I recently concluded an online open table in Stonehell using OSE. 216 sessions over 3½ years. This was a great experience and I made friends.
Right now, I’m running a weekly Forbidden Lands campaign set in Raven’s Purge. I pitched it as a mini-campaign to try the system (10-20 sessions), but we’ll see. My goal was to play it with basically no prep (I bought the Foundry VTT modules), using the provided adventure sites generators when needed. We’re 5 sessions in and there is some interesting emergent story happening, but there are frustrations, too.
I plan on running Dolmenwood online in the near-ish future (I like to run adventures using physical books and they are further delayed due to tariffs). I want to have maps, NPCs, monsters and player-facing rules all packaged in Foundry VTT, so I still have quite a lot of data entry to do.
I’m very much an old-school type of referee: I love a simple ruleset that supports my rulings grounded in verisimilitude, not in genre emulation or dramatic storytelling. That said, I’d love to run a game of Blades in the Dark or Scum and Villainy.
Wrapping up in person campaigns of Slugblaster, City of Mist, and Fabula Ultima. Continuing monthly campaigns of Blades in the Dark, FFG Star Wars, and Vampire v5. Planning con one shots of Star Borg, Mothership 1e, Zombie World, Avatar: Legends, Pendragon 6e, and Call of Cthulu 7e.
Nearing the end of an open table Castle Xyntillan campaign, at 44 sessions, run weekly, OSE Advanced with many modifications. Peak 6 players, but dwindled down to 3 here at the end.
Concluded last week a 22 (short) sessions campaign of Black Wyrm of Brandonsford plus Hole in the Oak, run almost weekly for inner-city high schoolers (including one named Brandon), with the same Advanced OSE hack. Peak 9 players, but 4 stalwarts.
One-Shot Sky-Blind Spire with Cairn, two weeks ago. 4 players.
Playering:
5E D&D Shadow of the Dragon Queen, 4 co-players, 9 sessions completed.
OSE Advanced haphazard sandbox by new GM, 2 co-players, 15? sessions completed.
OSE Advanced open table Stonehell, 3 co-players, 26 sessions completed, though I joined late, and have attended only 3.
Dragonbane campaign on hiatus, 3 co-players, 11 sessions completed.
All but the high-schooler campaign have been online.
EZD6 (my oddball ) has my favorite magic system. It’s great for elementary kids who just want to think up cool stuff. I love being free from rigid Vancian magic systems.
Currently playing, Shadowdark (GM) and DCC bi-weekly. Cy_Borg monthly, 5e bi-weekly, and a have a Dragonbane 1-shot and Mothership 1-shot coming up in a month.
Pick your favorite sci-fi show/movie and run that. Choose something you’re super-familiar with and your players are too. Star Wars is a good one. Star Trek, sometimes. The Expanse works for some as well. I’m sure there’s one that’s entirely your jam. Set your game there and the improv will take care of itself because you can shamelessly steal from their plot lines and adventures and settings and major characters to create and/or spin off your own.
Remember, D&D is just Lord of the Rings the role-playing game, because it was all the rage at the time and that’s what they all wanted to do: fight the armies of Mordor and maybe play as a Balrog.
Just finished running a 9 session hex crawl of Cloud Empress, but was left unimpressed by the system and the dungeons provided in the Land of the Cicadas.
Starting a Mythic Bastionland campaign tomorrow. I’m super excited about it, I hope the players will buy into the weird and dreamlike aspects of the implied setting.
I play mostly BoBs and weird games, all over the place and irregularly (something like 4 games in 2 weeks every 2 months in 1 or 2 two hours sessions).
Last one was Four lovers, before that, 2nd and last session of a Venture bloodbath, before that, Ar veilh, a friend’s unpublished hack of Gastkammeren, before that Swords without Masters, etc.
I’m currently playing two campaigns from the same GM.
One is 50 Fathoms (a remix of the campaign on the rulebook with custom stuff from him). I really like Savage Worlds, I know there’s lots of crunch inside SW but we just skip it and use the stats and skills for everything.
The other one is a homebrew mega dungeon city in Pathfinder 2e. I’ve come to love learning the crunch on this game, checking the rolls on roll20 to see if they’re calculated correctly and such.
When we finish I’ll propose a short Mausritter campaign because I’m loving reading Tiny Fables.
My main group is into its second year of a classic Dark Sun campaign using the Fantasy AGE game system. It’s the first time I’ve revisited the setting with adults since the mid-90s and its been a blast. We play over Roll20. Conversions were relatively painless. A lot of small tweaks, renaming, and flavor additions, but otherwise FAGE has handled things well. About the only hole I found was the lack of any real wilderness travel/exploration guidelines. But my adaption seems to be holding up.
I have a secondary group of colleagues from work. I’m usually a player but as we were between games I offered to run a DS game for them (A Little Knowledge, the DS intro adventure from the boxed set) with the AD&D 2e rules. That’s been fun too, in different ways. It’s been so long since I played AD&D I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten so much of it.
Well, I was very excited about running it at first, because I love mothership and I love Nausicaa so I thought it would be great. But to me the game has several problems that I could have seen coming:
The panic system of mothership is not a good fit for the tone. It’s modified a bit here, but to the point where most of the mechanics become unused. Players often don’t roll or don’t fail their rolls through advantage, so they get little stress scores, and almost never panic. When they do, it feels at odd with the fiction anyway.
The setting is kinda weird and much is left to the gm to fill in, as a result players don’t know what their characters would know about the world from living in it, they feel like strangers in their own world. I had the same issues with numenara and invisible sun. Fantasy and scifi settings give players a good grasp on the world they’re in because we have so many common references from novels and movies, but not here.
The material provided for hexcrawling and dungeon crawling is too minimalistic. A little landmark for each hex and a d10 encounter table for each biome. The dungeons are 6 to 8 room diagrams with little interactivity (we only went through 2 of them).
The beginning adventure (bean barge) was great because it had tension and a cool cast of NPCs, but all the urgency disappeared once you start hexcrawling even with some aims in mind (could be my fault as a GM).
I wonder if panic would be better replaced by taking on a short term trait/drive/impulse because of the failure. This feels more Miyazaki, in that characters can become resolved to do dangerous things as the stakes rise, rather than simply panicking. There needs to be another component though, like the character has a better chance of succeeding at that drive but their position is dangerous and other actions penalized.
I read Cloud Empress thinking I would love it but it felt pretty contradictory. It promotes a pacifist, anti-imperialist, and ecological tone through its setting and themes. Encouraging repair, resistance, and nonviolence. Yet mechanically, it leans heavily into weapons and survival gear, offering tools for violence rather than healing or rebuilding. It feels like a mismatch in theme vs. mechanics. And the lack of worldbuilding leaves players with evocative ideas but little structure to ground their stories or decisions.
Mechanics vs. tone aside, Cloud Empress shares a common issue with many NSR games: it aims for minimalism while relying on a setting that isn’t anchored in a familiar genre or historical framework, making it harder for players to intuitively grasp the world.
Just finished my playthrough of Crown of Salt for Mork Borg. It was a great introduction to OSR-style play for my players; this crew had only played Spire (which they loved) and 5e (which they really didn’t love).
I’m getting ready to play some Dread or Fiasco while camping, might dip into a short play of Paranoia, but my next campaign is ABSOLUTELY going to be Deep Carbon Observatory - my players loved the vibes of Mork/Crown of Salt, and I think DCO fits it 1:1. I’m curious what systems people have used for DCO?
I’ve been wanting to run Crown of Salt! Any tips, changes, or regrets from your sessions?
I’m running Dragon Town and the Darkness below for my family using Cairn. Super easy to run, although most of the items need tweaking and the dungeon procedures as written are not how I would do it.
Also running homebrew adventures for some friends using Tales of Argosa. I thought I would like the crunch, but I feel it gets in the way more than it enables stuff. Missing the fiction first approach of Odd-likes.
I’d like to start a 3rd group as an open table and run some flavor of odnd (likely Delving Deeper or Swords and Wizardry). Either string together some modules in a sandbox or run a mega dungeon like Stonehell. Although I just had some inspiration for a forest adventure, so maybe I’ll prep that instead.
Reading Crowns 2E and Block, Dodge, Parry and mining for ideas.
Players liked the cast from Saltberg a lot, they ended up recruiting all four of the hirelings and HATED Drathamar.
They did end the world by destroying the crown. After they hit it once, I read them the stories from before, and reiterated the fact that they felt a bad feeling upon getting to the temple . . . they still did it and were like “oooooooh” when the world ended.
The players also loved the final dungeon: bells (both got rung), the flute, mechsuit. One of the zombies got to read the tablet and the PC’s all failed the save . . . so they were awoken when they started a fight with the final boss, which was cool.
Started a new campaign of Burning Wheel last thursday. Only character creation so far, but everyone is excited. The setting is the year 1014 in England, on the eve of Cnut’s invasion to take over the Kingdom of England. Exciting stuff!
I am currently 4 sessions into a 10 session campaign of FreeMarket.
It’s a game about running a business on a space station. It’s a really strange setting, death is reversible and money is linked up to your reputation.
Our group believes that farms take up too much space on the station and the community at large should embrace food made by printers and reclaim all farmland for development.
The characters are a wannabe popstar, a memory-manipulating biologist and a 3D printing enthusiast.
I said that the campaign would alternate between light and dark but so far it’s been rather light so I’m trying to bring the dark.
) has my favorite magic system. It’s great for elementary kids who just want to think up cool stuff. I love being free from rigid Vancian magic systems.