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There are outliers, obviously, but I think spending years, possibly even decades safely ensconced in the d20 / D&D cocoon is pretty normal. I played BECMI / Rules Cyclopedia as a kid in the late '80s through early teen-ager-hood in the mid-'90s. Then took a long break, then picked up playing...

So I'm going to plug Ironsworn one more time as a better gateway to PbtA-style fantasy gaming than Dungeon World for a few reasons. The two games are very much kith-and-kin in terms of the type/style of gameplay they're trying to emulate, but Ironsworn just does it better. The explanations of...

Delve is excellent for those times when you want to do a "dungeon crawl" like area in Ironsworn. It adds some additional moves for dungeon / site exploration, some new Oracles for twists and unique discoveries while staying true to the core game. Edit: it also has an excellent set of rules for...

My overall experience in a limited run (6 sessions) with Dungeon World was positive, but I later discovered Ironsworn, and Ironsworn was everything I had hoped Dungeon World to be and more. Ironsworn plus the Delve supplement is all I would ever need for awesome narrative fantasy gaming. If you...

It's nice to see someone else recognizes the potential of Ironsworn to do ASOIAF / GoT style gaming.

ASOIAF is exactly the type of thing I'd use Ironsworn for, especially if you have a small group (2-3 or players), and really want to lean in on the intrigue / relationship side of things. Using the base Ironsworn rules with the campaign guide you just picked up sounds pretty sweet, actually.

Radiance RPG is a steampunk love child of D&D 4e and 3e. Core rules PDF can be had for the price of free. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/105102/Radiance-Players-Guide-A-Complete-Roleplaying-Game-in-the-Age-of-Electrotech

From our FFG Star Wars - Edge of the Empire campaign in 2022 --- PCs get hired to go into a communications center in a backwater, outer rim planet to basically shut off / jam a spectrum of frequencies that allow their patron to complete some other objective that the PCs aren't directly...

There are all kinds of things we can rationally/intelligently determine or surmise in context that we are not even remotely prepared, educated, or trained to address. Nearly anyone with basic knowledge of electrical wiring can walk through a house and figure out how wire in an additional outlet...

One alternative I tried once with decent success was to create color printouts of monster pictures in 1-inch circles on a page, then use a 1-inch circle craft punch to carefully punch them out. Once punched out, get a bottle of clear craft glue finish and then glue the circular prints face up...

First off, the sentence you've expressed here is an oxymoron, a paradoxical state. The only reason to create and maintain a "continuous," "growing and evolving," "fully realized living world" is to involve PCs in the goings on within it. But 95% of the time those things are only made concerns...

Just picked up a copy of Tales of Xadia from an FLGS. Had been hoping to find a hard copy of Cortex Prime out in the wild, but those are exceedingly rare these days. Tales of Xadia should be pretty close to the next best thing, and my kids love the cartoon series. I figure I can pick up...

Best thrift store find was my wife finding a near-perfect condition WEG d6 Star Wars 2e Revised, but that was about the only time I can recall finding anything even remotely interesting over the years. Second hand book stores have never been all that great for me, except for one. The Black and...

The answer is both "quite enough" and "not nearly enough" at the same time.

The One Ring, as already mentioned. The art for the Interface Zero 2.0 setting book for Savage Worlds is next level. Not all of it is truly "great," but there's a consistency and level of detail throughout that holds the book together in a way that the OP describes---it's evocative and compelling.

Animal companions are the one and only non-negotiable banned items in any campaign I run. I've just been burned too many times by getting into rules-lawyer-y battles over their mechanics---what are they allowed to do, when do they act in turn, what are the limits of the master's control/hold...

So I'm of two minds on this. One -- by any measure, the "open source" movement across intellectual property contexts (software, books, games, music) is a huge boon to the public at large. The internet as it exists in its current form would bear little resemblance to what it would otherwise...

I can definitely confirm that Ironsworn and Ironsworn: Starforged have mechanics that either explicitly or implicitly ask players and GM to prioritize intent over "hidden backstory." That once agreed-upon stakes and fictional positioning align with the result of invoking the mechanics, that the...

Sure. But that's you choosing to prioritize your own desires over the players'. "I totally made up this fictional thing 6 hours / days / weeks / years ago, and somehow just because I totally made it up 6 hours / days / weeks / years ago, I cannot possibly change it. My version of this totally...

Very much this. But man oh man, was I extrapolating to keep the "living world" alive and running. I was a darn good extrapolator. I could extrapolate upon extrapolated extrapolations, then extrapolate some more on the extrapolated extrapolated extrapolations. And for a long while -- well over a...