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As long as the differing factions' goals interact with the PCs' you are in business. An "evil" faction who wants the party's rival not to be king is just as interesting as a "good" faction who does. One other consideration is how easy it is for the PCs to discover a faction's goals - especially...

Good call. My first reading of the book involved saying "holy *&^%" over and over.

I agree that Night's Black Agents adventures do not fit the pattern that the rulebook tries to set up. But guaranteed success on a skill check - especially when combined with ability refreshes - is great for high action. I will say the Ringworld books Chaosium released BITD blew me away.

I suppose AI could run a prewritten module if it knew all of the PCs' capabilities. Can it improvise when a player tries something off the wall?

Spirit of the Century and Hollow Earth Expedition are more recent than those examples (GURPS Cliffhangers isn't). There was a Kickstarter for a new Solomon Kane game last year. I think it's been a while since we've had a Buck Rogers-type retro sci-fi game, too.

Keep on the Borderlands

Apologies for attacking the hypothetical, but from the way this unfolds, the DM has offered the players two mysteries to solve in that succinct setup. Mystery is a bad name, but certainly two possible objectives: find out about the artifact (a loaded word in D&D), and get it from the thief. And...

I would add a few bullets if the game is a multi-mystery campaign, but otherwise this is a great list. Incidentally, the first point is the design sensibility behind Gumshoe games.

This is one of those common instances where a sentence of out of character talk is worth an hour of play: "Given your character's expertise, they are satisfied that they have found what's relevant." "You quickly conclude that [the side information] is not relevant to the question at hand. It...

The trick is getting the brain to shut up. I usually envision what a NPC might say outside of play time.

As a D&D player in the first example, I'd be willing to entertain an explanation along the lines of "the intruder has a high intelligence, understood what the party was doing when they made camp, and knows the parameters of the spell." While it's still DM fiat, it sounds like there's enough...

We handwave it. When I was much younger, my group had just convinced my wife to start playing with us. One night we started a fight just as it was her turn to put the toddler to bed. Welp, the guy we thought we were fighting turned out to be a mind flayer, and let's just say my wife learned...

I'm afraid a postal service is one of those things, like vaccines and labor unions, that have worked for so long that people have forgotten how important they are.

A couple of points- Most contracts have happy endings. A lot of contractual language is an attempt to identify where things might go wrong because it has happened to one of the parties in the past. Word processing compounds this effect because it's easy to cut and paste. A lot of the flowery...

In the early days of the pandemic I commissioned a battlemap that I think cost $80. A few years ago I was quoted a figure of ~$200 for a map of 1960s Berlin with certain places I wanted noted. I don't think either estimate is too high.

Written by Hite & Ryder-Hanrahan according to this blurb - which should be another sign of my consternation. Stuff by either of them is an instabuy for me.

I've come round to approaching a game by asking "what do the PCs do in it?" which might get pretty close to your definition of "mode." Recent adds for a Terraforming Mars Kickstarter drive this home for me. I love the board game, but the things I picture a PC doing in the setting do not excite...

Dreaming Cities is rather old, but it had four sample settings in it.

We should be free to comment on the merits of a particular system, even if no one is going to be swayed by them.

There is also a recent nonfiction book called Cunning folk : life in the era of practical magic. It goes through the court records of England in this time for incidents involving magic. Ars Magica will also have stuff about hedge wizadry.