I use AI a lot for RPGs, in my case DnD 5e. I’m confident some of you hate AI and for good reasons. Some may be unaware. We may know people who let it replace their own creativity. I brainstorm with it. For example, we had Session -1 last week. It my first time facilitating it and I’m sure it needs inprovement. We developed factions. Well…we developed a ton of ideas for factions. I will use one as an example. The players feel done, so I want to organize their faction ideas into something cohesive and then ask them to edit it (we need one more short Session -1) So I said to AI, “Now let’s create factions. I’ll give you the notes from Session -1 and then let’s discuss the faction. Discuss! I don’t need you to create a faction for me.” Then I gave it these notes: The world is a little bit like Harry Potter, with some people that know about magic and most people do not. - This faction wants everyone to know about magic, wants to expose magic and make it public. They want power and to control it - They are hunting the party. Opposed to the magic group and the cleric group that dislikes use of magic not sanctioned by the gods. They are working behind the scenes — working with the assassin’s guild. It’s a network of cells, not centralized AI asked about their motivation, what they thought was wrong with the world, and what their methods were. Also, why are they hunting the party? Finally, it asked how united or decentralize the cells are. I used voice-to-text to give it a long answer in response to everything it provided. 1. It clearly didn’t understand my notes because my notes are out of context. So I explained them. 2. It asked a lot of really good questions and made some suggestion suggestions. 3. I disagreed with a lot of the suggestions, liked some of them, but the best part was that it launched my own creativity. I know all the other background for this world and the probing questions and ideas allowed me to really think about what the players wanted.

I've been enjoying reading "So You Want To Be A Gamemaster" for the last month or so. Even though his discussion of Rumor Tables focused on hexcrawls, I am excited for its potential in my new city-based proactive game. The basic concept for hexcrawls is that the rumor table is populated with nuggets of information PCs can pick up that will direct them to hexes (get the story moving). Characters might pick them up chatting with a merchant or tavern keep, as 'treasure' in a foe's things, a mysterious note passed to them, as the result of some divination magic, or just shared between sessions as stuff characters heard going around town. Fundamentally, the Rumor Table is a mechanism to get enough world information to players that they can make meaningful (informed) choices. And it solves a problem I often struggle with and was anxious about for the proactive game. In my city campaign they will be a mechanism to share faction goals, progress on those goals, and introduce NPCs they might look for to connect with those goals. I can probably work in some city crawl type clues as well, particularly if getting to the location can start them on one of their goals. Alexandrian Article: Hexcrawl Tool: Rumor Tables

I tend to do some of my game prep on Friday mornings, so I'll be hosting an informal coffee hour on Fridays at 11am ET. It's a little late for coffee, sure, but I'm hoping this helps some of our non-US members join us (and it won't be too early for members on the West Coast). Go to the Calendar page to see the event in your own time zone. Come hang out, drink your beverage of choice, and talk about your ongoing and planned games. See you there!

So I saw this community thing I think on Instagram and decided to sign up for it. I live in the UK so probably won't be able to attend many US based events due to timescales and my pretty hectic work schedule. I'm currently running a homebrew D&D 2024 game with some friends where we started to create the world using The Quiet Year, we didn't get through the entirety of the creation process as a few people were not quite gelling with it but I took what we created and went ahead with it. I want to run a Pirate Borg game pretty soon for my friends YouTube channel (Explorers of Elsewhere), I've run some one shots for him in the past and it was great fun. In my spare time I act, do improv and run a comic (as in comic books) art festival.