Wandering Adventure Party

@faticake
A few I read recently that I’d recommend for your preferences and didn’t see recommended already!
Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (magical realism)
The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson (sci fi)
The Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo (fantasy series of novellas)
North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher (sci fi)
Monk and Robot series by Becky Chambers (sci fi)
The Jinn-bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu (sci fi)
The Water Outlaws by S L Huang (historical fiction/fantasy)

@nickdrawthing big Earthsea vibes here!

@Tim_Eagon @68000 lots of folks in Boston are still masking as well

@martin @SymbolicCity I was going to say, this sounds very similar to the UVG campaign I’m currently running. Our last session covered 6 weeks in game time. I would say, I think anything more than 2 months per session is going to be a little tricky, unless you’re explicitly saying “nothing really interesting happens during this time, we skip it”. Which is fine, but should be an intentional choice I think

I’m thinking XP for gold distributed as mutual aid, alongside milestone rewards tied to the rebirth of the old gods of Dolmenwood, presented as a sort of animist reawakening to the natural state of the forest, and the toppling of the various monarchic regimes that rule over the land. It sets up the players (who would all be witches) against basically every other faction in the woods, but considering all of those factions are pretty awful, I think that makes sense

So I think the “Anarchist Witches of #Dolmenwood” campaign I was musing about earlier might actually be happening, I just have to get the right group together. Thinking about a campaign with this lens, I’ve actually been really enjoying the Dolmenwood books. The key for me is framing the whole Law vs Chaos cosmic battle as a propagandistic framing by both sides, a sort of capitalist-realism-esque idea that tries to convince you no other alternative exists. The witches provide that alternative

@afewbugs if they work for you, audiobooks are a wonderful solution to trying to make time for reading. I listen to them on my commute, while I’m doing chores around the house, etc

This is, also, promising that there might be something in here for me. Always happy to bend and play around with the explicitly stated words of a setting, but if I’m using someone else’s world, I usually want it to be more interesting than something I can come up with (edit: alt text)

A Witches campaign looks like it could be fun, with the Drune and all the nobles as obvious antagonists. Would require some player buy-in, but I think that could make for a good time.

@Alexander_Anotherskip_Davis @alxd @malin never heard of them but they seem cool, thanks for the recommendation. They don’t quite have the type of fantasy I’m looking for though, at least not currently

@alxd @malin appreciate the recc, but anything Brando Sando is an absolute no go for me. 10% of money he earns goes to support the Mormon church and directly funds efforts to kill queer people like me.

Fantasy novels have a ton of good anti authoritarian/monarchical stuff though: Earthsea, Malazan, The Singing Hills Cycle, The Burning Kingdoms, The Raven Tower, The Water Outlaws, Spear (Nicola Griffith), Blacktongue Theif/Daughters War, just from the top of my head

@malin it’s rare in Fantasy, particularly TTRPGs (fantasy novels are getting a lot better with it these days). I can’t think of any explicitly anti-monarchy fantasy TTRPG settings. Glorantha maybe gets a shout out for being anti-imperial, and that setting feels flexible enough to support an anarchist-adjacent campaign, but it’s still not really what I’m looking for. I gave up and just wrote my own setting, but would still love to hear any recommendations for published settings that support this

I’ve been perusing the #Dolmenwood books I received recently, and wow have my RPG preferences strongly shifted since I backed this Kickstarter. I’m so profoundly uninterested these days in a setting where monarchies and Law are framed as inherently good, while magic-using women living alone in the woods (and Chaos) are inherently evil. Kind of hoping that there is something salvageable out of these books because they are now taking up a bunch of space on my shelves

#OSR #TTRPG

@humanadverb (you probably realize this, but I gotta say it) the problem with white supremacist juries nullifying cases against the KKK is not jury nullification, it’s that the juries were always made up of the most racist white people they could find, often moving the cases to entirely different districts to do so. Leave it to liberals to misunderstand how white supremacy works though

@artemis basically, yes

@Tim_Eagon my fiancé(e) after I showed them how many books I had just received from the Dolmenwood Kickstarter, while our new bookshelves are lying unassembled on our floor: “yeah, those are staying in the box for now”.

@Tim_Eagon mine arrived yesterday, 3 days ahead of schedule! It’s a ton of books though, and I’m right in the middle of setting up new shelving, so the timing is kind of terrible… books look great though!

@Taskerland for me, sharing the project is part of completing it. Publishing an RPG has so little to do with writing or playing RPGs though that I don’t think it odd someone would want to skip that step.

For me, I like to believe there are other people out there who may enjoy gaming the way I do, which makes it worth the effort to make my game accessible (which is also why I made it free). If one other person actually gets my game to table and plays and has a good time, that’s worth it to me

@critfail_press if you’re interested, I wrote this blog post a little while ago, which is a more detailed description of how I run my campaigns (and all the campaigns I used as inspiration for that post, started in Azgaar). One note, I usually won’t use Azgaar’s generated polities, I’ll create my own most of the time. But that’s just personal preference.

Running Your First Sandbox – Archstone Press

(archstonepress.com)

@critfail_press yeah I think depending on how extensively you plan to use the built in tools, I’d say Azgaar is very flexible for different genres. As I mentioned I’ve used it for sci-fi, but I think it could also be used for more modern settings, or anything else where a realistic(ish) world generator is useful.

I run mostly sandbox campaigns, so I don’t prep plot, but rather use the world as inspiration to generate potential conflict, and plop the players down in the middle of it