Dice are pretty much synonymous with RPGs, but there are a few rare systems that forego them altogether, like Castle Falkenstein.

What are some other systems that don't use dice? Are there any that completely remove luck/random chance on "important player actions"?

Howdy. So I’ve been running a 5e D&D game live at a table and another one on foundry. Both groups kind of collapsed over the holidays and that’s fine. I want to try a super hero RPG. I’ve been looking at Masks but it seems kind of teen focused which I’m not into. Does anyone know if this system is more adaptable than I’m giving it credit or if there is a better system they could recommend?

Fantasy RPG settings have almost always drawn inspirations from real world cultures, including real world folklore and mythology. This also includes fantastic creatures, which are a staple of monster manualy since the earliest days of D&D.

And in recent years, there have been more and more efforts to draw TTRPG inspiration from non-European sources - a trend I approve of, since we can always use more diverse sources of inspiration.

However, I am curious how you all use creatures from different cultures in your fantasy campaigns and worldbuilding. I could see a few different approaches:

Do you assume "counterpart fantasy cultures" for your world? I.e. is there a Not!Europe, Not!Asia, Not!Africa, Not!Mesoamerica etc., each of which has "culturally appropriate" supernatural creatures? In such a situation, supernatural creatures would largely stick to their "home region", and occasional "guest stars" in other regions would be noteworthy. This works well, but it does mean you are usually limiting yourself to a "culturally appropriate" subset of the creatures in the books.

Alternately, you could try to integrate these creatures into whatever cultural region your campaign focuses on. In my view, this would require some rewriting in how these creatures are portrayed and/or named - if your region has a culturally English or Germanic slant, then having creatures that are called "Sramana", "Betobeto-san", or "Tzitzimitl" (to pick three examples from the recent Monster Core 2 for Pathfinder) will seem strange.

I feel there is no "right" or "wrong" approach to this, but I am curious how you are tackling this issue.

I'm making a character and want some advice on if it's reasonable and if my ideas for how to build it will be effective.

The idea is a dwarven fighter with the battlemaster subclass. The primary role would be as the party's tank but I also want it to be able to do some controlling. My thought is to build the character to grapple and then use chains to bind enemies. It would use heavy armor and a shield. I'm thinking that a topple weapon would be good but the weapon is secondary or for characters too big to grapple. My plan for combat is to rush to the most dangerous melee enemy, grapple and bind them and then move to the next enemy grapple and bind.

I'm looking at feats more geared toward tanking like heavy armor master, shield master, and sentinel. I'm also considering speedy to get to the stronger enemies quicker.

I know that you can grapple with one empty hand and being able to sheath or unsheath a weapon for free each attack makes it easy to switch between weapons and unarmed attacks when I need to. Can I use the chain to bind the enemy while using a shield? Should I look more at the grapple feat or tavern brawler? I don't currently plan to take either. Is there a better way to achieve the build's goals or better combat tactics that I should use? Is this kind of build even reasonable in the first place?

Edit: The system is D&D 2024

Another one of my pet peeves about fantasy world building is the concept of "large cities surrounded by miles and miles of howling wilderness" (looking at you, Forgotten Realms!) While such cities aren't completely unknown in real world history ("oasis towns" in particular, they are and were very rare. Most real world cities are surrounded by a network of smaller settlements, and while you can come up with reasons for why a fantasy city is truly isolated, a setting will be more plausible if that is a rare exception.

So, what is a good way of developing settlement patterns in fantasy worlds?

A concept I found useful for worldbuilding purposes is that of the "Central Place Theory", which describes the notion that settlements of different sizes support each other. (And I first came across it in the WFRP 1E rulebook, of all things!) While this theory is not free criticism, I feel that it yields results that are plausible enough. In order to adapt it for fantasy purposes, I propose the following categories:

• Villages are mostly inhabited by farmers and other food producers, although there might be a few specialist trades such as millers and village blacksmith. They are self-sufficient when it comes to food production, but need to trade for more complex tools. Using Central Europe as an example, it rarely takes more than an hour or two to travel to the next village.
• Towns have markets where the farmers can sell their produce, and thus are rarely more than a day's worth of travel away from any given village. They are administrative centers and can produce most of the tools that the rural population needs for daily survival. However, they are also part of a network of long-distance trade, selling surplus from their own region and buying items that are rare in the local area. Each town is supported by a small network of villages, without whom it would starve.
• Finally, Cities are major trade hubs and centers of craftsmanship. They will support multiple specialized trades and might be famous throughout the country (or beyond) for things they produce. Just like each town is supported by a network of villages, each city is supported by a network of towns.

In other words, when you place a city on a map, think about the network of towns and villages that support it. Depending on the scale of the map, you might not bother to place them all - but you should remember that they are there, instead having the wilderness start close to the city walls.

Which brings me to another point - real world history didn't have much in the way of "monster-infested wildernesses", but these are a staple of fantasy world - and they are a further reason why such dense settlement patterns might develop. After all, a lonely settlement is easy pickings for monsters - but a network of settlements can defend each other. If a single village faces monsters that are too tough for the inhabitants, they can ask for help from the next town or even city, who likely have specialist tools (and people) for that kind of thing.

In worlds where dangerous monsters roam the wilds, you could even make the argument that human(oid) civilization is not viable of the network of settlements is too thin - thus, you have "clusters of civilization" huddling together, while the wilds are full of lost settlement that could not be defended any more...

So, what are your thoughts on this? Have you put any consideration into settlement patterns for your own fantasy settings?

One of my pet peeves of modern fantasy media is the notion that some people are "special" - and thus implied to be "better" - than other people because of some inherent magical ability. One of the best-known modern examples of this is the Harry Potter franchise, where the protagonists are mostly mages, and even the characters who actually care about the welfare of the latter do so in an extremely patronizing way - i.e. by stopping the "bad mages" rather than working together.

In #dnd and similar #ttrpg, the concept is represent by the "sorcerer" and similar characters who gained their cool powers from some innate birth ability rather than study and hard work.

And while there is nothing wrong with wanting to play such a character, just for once I would like to see an in-setting examination of what it means to have this privilege, instead of the more common:

"Oh no, woe is me, I have been born with special powers and will be hated and persecuted for them. Thus, I must spend most of my time in a secret society with my fellow very special people!"

To be clear, people born with privilege did not ask to be born with privilege, and cannot be blamed for that. However, they should also acknowledge that they have this privilege, and not assume that they are somehow "better" than people without it.

I'm planning the next version of Juice and I would love some community input from those who have used the current version.

The most common request I have gotten is to make it bigger, the text is too small. I can also see from my download stats that the digital/screen version is much more popular than the pocketfold/printed version.

So here are a few questions that will help guide how the next version looks:

1. Should I stick with the pocketfold format, or go to a A5 / Half-US-Letter format?
2. Do people use the Fate (+/-) dice, or should I switch to a d6 (or d10)?
3. Do people like the constraint of sticking to d6/d10 everywhere, or should I open up the tables to be designed around all the sizes (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20)?
4. Which tables do you use the most?
5. Which tables do you use the least?
6. Which features are missing?
7. Do you use Juice for campaign-level play / worldbuilding, or for shorter adventures?
8. What tools / tables do you pair Juice with (if any)?
9. Do you play physical/analog or digital?

A few other notes:

• The current version won't go away, I'll be keeping it up on itch with the instructions
• I will be sticking to fantasy genre, no plans to make sci-fi or anything else

Drop your answers (or any other thoughts) in the comments!

Thanks

OSRIC 3.0 Player Guide released
https://attronarch.com/news-osric-3-0-player-guide-released?pk%5C_campaign=rss-feed

@rpg

#ttrpg #osr #blogospherefind

Looking back at my past campaigns, the ones I've had the most fun running (and which were arguably the most successful) were the ones where the PCs could take a fairly sandboxy approach to exploring a wilderness region. I'd like to develop a new campaign like this again one day, but what I could use for such a campaign is an interesting premise. I am ruling the following premises out:

• Adventurers plundering old ruins for profit: Too trite.
• Adenturer-archeologists uncovering the deep history of the region for academic bragging rights: A lot of fun, but I have done this before.
• Making the region "safe" for colonization and settlement: While the whole concept of "colonizing the frontier" provides plenty of interesting background drama for a campaign that I don't mind exploring, it is too ethically dubious to make the PCs take the side of the colonizers by default.

So, what other premises can you come up with that provide a justification for player characters to hang around a frontier region and explore it?

In my quest for ever-easier RPG introductions, I present:

• Choose-Your-Own-Trial is a CYOA[^1] where you're in jail, then on-trial. It introduces the system and gives you a tiny character sheet.
• Induction at the Temple of Beasts is a mini lore-dump in a short story (set after the trial).
• Another CYOA follows, where you hunt an albino basilisk who's definitely not Moby Dick.
• The 'Halfshots' are tiny modules which take about two hours to run.

Everything was made to be printed (so you can score through HP boxes with a pencil) but reading should be fine.

[^1]: A 'Choose-Your-Own-Adventure' book was a short book disguised as a long one, popular in the twentieth century. You make a choice at each paragraph to have the hero fight or flee or whatever by selecting the next paragraph you jump to.