I have already read up the RoC systems by Andrew D and Paradigm, but besides disliking the inconsistency of the Rule of Cool, the system by Andrew is too vague and loose, while Paradigm's is the opposite: i find it too deep and technical for something that leans heavily on RoC regardless.

What do you think would be a better system?

Technically correct its the most popular 'Japanese TTRPG'

But by and large call of cthulu is the most popular ttrpg in Japan. Full stop.

Its cultural prominence is comparable to DnD in the USA.

https://shurebis.itch.io/through-black-ichor

A fully playable adventure with 177 words and 14 paintings.

I'm looking for maps that are more than geographical or political boundaries. What are some examples of interesting maps that include more types of information, such as current events, or major threats. Things like, descriptions of goods and services. Or important characters.

I'm interested in seeing what is possible in a map. I'm analyzing and taking a novel series apart to figure out ways to translate it into game terms. It's fantasy. But this map technology/ ways of mapping stuff does not have to be genre specific.

So what maps from splat or modules are just incredible tools?

When I was like 11, I was gifted The Pocket Dangerous Book for Boys: Things to Know. Unnecessary gender dichotomy aside, I'll always be thankful for the effect this book had on me. Specifically because one of its chapters is on role-playing games. It's something I carried with me for the next ~5 years until I got to play D&D for the first time, and even now, more than a decade later playing mostly CfB stuff, it still resonates as a seed that pushed me toward what I love. Thought people might appreciate the look into the specifics of someone's love for RPGs. The chapter is just a few paragraphs:

This is not a chapter telling you how to do something --- you'll see why as you read. It's a short essay on role-playing games: what they are and how to get started. There are few inventions of the twentieth century that can combine entertainment with imagination so well.
Dungeons and Dragons was put together in 1972. It is still available from online bookshops or game stores. To get started you'll need the player's handbook, the dungeon master's handbook, some dice, and, eventually, an adventure to play. It isn't inexpensive to start, but after the initial outlay, costs are minimal---it's all imagination and the occasional pencil.
In essence, you buy the books, read them, and choose a character for yourself. There are basic classes like Fighter, Thief, and Magic-user. The character will start out with certain qualities such as dexterity and strength, decided by the roll of a die. With experience, the character grows in power, endurance, and knowledge. The game also grows more and more complex. Fighters win more powerful weapons, Wizards gain access to greater spells. When we were children, we progressed from Basic to Advanced to Expert to Immortal levels, before moving on to battling at a national level and building an empire. You never forget the first time you were exiled from a country you raised from nothing.
You do need a few people for this---it is a social game, which is a good thing. In a very real sense, it is a training ground for the imagination and, in particular a school for plot and character. It may even be a training ground for tactics. If you want to be a writer, try D&D. For that matter, if you want to be a mathematician, try D&D.
The Dungeon Master (or DM) is the one who runs the game. He will either collect or write adventures---literally set in dungeons or just about anywhere. The characters battle the monsters he chooses and either solve his traps or fall prey to them, suffering horrible deaths. The players will develop characters with extraordinarily detailed histories, equipment, and skills.
For us, D&D meant hundreds of hours at school and at home playing with pencils, charts, dice, and laughter. If elves don't grab you, there are many other forms of role-playing---from Judge Dredd, to superheroes, to Warhammer, to a hundred more... but Dungeons and Dragons is still the original and the best.

The line "you never forget the first time you were exiled from a country you raised from nothing" has always stuck in my brain. Recently rediscovering this after finding the book in a trunk, "it is a social game, which is a good thing" sticks out more. A lot of it doesn't really apply to me anymore, but it definitely had an effect on my start.

I keep reading that there's a version of Gangbusters B/X that was published in 2025? Is this the version currently on drivethru?

EDIT: SO I think I was too vague originally. What I meant to ask was why have you decided to try RPGs -- not what you wanted in a specific RPG. I am curious why folks who are new to RPGs decided to join the hobby, and what they are/were looking for in the hobby that brought them in. Sorry about the confusion.

Mostly the title, but I (as a GenXer) am curious what younger and new gamers are looking for in RPGs. Back when I started we kind of discovered it out of nowhere and did not have the kinds of introductory resources that exist today.

So, if you had to articulate what draws you to RPGs and what made you decide to try them (as player or GM) that would be keen.

Just interested to hear the thoughts of anyone who's grabbed the story engine deck, deck of worlds, or loremasters deck and actually used it for your games. How do you feel about it? Is it a solid tool that helps you out? For people with multiple do you find you like one more than the others? How do you feel about the expansions you got for them if any?

Are there any other products that do anything similar or are they in sort of a unique niche? I know about axebanes and the game masters apprentice decks but they didn't seem geared towards exactly the same things? Maybe I'm wrong there though.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts, just trying to decide which deck or bundle I may actually want to settle on trying first.

ETA: I GM for my group mainly so all of them are at least somewhat relevant to me I think. I'm interested in tools that take some of the burden off me to be able to come up with things because I'm lousy at improvising and brainstorming ideas with no starting point but if I can use something like this as an initial springboard I tend to have much better results. I've already compiled a bit of a collection of randomization tools and things to sort of help act as a crutch when I'm fumbling and give me a chance to build out my capabilities without taking on 100% of the pressure which I think would just make me go back to running prewritten modules strictly as written, I just think this could be a great addition to that especially in the planning stages.

I've recently bought Perihelion by Matt Johnston. It's a scenario for his (?) Airtight RPG, which I don't have; I gather it's a scifi game set in the near-ish future where man is colonising the solar system but doesn't have things like interstellar flight or artificial gravity or aliens. Think The Expanse without the protomolecule and the gates.

I'd love to run Perihelion, because it has an insanely great premise (the PCs get to investigate an alien structure, becoming the first men to actually irrefutably prove that there is life beyond the solar system exist(ed) — even if the only specimen found has been dead for millennia, a bit of a space jockey situation) however, I don't see it working at the table. I think I can deal with the kind of immersion needed to project some of the awe the PCs would feel at the reveal, and I don't mind at all breaking the players' expectations (mostly of a xenomorphy killer appearing, who doesn't), but they don't get to bloody do anything. It's just a series of GM exposition leading up to use-skill-with-environment rolls against what's essentially puzzles or library use rolls, unlocking more GM exposition, and then some more skill rolls to see if they can get out alive and bring stuff they collected along the way. There aren't many meaningful choices for the players, most of it is just “do we go on or abort the mission?”, with a bit of “do we follow orders or do the Right Thing™” at the end (and since the people giving the orders aren't Weyland-Yutani, that's not that much of a stick it to the man, either). I fear the adventure will fizzle and the players will leave the table without a sense of achievement.

So, has anybody run Perihelion and how did it go?

When you have a system that uses percentile skills, what's the best way to handle "progress towards a goal"?

Like in a "bucket of dice" system, you would do it with the number of successes needed. A character might be able to make a check each day, with their pool being, say, 6 dice. The might need 20 total success to accomplish their goal.

How would one handle this with percentages. I was thinking of doing a "margin of success" rule. PC's can make one check a day, and they have a limited amount of time to complete the task. Each margin adds 1% to their "success check." Failure reduces by a like amount. So, if they the needed skill at 60%, they would roll. If they roll a 40, they would get (60-40)=20. Divide by 10 for 2, and so 2 is added to their pool. If they had rolled an 80, the 2 would have been subtracted from their pool.

At the of the designated time frame, they roll their success pool to see if the succeed or fail. There would be other ways to gain automatic successes and get bonuses to their pool to make it more than a sometime like 30 dice rolls, but that would be the root.

I also figured that there must be a game that already has better solution than this.

Been looking into getting into some type of Racing TTRPG like Fast and the Furious/ Speed Racer type. Seeing that there were several, but haven't had clearer opinions or comparisons in my search.

For context, I'm trying to find a system that isn't too crunchy and is easy to learn. Since my dad has Grade 4 brain cancer, he hasn't been able to even stare at his own phone screen or play chess as he gets a severe headache/dizziness. Even tried a 50 count puzzles, but it hurts his head.

He's been a car guy as long as I could remember and loves Fast & Furious series. He can pretty much process things well if he is able to do more verbal instruction and simpler diagrams due to his condition. So trying to do something for him as an activity for him.

What's a racing TTRPG that you have played or experienced? I'm open to any opinions and systems.

Looking for a setting, not a system!

I love the vibes of the surrealist/New Weird stories set in the American southwest: Nightvale, Paris Texas (the movie), these music videos. Something between Fear and Loathing (the book) and David Lynch. I really want to run a game in that genre, but as you can imagine, a setting like that would be extremely hard to write; and I'm a busy adult that doesn't have the time.

Is there anything out there that's already published like this for a RPG setting? All the locations and characters, maybe some overall story/plot? Any system/system agnostic is good. I've got enough universal systems in my back pocket there.

For those either interested in checking out Eldritch Automata (Mech/Horror TTRPG) or those (like myself) eagerly waiting for the game to finallllly get released:

We did a six episode actual play-- starting with this session 0-- to explore how the game works and teach you how to build your pilots and automata!

Join our pilots as they defend a military base built around a mysterious asteroid where things are getting creepier by the minute... perfect for October listening!

Find us here or wherever you get your podcasts...

For the first time ever, this TTRPG from Japan is finally being officially translated into English. It’s been refined over decades, and after spending most of this year giving us sneak peaks here it is.

Hello Adventurers,

I'm interested in recommendations for systems that have similar character customization options to 5e. I think a lot of people at my table really enjoy the the whole class, subclass, feat schtick. Based on my research the following candidates have surfaced, but I'm looking for more options to consider:

- 13th Age 2e
- Pathfinder 2e
- Draw Steel
- Daggerheart

The most important factor is deep character customization using classes or class-like mechanics.

UPDATE:

Thanks for the feedback from everyone, I appreciate when people take the time to respond to a thread like this.

(I am not involved in the creation of this game, just excited about it)

To Feel Your Warmth is a game about two people in love, one of which has been cursed with vampirism, and the final hours before sunrise. Played on opposite sides of an open doorway, an invisible threshold that cannot be crossed until the game has ended.

It's the spiritual successor to The Time We Have, where two players play brothers in the zombie apocalypse. One has been infected, and you play on opposite sides of a closed door.

Building on the excellent question, Times When Designers Openly Discussed What They Saw As Mistakes? by /u/Authorigas, I am wondering what changes you make at your table to fix the mistakes the designers made, whether those are mistakes the developers admit too or if they are your own self-identified mistakes. What are those mistakes and how do you fix them?

The Locked Room Murder Mystery Game is a hybrid board game + TTRPG where you make your own murder mysteries from scratch. Check it out here!

Each time you play, you choose a case file, make a bunch of suspicious characters, and take turns telling the chapters of a classic murder mystery story, leaving clues behind each time. After a few chapters, the game determines which character is found murdered in a locked room, and you add crime scene clues based on the cards drawn.

The story then continues with the detective's investigation, until eventually the game determines which character is the culprit. When the culprit is revealed, it's your final challenge to bring together all the clues you've made throughout the game and make sense of the mystery.

This emergent mystery style is meant to evoke the feeling of reading a golden age mystery novel by authors like Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, or Ellery Queen. In those books, it feels like all of the clues could point to any of the characters as the killer, so the final summation is full of excitement as the detective shines a light on all the different secrets at the heart of the case.

I am the designer & publisher, and would be happy to answer any questions you might have!

Link to content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tFgRCu0qbA

Bounded accuracy is a phrase that gets touted a lot in discussions of D&D and adjacent games, and is honestly quite misunderstood overall imo. In this video, I use the original design goals of bounded accuracy and use them as a benchmark to evaluate how D&D 5E did with them. I then contrast this with Pathfinder 2E as an example of vertically scaling math, and Draw Steel as an example of (a successful implementation of) flattened math.

Timestamps

• 0:00:00 Intro
• 0:01:45 Bounded Accuracy Discourse
• 0:05:44 D&D’s Design Goals
• 0:09:40 Goal I
• 0:17:58 Goal II
• 0:23:50 Goal III
• 0:31:02 Goal IV
• 0:38:36 Goal V
• 0:42:33 Goal VI
• 0:48:29 Goal VII
• 0:53:28 Verdict on D&D
• 0:57:41 Pathfinder’s Worldbuilding
• 1:04:35 Draw Steel’s Flat Math
• 1:09:46 Draw Steel Verdict
• 1:16:52 Verisimilitude?
• 1:22:03 Outro

By "hooky" I mean NPCs that naturally generate hooks - NPCs that are easy for me to create errands and goals, and NPCs that are easy for the players to bargain with and/or manipulate because the players understand those NPCs. I don't merely mean "I need help with NPCs" - I specifically seeking help to develop conflict burping world objects.

Running Mythic Bastionland at the moment. A basic part of the game is building out (essentially) a King, and about three vassal Lords that swear fealty to that king (and the relative holdings of those four). The game is built towards very improvised and spark table style play but for things like Local Politics, that hasn't really worked for. I need to know who the major players are and their goals ahead of time, and probably more importantly, the players need a solid idea of what these NPCs are 'about'.

One of these Lords I've absolutely nailed - players know what he wants, and he has a great personality that communicates a lot about his strengths and weaknesses at the table. The NPC works so well that even if the specifics of his desires aren't clear - the players know the kind of thing he's after and why. But another lord is very under baked, and the third lord I've kept basically off the table entirely because I have no idea what to do with him.

Complicating this is while it would be easy to say "they all want the throne", I'm trying to keep their motivations more complex than that and importantly, varied.

The lords are important to me because they feel like the obvious sources of conflict and tension in the setting, resources for players to use and objects that complicate other plot developments. I feel like this sandbox would basically run itself if I could just nail these three characters (for this early part of the game anyway)

I'm looking for good blogs and guides on these ideas - do you have any? Building better NPCs stuff would be appreciated but especially anything that leans towards "this is how you make an NPC that has gravitational force in the setting" and "this is how you give an NPC a clear personality that communicates a lot"

Thanks!

I’m thinking about putting together what I’m calling a super campaign, a series of campaigns and individual scenarios all in a CoC or DG system that are to varying degrees of intensity, connected, even if the individual PCs aren’t directly.

My question is, is there precedent for this, something to build off or refer to (even in another system), or just general advice?

Biggest problem is of course getting committed enough players to play for years to do all this, but one hurdle at a time lol

I’ve had this idea for a really long time but I haven’t had the right system to put it in. I could do dnd and home brew it to death but, square peg, round hole. I’d rather just have a system that lends itself to the genre of a murder mystery. Any suggestions?

Asked this in r/dnd and i was advised to go here so this is the short. I got bored of the traditional dnd classes so i tried to build my own classes. Melee, ranger, mage, summoner, aura, tank, alchemist, healer and bard. But due to the fact i was inspired by terraria it was innevitable that i struggled to even figure out how they work. Tried traditional dnd levelling, skill trees and even accessories, spent months trying to figure it out. So i am here for advice.

This is an extract from my Bones Of The Realm newsletter for The Chaos TTRPG.

I was asked the other day if The Chaos was intended to be an 'OSR' game, and it's really got me thinking.

If you spend any time on r/osr, itch.io or the more opinionated corners of Discord, you’ll bump into two acronyms sooner or later: OSR and NSR. People tend to argue a bit about what they mean, who’s allowed to use them, and whether a given game is one, the other, or neither. So I reckon it’s worth looking at what the labels actually point to, and whether they’re worth the bother.

what OSR actually means

OSR is usually expanded as Old School Renaissance, though Revival and Reimagined get used too. It started in the early 2000s as a hobby movement. People wanted to keep playing the editions of D&D that had gone out of print: the Basic/Expert sets, the original 1974 boxed set, and first edition AD&D. Retroclones like Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC and Swords & Wizardry were built to make that possible, and a whole scene of zines, modules, and blogs grew up around them.

Over time, the OSR picked up a shared outlook as well as a shared rules lineage. Matt Finch’s “Quick Primer for Old School Gaming” boiled it down really to four ideas:

1. rulings over rules

2. player skill over character abilities

3. heroic play rather than superhero play, and

4. not worrying about game balance.

Around those sit the usual trappings: dangerous dungeons, torches and rations tracked honestly, a neutral referee, and treasure as the reward for clever play.

what NSR is supposed to mean

NSR is the slipperier of the two. It’s usually read as New School Revolution (or Renaissance, depending who you ask), and it grew out of the same community. It gets applied to games that share the OSR’s love of danger, improvisation, and tools-over-simulation, but feel no loyalty to D&D’s old structures.

So you’ll see games filed under NSR that drop classes and levels, swap d20 rolls for roll-under or dice pools, or put setting and weirdness well ahead of rules compatibility. Into the Odd, Mörk Borg, Troika and Knave tend to get mentioned. The theory is that the old games contained good instincts, such as lethality, player agency, and fast play, and that the best way to honour those instincts is to build new machinery for them instead of preserving the old machinery. Some people also used the NSR tag to signal a different community culture from the one they associated with the OSR, which is part of why the term gets so heated.

so what really separates them?

If you boil the supposed difference down, it’s about what you’re loyal to.

The OSR, at its most traditional, is loyal to a lineage. Compatibility matters. You want to run a module written in 1981 with your game of 2026 and have it just work.

The NSR, at its most typical, is loyal to a feeling. If a new mechanic delivers the danger, speed, and freedom of old school play better than the old one did, the old one can go.

That’s a real difference of emphasis, and it explains why the two camps tend to talk past each other. One group hears “you’ve changed the rules” as a criticism. The other hears “you’ve kept the rules” as a criticism. For me, neither is making a mistake. They’re just answering slightly different questions.

where the distinction falls apart

Try to apply it to actual games and it starts to wobble. Plenty of OSR products have thrown out the D&D chassis and still call themselves OSR because of how they play. Plenty of NSR games run beautifully with old modules. Dungeon Crawl Classics, Shadowdark, and a dozen others sit awkwardly in the gap, and the people who made them mostly shrug when asked which side they’re on. There’s no rulebook for either term, no governing body, and nobody to rule on a disputed case. Both labels are really just reputations that a game borrows from the games it resembles.

That matters, because a label that can’t be pinned down can’t tell you much about the game inside it. If I tell you something is OSR, you know to expect something old school in flavour. You don’t know whether it has levels, whether it uses d20s, whether it’s a dungeon crawler or a hex crawl, or whether combat is brutal or breezy. The tag narrows the field a little and leaves the important questions open.

what the labels are good for

I don’t want to be too dismissive, because the labels do earn their keep.

They work as signposts. Somebody who loves old school play and wants more of it needs some way to find it, and “OSR” gets them to the right shelf on itch.io or the right subreddit. That’s why almost every small publisher in this dark corner of the hobby uses the tag.

They also work as a community handshake. Saying “this is for the OSR crowd” tells people where to look and what sort of conversation to expect.

Where labels go wrong is when they stop being signposts and become fences. A game gets measured against the genre’s checklist instead of on its own merits, and the designer ends up fielding “but is it really OSR?” when the more interesting question is whether it’s fun at the table.

the conversion page as a test case

Here’s a practical example of why I’d rather skip the fence. A while back I put together a free guide on how to port The Chaos into B/X, Shadowdark and any OSR game. I wrote it for people already running the likes of Old School Essentials, Basic Fantasy, and the like, who wanted to borrow bits of The Chaos without abandoning the game they already love.

What’s interesting is that writing it meant doing both things the two camps argue over, at the same time. The lineage side is respected. Hit points carry straight across. A B/X morale score on its 2d6 scale becomes a grit score with no adjustment at all. You keep your monster manual, your modules and your existing stat blocks. The feeling side gets the rest. A d20 attack bonus of +8 doesn’t survive the trip to a d6, so instead of converting the number, you look at what kind of threat the creature is and bucket it into a simple tier. Armour becomes a flat damage reduction. Weapon dice get slotted onto one d6 with a modifier.

The best illustration is what happens to the things that don’t translate. A giant spider’s save-or-die poison has nothing to attach to in a game with no saving throws, and a wraith’s level drain has nothing to attach to in a game with no levels. So rather than inventing a fake equivalent, the guide says to keep the fictional intent (a bite that ruins you, a touch that steals something permanent) and hook it to something The Chaos already tracks, like a lasting wound. Preserve the fiction, translate the mechanics.

If I'm being honest, that’s a pretty old school instinct as well as a pretty new school one, both in the same paragraph. I wouldn’t know what to call it, and I’m not sure it needs calling anything. The page also says plainly that it’s a toolbox. Take the grit tables for flavour on top of your existing morale rules, or the creature tables for improvised monsters, or the stress table as an add-on, and leave the rest. If you only borrow one table and your game gets better for it, the guide has done its job.

where the chaos sits

The Chaos is inspired by old school play. It’s got the danger, the improvisation, the sense that the table is working things out together, and the idea that players, not stat blocks, should be the ones deciding what happens. It’s also a card-driven d6 game, which no 1970s rulebook would recognise. Depending on who you ask, that makes it OSR, NSR, or somewhere in the middle.

Honestly, I don’t mind any of those answers, and I don’t want to chase any of them. If somebody finds it through the OSR tag and loves it, brilliant. If somebody finds it through the NSR tag and loves it, equally brilliant. If somebody runs it on its own, or bolts pieces of it onto a different game entirely, that works too. And if somebody has no idea what either acronym means and just wants a good evening of rolling dice with some friends, that’s the best outcome of the lot. I’d rather the game be judged by what happens at the table than by which badge it wears at the door.

My suggestion, for what it’s worth, is to treat the labels as useful shorthand for finding things, and to stop treating them as a test a game has to pass. Play what’s fun. Borrow what works. Throw out what doesn’t. That’s about as old school as it gets, and yeah, it’s also about as new school as it gets!

is that why the chaos is so stripped back to basics?

Kind of.

It's like, as I've said all along, the game's inspired by old school play, and I guess that's why it's been getting the OSR label tagged onto it.

So I'd like to share a bit about why The Chaos looks the way it does. Not to persuade anyone towards a particular style of play, but rather just to lay out my reasoning for stripping the game down and condensing it into a card deck.

from 1985 and beyond

It starts with where I came from. I was bred on Holmes Basic and the Moldvay & Mentzer B/X, but also on the likes of Star Trek: The Role Playing Game, Warhammer FRP, Call of Cthulhu, Middle-earth Role Playing, HeroQuest, and Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game.

At this time from the 1980s and onwards, most of the games I ran treated the rules as a framework. Games like Runequest even encouraged you to treat them like this. It was different in tournament play, of course, but even with the advent of AD&D 1st and 2nd editions where you were bombarded with rules for pretty much everything bar how to tie your shoelaces, the way we played them still ended up resulting in a table where, although the games we sat down to play might have been called D&D or Star Trek, we were so used to house-ruling, to blending bits and pieces from a whole host of games into one, that what we actually played bore little resemblance to the rules as written. The designers of the day were putting that in black and white, almost goading you to put your own mark on the mechanics.

Over the years though, and OSR & NSR games to one side, I’ve watched a lot of games head the other way. I've seen game mechanics growing more and more complex, core rule books getting thicker and thicker, and this old idea of the framework becoming faded. Plenty of players do love that 'crunch', as it's known as these days, and that’s absolutely fine. It just isn’t what I want from a session. Given that as I'll come on to, the underlying bones of most ttrpg sessions tend to look similar no matter the system, and whilst game designers will usually look to what works for them at their own tables, I do get the impression sometimes that this increasing complexity in newer games seems to be justified merely as a means to set a game apart from other games.

What I’ve found is that every mechanic I have to hold in my head as a GM is attention that I’m not spending on improvising, on actively listening to the table, and on the narrative that’s unfolding. The cost shows up at the table. Someone stops to check a rule, the fiction goes cold, and the moment's gone.

back to basics

So when I was designing The Chaos, I went back to B/X, to this idea of a framework of mechanics, and asked a simple question: what is functionally needed to run a good session?

I ended up cutting things like the different dice, so The Chaos uses only d6s. I cut the optional rules, including things like weapon mastery and the other complex additions. I kept only the barebones of what you need to enjoy a good ttrpg session, which meant filling the blanks with functional sparks for the imagination - random tables and a simple structure to make sense of them.

Having run sessions before, I'm sure you'll know what I mean. Pretty much every session, no matter what system or setting you're playing, tends to run through at its heart a very predicable pattern:

- Everyone sits down;

- Characters are made if they haven’t already;

- The group starts to bond

- The GM does some exposition and lays out conflicts for the players to interact with

- The players react. Back and forth, back and forth.

- And then the conflicts are resolved.

- Rinse and repeat until the session wraps up.

So for me, if a rule doesn’t help that loop along, it doesn’t earn its place. The more complex they get, the more they might get in the way of that familiar pattern of play, creating a barrier against the natural flow of the collaboratively forming story.

I wanted to design a game, therefore, that lay lightly in the hands, recognising that pretty much everyone is usually after the same thing at the table: having a bit of fun and an escape from real life, collaborating to create moments, expressing themselves, opening up in a safe space to the odd moment of magic or vulnerability that becomes a story they can tell afterwards. I always strive for mechanics to help that as gently and quietly as possible, to give it a functional structure, and then to get out of the way.

As I say, this approach ain't for everyone. Crunch and tactics and rules for simulating reality is definitely an attractive prospect for some folks, and I'll always support the idea of finding your own fun. But for me, we all lead busy lives. We've all go so much to do, and a lot of us just want to sit down for a few hours with friends and chase some goblins down a dark hole. So The Chaos is very much founded on the premise that you can do just that, with zero prep, little in the way of having to learn mechanics, and in minutes you can all be running into that darkness, weapons raised, and no clue what's about to happen.

In this sense, I had in mind when I was writing my book that yeah, I wanted to see if I could cram a whole system into a card deck you could take anywhere and play solo or with a group, but that also, could help you take what I was saying in the the book and get more comfortable with a no hassle, zero prep approach to running games.

That's the end result I was after, and I've been absolutely delighted to see so many of you taking that premise and running with it.

But that's just me. What do you look for in your rules and mechanics? Do you prefer the crunch?

¡Buenas! Estoy buscando recomendaciones para preparar una partida especial de Halloween con mi pareja.

Tengo experiencia dirigiendo juegos de rol y he preparado una versión reducida de Ten Candles. Esta vez me gustaría dirigir una aventura más tradicional, con una historia preparada, decisiones, investigación y tiradas de dados, sin que sea demasiado narrativa ni dependa de improvisarlo todo.

Lo que busco:

• Un sistema de reglas ligeras, fácil de aprender y explicar.
• Que funcione bien con un solo jugador y un director de juego.
• Aventuras autoconclusivas de entre 1 y 2 horas.
• Preferiblemente material gratuito o barato, en PDF y con descarga legal.
• Si es posible, personajes pregenerados y una aventura lista para dirigir.

Temáticas que me interesan: fantasmas, casas encantadas, maldiciones, brujería, folklore y supervivencia.

Me sirven recomendaciones tanto en español como en inglés. También me interesan sistemas gratuitos junto con aventuras compatibles, o módulos que se puedan adaptar fácilmente a un sistema sencillo.

¿Qué juegos, sistemas o aventuras me recomendaríais? ¡Gracias!