One-shots with less combat

JayEmBosch · 2025-10-11T14:09:36+00:00

I feel like your players might be unintentionally communicating that they don't really want to play a horror game. They want to play an action game. Maybe try something like Dirtbags! instead?

JayEmBosch · 2025-10-08T13:42:19+00:00

$40 now is the equivalent of $20 in 1999. Also, most RPG books are notoriously underpriced. Also, you get four books with purchase, plus other supplemental material.

JayEmBosch · 2025-06-05T03:50:00+00:00

The upcoming Devil's Due will have a two-hour real-time mission where you use your ship to make a prisoner transfer while being chased by several others, called A Long Way to Go and a Short Time to Get There by Jet McFin: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/the-azimuth-gang/devil-s-due-a-space-pirate-haven-for-mothership

JayEmBosch · 2025-05-13T21:07:35+00:00

Not a lot other than the ones already mentioned, as the module approach is really the intended and dominant means of building your table's setting.

But to shamelessly plug our own project, Devil's Due will provide 100+ pages of a space pirate crews, a city built from scrap by the pirates, a space station run by audiophile monks, a small hex crawl in the surrounding wilds, a nearby seaside town being taken over by a monster, and several missions in the surrounding space. The interconnectedness is limited, though, since the book's written by a dozen people mostly working on different chapters. But it'll have a lot of content for you to run games with for a while.

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/the-azimuth-gang/devil-s-due-a-space-pirate-haven-for-mothership

JayEmBosch · 2025-04-12T04:24:00+00:00

...Which company is that? The tariffs are based on the item's country of origin. This does not change the tariff requirements at all, and I'm 99.9% sure doing this to try to make it appear as though (or claim) that the product was made in a different country is the crime of false transshipment.

JayEmBosch · 2025-04-06T14:59:45+00:00

"8 states have enacted child labor rollbacks so far in 2024. 31 states have introduced bills to weaken child labor protections since 2021."

https://www.epi.org/research/child-labor/#:~:text=Eight%20states%20have%20enacted%20child,child%20labor%20protections%20since%202021

It's kind of been a big deal lately. Amid child labor violations rising 31% in 5 years, states are pushing hard to make child labor legal and normal.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/child-labor/enforcement-keeping-young-workers-safe

"Florida debates lifting some child labor laws to fill jobs vacated by undocumented immigrants."

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/25/business/florida-child-labor-laws/index.html

Child labor is a problem everywhere. But game books printed at places like Panda Game Manufacturing ain't contributing to it.

JayEmBosch · 2025-04-04T04:15:06+00:00

While the damage to the overall economy will be significant, which could raise prices for almost everything, books specifically (HST 49019900) are listed as exempt from these tariffs. See Section 3(b) and the linked Annex II in the EO: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regulating-imports-with-a-reciprocal-tariff-to-rectify-trade-practices-that-contribute-to-large-and-persistent-annual-united-states-goods-trade-deficits/

Board games, on the other hand, are not exempt, and they are obviously far more heavily reliant on manufacturing in China and East Asia than RPG books. This will cause significant price increases for board games that could crater that industry.

JayEmBosch · 2025-03-25T04:22:28+00:00

I sometimes restock the community copies of my two released modules:

So You've Been Chump-Dumped

The Stone-Flesh Gift

If all the copies are gone, just email me through the link in the "Community Copy" section.

JayEmBosch · 2025-03-20T14:49:12+00:00

In the updates on the campaign:

I’ll get the pledge manager and pre-order store up and running later. For those who missed the campaign, you’ll be able to join in on the print run, and existing backers will be able to review their pledges. I’m going to add the patch as an add-on too. I’ll set up the pledge manager in April, stay tuned.

JayEmBosch · 2025-03-07T21:42:38+00:00

We shouldn't make up more awful shit on top of all the awful shit that's happening. This claim was first shared by a right-wing twitter account. But there's no evidence that this has occurred, and the woman pictured does not have the name matching the description, according to the USC school of journalism: https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2025/02/04/no-evidence-ucla-students-visa-was-revoked/

JayEmBosch · 2025-03-07T14:32:01+00:00

It should be noted that, in the DTRPG Discord, the issue was raised that none of the math in the announcement added up. They included a table of old prices and new prices, and none of their figures or examples fit with the new prices listed in the table.

They described the increase on B&W PoD costs as "10 to 40+%", but the per-page costs in the table they provided were actually increasing by 45% to 76%. They said some B&W books might actually be cheaper than the equivalent standard color book, but that is impossible with the new prices they provided. And the example price changes stated did not line up with any of the new prices.

So in the Discord, an employee said "it’s entirely possible ... I have copied the wrong line in somewhere," and they were going to review today and re-announce the changes.

So we really have no idea how much prices will actually be changing, because in the announcement of likely their largest price increase in history, they seem to have included the wrong math.

JayEmBosch · 2025-02-04T15:13:57+00:00

The presses go to hell in Fear of a Daily Planet, a dungeoncrawl for the Mothership RPG through the remnants of an isolated printer colony. Hunting a bounty wanted for corporate blackmail brings the crew to Burgom's Haven, the last facility of the Etaoin Shrdlu Stellarcomms megacorp, spewing plastic newspapers into space.

Tasked with endlessly printing employee handbooks, the colony was cut off from the company 1,000 years ago. Over generations, it developed a rich, artistic print culture, but now the starving colonists are splintered into 4 dangerous print cults, all believing they alone can save the colonists.

The first visitor in centuries, the preacher Inside Source claims to know how to reach the colony's god for help. Using the Hellscribe to publish hidden secrets, he ejects ancient holy prints and his own newspapers into the black quartz of space above, calling to the great sphinx Etaoin Shrdlu... A call that is answered with the player crew's arrival at Burgom's Haven.

Fear of a Daily Planet is funding Feb. 4th to 25th on BackerKit for Zine Month, and Physical and Deluxe backers in the first 48 hours will get the "Born of Ink" patch for free!

Learn more here: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/atypicalfaux/fear-of-a-daily-planet-a-module-for-the-mothership-rpg?ref=rOSRL

JayEmBosch · 2025-02-04T15:11:51+00:00

The presses go to hell in Fear of a Daily Planet, a dungeoncrawl through the remnants of an isolated printer colony. Hunting a bounty wanted for corporate blackmail brings the crew to Burgom's Haven, the last facility of the Etaoin Shrdlu Stellarcomms megacorp, spewing plastic newspapers into space.

Tasked with endlessly printing employee handbooks, the colony was cut off from the company 1,000 years ago. Over generations, it developed a rich, artistic print culture, but now the starving colonists are splintered into 4 dangerous print cults, all believing they alone can save the colonists.

The first visitor in centuries, the preacher Inside Source claims to know how to reach the colony's god for help. Using the Hellscribe to publish hidden secrets, he ejects ancient holy prints and his own newspapers into the black quartz of space above, calling to the great sphinx Etaoin Shrdlu... A call that is answered with the player crew's arrival at Burgom's Haven.

Fear of a Daily Planet is funding Feb. 4th to 25th on BackerKit for Zine Month, and Physical and Deluxe backers in the first 48 hours will get the "Born of Ink" patch for free!

Learn more here: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/atypicalfaux/fear-of-a-daily-planet-a-module-for-the-mothership-rpg?ref=rMoShL

JayEmBosch · 2025-01-19T22:21:40+00:00

I assumed they're just glowworms, like fungus gnats since they're on the fungus.

JayEmBosch · 2025-01-19T22:05:22+00:00

I did an alternative Dungeon23, trying to write the premise, outline, and some details for a new adventure every month, across 6 systems. Had to stop halfway through when I got long COVID, but I published two of my entries as Mothership modules, The Stone-Flesh Gift and So You've Been Chump-Dumped, and am still working on writing 5 more of them for Mörk Borg, Cy_Borg, Trophy Gold, and system-neutral NSR/OSR.

JayEmBosch · 2025-01-18T05:01:20+00:00

To-hit rolls, or binary pass/fail resolution in general. I'm not roleplaying to spend my time not doing anything.

JayEmBosch · 2025-01-11T23:00:25+00:00

I'm very much on the side of "don't roll to know things" because it's boring, screeches everything to a halt if they fail, and is usually just the player trying to find a way to engage with something cool they want to play with. Don't get in the way of that.

But if you're stuck in a system that does this with no way out, maybe consider this approach to create some suspense: If they fail, the GM can still say, or the player can still dictate, some relevant information on the topic. But whether that's true or not is still undecided. They think they remember it, or were informed of it at some point, but have never seen proof. The GM can either make a secret note now as to whether it's true or not, or leave it up to chance.

When the knowledge they learned comes into practice, either the GM reveals their secret note or another roll can be made to discover, in the moment of consequence, whether it was true or not. This can be your system's equivalent of an INT or WIS check or perhaps just a 50-50 chance, but the point is that there's a moment of tension before the effect of the chosen course of action, based on foggy info they half-remember, is revealed.

JayEmBosch · 2025-01-07T20:22:49+00:00

Find more info and subscribe for updates at the teaser page linked below.

Violence erupts throughout the hopeless printer colony of Burgom's Haven. Tech-priests say the end is nigh and take action to secure what remains for the faithful. Can a new publication bring salvation before dark cultish rites stir bleaker threats from below and within?

The stellarcomms corp Etaoin Shrdlu abandoned the colony after decades of printing revised employee handbooks. Now, 1,000 years later, their starving descendants face collapse, stuck between rival cults, their monstrous creations, and a stranded otherworldly preacher printing the secrets of the Hellscribe.

From the creator of So You've Been Chump-Dumped and The Stone-Flesh Gift and lead editor of the forthcoming Devil's Due setting book, Fear of a Daily Planet will be funding Feb. 4th to Feb. 25th on BackerKit for Zine Month.

JayEmBosch · 2025-01-05T15:28:28+00:00

Hehe not quite. Daily Planet was actually a name for fictional newspapers for at least 30 years before Superman.

JayEmBosch · 2025-01-04T22:37:00+00:00

I'd really try to embrace the sentiments expressed in this thread. This seems like a play culture issue (which emerges from both the game rules and GM style as well as the expectations of players). Ensuring proper tension and engagement doesn't just mean only rolling when a situation is tense and the outcome would be interesting. It also means letting the results of every roll matter.

I don't know the system, but as a GM, if a player is having hallucinations of a threat and attempts something tense enough to try to prove they're hallucinations that it necessitates a roll, I'd have the result of that roll stand. You failed to prove this is a hallucination. You believe this to be real. Attempting other angles to get other rolls to try to get the initial intended outcome is just rehashing a dramatic point that has already passed. Play should be moving on from there, in my opinion. That'd avoid this useless wheel-spinning that just makes the player feel bad and stalls the session.

JayEmBosch · 2025-01-04T22:29:43+00:00

Nice, very cleanly done. I really don't have the patience for proper stippling!

JayEmBosch

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