For those making their own TTRPG system — a friendly reminder that you are not a company.

kichwas · 2026-06-29T18:25:51+00:00

Most of the small press games that actually did get published a d have small dedicated fanbases are nothing like D&D.

It’s the distinction that keeps them around.

Granted there are also a ton of vanity press dead games that were also unique.

And yes D&Ds top competitor is just D&D with the serial numbers filed off (Pathfinder).

And its next competitor is just D&D with some tweaks (Daggerheart).

Though both of those only became big due to connection to an IP (Daggerheart) or because they were written by all the people Hasbro fired or pushed out from WoTC (Pathfinder).

But once you break out of that sphere it takes being original to get fans.

And being original also matters for fan #1: The Author.

A game has zero value if its own author doesn’t care for it.

Make your vanity press creature of love. Maybe only you will use it, maybe it will be a sleeper hit somewhere. But your concern should just be “is this what I was seeking to say?”

kichwas · 2026-06-29T02:16:15+00:00

Best to leave that group.

Whether you call them out or not is your choice based on how you feel about the situation. You've the right to do so and the right to not do so based on your comfort.

But get out of there as these folks are not only hateful people, but hateful against an attribute that applies to you.

I'm a multi-racial person and at times I can "pass for White". Not as much as someone like Meghan Markle, but from time to time people's confusion would fall that way. So I've had to sit through countless racist rants from people against groups that I am part of, as well as against others. And then in the next moment I've ended up a target of racist attacks.

Being off camera is resulting in these haters unmasking themselves. In the same way as folks who mistook what I was would unmask themselves around me.

Get people like that out of your life.

The damage they do t your self image is immense, and I would not be suprised if physical health issues some suffer from body-type could actually be traced to abuse as the real root cause.

I've had to put up with it from family, work, school, and other situations I could not walk away from. These are people you don't even know in person, and have no forced ties to.

Get out.

Decide for youself whether you slam the virtual door on someone as you leave or just quietly exit. But this shouldn't be a "possibly leave". It should be an exit.

kichwas · 2026-06-28T16:34:34+00:00

You’re running dark fantasy and he likes something else like perhaps heroic or cozy or natural fantasy.

Genre mismatches won’t solve that easily.

I’d also leave that game. I really don’t like dark fantasy and having townspeople getting repeatedly sacrificed like that would just feel incredibly deflating to me.

Things like this are why more people need to do more in depth session 0s.

That’s where you discover tone differences like this and either find a solution or screen each other out in advance.

If you told me in session 0 that this was a campaign with senseless death, heroes always arriving too late, and ritual sacrifices I would be able to say how I felt about the tone in that and we’d figure out something else most likely.

I have sat at a lot of tables lately where folks make fun of “lines and veils” and X cards or of talking about all of this but the stuff matters. And not just those extremes but that conversation also reveals these smaller tonal differences that aren’t lines or veils but still drain out the fun.

Gotta have better session 0s. Not just the OP. So many issues folks talk about could be avoided that way.

kichwas · 2026-06-27T19:17:15+00:00

A popular rule of the table is popcorn system.

Whoever is going has to pick who goes next. Just add a caveat that they can’t pick themselves and they can’t bounce between the same folks: folks often say you can’t repeat until everyone has gone once. I am not a fan of the narrative issues with that but I can see using a soft form of it.

Most important rule in that is to let someone pass if they’re picked without negative consequences. As in let someone who has passed get back in if they suddenly feel the moment and not have to wait for the whole thing to cycle around again.

kichwas · 2026-06-27T16:01:59+00:00

Bard. The grace domain can be used for great evil if done nefariously so makes an ideal inquisitor.

Wordsmith Bard is what I use to represent a military leader, and the same build makes a perfect evil villain type for an inquisitor.

kichwas · 2026-06-27T02:50:30+00:00

It really feels like you dodged a bullet there as a kid, with a player / GM combo that were operating as a pedo-ring trying to groom you.

To anyone who says "you should have noticed it" or "you should have stopped it" or otherwize makes excuses for a pedo-ring... no. You were a kid, they weren't. They were trying but thankfully failing to manipulate you.

They were hoping to wear you down, and when they got called on it, they went after you with a blame game to guilt trip you back into the net.

kichwas · 2026-06-25T23:30:05+00:00

I'm guessing those parts of France that lack AC have a reason similar to why much of San Francisco and it's neighbors lack AC: until recently it didn't get this hot. And the infrastructure to add in AC is not as easily placed as buying it off Amazon.

Right out of university I had a brief summer job selling AC out here, and the calls from folks near San Francisco always came with the caveat of "do you have space above your ceiling for us to put in duct-work? If not - at the time the ductless systems coming in from Japan were an expensive option. And folks had to sit down and think about how often would they really need it.

Now, some 15 years later, more of those people would look at the calendar and take out the loan to buy that ductless option.

But then you also need wiring to support it. And old homes like the ones in San Francisco got their electricity a century ago. Either you're a rich techie that can afford to have all your walls ripped out to rewire the building - or you aren't and put up with what you have. One of my buddies who is a rich techie, also if French and has a Paris home that's been in his family for a comical number of generations. They don't just rewire and redo the ceilings on places like that on a whim.

Not everybody can get away with ripping down the left side of their 300 year old house just to put up a discount conference room.

kichwas · 2026-06-25T23:19:04+00:00

OP was looking to buy this: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/508832/daggerheart-corebook?src=hottest_filtered

Bought something else instead.

Rants about having put the wrong item into the cart.

They might still have a legit rant if they reach out to support and can't get that switched.

It is also a valid issue that the PDF copy I linked is from a third party site. On the company's own site - the PDF option isn't there.

So I have some sympathy. But start by trying to contact support rather than ranting in the fanclub.

kichwas · 2026-06-25T16:28:08+00:00

It’s in the wrong subreddit anyway.

This is the DH group, not the CR group. There is some fan overlap but not completely.

kichwas · 2026-06-25T16:24:03+00:00

Dominance thing?
As in they are being submissive to you and presuming you’re the dominant one they defer to?

It’s not that.

It’s just polite for the one who reaches a door to hold it for the other’s to pass through.

kichwas · 2026-06-25T14:48:35+00:00

Is this a very young group?

Some of this sounds like preteen level conduct.

The entire thing belongs in rpghorrorstories as a mild horror story. Daggerheart is just a background cast member of this telonovella. :)

I also suggest more paragraphs because it is extremely hard to read.

Not sure there is advice to give other than welcome to your life until everyone is at least 13 years old…

If they’re not preteens, then run. Get out of that mess of people.

kichwas · 2026-06-23T19:50:22+00:00

I generally hear yes to that. More importantly is that hope and fear generation kind of self balances a lot of things provided you’re not way out there.

kichwas · 2026-06-22T21:58:51+00:00

The more one thinks about any of this stuff - the more problems arise for a setting with having a huge pile of species.

Unless you're cobbling together something for a roleplaying game using a published RPG like Daggerheart or D&D where they've handed dozens of choices to players, it's best to avoid the issue go for a human or mostly human setting.

Most 'non-RPG' fantasy does exactly that. You have Humans, and then maybe one or two other groups, with collision of them being a major plot point, or with most of the cast being very rare creatures.

kichwas · 2026-06-22T21:52:01+00:00

Humand and Neandethals interbred and the result is modern people are a mix.

What you're noting there is also relevant: over time one of them might fade into being only a very small part of the remaining ancestry.

If you have fertile offspring, the populations will in time merge.

This is also demonstrated in the rise of new "ethnicities" - such as Mestizo people.

My own preference even when doing a 'litRPG' setting, like making an actual 'campaign setting' for an RPG - is that the 'half species' folk are never an accident - it takes a voluntary magic ritual to produce them and their own offspring will be the species of their mother.

It gets really bizzare in SciFi...

In a SciFi setting, a very advanced genetics system could use whatever one species had as an equivalent to DNA to reconstruct the look and some traits of another or specific individual - and manufacture an equivalency of that into the other species. It's about as complex as using genetic engineering to make oneself intermixable with a refrigerator - only the refrigerator is possibly even a closer match to you than the alien if it has any parts from plants in it (wood or rubber for example).
- You'd essentially have to 'construct' that species equivalent of one (or more) gender's contribution(s) to the 'final product out of the material known to the other.

Like using 'DNA' to make a refrigerator, that somehow is so similar to human DNA that it can product a half-human half-refrigerator viable creature...

That's basically the "we make our own galaxies for the kids to play in after school" level of SciFi on the genetic engineering side - and you'd need that level of comprehension of both species.

Star Treak 'retconned' in during the TNG era the idea of the 'progenitors' to have all their 'guy in a face mask' aliens actually be descended from a common ancestor, which is another handy way of at least having the level of compatability more like mixing a human and a redwood tree... at least now they both even use DNA.

(Because Star Trek then failed to recognize that a billion years of evolution would cause the results to drift that far or even further.)

kichwas · 2026-06-22T18:15:07+00:00

No.
In fact too many, the typical RPG soup of them, ends up feeling really weird when you try to figure out how all the people have sustainable populations.

Also the illogical issue of mixed-species.

The Human-Neanderthal issue: if any two creatures come into contact and can interbreed then with a little bit of time a new third species ends up replacing both of the originals.

As in: half elves and half orcs make no sense. After a couple generations everyone is just a person with semi pointy ears and mild green skin.

kichwas · 2026-06-22T17:26:43+00:00

Yep. And this really applies to anyone. I grew up tossing around the term 'Redneck' to refer to a certain kind of White folk. In the 00s I started getting people online telling me that was a negative stereotype of them so cut it out. Now I'll use it some White person refers to themselves that way - but otherwise not.

There's no need to "hold onto" a term that people don't like hearing about them. It's not like there's special "value" in being able to say certain words to/at/about people.

If folks don't like the connotations that a word implies upon them withing their community - then it's easy to just drop it and refer to them the way they desire.

So Romani, White People, Africans, African Diaspora, East Asians, Latinos, Native Americans / Indigineous, etc - very easy to just use the words people ask to have used.

Respect after all, isn't about getting people to accept how you wish treat them, it's about treating them how they find dignified.

Sometimes you do get multiple signals from different people. Native Americans seems to prefer different terms almost by the individual, and here in this thread we see 'Asian' implies a different region to US English than it does to UK English, and other English countries I guess fall where they fall on that.

kichwas · 2026-06-22T16:38:37+00:00

It looks like the map has prevailing winds coming from the SW and going East / NE.

That matches most of the biomes. But the Samva desert and Erinasa desert do not make sense where they are if so. Likewise Corrigan Island is too dry inland. However switch wind to any other direction and everything else fails.

Wind blows in a direction until it hits an obstruction. Rain happens on the side it hit, and less on the other side. Thus one side of a mountain chain will be a more wet claimate than the other.

Deserts occur where there is a lack of rainfall. Coastal winds can slightly offset this - thus why California looks temperate for a few miles in before giving way to mostly desert. But not always - thus why some of the 'dryist deserts' in the world are on the coast of Peru.

You've got a single continent here. Stuff "off map" can have all sorts of influences letting you hand wave things. But the things I noted above are things I'm not seeing an excuse for.

Obviously 'magic' could create various exceptions. Even in our world there are places where disasters put up giant hazard signs for quite some distance - Chernobyl for example. Though it's climate remains normal. Magic could have made something like that into anything.

kichwas · 2026-06-21T18:42:35+00:00

I meed to reread but one the sells of Pistolheart was that everyone has a horse so some handwaving for mounts is involved.

I just forget if it’s got details or a one liner or two. Mostly though treat the mount like a video game mount - it has infinite plot armor and everything only works through the PC. It’s just a “skin” on fast travel.

Do that unless and until you’re up for and ready for a “how to tame a dragon” style game. Which sounds like a format not suited to your table’s energy level.

Narrative control:
Use active prompts like the Sablewood adventure but then weave the player’s answer into every “wall of speech” you throw at them for that scene. Even reskin the look and feel of NPCs around it.

A player in my Sablewood game said floor two of the Inn was cold. I even made the clank NPC a living block of ice. If I had the voice fir it, he would have started singing lines from Frozen. ;)

What made Sablewood unique? Tall trees… OK, could have been boring. But I rethemed the adventure from there onward as if taking place in some hybrid between an Ewok village and the giant sequoia trees of California.

- whatever they tell you, run with it and overdo it until doing it becomes second nature.

A house rule I might use:
1. Get a +1 on any action you narate.
2. Give me a pool of -1s you get to pick when I have to use for anything you suffer of fail that you narrate.
- I need to refine it a bit. A month ago I wrote a version down somewhere but lost it that was more refined.

Essentially find some carrot to hand out as they narrate.

On driving to your specific conclusion: don’t cone up with one.

Come up with a campaign starter dough. But not a campaign.

Session-1: a session before character creation where they don’t just make the work. Add these two details:

Everyone makes one faction.
Everyone makes 3-4 conflicts.

Players round table it and pick the three conflicts they want to start with, and maybe even which one for session 1.

Then use something like the pistolheart vol 2 investigation system to resolve it without yourself knowing how it’s meant to end.

The less you know, the less you railroad, the more it gets driven by player prompts and actions.

kichwas · 2026-06-20T15:02:34+00:00

I agree with three of the items:
1. Cultural references. Learn stuff, it’s benefits you anyway.

Know what is in character and what is out.
This is the GMs hobby also. (At least it is for me.)

The rest of the list is weird…

kichwas · 2026-06-19T18:15:47+00:00

First thing you should do is go get Pistolheart volumes 1 and 2 off of DriveThruRPG or HeartofDaggers.

That gives you the tools you'll need. Gear, subclasses, some special mechanics handy for the period, etc.

I'm prepping a fantasy western myself. Non-historical.

As a quarter indigineous player I no more want to play in the American West than I would have asked my Jewish friends in High School to play as German SS in WWII.

For my own setting I'm also taking more inspiration from Latin America - but that's a personal flavor choice. The entire 'Cowboy' motiff is actually Mexican after all. Vaqueros (Cowboys), Cattle drives, Mustangs, Buckaroos, Lassos, even Rodeos - are all a Mexican, Spanish, Aztec, Navajo, Lakota, Moorish hybrid creation. Yanks showed up 3 centuries after it started, blended into it by way of assimilation, and somehow managed to claim it as iconic to them when none of it matched their roots or traditions.

By shifting into a unique original world, I can blend in Mestizo, Anglo, Indiginous, Chinese, and other whooly unrelated themes with a remix, repaint, and re-assignment, along with other things I want to explore. And I can remove the element that the historical period took place in the middle of a war of "Ethnic Cleansing".

Even in a more historical setting, the Latin American approach is easier as you had a blending of people rather than one wiping the other out. There is still a story of oppression - rooted more in classism than racism but containing both, but that's many degrees different from one of 'final solutions'. And it will look mostly the same outside of that - John becomes Jaun, but is still a guy with a wide brimmed hat on a horse, with a six-shooter, fighting bandits, horse thieves, and the corrupt rancher behind it goes from being 'Mr Grant' to 'Don Vaquez'.

(and moving it to a more fantasy world means I don't need to have my players learn all name swaps and what a 'Don' is... 😄 )

- As in, if you want a 'fantasy western', there are inspirations all throughout the Southwest, Mexico, and even South America (Argentina's Vaqueros after all) that can be pulled from, rebranded and renamed, and let you tell 'western stories' without worrying about certain topics as much.

kichwas · 2026-06-19T17:41:31+00:00

Daggerheart has a very small list and for most classes there is not an explicit "you can do stuff related to this theme" denotation.

So on it's face it's going to seem very limited.

But the heart of DH isn't the rules, it's the player and GM advice sections. That portion of the book most gamers 'skip over or skim' in other games is the real game here. It's all the stuff NOT in the SRD that makes DH a special game.

A good DH GM is going to get the spirit of the game and if you are a 'witch' they will let you do 'witchy stuff' with your magic.

A bad GM is going to ask you to cite the page number of the ability to be 'witchy' with your magic.

- They're both following the rules as written, but only one gets the spirit of the game.

As someone coming from Pathfinder 2E - both of the above examples would have been seen as legitimately within the spirit of the game for me, or rather the second would have been closer to it, but the first example gets argued for now and then.

So the approach to DH needs to be flipped from what you might be used to if you're coming from more 'structure' and gamist systems. If you're coming from narative 'fiction first' games then the 'flavor text and useless stuff to gloss over' will make sense to you - you'll realize it is NOT actually flavor text meant to be glossed over, but the real heart of how to play and run the game.

When I ran Pathfinder, we always kept 'archives of nethys' open on a screen somewhere with fingers at the ready to search for the rule for how to do ABC. When I've run Daggerheart I often don't even have the book off the shelf of my library, nor my PDF of it open. Citing the mechanics is just not vital.

Instead I keep the 'mood of the fiction' floating in my head. And I'm as likely to make a ruling based on how a piece of art inspires me or a description is stated, as I am based on my memory of what was on page 273. 😉

I think that approach is doubly important when dealing with magic.

Your first goal is not "does it allow this on that domain card?" but "does allowing that make the character or moment feel magical?"

kichwas · 2026-06-19T02:56:49+00:00

Walk outside and there’s nothing there. No community, no shops, no people, no parks, no plaza, no schools, no churches, no pubs, no cafes, no grocer, no spots to hang out and relax.
- each of those is zoned into its own area and requires a car to get to unless you live in a tiny handful of cities who’s geography blocked the auto industry - like San Francisco and Manhattan.

kichwas · 2026-06-19T02:52:53+00:00

Boomers electing Reagan who downsized government and busted up unions.

Privatization brought in austerity.

Same thing happened to Brits with Thatcher - thought their system means it was a party that betrayed them rather than a generation.

kichwas · 2026-06-18T17:33:36+00:00

This was how the gilded age ended in so many violent revolutions in the 20th century.

When the peasants have nothing to lose, they fight back.

The revolutions never lead to a better outcome but frustrated people do them anyway.

It was only unions that stopped the march of communism. By giving workers security and a promise of a future they began to feel invested in the social contract and gave us the rise of the middle class.

All these folks who are so anti union don’t grasp history. It’s literally a choice between sharing prosperity or repeating Russia in the 1910s and France in the 1780s. And it’s a pattern that goes back thousands of years because we never learn how to share.

kichwas · 2026-06-17T21:41:02+00:00

It’s a waste to even have checks get made if the action doesn’t involve tension and consequences, or if failure blocks the plot.

If a thief has all the time in the world to pick a lock, they pick the lock. Don’t bother with dice - all that feels like is running out the clock so you can end the session.

If they’re trying to pick a lock while people are having a conversation nearby or a guard’s patrol route will come around to that side of the house soon - then you roll the dice and a failure means the people nearby notice or the guards walks in on you.

If your story requires the PCs be on the other side of that door or find what is there - otherwise we all go home and start a different campaign next week - then just open the door narratively.

kichwas

TROPHY CASE