Hello Game Masters! The name is Jon and I’m a GM from the metro Vancouver area of British Columbia, Canada. I’ve been running games since 2022 starting with D&D but have since converted over to Daggerheart mainly. In the daytime I teach, and this year I decided to do something really different. I wanted to see if students would interact with curriculum and content more meaningfully if it was more than just data to be stored. That’s how “Verdaria” was born: my classrooms home brewed sandbox. Every time we learn a new unit the “Verdarians” discover new details about their world. Unit on Ecosystems? We’ve discovered lush and diverse biomes at each quadrant of our map. Unit on Governments? We’ve now understood the various forms of power distributed across Verdaria’s kingdoms. It’s been revolutionary for me and the kids, and also affords me even more excuses to crack out the dice during regular school hours. I look forward to learning how I can facilitate this educational journey more and share some of my ideas with other like minded storytellers!

The last two weeks, I’ve been trying out a new game called Public Access—it’s an ongoing game, but I expect it to only run 10–12 sessions. I tried it out after watching this truly excellent review from Quinn’s Quest (who, if you haven’t watched, makes what I think is pretty much the best reviews of TTRPGs on the internet) https://youtu.be/DI8fUgSdgZg?si=ieolVb190wGzz_ag The game is an absolute blast. "No on remembers this children's show you watched growing up, except all of you. Something was...not quite right with it...what happened to it?" The explicit goal of every character is to find out what happened to this unsettling children's program that no one seems to remember called TV Odyssey. It’s inspired by analog horror and creepypastas, using the Brindlewood Bay system to facilitate a very cool storytelling system (rather than a puzzle heavy system like some mystery games). Brindlewood Bay and its offspring have a clue system where there’s no set answer to a mystery—instead, players collect clues, then make a role to create their own answer to the question with as many clues as possible. If their roll is a success, their answer is right. This concept bothered me a lot at first, but when it works, it works GREAT. It’s really nice for a game like this where the story, tone, atmosphere, and characters is the focus, and not actually the main mystery like in a Sherlock Holmes game or something like that. The mysteries build tension but never slow down the game from theorizing, which is nice. Other interesting mechanics include Keys, these boxes you can check to improve a roll. They effectively make characters unkillable, which is important for encouraging them to split up and get into danger. They're also all connected to either narrating a flashback to childhood, or mechanically entwining yourself deeper with the forces of horror, which is cool. All of this to set up the games I’ve run! We’ve had two virtual sessions, and I’m running with three players (friends from high school!). In the first session, we spent about an hour making characters, and two hours on our first mystery, the House on Escondido Street. The campaign has a cool narrative structure I won't spoil in case someone plays it, but it comes with a bunch of premade mysteries that are really well laid out. The group spent the day digging around the house, butting heads with the HOA, and otherwise engaging in investigative antics. They spent the night (which is its own phase where all rolls are more dangerous) watching a tape of the mysterious kids show that they found. Very good time.