Updated: October 2022.

This is a post I’m going to write and re-write. It will never be finished, as, if nothing else, when it gets too long, no player will want to answer all the questions and then it’ll be useless.

It’s also aimed at myself, and is not intended to replace any other sources, such as:

• RPG Safety Toolkit
• Monte Cook’s Consent in Gaming

©️ John Stavropoulos

Fundamentally, most of the “How do I resolve this problem in my group?” questions from GMs on /r/rpg come down to (IMO):

My player(s) want to play a game like X and I want to play a game like Y

Finally, FINALLY, ran Tomb of the Serpent Kings. It is rightly held up as a great intro dungeon, for teaching lessons (in a good way) about some OSR concepts to beginner players. We’re talking here about combat-as-war rather than combat-as-sport, and the general idea of “don’t assume your GM is keeping you alive”.

The players I ran this for wanted to play in Fifth Edition, and as I’d chosen the RPG for our last game, I used a free conversion pamphlet.

Spoilers below.

Obviously Slipgate Chokepoint has me thinking about Quake quite a lot. I’ve ripped the NIN soundtrack off my original Quake 1 CD that I bought for the Amiga 1200 that I owned. Fun fact, it could run Quake at about 9-20fps depending on the mod I loaded. I’ve installed a bunch of different Quake engines, and hi-res texture packs, then thrown them all out again, for something updated but unmodified.

And I’ve been having a load of fun. These are my musings on how and why I was having fun.

So a recap, if you take an enemy in Slipgate Chokepoint to a high enough -HP when you kill it, you have performed a Gib. Like in the FPSes it is based upon, you get a benefit if you gib an enemy, here that benefit is to immediately perform a second attack with Advantage.

The rules mandate that the GM describes the gib as exquisitely as possible. NO PRESSURE THERE THEN 😬.

Tried the example ‘Frayed Domain’ adventure again with the same two friends.

Changes:

• Halved the number of enemies per encounter
• Theatre-of-the-mind combat
• No roll20
• Quake soundtrack playing through Groovy 🤘

So on another Kickstarter I backed the luxury version of Artefact. I didn’t know I was backing a luxury thing, I just like getting physical stuff in the post, and for the (comparatively rare) :flag_gb: RPGs, I can order at much cheaper postage. Well, it arrived, and it’s very lovely indeed.

The idea of Artefact is, from the website:

ARTEFACT is a story game for one player, designed for contemplative solo play.

So I have a Kickstarter problem.

And one of the things I backed this year was this beauty. Go look, I’ll still be here when you get back. It’s basically Quake: The RPG, and is an adventure/conversion for Stay Frosty.

I used the perchance.org website to create a Slipgate Chokepoint character generator

First attempt, could have been worse. But I got a lot wrong.

The next adventure introduces an NPC but not for long and I thought it would be fun to introduce them early. Mugwort, a hobbit NPC in the Pony had alleged a chicken thief was due to “them no-good Rangers”. It’s supposed to be a hook for another monster up to no good. But what if it was a Ranger?

🎵 DRAMATIC CHORD 🎵