We did Stars and Wishes at the end of the last session. One of the players shared that he enjoys that "the world is on a clock" and how that adds tension, meaningful choices, and a planning element to the game. The settings has a dangerous eldrich storm roll through every 5-9 days. They need to time their expeditions and projects around these storms. Sometimes the storms leave new problems for them to solve. Sometimes when they are out, something goes wrong, and they are worried about getting back in time. At the moment, this is a need to gather resources several days from shelter. What I wanted to share is that this world clock is powerfully synergistic with the proactive structure. The decisions of what goals to pursue next turn into a planning not just on sequence of the goals, but on how much time is left and how confident they are in their estimate of the next storm [see code]. It is creating both a player and story need to understand the storm so they can accurately predict time for the next storm. It is creating a motivation to use the hexploration rules to speed travel and make it more predictable. The player's comment was that it is so much more than wanting to get back to town for a ball two weeks away. Context: The storm is a cuthulu-ian eldrich being trapped in between planes. The time between storms and the duration of the storms is a tap-code spelling out messages. When the broke the code they had "_are yo" [Who are you?] They had a lot of confidence the next storm was a u [8 days, 10 hours]. Right now they only have "Re_" and have a lot of uncertainty of what is next. It also created a goal of getting access to records from the academy of prior storms.

GenCon is upon us! This thread is for organizing social and gaming meetups for everyone who will be in Indy for GenCon this year. If you'll be attending this year, post in this thread! Let us know what you're playing, what you WANT to play, and connect with other forum members who will be there this year. See you all there!

Hi! I'm Michelle. I've been playing TTRPGS for over 10 years at least. In my first DnD group, we would swap turns being the DM. I love worldbuilding and collaborative storytelling. I have some ideas but not really anyone to implement them with. I'm not looking for a group though, lol. I'm in too many already. I am curious to learn from other DMs. Nice to meet you all!

In preparation for a game recently, I ended up using a bunch of the random tables from Shadowdark RPG. Like a third or more of that book is just really, really useful tables that I can use in pretty much any fantasy RPG (or even a few non-RPG ones) and get a lot of use out of them. I've also gotten some great use out of Knaves 2e, some Kevin Crawford games like Scarlet Heroes, and 13th Age. Outside of rulebooks, the GoblinPunch blog has some really great articles with tables. Rolling on these things is addictive. Does anyone have any favorites they use a lot? Bonus points if it's useful in multiple RPGs

Hey everyone. I just wanted to plug the group chats that are happening twice a week now. I'm in the Friday one right now and Alex is leading a great discussion on how to have inter character (not inter player) conflict as a way to bring intensity to a game. On Wednesday we got to reminise a little about old school TTPRGs. Long story short there is a wealth of experience in this group. Come, learn, teach and have learn how you can improve your games.