Hey everyone, we had a great chat today at the coffee hour. People shared a lot of great resources, and I wanted to collate them here for everyone interested. * Game Recs* - Goblin Quest: rowanrookanddecard.com/product/goblin-quest/?v=0b3b97fa6688 - Goblins with a Fat Asshttps://tombloom.itch.io/gwafa - The Ultimate Micro-Rpg Book has 40 tear out games. All kinds of themes and ways to playing: https://worldbuildersmarket.com/products/ultimate-micro-rpg-book - The Quiet Year: buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year *Adventure Recs* - Granny's Apple Pie: https://media.wizards.com/2018/dnd/dragon/21/DRA21_GrammysCountryApplePie.pdf *GM Resources* - Inspiration for characters - whothefuckismydndcharacter.com - A great ai tool for transcribing notes: GMassistant.ai - An example of the previous tool in action: gmassistant.app/sessions/0839a366-f4d0-4a80-a830-e819f1454974/public/d98c7c5b-1e0c-4c66-857f-bd7f0f7e5207 @Richard Mills , @Eric Person , @Phil Hollecker , @Chris Lock , @Sara Gly , @Mark Petersen , @Chuck Theobald

Last night was our first session of our open table Blades in the Dark game! Thanks to @James Willetts @Richard Mills and @Beth Bachuss for taking the plunge and pulling off some daring heists! I’ll update this each week with an overview and quick summary of the session, the prep, the post-game accounting, and some insight into the proactive process, to hopefully make the motions of running a proactive game a little more open and approachable. This week, we kicked off by choosing some pregenerated characters (to my great disappointment, no one picked “Jon’ah the Pungent”) and learning a few basics of the system. Then we got right into the action! I haven’t had the chance to make a poll and decide crew type (look out for that tomorrow!) so I chose cult to get us started and the group decided they wanted to steal the shiny ancient obelisk described on their crew sheet. In Blades, every crew type has a bunch of Claims—valuable turf, places, or objects currently held by other factions. Since we’re just starting, I substituted the claims sheet for goals to get the ball rolling quickly. I’ll talk more about my plans to make this a bit more proactive in my post-game section. The heist was good fun! The players decided that the Church of Ecstasy probably had the obelisk, and that it was being brought to their large temple by the Gondoliers. Meanwhile, the Keepers of the Flame infiltrate the church for cultish purposes… Highlights include James’ leech unleashing an unknown horror from a prison to wreak havoc and destruction, Richard’s whisper unleashing an indoor hailstorm to spook off some guards and loot the organ loft, and Beth’s lurk pretending to be a wealthy donor and strongman the delivery men into moving the obelisk for her. We opening and closed with critical successes, so things were mostly in a pretty safe position thanks to great rolls and clever plans! Downtime included pissing off the yet-unnamed rival gang, who have vowed revenge and will return at a later time. Also some training and some inventing of dangerous anti-ghost substances.

This is our final call for our first Blades in the Dark game on Wednesday at 7:00 PM ET! You can read more about it in this post. Sign up here: 3/25 Game: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/70A0B44AFA723A2FB6-63028606-blades 4/1 Game: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/70A0B44AFA723A2FB6-63029032-blades Relevant links and info (like the link to our Roll20 page) will go out tomorrow!

Hello all! Glad to be here. I've been playing and GMing since the late 1970s - DnD, HERO, Ubiquity, a bit of GURPS. And that HARP game that didn't work out so well. :-) I'm currently running two long-running Middle-earth setting games, with the One Ring ruleset (Cubicle 7). I love my players, they are are all new to roleplaying games and so they don't know what they should and shouldn't be doing. The result has been some amazing roleplaying and some interesting experiences. I enjoy world-building and story-crafting, but I'm also interested in how games can be used to provide experiences that are emotionally or psychologically "nourishing". I'm not necessarily talking about "therapeutic", I have no training or experience in that area. But I do believe that stories and settings can provide healing and comfort.

I pulled together a group of story focused players to try an emergent campaign (collaborative+proactive). I am going to use this thread to share periodic updates on how it is going and what is working. Meetings will be sparse this fall and then weekly after the new year. It is five players from my in-person games who had to move out of town.