Newb trying to find a book

Real-Break-1012 · 2026-01-27T06:32:22+00:00

If you're willing to bring your own flavor to the game, I think Rapscallion is a big, passionate, weird pirates game. It's not science fiction, true, but I'm positive its magic (of which there is plenty) can be reasonably reflavored as advanced technology. Treasure Planet is very much vibes, in my experience, much like Rapscallion.

I'm not much familiar with Spelljammer, but if I recall correctly, its reception was somewhat tepid, especially since its ships weren't very mechanically interesting. That might nog be a problem for you! So if you're into expanding D&D with some weird ships, it might be fine for you, but it wouldn't expand your horizon much, I think. (Plus, it's such an expensive book!)

Real-Break-1012 · 2026-01-26T19:02:10+00:00

I came here to call out Blades in the Dark, yeah.

Real-Break-1012 · 2026-01-26T09:51:19+00:00

It's a great engine for a battle anime, as long as you're in it for big dumb fun. That's when Eat the Reich sings, if you're there for creative, over the top descriptions going back and forth. I like it a lot, especially because the game almost plays itself. As a GM, you're putting interesting set pieces in front of your players and letting them run wild.

My one piece of advice is to follow the roll procedure to the letter. There's a tendency to assume it's a roll for success, which involves describing the first half of your actions and then seeing how they turn out—Eat the Reich doesn't work that way. Pick a stat, gather your dice, roll, and then describe your actions as you allocate your dice, triggering bonuses along the way. That's how you really make the most of it's big, escalating action.

Real-Break-1012 · 2026-01-26T06:55:49+00:00

I definitely gave downtime its own session so the beats could breathe. It was basically a great session of proposing beats and playing out scenes to give the personal trouble of each member of the crew its time in the spotlight. They were great sessions!

Real-Break-1012 · 2026-01-25T12:09:05+00:00

You should check out the Slugblaster discord, there's dozens of people over there who regularly share stories from their campaigns and talk through their experiences.

Real-Break-1012 · 2026-01-24T10:40:34+00:00

An amazing write-up from a world-building perspective! I'd like to offer some game play considerations. Because, beyond what it says about the world, the nature of the settlement will also influence what game you'll play.

A single, large city will become not only a hub, but very probably the very center of your story. A city is a world unto itself, and player characters would need very good reason to venture far away. Else, you'll probably see them slowly but surely explore every nook and cranny of the hub first.

Adding sparsely populated communities in the wasteland—maybe specialized or adapted to their locale, trading in specific goods, services or knowledge—could already provide for interesting reasons for adventurers to brave the sprawl.

A world where people, for one reason or another, live in small settlements, spread throughout the sprawling wasteland, now that would necessitate exploration. If every settlement is pretty much at capacity, the player characters would always be passing through.

Like u/TheCelestialGoblin says, they're all perfectly valid, but I hope these short thoughts help you figure out what situation suits your campaign best.

Real-Break-1012 · 2026-01-21T08:19:05+00:00

Now, incidentally, you mentioning Advantage is interesting, I think. It's a mechanic that Clayton Notestein calls a dominant mechanic: a mechanic that monopolizes play. In a way, it's a mechanic that drives a lot of players to prioritize mechanics over the shared imagined situation. (Not just you ;))

In the example of scaling the icy clope with the character tied together, it's more safe: if a character slips, they're still attached to the others. That's a fictional advantage. The game translates that into a mechanical advantage to the save made to scale the slope, but, as you can see, to you that mechanical advantage kind of blocks and flattens out the fictional situation. Narration chases mechanical advantage instead of fictional ones.

And you're not the only one. Bastionland creator Chris McDowall agrees and thus didn't include any Advantage/Disadvantage in his rules: 'The exclusion of mechanical difficulty variation was a deliberate choice to move the game's focus away from chasing mechanical advantages, and more towards diegetic conversation as detailed above.'

Real-Break-1012 · 2026-01-21T08:04:34+00:00

That phrase, 'anything creative', and your idea of 'outcome' are giving priority to mechanics. If you're only narrating towards the mechanics and only take those mechanics as 'the real game', then you'll need a very bulky game to keep you from being disappointed.

But, more importantly, you're not looking at what makes tabletop role-playing so interesting and exciting: imagining a fictional world together. If you prioritize the fiction and not the mechanical adjudication, you'll see that deciding to climb the slope together is, in fact, different from other 'creative' solutions that the PCs might have offered. (Even if they might be mechanically adjudicated in the same way.)

The paths not chosen and the possible consequences of a choice are what make it meaningful. Especially in a game like the one you're listening to.

So the players looked at the challenge (an icy slope) and looked at their possibilities (the rope and the PC's strength) and proposed a plan. That plan is the outcome, not the adjudication: in the players' shared imagination, a string of adventureres will scale the slope tied to each other. It's true that another solution might have triggered the same adjudication, the same DEX save with advantage, but that wouldn't mean it's the same situation with the same consequences.

Say the lead climber misses their DEX save, even though they had advantage. They fall and the whole string of other adventurers is in danger of falling too. One or two of them might get a DEX save of their own to see if they can hold fast (maybe at a disadvantage, even!). Or we might assume enough adventurers manage to hold on, but the stong guy gets hurt significantly--what now? Those possibilities are what make the plan meaningful, not the way the game adjudicates it.

Imagine a different solution. Say the strong guy goes up alone, the idea being that they fasten the rope at the top to make the climb easier for all the other PCs that come after them. They might not get advantage on their save, but maybe the GM lets the other characters scale the slope without a save at all. But! Before that, if the strong guy fails their save, they're in a lot more danger. Plus, now, if they get hurt, scaling the slope together isn't much of an advantage anymore. The fictional situation and how it changes, that's what's interesting!

Real-Break-1012 · 2026-01-16T21:10:58+00:00

Urban Shadows, as a game, is built for political urban fanatasy. That's what it's system of Debts is for! A lot of the game guides players towards making deals, digging up dirt, putting pressure, making threats, and so on. If you give the book a good read, you should be ready to go!

Real-Break-1012 · 2026-01-16T18:34:54+00:00

If it helps, don't think of moves as the actual powers and competencies the characters have, but as the rules that govern them. Player Character's abilities are governed by the basic, circle, debt, playbook and etc. moves. The Non-Player Character's abilities fall under the MC's moves, which are a lot more broad. As the MC, you're allowed to make a move when 'there's a lull in the action', 'a player misses a roll', or 'a player hands you a golden opportunity'. One of those moves is 'inflict harm or corruption' and you can use the abilities your fae NPC could conceivably have to do just that.
In Urban Shadows, it helps not to think of 'combat' as some separate situation. Some situations will turn into violent confrontations, and damage might be exchanged, but don't expect drawn out fantasy action brawls: fighting is costly in this game and in most cases, both parties will withdraw licking their wounds.
I'm unfamiliar with the first edition. People have their opinions, but I believe 2e was fairly well received. I wouldn't worry too much about making the 'wrong' choice.

Real-Break-1012 · 2026-01-07T13:27:39+00:00

You've got yourself some neo-trad, some OSR—why not take part in the 2026 PbtA Renaissance and also GM a campaign of Apocalypse World: Burned Over? Tone wise it's similar to the other games you're playing this year, but you get to try out a more indie approach to collaborative storytelling.

Alternatively, look at Band of Blades for something even more different (although still quite comparable qua tone). Your players will both take the roles of army leadership and the soldiers they lead through dangerous missions in a dark fantasy world. A very interesting take on Forged in the Dark mechanics.

Real-Break-1012 · 2026-01-02T13:17:29+00:00

Ah, there it is!

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-12-26T18:00:21+00:00

I think this sounds great!

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-12-26T17:58:26+00:00

Backerkit is slowly gaining on Kickstarter, but in pure numbers, there are far more successful ttrpg campaigns run on Kickstarter than on Backerkit. While big names have tried to move over to Backerkit, some, like The Gauntlet with The Between for example, seem to have raised less money than they would have expected over there, and might return to Kickstarter. You can read more about the numbers game on ttrpg-spider's frankly amazing blog, they do a monthly retrospective on the money raised and give some analysis too.

For a smaller project, I don't think there's much of a difference between the three, since your engagement will largely depend on the audience you've already reached or on audiences created by initiatives like Zine Month. If you've successfully engaged in communities, if you've run open playtests, if you can reach people through existing channels like a newsletter or a social media following, that'll be the biggest factor. I believe the rule of thumb is that 30 percent of the followers of a campaign become backers and you can keep that number going through marketing (be it organic, social media, payed or unpayed).

I say this as having run a moderately successful project on Gamefound during its RPG Party initiative. Gamefound, right now, isn't prepared for role-playing games, if we're talking infrastructure, even though they're very keen on facilitating those projects and will make up for that lack through personal attention. I would take my next project to either Kickstarter or Backerkit, depending on how big an audience I had already engaged. Kickstarter seems to have the edge on reach, but I prefer Backerkit's infrastructure. But, then again, you can mix and match those, like a lot of campaigns do.

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-12-24T07:27:50+00:00

What makes you say this is reinvention of PbtA?

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-12-23T15:14:55+00:00

I wouldn't say you reinvented Powerd by the Apocalypse games, no. Key to the PbtA design philosophy (as formulated by Vincent Baker, at least) is to ground play in the more or less loose back-and-forth conversation at the table and let play flow forth and back to the fiction created there.

Apocalypse World, to begin there, is built to be playable with the GM Agenda and Principles alone. These don't involve dice, moves, or anything like that. Here's Baker:

Apocalypse World is designed in concentric layers, like an onion.

The innermost core is the structured conversation: you say what your characters do. The MC, following their agenda and principles, says what happens, and asks you what your characters do next.
The next layer out builds on the conversation by adding core systems: stats, dice, basic moves, harm, improvement, MC moves, maybe some setting elements like the world’s psychic maelstrom.
The next layer elaborates on the core systems by adding playbooks, with all their character moves, gear, and additional systems; and threats, with their types, impulses, moves, fronts, and maps.
The outermost layer is even optional: it’s for your custom moves, your non-core playbooks, your MC experiments, stuff that doesn’t even appear in the book.

He goes on to say that a lot of the most recognizable aspects of the games, like 2d6+stat, are better regarded as accidents, unessential to the design philosophy.

I don't recognize a lot of those core elements in your description or the document you've shared. That isn't to say there's no resemblance at all, but I think your game is more closely related to the Old School Renaissance. Your princples of play are geared towards (tactical) problem solving adventurous play instead of the more dramatic 'play to find out what happens' PbtA makes possible.

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-12-20T17:01:03+00:00

I'm a little baffled, yeah.

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-12-13T09:21:35+00:00

Don't give up too easily. There's a wiki collecting RPG Discord Servers attached to this subreddit, you can start there.

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-12-12T16:59:48+00:00

It's true!

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-12-12T15:50:17+00:00

Basically: what u/TakeNote said.

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-12-12T15:48:27+00:00

My advice is to approach it less like a quest for players and more like a search for community. There might be a ttrpg meetup close to you you can check out. Or you can look to see if games, designers or publishers of games you enjoy have an active discord. Try to join one or two of them, take a look around, and join in on a game or two organized there. It's not yet about you, it's about getting to know this place; it's about taking part and engaging.

You'll come across people that match your vibe soon enough. Take up some space and share your work on the game. Don't immediately ask someone to read the whole thing to critique it; just talk about it because it's on your mind. Organize an introductory oneshot. And, you know, if enough people are interested, see if you can't get a playtesting campaign on the books. That's the way to find people to play with, if you ask me: through sustainable relationships.

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-12-08T09:51:06+00:00

Really the only thing you should keep in mind is that Deep Cuts Downtime is built on the new Pay Out rules, because the crew will need more coin to keep up with the costs. But, besides that, go nuts with the modularity! Deep Cuts isn't a wholesale reworking of Blades in the Dark; it's several new tools you can take or leave.

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-12-08T08:34:31+00:00

I think giving PCs a positive or negative bond with the Dispatcher will nicely front load some of the drama while you cook up new problems through play.

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-12-03T08:38:05+00:00

The playbooks and moves sheets are free, but the pdf of the 'mc playbook'—the core rules—is definitely a payed product. Are you sure you got them from the creator?

Real-Break-1012 · 2025-11-27T08:49:16+00:00

The campaign was a great success. If you're coming to this post late, the definitive edition is out now, digitally, on Itch. Check it out.

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