Category Archives: RPGs

Back in May, 2020, I blogged about short, rules-light RPGs, and how The Ultimate Micro-RPG book—a collection of 40 one-page games—was going to be published in November of that year. While I pre-ordered it, I didn’t end up reading it until this year. And I read it slowly. I read the book the same way I read a volume of poetry, one piece at a time, setting the book aside after each. Each game is worth contemplating alone. The collection is well thought out and well laid out. While I […]

Tl;dr: If you enjoy fantasy RPGs, buy Stonetop! Excellent GM advice, collaborative worldbuilding, and easy to improv. The beta materials are copious (over 200,000 words!), beautifully illustrated, and available to backers now. Over two years ago, in December, 2020, I promised Jeremy Strandberg that if he sent me the beta-test materials for Stonetop, I’d play at least three sessions of his system and give him feedback. We ended up playing 41 sessions—the system is that much fun! And while the printed books haven’t gone to press yet, that’s a testament […]

Uncommon World is my crowdsourced update to the core moves of Dungeon World, based on a survey of over 250 players, choosing between moves from seven fantasy PbtA games. Originally released in October, 2021, I’ve updated the Uncommon World PDF: Here is the full change log. And if this system is new to you, here’s the overview.

Monster of the Week: Codex of Worlds is now crowdfunding on Backerkit! I lifted one of my prep techniques from the mystery countdowns of Monster of the Week by Michael Sands. These aren’t “whodunit” mysteries but instead mysterious monsters with mysterious agendas and mysterious weaknesses. As the book puts it­— Each mystery has a countdown: this is the sequence of the terrible things that will happen if the hunters don’t stop the monster. The countdown will be your guide to what will be going on off-screen as the hunters investigate. […]

I went back through the Dungeon World subreddit posts to come up with the top 10 things that people should know when making the switch from D&D 5e— And you may find these other discussions from Reddit helpful: Finally, here’s my own story of why I switched from 5e to Dungeon World and a supplement I made for incorporating 5e skills.

One of the reasons I personally switched from 5e to Dungeon World was because of DW’s use of a Creative Commons license, which meant that—while the game text was copyright—re-use was granted along with certain obligations (e.g., attribution). This commons is probably far larger than you think, with many systems and much third-party content available to adapt. Normally I write about DW hacks, all of which but Chasing Adventure are licensed under the Creative Commons: Fantasy World, Freebooters on the Frontier, Homebrew World, Stonetop, Unlimited Dungeons, Urban/Modern/Fantasy. However, there are […]

Now more than ever people are looking for alternatives to Dungeons & Dragons. But, with thousands of choices of tabletop roleplaying games, where to start? Fantasy RPGs Other Types of RPGs With so much to choose from, consider running a few one-shot games to find a system that resonates with you!

If Wizards of the Coast backs down from their draconian changes to the OGL, it will be because of subscription revenue: “Cancelled D&D Beyond subscriptions forced Hasbro’s hand.” Subscription revenue grows more rapidly and is more stable than one-off sales to a base of customers. So it’s no surprise that WotC and others in the RPG space want to convert traditional one-off sales to subscriptions, from Patreons for independents to direct subscriptions for larger firms. One way for major players to generate subscription revenue has been with virtual tabletop (VTT) […]

I researched a lot of PbtA and FitD science-fiction games before selecting Impulse Drive. For my group, the game provides the Firefly/Expanse-style heroics we were looking for, with enough of a framework to encourage the narrative without so much complexity that it bogs down play. Our group just shifted from playing every other week to playing every week, because they couldn’t get enough! When I first started reading Impulse Drive, I searched the web for something like the Dungeon World Syllabus, a collection of invaluable links for GMs. Not finding […]

After our Microscope worldbuilding, and before our first actual session of Impulse Drive, I ran a Session Zero based primarily on Stonetop’s Introductions procedure. Stonetop is a hearth fantasy PbtA by Jeremy Strandberg (you can back it here, for a limited time). Each playbook has two customized sets of questions: one set for the player to answer about NPCs and one set for the player as PC to pose to the other PCs. Here’s the process for the Ranger— Stonetop is about adventuring for the sake of protecting and growing […]

Having heard great things about using the Microscope RPG for collaborative world-building, I knew that I wanted to kick-off our new science-fiction PbtA campaign with a Microscope session. Heck, our planned setting is literally the first scenario listed on the website: “Humanity spreads to the stars and forges a galactic civilization”! (Fantasy RPG players, the next two are “Fledgling nations arise from the ruins of the empire” and “An ancient line of dragon-kings dies out as magic fades from the realm.”) Since we would be playing online, we used the […]

Suddenly an Ogre is a short gamebook using the Dungeon World system. Most choices that you make correspond to Basic Moves of the game. This gives you an opportunity to experience a bit of gameplay without a GM. The title is an homage to the essay “Suddenly Ogres: What to do on Spout Lore and Discern Realities misses” by Vasiliy Shapovalov. Published using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. You are encouraged to adapt this for your game system of choice. Comments and suggestions welcome, directly […]

This afternoon we played Dialect, by Thorny Games, a game about coining words as part of telling the story of a community. The game comes with four types of isolated communities, including a Mars colony, but we picked a 1980s cult, because of course we did. (And there are many third-party frameworks for different types of communities as well.) Unlike role playing games, storytelling games such as Dialect typically involve more player negotiation about directions of the story. This is akin to the collaborative worldbuilding at the start of some […]