What ROLE-PLAYING have you been doing?

Dungeon magazine! Ha! I totally forgot about that one. Despite having several issues of Dragon, I never actually bought an issue of Dungeon. Were there a lot of Basic D&D adventures in it or was it mostly AD&D?

I think I'm going to track down another Basic D&D (pink) box set and a few modules. It's also likely I'll take a look at that free D&D 5e download.

Last night I ran my weekly group through a module of my own creation as a 0-Level Funnel hack of the Dungeon World rules. It was kind of a playtest of both my hack and the adventure itself. It was a rollicking 4-hour session from start to finish, following 8 lowly villagers as they tried to survive a crucible of pain an terror. I'm getting ready to kickstart a print+pdf version of the adventure, so the positive results of the session were really encouraging.

The other two campaigns we're playing are based on the Dungeon World rules as well. I just find myself unable to resist the ease-of-use, speed, and eminent hackability of the damn thing.

One is a setting my players created collaboratively using Dawn of Worlds , resulting in things like a race of beetle-folk charged with protecting a library of leaf-books that contain all recorded lore, and a shadow-spirit that corrupts their god-tree and drives them from their ancestral forest home. Nary a traditional fantasy race in sight, including humans!

The other is the old Spawn of Azathoth campaign I ran back in 1986 when I first discovered Call of Cthulhu. We started it using the Trail of Cthulhu rules, but I quickly became annoyed with them, converted everything to *World, and haven't looked back. The sessions have been great, 90% meaty improvisational roleplaying and only a couple of brief combat encounters. The horror is very gradually dawning and it's a beautiful thing to watch, especially since 3 of my 6 players are pretty much clueless about all things Lovecraft.

The campaign itself is not as great as I remember it being. It was groundbreaking at the time, and contains a few truly inspired ideas, but relies far, far too much on coincidence to maintain suspension of disbelief (i.e., the PCs are supposed travel to Florida to interview an heir of a deceased NPC, and just happen to stumble upon a cult of ghouls and underwater temple that are completely unrelated to the main plot). So I cut and rewrote a bunch of stuff. The funnest part I'm adding is an overland journey from Delhi to the northern Urals (Hyperborea!). It's required a fair amount of research to figure out how that would have gotten done in 1935, but I think it will be worth it once the NKVD starts nipping at their heels. It's also been a lot of fun creating excerpts from sanity-testing tomes for them to read -- there's enough out there on the web to throw together paragraphs of "actual text" from things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts or the Book of Eibon, in which I can embed clues or red herrings as needed.

Dungeon World? I'm curious. Is this the right rule set?

rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/108028/Dungeon-World

Green Lantern wrote: Dungeon World? I'm curious. Is this the right rule set?

rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/108028/Dungeon-World

Yeah, that's the one. And you can peruse the rules online for free here .

Dungeon World and its ilk are great. They're actually super traditional games for the most part, but laid out in a way that reflects how people* actually play RPGs, instead approaching it as a pseudo-wargame and assuming that you can read between the lines because you've been doing this since 1985.

There's a specifically Lovecraftian hack called TREMULOUS that is worth checking out if you want someone else to do the work for you.

*e.g. people who are socially skilled and into playing an improvised-story game, as opposed to the socially retarded and/or those who want their friends to participate in an interactive reading of their novel.

i picked up the dungeonworld rule book and read during the pbf game that ran for a while. It is worth a look. I did ultimately cull it as i prefer DCC and some of the retro clones but thats just a style preference on my part. DW is a very easy to play system that can both encourage story telling but also be played as a survivalist dungeon crawl challenge.

Jason Lutes wrote:

Green Lantern wrote: Dungeon World? I'm curious. Is this the right rule set?

rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/108028/Dungeon-World

Yeah, that's the one. And you can peruse the rules online for free here .

Jason, I've been reading the rules and this game looks very cool. Thanks for sharing, sir. Is there any benefit to buying the pdf rulebook over just playing the game with what's on the website?

Green Lantern wrote:

Jason Lutes wrote:

Green Lantern wrote: Dungeon World? I'm curious. Is this the right rule set?

rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/108028/Dungeon-World

Yeah, that's the one. And you can peruse the rules online for free here .

Jason, I've been reading the rules and this game looks very cool. Thanks for sharing, sir. Is there any benefit to buying the pdf rulebook over just playing the game with what's on the website?

I personally love having a print book at the table, and I find the pdf/print versions easier to navigate than the gazetteer, but ymmv. Otherwise, the main reason is to support the guys who wrote it!

In related news, I just this very minute launched a kickstarter for Servants of the Cinder Queen , an adventure I wrote for Dungeon World.

Thanks, Jason. I am loving Dungeon World, especially the GM tips on making moves and building fronts. That stuff is awesome! I'll check out your kickstarter too, sir.

We continued our Dark Heresy campaign.

This is probably the first game i've played that really qualifies as long running. My character has leveled up a few times now and we have had around a dozen sessions which is longer than games i'm in typically last. The GM prefers published modules so we continue through something that FFG people wrote. This time we are in a giant cathedral full of bishops investigating some heretical conspiracy. This high light was when we totally made a mess of an exorcism and had to shoot the possessed person. He nearly beat the snot out of us by my partner hit him with a melta gun. The downside is im not convinced its a great detective module. From my side of the table it feels very follow the trail of clues and make sure you pass all of the skill checks or enjoy being stuck. I like the setting though.


Also i ran a Cyberpunk 2020 one shot after being gifted a copy of the rule book. Its a fun rule book to read actually, it has a casual flowing style rather than that of a recipe book with is always nice. I put together some nice neon maps in gimp

Then put a hacker being hunted by the cops on the 3rd floor, created very brief descriptions for about 5 npcs and each location in the building and let a Media and a Solo lose to hunt the dude down before the cops got him. It was good fun but i let them min max with some interesting consequences. The Solo ahd hydraulic ram arms and maxed Aikido skills, so he could throw people through walls, the media hardly ever failed a smooth talking check. Fortunately they didn't work together at all. One thing i like about Cp 2020 is that it emphasises what the books (neuromancer etc) emphasize and thats the feel and language of the street. Its not just high tech action, its PUNK. So it has to feel punk and that really is what gives the game its edge.

I haven't played it, but I picked up a paperback of the Hollow Earth Expedition book because it was relatively cheap and I love the setting. Anyone have any experience with it?

I'm reading almost universal high praise for the D&D 5e PHB.

Who's got it? What's the word around these parts?

Jeff White wrote: I'm reading almost universal high praise for the D&D 5e PHB.

Who's got it? What's the word around these parts?

I bought it and have picked through it a bit. Haven't played however.

My impression is very good. The art and presentation are excellent. As to the game itself, it takes some of the consistency of 3rd edition and really streamlined it; combat should no longer take up the entire session.

I'm looking forward to playing it.

My D&D group has been annoying me lately. The campaign has been going on for two years, and all the players are middle-aged, except maybe one guy who is retired. So these should be reasonably mature players that can theoretically play a game together without drama.

Player A is the retired guy. He has no prior experience with role-playing games. He is easy-going but indecisive, and sometimes when he gets enthusiastic about the game, he gets incredibly loud. Like so loud that nobody else can be understood. He seems completely unaware that he is sometimes extremely annoying.

Player B is smart, opinionated, decisive, and sometimes abrasive. He likes to lead, but people don't always follow. He is an old friend of mine.

Player C is a close friend of B. C is very into the role-playing aspect and fascinated by the campaign setting. He often works late on weekends. When there is conflict in the group, he retreats into playing games on his phone.

Players D and E are a married couple. They are very nice introverts, and new to playing D&D. They are often indecisive.

There are also 6 other past or present players in the campaign, though we have never had more than 8 players, and usually no more than 7.

When B got a new job that involved working many late shifts, it became more of a hassle for him to show up for game. His friend C had a similar schedule. They also disliked playing with player A, and tried to persuade me to kick A out of the group more than a year ago. I declined to give A the boot (though he would be my first pick to boot out), because I don't like to kick out people unless they are deliberately causing trouble. Also, I sensed that the work schedule issue might cause either B or C to drop out anyway. B and C left.

Shortly after B and C left, D and E joined the game. Everybody in the group likes D and E. However, with 50% of the group now consisting of indecisive players (A, D, and E), the pace of the campaign has slowed to almost a crawl. One recent session resulted in zero XP, because the party fought two inconclusive skirmishes with the same monster and retreated from it both times. They accomplished nothing else that session, but spent a lot of time discussing and planning.

Recently, B has started showing up again on an irregular basis. His first time back, there was a point when A put his hand on B's shoulder and left it there while addressing him. B, sleep-deprived, reacted badlly and ordered A to remove his hand. This scene deeply offended D and E, causing them to dislike B. The next time B showed up, there was an encounter that involved various party members being briefly controlled by an enemy, and B used excessive and lethal force against both A and E during that fight.

So now D and E have told other players to tell me that they are prepared to drop out if B is going to be a regular player in the campaign. My inclination is to treat them the same way I treated B and C last year: bye-bye. But other players will be upset if D and E leave because of B.

So I told B about this, and he said that he will show up at least one more time. At the end of that session, he will invite the rest of the group to vote on whether he can stay in the campaign.

Too much drama. Every player seems to be enjoying the campaign, but the group dynamics may tear this group apart. I think that B's idea is good, so hopefully that will work out okay.

In my experience your group is only going to degrade further. The vote is a terrible idea, imo. The ones who don't want the drama will probably be the first to drop out permanently.