs the PCs to be on board the whole shared story telling experience), Burning Wheel (rather complex on paper, seems to be like learning 4/5 subgames) and Mouse Guard (more choose your own adventure feel). I do believe however that the mechanics for role play are far more advance then an old fashioned alignment system.

They're doing different things, I think. Near as I can tell, Alignment in D&D became a roleplaying thing more or less by accident. Alignment was more about choosing sides than it was about what really motivated the character: Early D&D pretty much left character motivation entirely up to the player, rather than explicitly writing it down anywhere.

Games like Burning Wheel that explicitly have you write down what motivates your character and have mechanics that relate to that obviously create a different feel. That's not what everyone is looking for from a roleplaying game, obviously. A lot of people are perfectly content to either assume that their character's in it for the loot, or to do their roleplaying without an explicit mechanical support for it.

It is interesting to contrast the treatment of Alignment in Dungeon World, where you get XP at the end of a session if you fulfilled the one-sentence summary of your character's alignment. The Paladin, for example, chooses between emphasizing Lawful with "Deny mercy to a criminal or unbeliever" or emphasizing Good with "Endanger yourself to protect someone weaker than you". This would be a pretty easy technique to back-port to D&D itself.

D&D 5e also drastically reduced the mechanical implications of character alignment. There are no alignment restrictions for specific races or classes. Spells like Detect Evil and Good or Protection from Evil and Good no longer affect Good/Evil alignments, they target certain types of inherently Good/Evil creatures like Fey, Celestials, Undead, Fiends, etc.

On top of that they added in Traits, Ideals, Flaws, and Bonds which do a lot more to define you character's personality than their alignment does. Alignment is just one very small aspect of your character. At this point it could hardly be any less restrictive.

Gremlin wrote:

It is interesting to contrast the treatment of Alignment in Dungeon World, where you get XP at the end of a session if you fulfilled the one-sentence summary of your character's alignment. The Paladin, for example, chooses between emphasizing Lawful with "Deny mercy to a criminal or unbeliever" or emphasizing Good with "Endanger yourself to protect someone weaker than you". This would be a pretty easy technique to back-port to D&D itself.

That's an interesting trick. I'll have to look into some Dungeon World. I mean, I was going to eventually, but this bumps it up on the list.

muttonchop wrote:

On top of that they added in Traits, Ideals, Flaws, and Bonds which do a lot more to define you character's personality than their alignment does. Alignment is just one very small aspect of your character. At this point it could hardly be any less restrictive.

Yeah, I forgot about that. Very similar to Burning Wheel's Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits as a matter of fact. (Though Inspiration is a more constrained mechanic than BW's Artha, which is central to Burning Wheel's long-term play.)