The RPG Study

I’ve been doing a lot of reading, trying to determine what system and adventure I might like to run after my Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Light of Xaryxis games end. One of the products that I was reading the other day was the Titansgrave: Ashes of Valkana setting and adventure from Green Ronin Publishing. While doing so, I was struck by a particular passage regarding story and character development: "If you watch the show, you'll not that Wil teases a lot of information out of the players about their characters in the early episodes. He then uses that information to customize the adventure, which allows for both story and character development." - Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana The emphasis is mine. I want to unpack this a little more because I think this simple sentence actually holds within it a lot of really excellent advice when it comes to running our games. Typical Narrative Development   In typical narrative stories, be it a book a movie, or a TV show, we are of...

The RPG community has, thankfully, had over a month now to move on from the OGL crisis that we faced at the beginning of the year. Wizards of the Coast ended up doing the sensible thing and acted to maintain the integrity of the OGL 1.0a as well as taking the extra step of releasing the 5th Edition SRD 5.1 in to a Creative Commons License.  During the month of January however, there was a lot of focus in the TTRPG community on other games and systems that the GM community specifically was interested in running. A lot of great games were suggested and explored even after the OGL issue was (mostly) resolved. Many of us are still interested in running these other games that we purchased during and after the fiasco, or that we had purchased prior to the start of 2023 and never got a chance to run. Start up Costs There are many challenges a GM faces when trying to play a new system. It can be finding and purchasing necessary game material. It can also be learning and understanding the s...