The frontier fort town of Ashgate is home to 400 souls, each trying to make a life at the eastern end of Woldarm’s Passage in a strange and unfamiliar land of strange beasts, volcanic lakes, and mud pots. Agents of the Black Hand skillfully manipulate the politics of the many interested factions to hold their control and push down challengers to their strange rule. Wolfram’s Passage is an ancient pathway under the Spine of the World that was hidden for centuries under a pyroclastic flow. Since their discovery a hundred years ago, Kigs and Vess have leveraged their Passage to grow a black market trade between the Manyhorn Traders of The Expanse and the Spicers’ Guild of the Azure Coast. Under the watchful eyes of Black Hands Agents, this trade slowly built a small population of hospitality workers and caravan drivers, most of whom found a new home across the Spine to escape something from their past with the anonymity of a new start. Life is cheap in Ashgate, but it is theirs. A year ago, something notable changed in Ashgate. Unknown to most residents, the Black Hand made a compact with the Arcanum to develop the mining of essential minerals depleted across the Azure Coast: minerals that are rich and untouched in the lava fields of the eastern Expanse. The result in Ashgate has been an influx of prospectors and explorers who venture beyond the Fort in search of buried riches. Some of them come back. Fewer know why they are here in the first place.

Hello all, since I've been in the process of moving and starting a new job, I haven't had as much time as I'd like to run our weekly game here. For the time being, I'd still like to do some community events, so I'm going to start holding an evening Happy Hour (much like Jonah's Coffee Hour) at 7:00 PM ET on Wednesdays! Even though I don't have a weekly game to prep right now, I have some GenCon prep to do, some freelance work for a few systems, and some personal projects for future campaigns that I'd love to work on and talk shop with folks about. I also have an endless pile of grey shame in unpainted minis that I want to get to. Come grab a beverage of choice and talk about planned and ongoing games! Excited to see you there.

Hi everyone! I’m so excited to be here, I have joined the community for a while now 🎉

Hello Game Master's Laboratory! My name is Michael (like many of us) and I've been playing RPGs beginning with but not limited to D&D (like many of us) for many years. Although I played in the "good old days" I'm only somewhat nostalgic for them. I like almost everything that has evolved in roleplaying games. I joined Skool to build my own community around teaching the art of being a "Dungeon Master" and I was delighted to find this group because I'm already a fan of proactive roleplaying. It actually comes pretty close to my own philosophies in a lot of ways, and in the past I have had similar thoughts to putting that in a system. "Player-centric" was one term I've played with before. But you guys have done a lot better with proactive, because I realized along the way that we need to involve the players in the creative process, but there is more to game than just satisfying the player's needs. What I think about, these days is in terms of the whole table is working together to serve the needs of the world, itself: a world in which nothing is real (or canonical) until it happens at the table. The GM may have ideas about the lore and background of the setting, they may know about plots and agendas going on behind the scenes, but the output of playing, the living world, is the result of those ideas coming together with the actions of the players, one scene or encounter or adventure at a time. Well, there's my grand philosophical statement. That was the assignment, right? "introduce yourself with a grand philosophical statement on the deep structure of Tabletop Roleplaying Games?" Or did I make that up?

I have been reading through draft character goals for the new campaign and nearly snort-laughted at this one ... "He intends to complete his mission in spite of his assigned party's incompetence, and will succeed in not only identifying sources of arcane power, but in securing them for responsible exploitation." Not quite the format I asked for, but I can completely picture this character now. I am curious what you would pick as a favorite character goal...