Those of you in the Friday morning chat would have heard me talking about the giant battle arena I'm printing. I'm about half way though and this is how it's looking. When it's done it should be about 22" in diameter. For comparison I also posted pictures of the largest I could print it on one plate.

Some of you may have heard me talk about wanting to do a 5 week mini campaign this Halloween. I've got my players and I've come up with the scaffolding. I sent out the following questionnaire to them. What I love about this is that I'm giving them the opportunity to actually share their real fears with me to be used as material for the game, but I have stressed that I DO NOT WANT THEM TELL ME IF THEIR FEARS ARE REALLY THEIRS OR JUST FEARS I GET TO USE FOR THE GAME. If they give me their real fears they will have a more intense experience. Once I get their questionnaires back I'll put together the actual sessions. Each session will focus on a different horror element with the guiding principle being that if they can hit it, its combat, not horror. If anyone is interested in my over all story I'm happy to share it. I just dont want to type it all out if no one is intertested. As a setting, Im loosley using a four session module called One for the Sorrow - Whispers in the Mist as my sand box. Its ideal because its already split into 4 sessions. I need 5 but I already know what my fifth session will be

The gist of what's below: our new RPG, how to get it, and why we made it. This month, instead of our usual Proactive Packet for Gold members, we're releasing a manuscript for our Proactive RPG, The Ordained: a fast-paced, storytelling RPG meant to be run in short campaigns. I'm hoping it creates about as much encouragement as possible for proactive playstyles, with less lecturing and books to read. Those are fun (at least for Jonah and I) but actually playing the game is more fun. The game implements most of the major principles of our books and merges them into a hexcrawl, sandbox-style game with lots of storytelling elements. PCs literally get their hands into the narrative, engaging in collaborative worldbuilding in the fiction by respooling threads of fate as best they can. It's also a punchy 40 pages (counting covers, maps, etc) so it's a pretty quick read to get to the table. How do you get it? It's in the Classroom tab under the Proactive Packets tab, which Gold members have access to. It's just an initial manuscript now (not even a playtesting manuscript) so it's up for our Gold members. When we have a finished draft, I'll run some closed playtests. Once it's through layout and art, it'll be up through DriveThruRPG. Until then, it'll stay in the Classroom tab for our Gold members---while it's a complete game, it's not a finished product, so I don't really want to represent our work with it on DriveThruRPG or something. This is sort of an experiment with marrying proactive principles into game mechanics (something many games already do!) in a controlled environment: it's short and punchy, builds a lot on some other pretty player-driven games, and has a lot of step-by-step setup for the game that uses proactive principles without necessarily giving a powerpoint on them. That's because my other motivation is easier onboarding for our players. Jonah and I's biggest regret about the first book is that we devoted very little space to actually getting players on board with, and indulging in, the principles of a proactive roleplaying game (a pretty big oversight since the game style is, well, player driven). This game doesn't outline those principles in the same way, because in order to create characters and use them effectively, you'll have to follow them (although there is a few snippets of lecture, as condensed as I could get them). We have other onboarding ideas for PARP, like live play and new written projects, but this is the one I got done first.

Tonight at 7:00 PM ET, we'll have our weekly happy hour! Feel free to drop in---we'll chat about our games, pitch ideas, and trade tricks for running! You can join by just clicking the live event link at the top of the feed at 7:00. See you there!

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.