Heading to GaryCon Wednesday thru Sunday. First time there. I’ll be running Shadowdark RPG for a company while I’m there and also attending some Gamemaster seminars. Exhibit hall should be fun too and seeing all the industry greats

Started playing about 9 months ago, also started DMing for one shots. Am 2 sessions into a campaign using Dragons of Stormwreck Isle (it's a starter adventure for dnd). I had read the proactive turquoise book many months ago so my players all have goals of varying complexity I'm working into this adventure module. I only started the newer book after this campaign started so we didn't do a session -1 but I'm intrigued to explore this more later. I'm also a talk therapist and just watched the zoom session of the gold membership, I see a lot of overlap in certain skills like using silence to encourage players to generate their own ideas and reviewing group norms or goals each session, basically holding the frame-- this was what drew me in so much to the first book, I love this idea of putting it back on the players, somewhat because I'm new, don't know all the rules, and in a way I'm not even that creative lol. So glad you started this community, I love the idea of more active player involvement!

The last two weeks, I’ve been trying out a new game called Public Access—it’s an ongoing game, but I expect it to only run 10–12 sessions. I tried it out after watching this truly excellent review from Quinn’s Quest (who, if you haven’t watched, makes what I think is pretty much the best reviews of TTRPGs on the internet) https://youtu.be/DI8fUgSdgZg?si=ieolVb190wGzz_ag The game is an absolute blast. "No on remembers this children's show you watched growing up, except all of you. Something was...not quite right with it...what happened to it?" The explicit goal of every character is to find out what happened to this unsettling children's program that no one seems to remember called TV Odyssey. It’s inspired by analog horror and creepypastas, using the Brindlewood Bay system to facilitate a very cool storytelling system (rather than a puzzle heavy system like some mystery games). Brindlewood Bay and its offspring have a clue system where there’s no set answer to a mystery—instead, players collect clues, then make a role to create their own answer to the question with as many clues as possible. If their roll is a success, their answer is right. This concept bothered me a lot at first, but when it works, it works GREAT. It’s really nice for a game like this where the story, tone, atmosphere, and characters is the focus, and not actually the main mystery like in a Sherlock Holmes game or something like that. The mysteries build tension but never slow down the game from theorizing, which is nice. Other interesting mechanics include Keys, these boxes you can check to improve a roll. They effectively make characters unkillable, which is important for encouraging them to split up and get into danger. They're also all connected to either narrating a flashback to childhood, or mechanically entwining yourself deeper with the forces of horror, which is cool. All of this to set up the games I’ve run! We’ve had two virtual sessions, and I’m running with three players (friends from high school!). In the first session, we spent about an hour making characters, and two hours on our first mystery, the House on Escondido Street. The campaign has a cool narrative structure I won't spoil in case someone plays it, but it comes with a bunch of premade mysteries that are really well laid out. The group spent the day digging around the house, butting heads with the HOA, and otherwise engaging in investigative antics. They spent the night (which is its own phase where all rolls are more dangerous) watching a tape of the mysterious kids show that they found. Very good time.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeXvHKXbn0EnJ5rXN9UICsiyynvdAZOHW3AIhVItFEjajUkMA/viewform?usp=publish-editor On Wednesday, March 18th at 7:00 PM EST, we'll be running a collaborative world-building session for anyone interested! Learn how to kick off a proactive, emergent game by participating in the process, and set up the campaign for our West Marches game in the months to come. You can learn more about the upcoming campaign here, and you can RSVP for the collaborative event with the link at the top of this post. There's no player limit for this meeting, so no need to worry about if there's room. For those who can't make it, don't worry! We'll be putting up polls and bits of the process here this week, so you'll still be able to leave your mark on the setting before the game starts. Check in the Live Events channel each day, as we'll be covering the setting, factions, NPCs, and more. Please note that this will be recorded and posted in our classroom tab (and nowhere else!) as an example of the Session -1 process. If you're uncomfortable with this, you're still welcome to join us with your camera and/or mic off, via the chat in the event, and in the surveys we'll run this week. Also feel free to reach out to us if you'd like us to edit the video before uploading it. Can't wait to see you all there!

Update B: As I make my way through the latest book, I’ll post here how we used it. Daggerheart’s main “Given” is there must be magic, or magic-adjacent lore, like tech so advanced it works like magic. For world-building we used A Spark In Fate Core, as per Tristan’s recommendation a while back, so it’s pretty similar. Posting my in-person Daggerheart games in three different threads here… Please post accordingly so I know which game you’re commenting on. 🙏 One thing I’ve noticed is that emergent/proactive play is pretty streamlined in the Daggerheart system during world-building and character creation. I’m also taking some of my lessons learned from previous campaigns since reading the PARP guide and gauging ahead of time how proactive and goal-oriented the players want the campaign to be. That means these three different campaigns may have varying levels of proactive versus reactive play. Stay tuned!