Part of the fun of DMing for me is in homebrewing cultures…or, more accurately, homebrewing factions that have a culture. Besides which, there are some fundamental flaws in your premises: You assert that a counterpart culture is easier to understand than an original one. I 100% understand any culture I make up, definitionally. On the other hand, neither I nor anyone else at my table can say the same about any IRL culture. Even members of a given IRL culture can never fully understand the totality of it. You also say [if] you create fantasy ancestries from scratch, you need to convey all that information to the players. And I don’t think that’s true. Players don’t need to know everything about a culture to interact with them. In many cases, the player characters are themselves unfamiliar with that culture, in which case any mystery, mistakes, miscommunications etc are valuable in-character roleplay. And when the PCs would be familiar with a relevant aspect of a given culture, you can simply tell them that detail, no need to loredump everything. (Eg “I beg for mercy” “Your character knows that The Southern Pirates are notorious for never taking prisoners, are you sure you want to try that?”)

@flavonol@lemmy.world Many, I imagine. I spend… too much time on the Pathfinder 2e subreddit, and it is so painfully clear from how quietly obsessed that space is with class build optimization, that the idea of fighting for anything but a decisive, 100% kill outcome (on either side) is unimaginable to most people there. I think the most recent thing I saw could be summed up as “what’s the point of Hexploration if the outcome is just moderate difficulty fights?” Even the idea of non-combat encounters or worldbuilding encounters are becoming alien to modern TTRPG fans, it seems.

The Storypath system is descended from the systems used in Vampire: the Masquerade, World of Darkness and other stuff from White Wolf publishing. There’s already games published by Onyx Path that implement Storypath (such as Trinity Contiuum & Scion), but this is a generic version with example settings included. This finalized version actually came out over a week ago, but today I noticed that despite the apparent interest in Storypath on Backerkit, nobody on r/rpg or here had posted about the announcement. I haven’t played it yet myself; does anyone here have experience with or interest in Storypath? Note: While the PDF is available now, it’ll be some months before the hardcover ships.

So the short answer is yes it’s best at a fantasy setting and hard to hack. BW has a massive collection of skills, traits, and lifepaths that are all tailored for a fantasy medieval setting. These aren’t just lists but each has its own stats, nuance, and connections to other things. You need all of this just to create characters and skills are pretty much how you play the game. To hack this you would need to make entire new sets of lifepaths and new relevant skills at a minimum. It’s not hard to make a new skill or two to fit a custom setting but if you were trying to do cyberpunk or something the amount of overhaul would be staggering. I haven’t looked into it but there something called Burning Empires that has done the heavy lifting for you and modified BW for a sci-fi setting. Mouseguard and Torchbearer also re-theme the BW system in specific ways (Mouseguard more so) but also simplify the rule system considerably. That all said, BW itself has a pretty crazy range of stories you can tell just from the different settings (loosely tied to races) available. Classic fantasy? Stick with humans, maybe with a sprinkle of elf/dwarf if you’re feeling spicy (recommend sticking with humans for your first go though). Want a pastoral setting plagued by cult-crazed terrorists? Roden got you covered. Want to play as giant magic wolves dealing with pack dynamics and protecting the woods? Great Wolves are all set up for you. Want to be giant spiders and…uh…anyway yeah you can do that too. It’s a wild system that does so much differently but there’s a lot of great stuff packed in there. It’s changed how I play basically everything else.

Hello everybody, our game is finally out on KS: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weirdplace/residue-rpg It is called Residue, and it is a love letter to Mothership RPG and Fighting Fantasy books. I always loved reading those books when I was younger and following an adventure, and I wanted to bring that same solo experience into a sci-fi horror setting. The easiest way to describe it is Call of Cthulhu meets Mad Max. In Residue, you play as one of three characters and try to survive the environment while exploring ruins of past civilizations in search of quartz that contain memories. Places twist and turn, geometries change, and spacetime is shattered, so learning and understanding is one of the last purposes left. You manage resources to stay alive and fight the corruption of the land. If you ever lose your resolve, you become Corrupted permanently, which unlocks special items but changes the narrative, NPCs become hostile, and the ruins push back harder. My plan is to do a Box Set. The game has a dual-layer player board, tokens, cards, and custom dice. You can also download a free quickstart guidebook here to feel the vibes and mechanics. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1efJh94DwDM3bsZox6t1FB8OrM2DLKJLJ?usp=sharing If we get funded, it will be a dream come true to make this thing. Thank you for checking it out.[image: 408b2636-b309-451c-8279-b4c30e99f7c3.webp]

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That’s the ideal, but certainly not the norm - at least not in my experience.

I’ve played a Call of Cthulhu games in nWoD or CofD before. Never tried fantasy, that seems neat.

Well it seems they’re hiring literally anybody who asks so I say go for it

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Elves being magical creature, I am always puzzled that some setting try to give them human like gender and sexuality. I actually find-it more interesting that they do these things totally differently than us mundane human

First I got notified about Para Bellum. Now I got pinged about a bit of short-fiction. I think that’s cool, I haven’t looked into those books but IMO there haven’t been much about Desert Wars in the official lore

That is pretty cool!

Main part is already decided https://www.explorersdesign.com/bloggies-breakdown-round-4/

My ears are open!

I love the idea of reversing the incentives for pacing. Giving players a reason to keep pushing instead of struggling to rest feels a bit more organic and less focused on adapting to what is ultimately a very gamey way of handling rest. I’m sure it has its own issues, and it does seem very combat focused, but I really like the idea of how it affects the cost benefit analysis of pushing forward versus resting.

I’d advise that you talk to a professional and don’t seek mental health advice from social media.

I think the Gm-section of Kult divinity lost is pretty great, as it explains you how to build a mind-map for your metaplot and how to use PBTA mechanics to make the plot move in the background. Now what I practically do is outiline the main theme and the reccuring NPC, then rely a lot on what the PC want to do and how they act to see how it develops. There is no point in writing long texts nor planning too much in advance when the PC will break everything by killing the wrong person

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Long time back… A player with a player with a paladin character changed deities for whatever reason… Oooo. I had a lot of fun with that as the DM