Random stats, pick class based on that come up with a one or two sentence background, ask gm how much gold/points/credits i can spent on starting equipment and if there are any restrictions they have in mind for my background. my last solo characters were an ex townsguard who helped his brother escape from prison, after his recruitment job for a local gang went side ways, so they fled the town and are now trying the adventurers live. i think i’d be fine with also randomizing equipment and then coming up with a background, but i’d hate to fully randomize a character and end up with a line cook who owns nothing but a fancy suit and roller skates for some reason.

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One thing about this is it assumes the schedule is made like on the fly. The group I used to play with played every saturday afternoon. It was like a club. You only join if you can make it. They rotated games/runners every so often and I got them to rotate every week so that a particular game would be once a month so I could keep doing it for awhile.

Welcome back to Advent’s Amazing Advice! The series where I take popular One-Shots, Adventures, Campaigns, etc., and fully prep them for both New and Busy DMs. This prep includes music, ambiance, encounter sheets, handouts, battle maps, tweaks, and more, so you can run the best sessions possible with the least stress possible! Inspired by Stranger Things and written by Mike Wheeler himself, this adventure drops your players into a monster hunt like no other. Summoned by Sir Tristan, ruler of a remote mountain realm, your party is tasked with tracking down a fearsome creature known as the Thessalhydra, which has attacked his castle and terrorized the land. In Part 1, your players will explore a mysterious forest, encounter travelers, priests, and farmers, until they uncover the entrance to the troglodyte caverns. There, they can fight or negotiate their way deeper until they reach the ever-shifting Cursed Labyrinth. Should they solve the riddles of the mysterious Lost Knight, they will be greeted with a portal…to the Upside Down. Without further ado: Google Docs Notes for Stranger Things (Part 1): DM Notes Link to: Stranger Things Adventure Link to: Stranger Things The Hunt for the Thessalhydra Playlist Link to: The AAA Collection Included in The AAA Collection is: Downloadable copy of DM Notes, including links to music tracks for ambiance and fights Special PDF for all encounters. This includes the enemy stat blocks organized neatly, along with an initiative tracker and spots to mark HP Custom Maps of Troglodyte Cavern Over 7 dozen other Fully Prepped One-Shots, Adventures, and Campaigns: Click Here As always, if you see something you think I can improve, add, change, etc., please let me know. I want this to be an amazing resource for all DMs and plan to keep it constantly updated! If you’d like to support me, shape future releases, and get content early, feel free to check out my Patreon! Cheers, Advent

I think you’ve done well with the concept! Solid history without being too ornate, lots of open room for development and questions answered, and sounds like you’ve already got ideas about how to highlight with mechanics. The only piece of advice I would give is, in addition to thinking about leaving hooks open for the DM to work into the story, also consider the other direction: how is your character going to be moved, compelled, and changed by the broad strokes of the adventure they are going to get into and the companions they are going to be adventuring with? How can this character help set up other characters to do “their thing”? I’ve found the games I’ve played in to only be improved by having those dialogues with the DM and other players up front

D&D in the '70s was more like a strategy wargame than a TTRPG as we know them now.

To those unfamiliar, Sam attempted to create a real-time play-by-post wargame set on Mothership’s best module, but he accidentally created an enormous text-only LARP instead. I think this blog post is among the better ones if you never heard of this before.

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You are not alone.

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The king doesn’t give a fig what’s going on in the kingdom as long as he’s got his ale and whores. He does not like when politics interfere with his revels and he can be rather brutal when it happens. The prince, an adult, has a pretty free hand but wants to avoid pissing off his overbearing father. The party is a small group of the princes drinking companions that the prince sometimes pays to solve his problems that threaten to rise to the level of annoying the king. The prince has lately been cavorting in some of the villages and claiming the right of prima nocta in his father’s name. A group of villagers has decided to put an end to it. They’ve started ambushing patrols and maybe even made an attempt to capture the prince himself. The party needs to find and eliminate these trouble makers before his father finds out. This would be suitable for a low level party. If the players are higher level, switch it to the villagers having pooled their money and hired some adventurers of a suitable to take out the prince.

That looks great! You know, I’ve never actually played a TTRPG set with the kind of technology that would be right for star forts, but I want to know what’s out there now

Campaign Cartographer 3+ is indeed only available for Windows. Though I must say that I have it working under WINE just fine. YMMV, ofc.

ha, jackpot now you can prep for the trip to the fae and for the use of your phylactery of phylacteries and can pretend to allways have thought of this

The world is cracked. We seeped through. Now we’re here. In Curseborne, our world is connected to disturbing realms via liminal spaces. Can you taste that emotion in the air? Someone close by is hiding. And they’re scared. In Curseborne, you are damned. Your damnation grants unnatural gifts and terrifying impulses. I never asked for this. An ancestor made a deal with the devil. I bear the consequences. In Curseborne, the sins of the father are visited upon the son. Your accursed family’s pacts and crimes lead to a web of political intrigue and lasting perdition. You think I’m scary now? Wait until you see the beast I become. In Curseborne, monsters are real. And you play as one. This book contains: A setting and huge number of story hooks, varied adversaries, and the complete Storypath Ultra system. The complete guide to playing an Accursed in the world of Curseborne. 31 playable types of Accursed split across five damned Lineages: the vampiric Hungry, the shapeshifting Primal, the otherworldly Outcasts, the spellweaving Sorcerers, and the haunting Dead. A massive number of spells and abilities with which you can customize your character and tailor their journey.

yeah! a bit like Pathfinder! i hadn’t thought of that comparison. Storypath system is clearly a descendant of Storytell*, mechanically. Outcasts are, right now, like Angels and Demons, though thematically they could also one day include things like Prometheans and possibly Changelings. Dead are, well, dead! XD Like Risen, if you remember those. Like the Crow. They are ghosts that inhabit their dead bodies. No Mummies yet, sadly, but I expect they would also fall under Dead in the future. You are right that each WoD game, and I’d say CofD game, have very strong themes, that that has also been an appeal to me. Curseborne is an approach that, at least right now, is more breadth than depth. Each creature shares the same history and cosmology, in that the world is Cursed, and curses manifest in the lives of everyone in small to large ways, including becoming Accursed. Each Lineage will showcase some smaller, unique themes as well, such as The Hunger for Hungry, or Elemental connection for the Primals, but by nature of fitting it all into one book, the themes are a fair bit thinner and less developed. This isn’t necessarily BAD, especially when we have decades of other similar books to pilfer and adapt, but it is different. I do think it’s worth the read, and I’ve never even been a fan of crossover games! But I like what I’m seeing here, and I appreciate the unified underlying systems and cosmology between all the Lineages. I do expect them to be fleshed out more as time goes on, with Lineage books to focus on each Lineage in more depth.

@Zagorath@aussie.zone

Curseborne is a spiritual successor to those older Storytell* game lines, World / Chronicles of Darkness. a new Urban Horror game designed with supernatural type crossover baked in from the start. made by some of the old hats from old WW and associated ppl who have been involved in the licensed products over the years. It uses the Storypath Ultra system. it’s made in-house by Onyx Path Publishing so they don’t have to deal with Paradox/White Wolf licensing. addendum: Requiem was actually quite successful as a gameline, even if it could not outright replace Masquerade in public mindshare. but it doesn’t have to since they are different games, even if there’s overlap.

definitely a lightweight game to start with and get into the hobby!

i will say that mostly i will be attempting to run Curseborne with RAW. to lean into the Curseborne approach as much as possible. reading it over, there really isn’t much that i strictly feel i need from VtR that is missing. sure i may drop some names here or there. Daeva / House Bathory, Ventrue / Heirs, Mekhet / Ascetics. really just missing Gangrel and Nosferatu. Nos may be hard for me to lose, so they may be the one i want to pull in. from Kindred mechanics, tho, i think we’re only really missing Blush of Life (which doesn’t seem to be needed in Curseborne), Blood Bond and Predatory Aura. Blush of Life you can port as is, just change it to bleed a Curse die, or Hold 1, depending how often you want it to come up. do the same for Kindred Senses, but build it off of the +1e the Hungry get at night. Blood Bond can actually be incorporated right into the Bond system, so that’s easy The Cleansing is more narrative than anything else. I also haven’t yet seen a Blood Sympathy analog in CB, so that’s something to keep an eye out for. Predatory Aura is a bit more complicated, however. I’ll need more time to mull it over and will post separately about it.