#wrote you this starter like a week ago but only just getting round to queue it

[somewherebetweenrage]

surprise starter for @mxndwitch​ 

   “Tell me about them?” Voice is low, words soft. There is no question who it is that Erik wants to hear about; they both know.

   The mutant is leaning forward in the upright chair, forearms resting on thighs, head down in a way that speaks of defeat. He should not be here again – grieving, that is – with his world-battered daughter across the room from him in her own period of mourning. There should be happiness at finding her, joy at the news of new life. But there is neither, only relief that Wanda is still living, even though her children are not.

   The news that she is soon to become a sister again will have to wait a little longer.

[open-hearth-rpg]

The TTRPG Year So Far

I’ve been away from the blog for a couple of weeks, mostly because I’ve actually had a burst of productive energy. This week I released Danger! Unexploded Spell, a series playset for Girl By Moonlight: “Unacceptable mages drafted by the authorities protect their city from damage wrought by arcane air raids and bombings while trying to survive and create a community.”

Before that I finally cracked down and finished writing up Numberless Secrets, my Hearts of Wulin sourcebook for running mysteries. That came in at about 110 pages, and includes six sample mysteries. I’m really happy with the end results. Of course leading up to that I posted the draft of the new Celestial playbook for HoW on the blog and a tweaked version of the Villain playbook. 

Then in early April ago I put out Veil: Iterations, my version 1.5 rules for The Veil. I’ve had some feedback, but it is a pretty niche release (like all of my stuff). I have to make a couple of tweaks to that. 

Assuming I get this next GBM playtest written up, I have several other things in the queue: a couple new cases for Apocalypse Keys, my fantasy/samurai hack of Free from the Yoke, Hearts of Yokai (PbtA inspired by Changeling the Lost), and maybe more campaign frames for Hearts of Wulin. I’m sure there’s a couple of other things I’m forgetting. 

ACTUAL GAMING

All of that has been in parallel to all of the games which I’ve been running online and locally. Here’s what I’ve done so far this year, 87 sessions total with nine as a player. I have links to actual plays where they’re available. You can also listen to these in podcast format on our Open Hearth site:

Before the Sith: My hack of Before the Storm for the Star Wars minicon. I’d run another hack of this for superheroes before and realized that a four hour block just didn’t work. So I ran this as two three-hour blocks with an hour break in the middle. That helped and gave us room to let the scenes breathe. Even with that, we still ended up cutting out one of the rounds to make sure we had enough time for the ending. 

My Star Wars framing worked, but I think particularly because we had three Jedi and one non-Jedi character. That created a really solid set of tensions and questions. In the end two of the four characters had tragic/heroic deaths in the final battle. The core game’s mechanic for the cards works really well and would be worth adapting for other games. (one session)

Bounty of the Week: We just started this as a stand-in for the Veil: Iterations game I’ve been running on alt-Sundays. I managed to over pack my schedule so I asked if someone else could step in to run something. We did our session zero and I’m looking forward to playing. I’ve played vanilla MotW a couple of times in both editions and dug it. However I found it tough going when I ran it, I think because I have a different approach to structuring mysteries. (not recorded, one session)

Dreams and Machines: Oof. I ran a couple of sessions of D&M from the starter set last year, and even wrote up my impressions. I picked up the physical boxed set afterwards. So when someone asked for a series to see how 2d20 worked, I volunteered to run the full game complete with character creation. It crashed and burned.

I don’t want to go too far into this here- it deserves a full write up. But I only remember canceling one other series in mid-run because the game itself just didn’t work for us (that would be Dangerous Times: Muckrakers and Magic in Old New York). I like 2d20– I have two other series using it on this list. But Dreams and Machines has some serious problems. After the second play session, the group talked about our frustrations. I switched over to a Hearts of Wulin series, to help cleanse my palate. (two sessions)

Dune (not recorded): This remains probably my favorite implementation of 2d20. It has its issues (move as an action, spatial duel set up, slow advancement) but I dig the presentation, resources, and the mechanics generally. We’ve gotten fairly deep in our story. The world our PC house has taken possession of has developed nicely– with interesting ideas about society and ecology. Plus we’ve had some fun interactions with rival houses. We will be hitting a stopping point for this soon. That’s because the group’s schedule can be uncertain and we want to do some short-run things we can likely finish. (six sessions)

Fearful Symmetries: The Second Aethyr: We did a full three-month campaign arc of this Trail of Cthulhu series at the beginning of 2023. I loved Fearful Symmetries' combination of magicians, folk horror, and a specific historical place. Towards the end of that series it became clear we could easily do another arc. 

We took up that story a year later real and in-game time, checking in with our characters and how they’d recovered from the conflict at the end of the last series. Despite the break, everyone fell right back in. We ended up with three “mysteries” (including a country house murder) plus some transitional sessions, and an action-packed coda. I loved it the whole way through. It has renewed my faith in simple, streamlined Gumshoe. 

We decided we would do a third and final arc, even talking in the final session about the framing for the start of the next campaign. We might do this later this year or at the beginning of next. I’ve done some pipelaying already for the campaign, and have been thinking about how to integrate the Bookhounds of London material with it. (twelve sessions)

Girl by Moonlight: On a Sea of Stars: Another one we started last year, though right at the end. It became one of my favorite series; I dig GBM’s approach and mechanics. The group enjoyed it, though I think one of the players significantly less so than the others. We decided to do a two-month series to finish out the campaign this year. I imagined it as a mid-season break for a prestige TV show. On Wednesday we hit our 14th session, playing out the final, world-breaking mission. Next session we will do role-play and epilogues to finish out these stories. 

I really like GbM. The mechanics drive an interactivity which feels right with the genre. Any action can be from the individual, but becomes stronger when you wrap in the other characters. It may be the rpg with the strongest support-class mechanics I’ve ever seen. (four sessions)

Godbound: Sundered Cycles:We finally ran the third and final quarterly arc of this series. I really enjoy Godbound. I love how the wild powers combined with an OSR adjacent system make people think carefully about how to solve problems. It has some wonky bits– and the problem of the flat OSR combat, but overall it works. 

I really enjoyed returning to this because we’d built up the characters and world so fully in the previous two quarterlies. Going back made me a little nervous but– as I mentioned in an earlier post– I’ve found it's much easier to go back to previous games when playing online. We also added a fifth, new player which added a great dimension to the play. They had a unique perspective on divinity and the characters’ role in that. 

Had a great set of epilogues and we tied the finale into events from the Mountain Home game. I like the world we’ve built and will probably go back there again. I used some of the Thousand Thousand Island bits early on, but there’s still a ton of that I could integrate.  (ten sessions)

Hearts of Wulin: Ageless Sin (not recorded): A solid four-part HoW series using the supernatural set up. I ran for three folks I hadn’t before which was great– and everyone really leaned into the genre. Big, hot tragic ending in the last session. (four sessions)

Hearts of Wulin: 3 Mountains, 1 Heart: A great series. This is what we transitioned into when Dreams and Machines collapsed. We used the fantastical materials, even doing an initial playtest of the Celestial playbook (which needs some proofing and tweaking). We had some great characters, including our Celestial. The Fox-spirit PC from Ageless Sin returned and I integrated several elements from that story into this one. We also had a really fun take on the Aware and a PC who used music in a unique way. I’ve had players run musician characters, but I don’t ever think I’ve seen someone lean into performance and musicality like they did. (five sessions)

The Hunted: I need to write up a review of this. It’s one of the best one-shot frameworks I’ve ever played. It uses Forged in the Dark to create an amazing, tense, and propulsive game of characters being hunted by something terrible. Great play structure, dynamite tools for collaboration, and just dripping with atmosphere. Highly recommended. (one session)

Imperium Maledictum: 3 Cycles from Retirement and Plausible Deniability: So I have been running this to justify buying the core book (and the GM screen as it turns out). This is a newish 40K game, clearly intended to be a kind of follow up to Rogue Trader– though it is both narrower and broader than that. It uses the same mechanics as the latest version of Warhammer Fantasy, creating some consistency between the games. 

I’ve enjoyed both series– despite the tradness of the system. There’s enough interesting flexible choices for success and combat to make it really interesting. But it's abstract in a lot of places (like zones for movement and influence as a resource). I originally planned to just run one series during the day, but I had enough interest that I put another on the calendar for the same day in the evening. I’d always planned to do different adventures for the two groups, but having one player in both confirmed that for me. I’ll admit I had some worries going in, but I’m having a great time running this and leaning into slightly-satirical grimdark combined with the 40K elements which attract me. (seven sessions)

Mecha Hack: The only rpg I played besides the newly starting Bounty of the Week campaign. I thoroughly enjoyed this OSR game which combined a dynamite GM with a great group. I had some of the most tense moments I think I ever have. The combat clicked, exploration merged tension with narrative, and the final fully role-play session tied everything together. Plus I learned about Owlbear Rodeo which I’ve been using in a couple of campaigns. (nine sessions)

Murder in the Jedi Temple: I ran this one shot for our Star Wars mini-con. I’d playtested the scenario with a group which helped me trim and fix a couple of things for play. While the playtest went OK (pretty clear one player hated it), the game went well at the table and we managed to get a full, rich story done in four hours. (two sessions)

Pressure: One of the two newish Osprey rpgs I did a two-shot of. I found it decidedly mid but I had a really good time with the two adventures I ran. In particular I dug my set up for the second session and how wild things got. You can check out my review of it here. (two sessions)

Pulp Cthulhu: I did a short series of this by way of justifying my purchase of the Humble Bundle for Call of Cthulhu 7e. I enjoyed the play which adapted and drastically changed an adventure from the book. Pulp Cthulhu is pretty much CoC 7e with a few talents and more ability to spend luck. It’s a minor adaptation. It reinforced for me that if I’m going to do trad-ish Cthulhu I’m pretty off running Trail. 

It’s probably the last time I run CoC, given that Chaosium decided that their best move was to hire an unapologetic shitheel who doxxed folks who were already subject to harassment. After this, despite my love for Glorantha, I’m done with their stuff. (three sessions)

Star Trek Adventures: We wrapped our multi-year 13th Age campaign in 2023– we’d started it well before the pandemic. I pitched out several concepts and this one tied for first. Since I’d already invested in the books I cast the tie-breaking vote. We have a big table (six players). I was worried about that originally but it has been fine. We’ve done four “episodes” so far, each split over two sessions. I’ve encouraged them to keep thinking of this as a TV show– with that kind of dramatic logic. 

One of the challenges has been that we have two people who really know Star Trek, two who know Star Trek, and two who don’t know Star Trek.

Of course shortly after I started (and picked up the last of the physical books) Modiphius announced Star Trek Adventures 2nd Edition. I don’t think I’ll switch over– in part because I spent a bunch of money buying sets of Effect Dice which the new edition doesn’t use. (face to face, ten sessions)

Tomb Raider: The Last Guardians: I ran a short playtest of this last year, but only a few sessions. This time I’m running in the Open Playtest with more room, trying out a new adventure and team playbook. I continue to dig the mechanics here– and the character interactions work throughout. I’m hoping that after the playtest period I’ll be able to post the videos. (three sessions)

Tomorrow City:The other Osprey RPG I ran. I did a two shot of this (you can see the review here). I liked the system and the setting’s solid. It’s not a bad start for something simple and dieselpunk. But it is one of those cases where you have to decide if the setting’s something you really want to lean into and learn. If not, then the evaluation’s really on the strength of the system. (two sessions)

Veil: Iterations: This is our every other Sunday game. I started this last year to playtest some of the new elements. However we had a bunch of bumps in 2024 and only got in a few sessions. Right now it is on hiatus until after our Bounty of the Week game, when my time frees up a little bit. (not recorded, three sessions)