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The World/Chronicles of Darkness seem interesting, but have few things that I don’t like. There’s a bunch of different settings, like a convoluted comic book continuity. The rules can get quite complicated, especially in Chronicles. I’m not invested in any one setting. I just want to be able to...

I'm mildly interested by the changes made to the setting/lore compared to Redemption and Bloodlines 1. The powers seem to have been changed, with changing into bats, becoming mist and telekinesis being new capabilities you can develop from the onset rather than being arbitrarily restricted to...

The monster type mechanic doesn't fit with the world building of my campaign. As far as I can tell, the rules as written do not allow you to add multiple types to a creature, change its type to another, or change the standard listing of types. The standard types mechanic does not fit with my...

That supposed "greater demand" isn't reflected on DriveThruRPG's public metals listing. Neither World of Darkness, Chronicles of Darkness or V5 seem to have a leg over the other. As I said, I have no investment in any of the campaign settings. I find the fans' fixation on these edition wars to...

I'm ambivalent. I've never really liked the restrictive nature of the IP nor its stranglehold over the urban fantasy market. Allowing Onyx Path to keep publishing their World of Darkness derivatives is an unsound business decision. It makes more sense to mandate Onyx Path release their products...

According to interviews with the developers, this seems to have only the most tangential relationship to the tabletop IP. The "ability trees" are structured completely differently: "chiropteran" involves levitation, "mentalism" involves telekinesis, and "nebulation" involves becoming mist. You...

The responses have been really great. Thanks. So I guess my original complaints may be summarized as: Doing insufficient research when adapting mythical monsters, resulting in monsters with the wrong names or other erroneous details Adapting a mythical monster in a way that destroys what...

Did you know? The name stirge derives from the Greco-Latin strix, meaning “screech owl.” It further gained connotations as “witch”, which remained when it was loaned into other languages. Curiously, a similar phenomenon was observed with the words for “screech owl” in Hebrew and...

I’ve always been frustrated by the inordinate focus on violence in RPGs. Plenty of fantasy stories resolved encounters with non-violent solutions. I’m not suggesting adding mental/social hit points or using a genuinely universal task resolution mechanic a la Risus, but I wish the rules had...

Skirmisher recently released a supplement on spontaneous generation. I recommend it to anyone who wants a brief introduction to magical world building... or simply wants to indulge their inner child. I admit, I like magical physics because it delights my inner child. Who didn’t want to hatch...

There isn’t anything inherently wrong with the great wheel cosmology, but I find it needlessly byzantine as a result of being haphazardly slapped together by a bazillion writers over forty years. I decided to go back to basics for the sake of my own sanity. Western fantasy games generally take...

I feel I’ve been misunderstood. This is essentially what I have been trying to say. Characters would experience the world the same way that we do, even if the underlying physics aren’t those of our real world. My reasoning for this is that I see, for lack of a better term, D&Disms as being...

In typical D&D settings, these elemental planes are assumed to be the origin of the material plane. Despite having no other causal connection, unless you’re playing Monte Cook’s Midgard setting in which the elemental planes literally cause the weather. In my experience, planes are more trouble...

I prefer to use fantastical physics because they make more sense when fantastical things exist as part of the world. For example, it makes zero sense for there to be elemental beings and planes based on the four classical elements if the world is composed of the periodic elements. That’s what I...

Roleplaying games have a long history of taking monsters from mythology and turning them into encounters. Often the monsters are rendered barely recognizable compared to their mythological origins, assuming that said origin had any interesting aspects that got shorn off. Plenty are already so...

The responses so far have proven very educational. Thank you. So this sort of, I don’t know what to call it, race building is very disturbing to me. You are writing a race whose sole purpose is to be killed by the heroes, and justly killed at that rather than the heroes being vicious...

Something I dislike about typical modern fantasy world building is that it basically tacks magic onto a world that otherwise operates according to real physics. I don’t think that is holistic, since the pre-modern societies that laid the foundation for the fantasy genre didn’t think that way. So...

So I see people online claiming that orcs (or drow or any other savage humanoid race) often unconsciously represent cruel stereotypes of people of color and promote a colonialist narrative. I also see plenty of people claiming that orcs do not and never have represented racial minorities, and...

I've divided some of my responses into labeled spoiler tags due to length or irrelevance: The morals of those alignments are arbitrary because they are subject to the whims of the writers and their own real world political views, which are completely subjective because objective morality does...

(Scroll to the bottom for a one-paragraph conclusion.) The nature of the soul is a vital point of argument in the game, such as why undead are evil. However, the core rules never conclusively define what the soul is. There are only scattered and vague references to how souls work. I will try my...