I like Assess the Situation/Open Your Brain/Discern realities etc. Ever since playing Disco Elysium I treat those kinds of moves as Shivers from Disco Elysium. It tends to get a really good response.

Maybe there should be a piece that tells a story beyond “nyah, I’m evil!”

Any manner of wizard should really have a personal ritual site, allowing them to bask and practice at astrologically appropriate times. Sacrifices on the equinoxes to ensure a bountiful summer and a mild winter; Fires on the solstices in appreciation of said summer/winter; charge under the waxing moon in anticipation of a particularly challenging ritual; dampen troublesome magical side effects under the waning moon; clear your mind under the new moon; channel power of the full moon into your key rituals.

With larger groups I tend to stick to less mechanically complex games.

Most OSR games can be run on the fly with any number of players. I had a fixed group of 9 run through Keep on the Borderlands, with 1 or two extras jumping in for a session here or there.

My absolute favourite is Savage Worlds. It’ss great as the maths isn’t tight and “balancing” an encounter is just a matter of throwing in more mooks, throw in a wild card per 2 or 3 players. It can fit to any setting, though I strongly recommend Deadlands.

My close second favourite is Call of Cthulhu, which I’ve run with 8 players. There’s not a combat focus so sessions are unlikely to get bogged down, and even then, most combat actions are a simple contested roll. Investigations tend to resolve as people splitting into pairs and following different leads; two go archiving at the library, two visit a sanitarium patient, two head over to the local paper to see if any stories have been published or even blocked by an editor, two stake out points of interest.

The Crew - Mission Deep Sea - card game with a simple trick taking mechanic. Difficulty is very modular as you decide a difficulty level before each game. Difficulty is decided by the numbers of missions taken and the relative complexity of those missions (this is all explained on the mission cards). Missions are based on which tricks you win, with simple rules like “I win no 1’s” or “I win at least 3 9’s”.

Hanabi - Card playing game where you don’t know your own hand. You describe aspects of each others hands (colours of cards, numbers on cards). Your goal is to place a pile of the cards 1,2,3,4,5 in each of 5 colours. Don’t play with mathematicians.

Why would you vote for it to be unrestricted? They’ve only unprivated due to the threats. Stick to Lemmy.

Ah. Are you aware of Mage: the Ascension and Mage: the Awakening? Both World of Darkness books; mechanically crunchy with a strong focus on magic as a solution to all situations. Looking at established systems that have already done something similar can help with ideas.

For a slightly different spin, I just picked up the Black Sword Hack yesterday. In terms of combat items, there are actual listed combat items but it’s all fluff really; every weapon is d6 damage. Maybe that would be another thing that interests you: weapons are abstracted to the point of players being able to buy/find “a weapon” which gives you a basic action.

I tend to focus on products which go against certain “maxims” of play; having alternatives to some of the more strict rules inherited from Gygax offers insight into the philosophy behind certain rules and whether such rules are actually fun at the table.

The Black Hack is my go-to book for this purpose: distances are relative, consumables are abstracted to the usage die, experience is based on stories told and not treasure dragged back to town, and all of the dice rolling can be made by players if the GM so chooses. Such a free system allows for easier hacking; You don’t need to compare relative power of classes when determining how much XP your homebrew needs in order to level up.

For supplements and splatbooks, I particularly like Wonder & Wickedness and Marvels & Malisons as magic supplements. It’s easy as hell to slap together a sorcerer class from these two books and staple it onto the Black Hack. My favourite setting books are Ultraviolet Grasslands and Hot Springs Island; both offer perfect sandbox adventures for the Black Hack. Both offer some manner of departure from the traditional tropes of TSR adventures. I have had to modify some aspects of the latter, such as the

There are a stupid number of blogs and zines that I could namedrop, but the one I find myself agreeing with the most is The Alexandrian.

Some of my favourite systems are light on combat rules or feature combat as some kind of fail state. If you’re leveling a shotgun at an ancient void-dweller that may or may not be immune to conventional weaponry, you’ve messed up somewhere. Maybe the better plan is to douse the floorboards in lamp oil, smash a lit lantern, and run.

Would I play a game with no combat items? Absolutely. I’d love a game that invests as much pagespace into intrigue or stealth systems as some D&D-like systems invest into combat.

I just go for completed series nowadays. It’s just not worth the time ranting and actively waiting for the completion of certain series. I’ve made a conscious decision not to start on Rothfuss’s trilogy until he finishes the final book.

I also find that recently I go for books with more mature themes; not gore- and sex-fests where everyone is morally grey for the sake of it, but stuff like Robin Hobb’s books which explore feminism through a fantasy lens, or stories with characters who confront their flaws rather than being some ideal version of a character archetype.

The same for me. One of my favourite settings.

Jack Vance (namesake of Vancian magic) introduced two interesting concepts in his Dying Earth series. In earlier books magic was essentially invented by the ancient masters who were expert logicians and scientists. Each spell was essentially a proof of concept that a sequence of actions compelled reality to act in a certain way.

By the time of the first short stories in the Dying Earth series, mankind has long since deteriorated due to an overreliance on what is essentially magic to the layperson. Even the wily magicians of the modern time are only capable of rote learning a few arguments at a time; hence the fire and forget Vancian magic system of old D&D.

In later books, magicians have returned to near godly power. They’ve somehow found a link between djinn-like creatures capable of controlling portions of reality, and the rote rituals of old. They’ve learned to essentially cut out the middle-man and directly enslave these djinni to do their bidding.

I’m looking for community engagement without the homogenised superculture. I’d like to be able to discuss books on a small book community without someone jumping in with “I also choose this guy’s dead wife” or “not my proudest fap” because it’s a low effort way of garnering meta-points. I also like the lack of an account-based point system.

So far Lemmy is delivering and so I’m engaging here a lot more actively than I ever did on Reddit.

The site defaults to sorting by active posts. There are options for hot, new, and top over the past day. I tend to sort by new.

Currently Reading The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. Also trying to get a Lovecraft book club off the ground over at !lovecraft@ka.tet42.org

At the university I run Halloween sessions for new players, and by far the best scenario I’ve run is the first one: House of the Midnight Violet. It’s a 3 hour scenario for a party of 4th level. I’ve run it twice for a party of 3rd level with no adjustments. It’s plays very well as is, though I’d personally suggest running the groups of dolls and cats as swarm creatures rather than individual creatures, for the sake of your own sanity.

Managed to play Arkham Horror twice in one week, though missed playing War of the Ring with my partner.

Wednesday was an 11 hour Arkham Horror marathon due to 2 friends moving away. Four of us took the day off. We attempted the two-party Dream Eaters campaign with two groups of 3. The awake team blitzed through their scenarios while the dreamers struggled through theirs (having already played the other way, the dream scenarios are more complex). This resulted in the awake team waiting 30 mins - 1 hour per scenario for the dreamers to finish. We finished at the end of scenario 3 as we were so exhausted.

Saturday was my Path to Carcosa group, which proved to be a lot more fun, probably because we weren’t trying to cram a whole campaign into one day. Completed scenario 3 before the final agenda came up. Our seeker is ridiculous at hoovering clues.

I’m running an in-person Quest for the Frozen Flame campaign with Foundry for maps/bestiary. They’re about to come to Rimecrag Pass tomorrow. I did have an oracle ready for Strength of Thousands but that fell through in the planning stage.

People have already mentioned my two suggestions: 4E DMG2 and The Lazy Dungeon Master.

This isn’t a specific book recommendation, but I would recommend reading a diverse range of RPG books, across a breadth of topics which interest you. In particular, reading the storytelling sections and how those guidelines interact with the delivery mechanics of the specific game can offer a new perspective on how to run your games.

For example, I enjoy horror roleplaying in particular, so books I may read are Call of Cthulhu for Cosmic Horror or the World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness books for Personal Horror. While I run Call of Cthulhu a lot more than World of Darkness, the tips on storytelling personal conflict from WoD offer some interesting insight into running sanity conflicts in CoC.

I use Foundry on an Oracle Always Free server. I project that in our department’s meeting room from the room’s computer; I then run the GM side and music from my laptop.