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23 Campaign Concepts: Things I’d Like to Run (2013)

Back in 2013 I wrote up a collection of 23 different campaign pitches. Today I’m going back through each to see a) if I ended up running it, b) if I still would want to run it, and c) if yes, what would I use to get it to the table.

[open-hearth-rpg]

Dune Open Hearth Gaming Videos

Over the many years we have accumulated a large collection of actual play videos for a ton of different games-- both in our previous community incarnation and our new form. We collect these each week and add them to playlists on our Open Hearth Gaming Community YouTube site.

You can see all those playlists here: https://www.youtube.com/@OpenHearthGaming/playlists

For example, we have 11 sessions of Dune over a couple of series. Folks can watch some play of this 2d20 game-- in series set not on Arrakis, but player-created worlds. These are unedited, raw play from the table-- and a great chance to see what the game's like.

Playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjWnuWTlTzYAd6DiFNdEk4sFsqfVgt9Wc&si=nqLSuo3FsZXDmXau

We have hundreds off different games and series there for everyone to check out. You can subscribe to be updated as we add new sessions.

[open-hearth-rpg]

I’m done. I fucking did it. I spent like 30-40 hours making a video essay and it was terrible and also something im prouder of than anything i did in grad school. Holy shit that took forever

If you are interested in

Spire: The City Must Fall, by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor

Babel: An Arcane History, by RF Kuang

Portrayals of imperialism in fiction

Textual analysis of tabletop games and the implications of their settings

The futility of moderate resistance to liberal governments

Mushrooms

please check out this video, oh my god i worked so hard on it and i think its pretty good, and i know im not the only person in ttrpgs doing cool projects but i do think this essay is special!!!

Transcript here if you just wanna read it

[open-hearth-rpg]

The Celestial: A New Hearts of Wulin Playbook

After having updated the Villain Playbook last week, I wondered if there might be room for another playbook in the mix. Today I present a rough, first draft of a new playbook specifically for the Fantastic and especially the Xianxia style of play. This is someone who comes from one of the spirit realms, some powerful isolated place of cultivation, or Heaven itself. They might be a little god, a spirit, a powerful cultivator, or the like. They have a mortal form now during their time in the mortal world. This playbook is inspired by Heaven Official’s Blessing especially but also shows like Till the End of the Moon and The Blue Whisper.

[open-hearth-rpg]

The Celestial: A New Hearts of Wulin Playbook

After having updated the Villain Playbook last week, I wondered if there might be room for another playbook in the mix. Today I present a rough, first draft of a new playbook specifically for the Fantastic and especially the Xianxia style of play. This is someone who comes from one of the spirit realms, some powerful isolated place of cultivation, or Heaven itself. They might be a little god, a spirit, a powerful cultivator, or the like. They have a mortal form now during their time in the mortal world. This playbook is inspired by Heaven Official’s Blessing especially but also shows like Till the End of the Moon and The Blue Whisper.

[open-hearth-rpg]

The Celestial: A New Hearts of Wulin Playbook

After having updated the Villain Playbook last week, I wondered if there might be room for another playbook in the mix. Today I present a rough, first draft of a new playbook specifically for the Fantastic and especially the Xianxia style of play. This is someone who comes from one of the spirit realms, some powerful isolated place of cultivation, or Heaven itself. They might be a little god, a spirit, a powerful cultivator, or the like. They have a mortal form now during their time in the mortal world. This playbook is inspired by Heaven Official’s Blessing especially but also shows like Till the End of the Moon and The Blue Whisper.

[open-hearth-rpg]

I'll tell you what's my f*cking ttrpg catnip-- as in thing which hits my lizard brain but functionally does nothing:

Heavy stock, landscape GM screens. I run 90% of my sessions online and even when I'm f2f I rarely use a screen-- and even then (for Star Trek Adventures) I never look at the interior tables. But I love these things-- and I love that publishers know that I can sort of justify buying these if they put a booklet with some random generation tools inside (see Dune for a great one). Free League and Modiphius both do a great job with this-- lovely, heavy beasts. I have a screen for Root which I'm never going to use but I love it as an object. I spent some of my DTRPG money on the Imperium Maledictum screen...for the booklet of course. It's nice, not as heavy or thicc as I'd like but great colors, nice profile, clean interior. I'm running two series of this starting next month and I'm saying to myself, maybe I'll have the screen handy to check things, but I know in my heart of hearts I won't.

[open-hearth-rpg]

Learning Legacy: Life Among the Ruins

We've added this discussion discussion to our Open Hearth podcast feed. This is a talk by Lowell Francis about Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, a PbtA game of post-apocalyptic families and factions. Lowell walks through the facets of the game giving advice and insight, with feedback and questions from the seminar participants.

Talk Outline Example Character Keeper Sample Map Legacy: System Guide for New Players World Building: Collaborative Maps

[open-hearth-rpg]

wuxia, xianxia, and cultivation differences meta

translations: wuxia 武俠, xianxia 仙俠, and cultivation 修真/修仙 (xīuzhēn/xīuxiān)

think i've seen posts on this eons ago, and i'm pretty sure there are tons of these online, but since this has been written up already let's just have another one.

wuxia 武俠

wuxia and xianxia sound similar, but basically for wuxia it is about the pugilistic world (江湖 jiānghú). It is relatively more down-to-earth, and people practice martial arts ("kungfu") in their current life -- they do not do it to become xians (仙) and gods (神) however.

Like Thousand Autumns and Faraway Wanderers/Word of Honor, it has more historical background and ties to the current court and kingdoms, because people are living in the moment and concern themselves with worldly issues.

Martial arts may seem unrealistic, but in view of chinese fantasy it would be considered "real". It consists of fighting moves and internal energy, which they call qi or nèigōng (內功), and at times you see people flying around, climbing hills and jumping across rooftops which is qīnggōng (輕功).

xianxia 仙俠

A level up would be xianxia, where characters in the story cultivate to become xians (and gods, like in the heaven official's blessing). They don't really care about earthly issues here now, because their ambitions lie beyond the current world, and cultivation, getting stronger, and an immortal life are majorly all their goals.

You may not always see them working towards that purpose, such as in mdzs they are considered a lower-xianxia society (低魔), meaning people don't go through all the steps of cultivation and only stay at the stage before the "golden core" stage.

In xianxia, characters still learn basic fighting moves aka. martial arts, but to direct the internal energy they use línglì (灵力), zhēnqì (真气), and fǎlì (法力), all xianxia terms you commonly see. "neigong" is practically nonexistent in this genre. That's why people building up their "neigong" instead of "lingli" are likely never going to be able to cultivate.

cultivation 修真/修仙

A subgenre in the xianxia category would be cultivation. Characters actively go through the stages of cultivation, and likely for the MC, because they are the main character, they successfully become a xian and exit the world at the end of the novel.

There are many stages of cultivation, usually defined at the beginning of the novel in the synopsis, and a typical example of the different levels would be this:

练气，筑基，金丹，元婴，化神，炼虚，合体，大乘，渡劫

And with a cursory search, an English translation would be something like this, albeit not with all the cultivation ranks identified.

Qi condensation (练气), Foundation establishment (筑基), Core Formation (金丹), Nascent Soul (元婴), and the names after that vary too greatly with translation and fandom so I'll jump straight to Immortal Ascension

extra info: getting into the philosophy of it all

It'd be interesting to note that the word "xiá" (俠) permeates all these genres. This is something akin to the concept of "hero", but not at all also, and I'd love to speak more on this but this post has already gone way longer than I hoped it would be, so perhaps another day.

Regardless, it is interesting to note that wuxia has a greater emphasis on "xia" than xianxia. (some joke that cultivation doesn't have the word "xia" in it, and much of that is because characters have foregone heroism and focused on gaining powers and working towards ascension instead). As a result, wuxia is more confucianism-oriented, though not without its taoism and buddhism influences.

xianxia, on the other hand, is mainly derived from "dào" (道), from taoism, which is another lengthy concept if I ever get to it.

And some may have heard of the "farming" genre, 种田 (zhòngtián). This has to do with golden fingers (mary sues) in imperialistic china, earning a wealth of money, and all that. It has nothing to do with cultivation, alike they sound in english.

that's it for now, hmu if you wish to ask/discuss!

(and apologies for the pinyin translations, hope it's understandable still! formally writing pinyin they are supposed to be two separate words not one.)

[open-hearth-rpg]

The Villain: Expanded for Hearts of Wulin

Hearts of Wulin: Worlds contains a ton of great new settings, some community-generated content, and a mystery-solving mode to handle stories like Ancient Detective. It also has the 7th playbook, The Villain. However, when I originally wrote that, I left some things out. Generally for the Fantastic and Courtly playsets, each playbook got three and two new moves respectively. I did add a new Villain role for each, but no new moves.

KPOPandRPGS pointed this out to me a couple of weeks ago. So today I presented the full version of The Villain, including special moves for those settings. There’s also a new Role move for Numberless Secrets. This is a rough, first draft so these may change in the future, depending on feedback.

[open-hearth-rpg]

Visualizing @haveyouplayedthisttrpg's data

A while ago, I posted this over on the Indie RPG Newsletter but forgot to also put it here. If you haven't heard of Have You Played This, the blog runs polls about various RPGs and people can reply if they've played, read, just heard of it, or not even that.

Here's the highlights:

On average, these polls get 470 votes.

For the majority of these polls, more than 50% of respondents said they’d never heard of the game.

Out of 81 games that have been polled, only 33 games had even reached the eyes and ears of more than 50% of the respondents. Most people haven’t heard of most of the games!

And here's the image:

The image is a bit compressed. So if you’d like to read it comfortably, you can head to my google sheet and see it at full scale.

While this far from definitive (there’s also a huge variance in the number of votes for each game), it’s interesting to get a sense of what games are relatively popular. For example, Thirsty Sword Lesbians seems to be about as well-known as Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay on tumblr. Would you have guessed that? Actually, maybe, you could’ve. But would you have expected to see that Mouse Guard and Mausritter are roughly as popular – maybe tumblr just loves mice equally.

Also bless everyone who said they’d never heard of Pathfinder.

[open-hearth-rpg]

Free templates for TTRPG books

We just released two templates for TTRPGs in Affinity Publisher!

If you don’t really know where to start when creating a book, we got you! Both templates are FREE and will always be FREE!

Both include margins, bleed and a larger gutter for better readability in the book's center. ✨✨

We currently made a 8.5x11 template and 5.5x8.5!

You can pick them up here: https://wendigoworkshop.itch.io/free-affinity-publisher-template-for-ttrpg

Or here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/free-affinity-100696871

[open-hearth-rpg]

Review: So You Want To Be A Game Master by Justin Alexander

I was reading Justin Alexander’s book So You Want To Be a Game Master this week and something very obvious sneaked up on me. When someone says a book is for “new GMs”, they’re going to have to imagine some kind of person when they say that. When you say “new GMs”, what do you imagine to be their past experiences, their wants, their needs?

Now this book has an answer to that question. But it’s answer that is inherited, rather than made. Because the book is essentially a kind of transmutation of the Alexandrian blog, from pixel to print, the intended reader of the book has to be pretty close to the blog’s primary readership. Which turns out to be primarily, people running D&D 5e, secondarily, people running similar trad games, and tertiaririrally, anyone else.

But the model of the GM that D&D 5e and similar-ish trad games propose is a specific one. You know the model but it’s worth expanding: world-creator, NPC-actor, story-starter, story-ender, rules-teacher, player-manager, pseudo-computer, and so on, and so on. I’m not a fan of this model. For one thing, I think it is too much. I don’t think anyone dreams of doing this much labour.

Ever since the hobby began, people have been trying to solve it. The two broad solutions have been: adventure modules and highly specific games. Adventure modules say, “We got you, boss. Here’s a bunch of work done already. Focus on the other stuff.” Highly specific games say, “We’re world, scenario, rules, everything, all wound up and ready to go. Just follow instructions. Add salt to taste.”

Even as the Alexandrian has a lot of content about “fixing” D&D modules like Descent into Avernus, neither of these two solutions are to be found in So You Want To Be A Game Master. Instead, the book primarily gives you two things: techniques and procedures for running specific modes of play (dungeons have a dungeon turn, raids have raid turns, mysteries have the node structure and the three clue rule) and advice on how to write and create your own play materials (creating dungeons, hexcrawls, and so on). I have no doubt a need is being met here. But focusing on these things presupposes that our conceptual new GM won’t be using the previously mentioned two solutions – modules or specific games. Why?

Maybe it’s because this imagined new GM really wants to write their own adventure material. Fair enough. I’m one of those people. Or I was, when I played 5e a lot. (Nowadays, I’ll do anything to avoid doing anything.) But this isn’t a book about writing per se – as in, it’s not about the act of imagination where your mind goes away and comes back with words. It’s mostly about how to structure the results of that creative act. It’s mostly giving you formats to follow.

So I think we come to the answer finally: This book imagines a new GM is someone who is running D&D 5e or some other un-opinionated game and wants structures to follow when they write their own adventures. There is other good stuff in there for other people but it’s limited: this is who will get the most out of this book.

(This first appeared on the Indie RPG Newsletter)

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I’m probably gonna sound very disjointed. But I have an idea for a superhero campaign where all the P.Cs are kids cause all adults have disappeared.

I thought MASKS would be a good system for this but my friend informed me that in order for MASKS to work you kinda need mentor characters.

So in your opinion, what would be a good, easy to learn superhero based system to run this game.

THEME: Superheros, Kids - Only

Henshin, by Cave of Monsters Games.

Henshin A Sentai RPG is a storytelling tabletop game about young heroes with transformative powers who battle both monsters and personal problems. It borrows from a Japanese superhero culture of color-coded masked teams, giant robots, and over-the-top special effects. Anyone can tell fun, collaborative stories in Henshin!, regardless of familiarity with the tropes, and the game showcases a diversity of settings and characters for every player.

This book includes instructions and actual play examples for everything needed to start playing Henshin! right away. Also included are the eleven Color playbooks, seven ready-to-play settings, original exclusive art, and references to digital downloads. Resources and information can be found at henshingame.com. Let’s Henshin!

Henshin is inspired by the Tokusatsu genre of superhero media, and reminds me intensely of Power Rangers. Your characters will wrestle with personal obstacles such as dealing with their temper, their failures, and the way they are seen by their peers. The system is inspired by No Dice, No Masters but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily GM-less, just that it doesn’t use dice. Henshin’s settings are also very flexible, so you should be able to write your own custom setting in which the kids have taken on super-powered relics in order to survive in a world without adults.

Masks: Retconned, by Sam Roberts.

You’re like most teenagers, with one small difference: You’re a superhero. Fight villains, be part of a team, save the day, and maybe, slowly figure out who you are.

Masks: Retconned is a game of teen superhero adventures, designed for 3+ players. Most of the players will take on the role of individual Heroes on a Team. Imagine these as the protagonists of your new comic book series. One player takes on the role of GM, embodying the superheroic setting, supporting characters, and villains.

If you like the basic premise of Masks but you don’t want to deal with the adult entanglements, you might want to take a look at Masks: Retconned. The game is very bare-bones, and only has the basic mechanics - your stats, your emotions, and the graded success scale and what it means for moves. The rest is meant to be designed as you need it. So if you don’t mind doing a little bit of game design before you sit down to play, you might want to check this out!

Powered by Cereal, by bismuth.

Become the Teen With Attitude you always wanted to be Inspired by tokusatsu hero teams and magical girl squads, PbC is a game about building a brightly-coloured Hero team and playing their adventures across a Series, fighting to save the world from evil!

PbC brings all players together to collaborate on crafting a Series, with its own aesthetics for heroes and villains, its own setting, and unique qualities for each hero. Play comprises the Episodes of the Series: both the Heroes' lives, and fights against Boss characters. It uses a relatively straightforward d6 system and encourages the Hero players to think about how their individual actions work towards a team strategy, bolstering allies and keeping momentum!

Characters in PbC are embodiments of different virtues, and these virtues will define your personal strengths, as represented in the Verbs and Adjectives assigned to your character. Relationships are also important in this game, and this is represented by connections that each player will have with side characters, whether that be positive or negative. Overall the game is still very lighthearted, as it’s inspired by Saturday morning cartoons.

When you try to do something in PbC, you roll a number of d6’s, and check to see how many results were unique. The more unique results you have, the more successes! This means that there’s a cap on how successful your character ca be, but I think the fact that any roll is going to have at least one success really communicates the tone of this game. This another game where the setting is build-your-own, and I don’t see any mechanics that require adults to be part of the setting.

Teens With Powers, by Unknown Dungeon.

Teens with Powers is a one-page roleplaying game about extraordinary young people, inspired by TV shows like Teen Titans and Avatar the Last Airbender, and shonen manga.  As a group, the players and GM come up with the setting, themes, and age-range of the characters. Then each player creates a character with a singular power that they can use to help solve problems and fight evil, while also traversing the trials of being young adults.

Teens with Powers uses a dice-pool system to resolve risky actions, and a back-and-forth combat system to allow of maximum expression and excitement. Also included is a back-page with GM advice and rules.

Teens with Power is a stripped-down Forged in the Dark game. There isn’t much of a setting involved in the first place, so you should be able to build your own setting to fit your preferences. The downside is that there isn’t much guidance or inspiration for powers, so it might be worth it to check out something like Supertables to help you come up with your powers.

This ruleset has a mechanic called Limit, which tracks how close your character is coming to breaking down - push too far, and you lose control of your powers, likely causing damage and hurting something or someone you care about. This might be also good for a high-tension game where the disappearance of adults is the cause of a lot of stress and fear for your characters.

Super City, by David Garrett.

One in every one hundred children in Super City is born with super powers. You are one of those children. Together with your classmates at Super City Elementary, you save helpless citizens, rescue lost pets, and eat delicious ice cream.

Utilizing the ultralight VRBS system, Super City is easy enough for a six year-old to master, but also provides the structure for anyone to generate a superhero story of their own.

Super City was designed to be able to run for small kids, so the rule-set is definitely very light. Your powers will be represented as verbs, and you’ll gain better control over your powers as you progress. The game is organized over a series of scenes, which will present you with a number of problems that you’ll have to solve. You also have a collective pool of Energy, which is meant to track how close your characters are to running out of steam. The goal is to get through the mission without running out of Energy, which depletes when you fail a roll.

This is a game without a setting or history, which means you can backfill whatever lore makes sense for your characters.

Cosmic Ray Kids, by Hedgemaze Press.

Cosmic Ray Kids is a single-page (front and back) atomic-age adventure roleplaying game for all ages. Play as superpowered youngsters who fight the forces of evil with heroics and heart!

Cosmic Ray Kids uses a push-your-luck style of gameplay, that looks very much like the PUSH system by Cezar Capacle. Rolling a 6 is the best possible result. If you roll a 4 or lower, you can choose to roll again - but roll higher than a 7 and you’ve gone too far!

This game also has a Boost resource that is communal, and can be spent to improve a roll up to a certain point. This gives the players an option in case there is something that they can’t risk a re-roll for but still need a success, and also encourages the group to work together to figure out how to solve problems. If you want a game that has a retro-cartoon feel that encourages the characters to work together, Cosmic Ray Kids might be worth checking out!

A Special Extra:

It’s not a superhero game, but Children of the Fall is a GM-less game that takes place in an apocalypse that has turned adults into bloodthirsty monsters. It’s very gritty and dark, but an interesting premise.

[open-hearth-rpg]

Open Hearth Video Roundup - April 12, 2024

Welcome to the weekly Open Hearth Gaming video roundup!

These recorded sessions represent only a portion of the games we play every week, and anyone is welcome to join the fun! If you'd like to play in games like these, join our Playabl community and click on the "Calendar" tab to sign up for upcoming games. To browse our entire library of session videos, please visit our YouTube Playlists page.

Open Hearth Gaming Calendar

Orbital (Session 3 of 3) Donogh runs for Mark and Puckett Cash Only rushes to get those star-crossed lovers out of their hunter's crosshairs. Rye calls up one of her regulars to spirit them away, thanks to the best smuggler in the sector! Meanwhile Hemlock sits down with Calla to come to an arrangement. But every scheme is sidelined by the awakening in the depths of the station, something in motion thanks to that surprise nuke...

Eotenweard: The Old North (Session 4) Alun R. runs for Dom, Dominik M., and Pawel S. Amid the smoking aftermath of the Ogre's rampage our Heroes agree the solution to the ills that beset Stenholm (and a missing hawk) must lie within the nearby Treacherous Forest. There's evidence that someone got there before them, a grisly dismemberment, and a revelation of who is to blame. Then...the Heroes discover they have been misled; must identify the real villain; and confront that embodiment of the Darkness...

Trail of Cthulhu: Fearful Symmetries: Arc Two (Session 6) Lowell Francis runs for Alun R., Paul Rivers, Sherri, and Will H The characters arrive at Mathers Hall in Norfolk and Willford discovers the geography has changed in the two weeks since he last visited. They meet some of the guests-- a strange mix of folks deep in the secrets of magic, as well as staff who may be invested as well. The doctor receives a ride from Verity Dyse and becomes wary. Dinner and after reveals more secrets...and then a missing guest!

Trail of Cthulhu: Fearful Symmetries: Arc Two (Session 7) Lowell Francis runs for Alun R., Paul Rivers, Sherri, and Will H The morning of the shoot at Mathers Hall opens with a missing guest that few comment on. Paired up with fellow guests, the magicians learn more about their personalities and agendas. Richard skips the hunt, instead learning more about the origin of the mysterious Pascale Dumont. The investigation continues, with the good Doctor turning the tables on their host by admitting in private to the murder of Lord Bradbury. But then Lord Portmore's associate vanishes and there's an attempt on Verity Dyce's life which goes awry.

Dreams and Machines: Red King's Slumbers (Session 1) Lowell Francis runs for Eliot, José Feito, Kevin M, and Vince Session Zero and inciting incident for a short series of Dreams and Machines, a new setting inspired by Horizon: Zero Dawn and other sci-fi post-apocalyptic games. We create our characters, build bonds, and start things out so the players can begin to get used to the mechanics of this version of 2d20.

Dreams and Machines: Red King's Slumbers (Session 2) Lowell Francis runs for Eliot, José Feito, Kevin M, and Vince In the wake of their battle against the Thralls, our heroes discover an ancient cache containing a potentially dangerous technology, but decide to bring them along. They reach New Mossgrove and find out that recent attacks have changed the balance of power within the town...

Girl by Moonlight: On a Sea of Stars (Session 1 of 5) Donogh runs for Ian, Matthew Doughty, and Sabine V. Having awoken vengeful Gods with their meddling in time travel - a last branch of humanity hurtles through space in an interstellar ziggurat, hunted by the Leviathans. Our group of Pilots, chosen by their congregation to be doomed martyrs, is the only thing that can protect them - but it it only out there on a sea of stars that the pilots and their Engines feel whole, with an intimate bond and control over their own fate that the rest of humanity can barely imagine...

Girl by Moonlight: On a Sea of Stars (Session 2 of 5) Donogh runs for Ian and Sabine V. We are introduced to two of our pilots: Jet/Apogee the Outsider goes outside the Ziggurat to do some post asteroid-strike repairs, but returns to polish the Engine Shamash to its full glory. Cordelia the Enigma, living a double life as a maintenance worker who as Red Shift sneaks into the hangar bay to take the Engine Tezcatlipoca out on an unscheduled foray.

Godbound: Sundered Cycles (Session 32 of 33) Lowell Francis runs for Dan Brown, Ethan Harvey, Patrick Knowles, Sherri, and Tyler Lominack Interacting with the new pantheon our gods joined to their own, they work to learn more about the looming Draconic and Elemental Evil threats. Threadless builds her dragon, though there remains a flaw at the heart of it. Random speaks with his bride about their future. Tasos considers expanding his nightmare realm. Darius finds both a kindred spirit and a solution. And Ordevi takes his leave from the pantheon, heading out to spread word of the new gods via a knowledge aqueduct.

Godbound: Sundered Cycles (Session 33 of 33) Lowell Francis runs for Ethan Harvey, Patrick Knowles, Sherri, and Tyler Lominack The final session of the campaign.

Damn the Man, Save the Music! Donogh runs for Casey T, David Adrian Randall, and Thomas Manuel The employees of Revolution Records are (not) prepping for the imminent arrival of Mr Maestro! Jake J the local rockstar is desperately seeking a band, Brags the space case is trying to find the lost cat, Apple the overachieving temp is looking to reconnect with a cute skater boy! And they're wondering what Yu's beef is with the big shot and what exactly Purple means on the DEFCON scale...

Star Wars Saturday

Fellowship Rich Rogers runs for Cody Eastlick, Greg G., Kae, Steven Watkins, and Tyler Lominack The Fellowship of the Dilligent Spark travel to Dathomir to discover the sinister plot of Taron Malicos, then rush to face him and his Nightbrother band.

Stars in the Dark: Stars in the Dark II (Session 6) Anders runs for Marc Majcher, Mark (they/them), Rich Rogers, and Steven Watkins KABOOOM!

Off-Calendar Highlights

The Between: Stars and Suns, Season Two (Session 9) Madelancholy runs for Jack, Mike, Sarah W., and Steph "Coming and Going" - In an attempt to find out more about the Slugger, Ernest gets more involved in Bout Club, to his dismay. Sir Atticus listens to La Hortencia's story after fending off interference from a familiar acquaintance. Dame Georgie allows himself to be a temporary vessel to the Abbey's demonic presence, only to be betrayed more than once. Liat makes several tempting offers.

Trophy Gold: Hissing Darkness: In the Wake of Secrets (Session 1) Madelancholy runs for Dom, James, Jazy, and Mike Ferdinando The first of two concurrent series of this Rooted in Trophy (Gold) incursion, the characters wake too early in a Ship warped by perfect darkness…survival a priority.

Trophy Gold: Hissing Darkness: Whispers in Exile (Session 1) Madelancholy runs for Amanda/iamatrex, B, Jonn, and Marc Majcher The second group to find themselves in the strange eerie darkness of the Ship, the survivors make their way out of Cold-Sleep, finding terrible things in the next Set...

Trophy Gold: Hissing Darkness: In the Wake of Secrets (Session 2) Madelancholy runs for Dom, James, Jazy, and Mike Ferdinando The survivors manage to battle their way out of the Cold-Sleep Warrens...but now they find themselves in the twisted, warped halls and vents of The Maze, stalked by something deadly, even as the Dark calls out to them: Reunion. Rebirth. Remake. And one of their number does, succumbing to their urge to consume and be consumed...

Trophy Gold: Hissing Darkness: Whispers in Exile (Session 2) Madelancholy runs for Amanda/iamatrex, B, Jonn, and Marc Majcher Deep within The Maze, the survivors encounter the strange warping of the Ship and more signs of that which hunts them. Memories come unbidden and are made real, and calls from the Dark tempt further connection...

Paranormal Inc (Session 9) Madelancholy runs for Brent and Michael D. Down by the Haunted Riverside - What could go wrong on a day-long cruise of teambuilding/employee party fun-time? Rumours abound as strange occurrences plague their trip - is it the boat, the river, or the Very Good Boat Cruise Company themselves?

[open-hearth-rpg]

Murder in the Jedi Temple

As a wrote a little while ago, we have our Open Hearth 3rd Annual Star Wars minicon coming up. It’s a collection of open games reskinning various ttrps into the SW universe. Rich Rogers has been doing Star Wars Saturdays, with nearly a hundred different systems, for many years now. This is a capstone to that. I’ve already added my Before the Sith reskin of Before the Storm, but this week I had another flash of inspiration that ate up several hours hacking another concept.

Rosewood Abbey is a mystery-based PbtA game written by Kalum and inspired by The Name of the Rose and Cadfael. I love the concept and Kalum’s posting about a new physical edition got me thinking about an adaptation. So I wrote up a quick reskin, loosely based on Rosewood and also borrowing a little from Numberless Secrets, my Hearts of Wulin mystery hack. Below you’ll find the mechanical notes; its a reskin so you’ll need some familiarity with the original. There’s also the details of the one-shot mystery I have planned.

[open-hearth-rpg]

Sometimes I taste sweet, delicious tears in my YouTube comments: "When you insist on pushing your political ideology into your gaming, you only ensure a more limited audience. For example, the minute you mention pronouns, I dislike and block your channel. Have a nice life."