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It's October, so clearly we need to highlight some new horror realeases from the last 12 months! Here are a few highlights: The Stone Flesh Gift (ATypicalFaux) An exploration of an ancient living ship knocked off course, for the Mothership sci-fi horror RPG. Zine; 40 pages; colour; Order and...

Well . . . my Dungeons Unleashed campaign game is around 20 sessions (a few were split sessions). That could go another dozen sessions easy. No sure I'll get the group back together -- lots of new kids. These were mostly done only, so it might restart. I'd happily run a Hackmaster 5e game for...

Neat. Took me a few tries to get that the water could and does link up nicely if you just drag it correctly! Interesting that it saves as a json. I had to try popping it open into notepad++ changing something and reloading it. It worked.

The annual site-wide sale at the Compose Dream Games RPG Marketplace is on. All print titles are 20% off and all PDFs are 25% off. With 77 publisher's and both a Canadian and United Kingdom location, we image you'll find something of note. Head either to...

My experience running a Canadian RPG distributor and online retailer RIGHT now, says we punch well above our weight. Both in terms of designers, and in terms of demand. I suppose one could argue that most RPG businesses are basically at the hobby level mind you, it depends on what you mean by that!

Compose Dream Games has been operating in Canada since 2017. I run it. We carry a lot of indie titles, and have them available in both Print with PDF and PDF only. We dominantly carry Canadian publishers, with the largest secondary publisher count from the UK. We operate in both of those...

We’ve got quite the mix to share today! Kicking things off with a pair of solo play experiences, followed by a GMless story-driven game, then a light diceless title, and rounding it all out with a big, high-level 5e adventure. Something here for just about every table Cartograph (Ravensridge...

Time to highlight some of our UK Publishers! We've carried Hatchling Games titles in Canada before, but now we have their titles in both markets. Plane Sailing Games just join us this past week, and Headless Press this month, welcome aboard! Love & Barbed Wire (Plane Sailing Games) A two...

A little late in the year to start calling out the new releases from the year -- but we've just had a pallet land in the UK from our Canadian Warehouse, so now many of them are available in both markets. Here's a few highlights: Going for Broke (Buried Without Ceremony) A fast-paced sitcom RPG...

Seems pretty similar yeah. The Revised books themselves suggest using the existing ACKS adventures from the prior edition several times (in the Judges Journal). We still have some of the fancy gold-foil covers and judges screens available through Compose Dream Games (and the PDFs too of...

Designer of Simple Superheroes #0 here. I'm currently running sessions of the in-development variant Supervillains Unleashed. As many designers do . . . I have opinions about what makes a supers game great. One is rather strong and isn't what some here say they want: heroes from different...

As you describe what you are doing, you are primarily using Event List (or Scenario). That's how I define it anyway in this post Alternatives to map-and-key As for the "best interests" which I generalized to Conflict Agendas, this is something that the players actively create in play. Games...

Because that's what narrativist mechanics do. They let player's directly manipulate the story in a way that only the GM normally can. Lot's of people get tripped up on this thinking that "immersive" = narrative and for many people the meta nature of narrativist mechanics takes them out of...

Here’s the types I think we’ve covered so far: Map-and-key Draw a map, fill it with content. Where the players go, there is where the game goes. covered in OP Event List (or Scenario) May have a time line, may be partially location based, can activate based on player actions or NPC...

I think they did. Implicitly if not explicitly in the OP. Alright so it seems like the "best interests" that Permerton is talking about could be generalized, because there do seem to be a number of games that tend to structure themselves this way. I think this tends to harken to more "drama"...

In a discussions like this that essentially asks the question "what are some uncommon / lesser known ways of doing X?" What exactly is the point of emphasizing the most common game? What's the point of weighing it so high? The whole point is to talk about other approaches and methods. In this...

Interesting topic Permerton. As someone who runs a lot of Superhero games, and never includes maps in my prep or scenario design, this is an interesting topic. Prep and adventures for this is usually a number of possible events, some tied to specific locations, some not, and a few key...

I've seen some mechanic's that specifically represent/gameify tension in RPGs: Dread's Jenga Tower -- you pull when you need to do something it falls, you probably die, and the tension resets for everyone else. This one didn't work particularly well for me when I got to play it, but it is...