I know people vary in their acceptance of AI, and I have my own concerns, but I've been using NotebookLM lately and really enjoying it. You include sources into a notebook and it adds the content into a model. I add episode recordings into a notebook and it provides stunningly good summaries, and also answers questions about the content very well. It isn't perfect, and occasionally you have to correct it (especially names), but it has proven to be very useful for helping me to remember things that happened 100+ episodes ago.

I run games at my local high school. So, so many of the players (students) just sit in front of me and stare at me with dead eyes. These kids are good kids, too! And I don't want to fall into the boomerism of "kids these days are addicted to their phones", but it's like none of them even want to do anything, they just wait for me to say something, try and make a Marvel-esque "zinger", and turn the game into a shitty comedy routine. I gave them a goal, I gave them like 10 different places to go or people to talk to, just as a beginning, and they didn't do anything. The campaign is ending tomorrow, but does anyone have advice for next year's game?

Hey, y’all! I wanted a repository of anecdotes and character concepts from everyone. Drop your concepts when you’ve been a PC and invoked the PARP principles with other GMs.

Feel free to read the background below, you'll see I took many of your suggestions (had to simplify some for my beginner level GM thought processes) but this is the current status: The adventuring group has gone ahead through a time portal about 100 years with the help of the time staff. The time period they are in is a grim setting, Moander has huge influence and power there although details are light on that right now. Once there they learned that the Paladin's grandfather has likely been kidnapped by the Revenant Occupation from the custody of the Temporal Authority (time cops). The Revenant Occupation (RO) is a group of dwarves & elves who want to purify their race, part of it is they put forth they want to eliminate time travel. The players don't know though that they actually just want time travel for themselves and that is why they kidnapped the grandfather, the idea being to sacrifice him to try to access this magic in a ritual. They believe they know where the grandfather is but have heard that he is safe temporarily. The group became extremely suspicious of the time cops (I wasn't expecting that), so they are working on infiltrating them by becoming recruits and getting more information. They've also realized they don't have much money so they took up an offer to battle in an arena against psychic, mutant, dinos. I'm planning to have them hopefully win some gold and a dino egg as a prize and see where they go with that. (I unconsciously realized I got this idea from dungeon crawler carl) My thought is that as they infiltrate the time cops they will find spies there from the RO and could get more info on the grandfather and time travel in general. They will also learn about how I'm framing time travel in this campaign, I might have gotten this idea here, more that time travel creates different universes so you can't go back in time and change things. I'm afraid of keeping track of things if stuff gets too bonkers with that. They'll learn this in the training process as recruits.

Dnd 5.5e. To try to make a long story short, we are about 2 sessions into a collaborative campaign that was an offshoot of a prewritten mod. 5 player characters who were enticed into going a hundred years into the future. Got most of my ideas about how to run this from you all here, thank you ! If you’d like a lot of detail you can probably read my past posts. The Paladin is motivated to find his missing grandfather who had been assumed dead but got clues he might be in this time period, was further found to have a natural time traveling ability. I have two relevant factions to this scenario–the Revenant Occupation who are eco fascists/racists who want to eliminate dwarves and elves and purify the area of time travel and the Temporal Authority who regulates time travel. I set up the clues so the grandfather had previously been arrested by the Temporal Authority in their massive compound but then the Revenant Occupation kidnapped him and took him to their subterranean dungeon and that they want to sacrifice him at a big gathering they’re having. They are set on wanting to talk to someone at the Temporal Authority to get more info about this, the organization itself, the kidnapping, and the revenant occupation. Naturally I had thought the Temporal Authority would just be an afterthought of a faction for now, the players have been told they’re a bureaucracy, not evil but there’s lots of agents, a big fortified compound with lots of weapons & monsters, but of course this is what they’re focused on ha ha. People avoid the Temporal Authority because if you draw attention to yourself or ask too many questions they start following you and harassing your friends and family. The players are aware the Temporal Authority recruits a lot so they’re focused on attending a recruitment event and talking to people on the inside. They feel something isn’t adding up with the grandfather being kidnapped from there. Any suggestions about potential routes to take with that? I didn’t give that much thought, I don’t have a secret reason this doesn’t make sense to them. Any suggestions about what attending a recruitment event might be like or possible options for paths they could take that would tie this together? I do have a local tavern owner who is going to meet up with them in a few days to connect them with someone who deals in magical goods and to connect them with a disgruntled Temporal Authority employee if that helps with any suggestions. Thanks if you've read this far!