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Let's say you've got 8+ players plus the GM. What games would you recommend for a sprawling group like that? Sessions would be 2-3 hours long and players are interested in character development over time and a variety of challenges (including, but not limited to, combat).

Gaming Ballistic, the only licensed third party publisher of Dungeon Fantasy RPG expansions, is back with two books of magic items. The kickstarter ends tonight. I've had a chance to read early drafts of both books, and they look really good. Each item includes a rich backstory, plenty of...

One of my favorite authors and publishers, Douglas Cole of Gaming Ballistic, is offering another book for Old-School Essentials: Best Supporting Actors: Ready-to-Use Adversaries and Allies for Old-School Essentials. It's a collection of 172 characters with stats and personalities. Specific...

This afternoon, while waiting for my son's circus class to end, I tried a new one-page RPG, I Do Not Want a Mastodon. I was sitting in a waiting area with no dice, so I played on discord using a die-rolling bot that I've used for GURPS before (pseudobot). Here's the transcript. uzirath —...

One of my favorite small publishers, Gaming Ballistic, is at the tail end of their Nightmare Fuel backerkit fundraiser for three new books of monsters for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game (powered by GURPS). Each book focuses on a particular type of creature: snakes, insects, and plants. The...

If you were creating a random PC generator and wanted to include non-binary as a third gender option, what statistical weight would you give it? One in three? (Even odds of being male, female, or non-binary?) Or some reduced amount? In the US there are about 1.2 million people who identify as...

Looking for a fresh campaign setting? The latest monthly GURPS publication from Steve Jackson Games provides an in-depth look at the history and culture of one of the world's great maritime empires. I was lucky enough to be a playtester for the book and spent much of last winter reading drafts...

Taking a break from my daily dose of discussions about immersion, story-now, gm notes, and prevarication, I thought I'd mention a new Kickstarter for a book that I was lucky enough to be able to playtest recently. The book is Delvers to Grow by Kevin Smyth, who also wrote Hand of Asgard and...

Many RPGs, whether fantasy or sci-fi, include the concept of returning from death. In some campaigns, it's just a simple spell with a fixed price. In others, there may be quests to fulfill. I've played in a sci-fi game where you paid a hefty fee for "brain tapes" and cloned bodies. I've also...

I know that I'm not the only GURPS fan on ENWorld and many more of you use GURPS supplements with other systems. In case you missed it, there is a sweet deal on Kickstarter right now called the GURPS 2020 PDF Challenge wherein you can get potentially a dozen PDFs for $3. Right now the first ten...

While browsing through my kids' copy of the May 22 issue of The Week Junior, I came across a great spread about bird migration. It included lots of interesting scientific tidbits along with a blurb about how mysterious migration has been throughout history: In the past, people could only guess...

I'm running an RPG activity at my middle school. We will have about 40 minutes of play time during each session. This semester, I'll be running a table for new players (which I haven't done in a few years). I prefer to have each session be a complete encounter (or, occasionally, a pair or trio...

Skip this thread if you don't want to know about an element at the end of the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. At the end of the adventure, the party encounters Oceanus in the ship. For a variety of reasons, I'd like to replace him with something else. Reasons include the...

I ran "Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh" from Ghosts of Saltmarsh this weekend. My players and I loved it. (It was one of my favorites when it was first published.) Don't read ahead if you don't want to know about a particular treasure, though I'm not giving anything away other than to describe it.

I was never much interested in Norse adventures in my games. (My longest multi-decade campaign was in a world inspired by the Arabian Nights.) Then Douglas Cole came along with a series of great books for my current favorite RPG, the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game. His first adventure, Hall of...

In the How do you get to GURPS? thread, DMMike brought up an issue that intrigues me, but strays enough from the topic to deserve its own thread: As a player, how important is it to you that the GM gets all the rules right? For the purposes of this thread, I'm setting aside edge case horror...

If you have some sort of druid-type characters in your campaign (i.e., some sort of magic user who channels the forces of the natural world), how do they fit into your cosmology and metaphysics? Is Nature aligned with gods of Good or Evil? Does it have a moral component? Could you have an evil...

My favorite recently published RPG is having a kickstarter for a new monsters book and reprint of the boxed set: Powered by GURPS: Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 2 & Game Reprint. I've run a bunch of games with this system, played in a few, and have been teaching it to students in our middle school...

I was just reading another interesting thread, The Dying Conundrum, and I realized that my response wouldn't really address the question. Thus a new thread is born. Does anyone else not kill player characters? Or at least mostly not? Ever since high school, I've generally run long campaigns...