#gm stuff

The Devil Comes to Al Arima is a "Pamphlet Module" for LANCER. Formatted as a double sided brochure, it contains everything you need to play an exciting one-shot mission that will surprise even veteran players. Kicked off by an interstellar transport ship crashing down in a city, it features:

A ready-to-run mission that can be used as a one-off adventure or slotted easily into a long-term campaign

An exciting search-and-rescue operation with clues for players to discover

A powerful, unique boss enemy with special Finale actions to challenge your squad

Exotic gear for players to discover

An LCP, premade map, and customized tokens for running the climactic combat

Pick it up here on itch.io!

I got an adventure I wrote published this week! It's for free here, don't worry!

A school of magic hiding a dark secret that could spell their own destruction if not cared for, and a small village in need of help are even more connected than anyone initially thought.

Pathfinder

D&D, but more. The systems generally hang together better, if thats a selling feature for you, and the if you like waiting for math to be done, boy is this one going to wow you. It's got more system mastery to demonstrate which is cool, but in general it works like D&D, so you're going to do a bunch of prep work, your players will sidestep it, and you'll scramble to keep laying down track until eventually the campaign fizzles out or you do. Key GM moves are: "PREP" "Study" and "Look stuff up."

OSR

Like D&D, but without all the pesky systems. Most of these run on trust and a steady stream of rulings rather than rules. If your favorite bit of D&D is, "don't worry about it, make something up," the OSR is probably going to be your happy place. Your go-to GM moves are, "say something cool," "refer to a random chart," and "say yes or roll." Less exhausting than D&D, but you're still doing most of the heavy lifting here.

Shadowrun

Watch your friends make complicated characters and then do hours of leg work in hopes of not having to engage overmuch with the combat system. If you've got a Decker, try and keep everyone who is not a Decker engaged as they pull off a solo mission in cyber space. Then do it again as the Mage goes Astral. If you're lucky the plan ends there. If you aren't, you'll probably get to check out the combat rules as the run goes sideways. It's like D&D, but you prep three times as much, roll three times as many dice, shopping trips take even longer, and your party will plan entire sessions to death. Your go to moves here are "wait," "forcibly shift the spotlight" and "look up a rule."

Call of Cthulhu

It's D&D, but you are constructing a mystery. The more they know about it the less able to disentangle it the characters become. There are combat stats and a bestiary despite combat being a fail state. Many such traps exist and you are going to need to tapdance to avoid them. Your go to move is "reveal something spooky; kill a character" and "footstomp a clue."

Savage Worlds

It's D&D, I guess. I mean in a pinch. It's genre-nonspecific and runs on dice pools, but don't let that put you off. The GM is still responsible for cooking up a scenario, awarding experience, and handing out Bennies when the players play their characters according to their Bonds/Ideals/Flaws (okay edges and hindrances, fine) or when they are performing roleplay to your liking. It's fine. It's D&D but you can wear a cool Indiana Jones hat or a jetpack if you want. Go to moves include, "roll, I guess" "make it pulp" and "your performance amuses Caesar"

Powered By the Apocalypse

Despite some early installment weirdness in which one of these is literally D&D, these are not D&D. Prep is minimal, narrative is player-directed, and there's a larger focus on genre and fictional positioning. Fewer rules to memorize, but the way those rules work do <i>not</i> like you fucking with them. Yield to the fiction, hang on loosely. If you play the mechanics, everything falls apart. You've been warned. Your moves are "lean on genre convention" "stir up drama" "feel like you're not calling for enough moves, drastically over-correct and ruin fucking everything."

Forged In the Dark

Anyway please enjoy my ttrpg nerdism reaching new levels:

[ID: An excel sheet showing redacted names in rows. The columns are Nat twenties, Nat ones, and Luck Score. Below the data are the redacted name and score for each of the following: Most Nat twenties, Most Nat ones, Luckiest, and Unluckiest. End ID.]

The Luck Score is total Nat20s minus total Nat1s. This sheet is automatically linked to the per-session rolls sheets, shown below. So I never have to do math, and I love that for me.

[ID: An excel sheet with rows reading Session 1 through Session 10. The columns are redacted names and a total of the type of roll (Nat twenties) per session. End ID.]

Glad you're enjoying them!! We're having a blast playing and it's just really, really nice to hear that other people are getting joy out of our games too. I know everyone else in the T&T group agrees with that.

As for GMing. Hoo boy. I would like to preface all of this advice with 'this game is the first time I've actually run any sort of original story for a RPG and although i'm happier with Family Matters than any other game i've ever run, i'm still aware i could have done better on many counts. i am not a perfect GM by any means and i have failed my players so many times before. take this advice with a massive Massive grain of salt'

in no particular order:

get acquainted with the system you're using! (this goes without saying, really, but.) i personally tend to learn system best through listening to other people play - whether that's through actual-play podcasts or just being part of another group. if you have a good grasp on the system and rules, it'll make your life so much easier.

i'm forgetful, so have a bunch of physical GM screens on my desk with important bits of the rules (DCs for different sorts of checks, combat order). if you don't have a photographic memory for these sorts of things, i recommend that (and also having a copy of the rulebook on hand, just in case)

that being said, if you can't remember a particular rule or intricacy of the game, you can always a) ask your players b) just make something up wholesale. it's your game, you can play it as loose as you want.

try not to make the story too complicated. (i say, kicking off my first adventure with an absurdly complicated plot. i... am a hypocrite.) more often than not, whatever plot beats/story you have is going to last a lot longer than you'd expected. the players will wander around and make mistakes and spend like half an hour making really bad puns about wells, or something

this is really specific but i've fallen into this trap too many times, so i kind of legally have to put this here: you may be tempted to base your first game off/around a pre-existing story (the first D&D game I ran was a straight-up ripoff of TAZ Balance). i'm not saying this can't be done well (there's actually a very good podcast based around this premise and it's delightful) and i'm not saying you can't do it. i am just saying, from experience, that if you do this sort of thing you're going to want to follow the pre-existing plot beats of whatever it is you're cribbing from, and you're going to be disappointed when the players don't hit the 'right' plot beats/emotional moments/big reveals. which they're most likely not going to do, because they can't read your mind! they don't know what you want, especially if they aren't familiar with the source material.

you most likely will end up never using half of the things you plan. you just kind of need to learn to live with that. (but also once the story's over you can share Stuff That Could Have Happened with the players if you're into that sort of thing, we do that a lot in T&T and it's always fun seeing stuff that could have gone down)

Yes, And and Rule of Cool are your best friends. you're working with the players to create a story, not against them. if a player proposes a really, really cool idea that isn't something you planned for or expected, do your best to help them make that happen.

i don't want to give advice on planning games because my planning documents are a MESS and i should not be looked to as an example under any circumstances. however:

i tend to play it very fast and loose with planning because i don't want to stick down the players into having to do anything in particular. so more often than not, i sketch out the starting conditions, the motivations and personalities of any PCs, the details of whatever complication or problem it is, and then i just try to let things unfold organically.

the advice that was always given to me was to plan out stuff on a 'this is what would have happened if the party hadn't showed up' basis. i don't always do this but it's helpful when you're trying to be flexible because it gives you a nice baseline to work with.

...and if all else fails, you'll always have Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies on your side. (this is a joke)

... I can't run pre-published Adventure Paths without investing a substantial amount of time re-writing half of it to align to my own interests.

"Party spends three months solving a subplot I spun from two paragraphs of text and a half-dozen implications" is like... Something that happens to me a lot.