Hi there everyone. I'm Richard, pronouns he/they. I started playing RPGs in 2018 with 5e after seeing a group playing it on a camping trip and thinking "I want to get in on that". So I started going to a local meetup. I played in an online campaign for a few years. The dreaded 2000 plague hit and I was in 5 online games a week. I also DM, now regularly, but didn't get on with pre-written modules as it's just too many words to get through and my memory to retain. A wall of awful for my brain. So far I've stuck to one-shots but will be running a homebrew 5.24e campaign using the Proactive approach next year. While I've mostly played and DMd DnD 5e, I own several other games that I'd love to run at some point. Although I'm better off learning as a player first. I've the original West End Games Star Wars & the FFG version. Daggerheart (I soooo want to run this and think I could right off the starting line). Alice is Missing (an unusal one as it's 100% by text message yet still around a table). Goblin Quest (because it's zaney and fun). I also have both of the diceless RPGs by Guy Sclanders from the How to be a Great GM YouTube channel (they're BountyHunter and Mage Hunter) that I'd like to run as they're nice and simple and you can drop them into any sci-fi or fantasy setting. Anyway, I'm delighted I found this platform by chance via a podcast. I'm halfway through the Proactive book and have the new book on order. I look forward to learning more for people here.

Last night in the Q&A, we talked a bit about introducing proactive play to new versus old players (there should be a recording posted in the classroom tab soon for those interested). It got me thinking about something Jonah and I have talked about a bit, but never expanded on much: how does one introduce proactive play to a new GM versus an experienced one? I'm more curious about your experiences than anything else---how experienced of a GM were you when you heard about the style? I know we've got a bunch of pretty new GMs, or players turned GMs in the lab, and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Jonah and I were both longtime GMs when we started running games like this, and we implemented proactive play slowly and unintentionally over the course of multiple campaigns. My instinct is that newer GMs might actually have an easier time with the style over all, because they don't have a habit of player-reactive prep they have to break, but I have no idea if that's true or not haha, it's purely guesswork GMs, how long had you been running when you came across this concept? What has your experience been like, and do you think your experience as a GM affected it?

We are unbelievably excited for the launch of the second book in the Game Master's Handbook series, and follow-up to the Proactive Roleplaying book: The Game Master's Handbook of Collaborative Campaign Design! This book walks GMs through planning and executing full campaigns, from a full Session -1 system to kick things off to finishing every arc in a satisfying conclusion. We are so, so, so proud and grateful to share this with you, and we can't wait to hear what folks think! You can find it on Amazon (link below) or with all major book retailers, so check what's available near you! We can't wait for you to read it! We'll have more news for you soon, so keep an eye out! Thank you all again for being a part of the journey, and we'll be chatting with you a ton in the coming days. There's an invitation to this lab in the book this time, so we're expecting a few new friends in the coming weeks. We can't possibly convey to you all how grateful we are for the welcoming, helpful, and kindhearted people here, and we trust that vibe will continue as we meet new folks. Talk to you soon! Tristan https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Handbook-Collaborative-Campaign-Design/dp/1964487048

Hey folks, Jonah and I try not to use the lab to spew our own cynical, penny-pinching schemes too often, but this is both pretty relevant to the lab and has a really big impact on our work, so I thought I’d share it anyway. You can preorder our book through Barnes and Noble here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-game-masters-handbook-of-collaborative-campaign-design-jonah-fishel/1147035456 Barnes and Noble is running a preorder discount on a bunch of books, including our own! Preorders make a huge, HUGE difference in the success of a book in physical retailers—they’ll decide how many books they want to buy/stock when it actually releases, so if you’re at all interested in our next book, please consider checking it out. If the book preorders well, they’ll place a larger order, which (1) helps us sustain our authorial careers, (2) makes our publishers more likely to approve future projects for them, and (3) helps us work on future cool projects for here! With that said, we always advocate for shopping with your friendly neighborhood bookstore, so if you prefer, hold off until they’ll carry it! There are other folks who’ll carry it as well, the easiest to access for most people being Amazon. We’re extremely proud of this book, and in many ways we think it’s an overall stronger work than the previous one (and we certainly had a lot more experience when we wrote it). You also don’t need to have read the proactive one if you want to read this one, although the two books can work well with one another. If you’re interested in any level of narrative in your game, consider checking it out! Thanks everyone, we’ll see you in the lab.

I want to run an OSR hexcrawl game whose story emerges from randomness. How do you bring randomness to your games, and what tools do you use to reference these sources of randomness? Sources of randomness could include flipping to a random page in a book, playing word association, combining the results of several random words to inspire creativity, or random tables. Tools could include pen and paper, a whiteboard, Google Docs, Apple’s notes app, etc.