For me the main one is to run Blades in the Dark for the very first time and maybe play through the Pendragon starter adventure.
Savage Worlds. They call their fortunate hero inspiration point analogue ‘bennies,’ hehehe.
I imagine Benny from F:NV spinning around and saying “what in the goddamn” every time it comes up
It’s great! I’m running a campaign at the moment (or trying to, hosting Foundry behind a CGNAT is a pain and I’m 4-for-4 on services that haven’t worked for me) and it’s been a breeze to run. We ran 5e before, and the transition has been buttery smooth.
Their main gripes about 5e was how slow combat was IRL, even with digital tools for dice rolling and calculations (mostly due to 5e’s HP bloat and action economy). My main gripe about 5e is that homebrewing feels like balancing a jenga tower of oddly shaped blocks. SW fixes both through sheer simplicity.
We’re running a low-fantasy western themed campaign set in the british isles circa 1900 atm, and I’ve already got a cyberpunk+vtm campaign planned, a star wars campaign planned, a concept of a witcher campaign (want to nail the themes and storytelling logic of the books), and a ragnarök campaign planned.
I was window shopping other systems when I got tired of trying to nail a cyberpunk red homebrew for 5e, and starting designing my own system, only to discover it already existed in the form of Savage Worlds, even down to how feats and antifeats work in it (edges and hindrances). As if it was tailor made for what I want to run.
Well that just gave me a flashback damn
Patroling the Mojave makes you wish for-
Slugblaster: Kickflip Over a Quantum Centipede
Blades in the Dark
FATE Core
Triangle Agency
In no particular order those are top of my list.
My group is starting a Traveller campaign
Ooo blades is my favourite game system. It was my longest running campaign and we actually finished it. They ended up accidentally summoning a demon which burned half the city before containing it and using that to threaten the government into giving the poor more rights.
I’ve got a few waiting in the wings to play at some point. The main one I want to try is the Wildsea. I’ve got to finish Spire and possibly Heart before moving into a new system first though. Depending on how many demons my players end up summoning the spire game could end quite quickly.
Mothership RPG (OSR style), got myself the deluxe box as christmas gift.
Would also love to try out Microscope (fractal wordlbuilding) but that’s not RPG, not all of my players are interested in something like that.
The box set is great. I’m currently running another bug hunt and absolutely loving it. The mechanics are brilliant, everything runs super smoothly with the mechanics giving enough threat and stress to keep it interesting but otherwise getting out of the way and allowing lots of role play. It’s a real easy one to teach as well because everything is so simple and intuitive. Plus the companion app seems quite usable (though we have done everything on paper).
I’ve played in one microscope session. Could be a good one to keep in the back pocket if you have some sickness one session as you need no prep.
Thanks for the info! Haven’t really delved into the story books yet (just read the warden manual), guess Another Bug Hunt will be the first:)
Ad microscope, great idea!
If you get around to Microscope and enjoy it, it recommend both The Quiet Year and For the Queen.
When I played Microscope, I found that the game was a little too unconstrained and it was very hard to keep things from becoming totally silly, then in the close up scenes, everyone would basically want to default to playing a super rules-light generic TTRPG, and two or three of those scenes would dominate the session. I feel that it may get better with frequent play, but that’s not really what it’s designed for. Ben Robbins, the creator is a very talented game designer and is also famous for the West Marches style of D&D play, and has made numerous GMless TTRPGs since, and I’ve only ever heard great things about them.
The Quiet Year is a game with a more constrained setting, that basically uses a map you fill in as you please and a bunch of prompts tied to playing cards to play out the 4 seasons of a small settlement moving from it’s founding to a final point where either the settlement is implied to die out, or is a fantastic springboard for a traditional TTRPG to take over. There are plenty of hacks online that move the tone from a post apocalypse feeling survival focused game to basically anything that charts a settlement for a year, including one by the creators called The deep forest which I understand to be a decolonising focused and a bit more cottagecore / cottagecore. I preferred this to Microscope mostly because of the fact that it’s prompts constrain the tone from becoming all out silly.
Finally For the Queen has been one of the best games I’ve ever discovered. I’ve played the first edition but there is a second created by the same creator, Alex Roberts, produced by Critical Role’s Darrington Press. If you’re Critical Role averse for some reason, the first edition was not tied to them at all. This game is by far the easiest to teach new players, and is the first game I’d bring to play with absolute TTRPG newbies. In my opinion it generates the best story, although rather than being solely worldbuilding, it places a primary interest on your characters and relationships to a queen figure. I find that despite this, the world’s that comes out of it are far more evocative and exciting to develop than other GMless TTRPGs, and a large part of that is the hard to hack reality that it’s just got good prompts. Despite that it’s got the most hacks of the original of anything here, as the original game is so streamlined and well playtested, which really shows while playing it.