I say! This sort of thing seems to be working a treat in the board-games section.
What RPG campaigns are you GMing or DMing at the time being? What ones are you playing a character in?
I have been running a one-on-one game by way of FaceTime. It is set in my veteran SFRPG setting Flat Black, the PC is a clandestine operator for a very secret organisation, and we are using a modified version of the old SFRPG ForeSight that I rabbit on about from time to time. But unfortunately I am not especially well at the moment, and have had to suspend the campaign until my mind resumes working properly.
I’m three sessions into my very first foray into GM-ing, all via Skype with my siblings and their spouses. I thought I’d make the most of the captive audience and try out the D&D starter set I got last Christmas.
It’s been a lot of fun, but also quite challenging. The adventure is perfect because it splits nicely into distinct chunks that tend to make up one evening, but I’m spending a lot of effort trying to make sure evryone gets a chance to shine. It’s all about practice, though right?
Irresponsible and Right, an alt-WWII game with magic that’s been running since 2007 with roughly monthly sessions. It’s February 1945; Stalin is dead and there’s something very odd about his successor; Chicago isn’t there any more, and as a result there’s no Manhattan Project; and there seem to be a lot of dragons about. (The system is GURPS.) The game writeup is over 200K words at this point. Probably the best campaign I will ever run, but unpublishable because so much of it happened as a reaction to what interested the players.
Hurricane Season, GURPS Monster Hunters played in a Hiaasen/Dorsey sort of Florida. (Also heavily influenced by “Florida Man” stories, and the things said about Jacksonville in The Good Place.) So far they’ve dealt with white supremacists backed by a vampire, and a Filipino nurse who seems to have been both a necromancer and a really helpful person. As an experiment, I’m loosely following a TV-series structure with explicit episode breaks and a season villain. (The vampire. Who could have been killed in the pilot, in which case I had a backup season villain ready to go.)
Planning:
GURPS TimeWatch. Because I’m a glutton for punishment, but also because I’m not really a fan of the Gumshoe system; it’s very blunt, and recovery intervals are hard to fine tune.
Playing:
Vampire 5th run by @DrBob - set in Oldcastle, the grim Scottish town featured in several of Stuart MacBride’s books. I’m not really interested in the angsty woe-is-me vampire, but neither are the other players or the GM so that works out quite well.
Tunnels and Trolls run by @BigJackBrass: with Whartson Hall. I don’t know whether it’s the game, the GM, or the combination, but the fantasy is pleasantly surreal. (I’m not going to list all the other Whartson Hall games - we tend to play a single adventure then switch to something else, and every once in a while go back to an earlier campaign.)
Gates of the City: a very custom multiple-worlds setting run by an old friend. I feel we’re struggling a bit against the Savage Worlds system but the game’s much more about talking and investigation than it is about game-mechanics.
About to start: QRA, a Transhuman Space campaign featuring the Royal Navy.
Some game systems try to make this happen through mechanics, and to some extent this can work, but I suspect that a lot of being a good GM is keeping an eye on the room and tweaking everything for the maximum enjoyment by these players at this table right now.
Playing in: Road to R’lyeh, a Call of Cthulhu campaign set in Seattle in the late 1940s. An important theme is political and social corruption; at least one set of adversaries seems to be a group of cultists led by a wealthy family that literally gets away with murder.
Running: Tapestry, a GURPS campaign set in a Bronze Age world with multiple hominid races and spirit-based magic. The focus is on trade between different races and cultures.
The Lost Mines of Phandelver is a good adventure I think, with plenty of opportunities for your own improvisation and offshoot adventures. I’m currently looking to expand the role of a relatively minor NPC into its own adventure/campaign
Playing: a weekly 2nd-to-3rd ed Vampire the Masquerade game. Set in the exotic location of Slough! We’re nearing the end of the campaign, so probably only 1 or 2 sessions to go of this one.
Running: as mentioned by Roger, a monthly Vampire the Masquerade 5th ed game, set in the fictitious Scottish city of Oldcastle. The way 5e handles Disciplines and combat is starting to annoy me, so I may start to experiment with some house rules if the players don’t mind being guinea pigs.
It’s not technically “current” because I’m not actually playing it, but I’m finally reading through my Spire book.
Unsure yet if I’ll give running it a go, though, because GMing (or, really, creative efforts in general) are draining and stressful for me. But it’s such a cool world and concept, I might have to run it because I don’t know anyone else who can/will.
Running: Verdenspire - A campaign that started out as an idea for running the Dragon Age RPG, which is why it’s all (mostly) set in one city (a la Dragon Age 2). But switched over to D&D when a friend expressed a desire to play some D&D and offered a venue to play (plus I knew the rules better). Had a quick stop off along the way to steal some setting ideas from The Spire (the RPG and the totally unrelated comic of the same name).
It’s my own world, but only really in the sense that I didn’t want the weight of already established lore to deal with. I’ve got the main concepts sketched out and I fill in stuff when the adventure needs. It takes a lot of inspiration from late-era Discworld and Eberron for what kind of fantasy world it is. More technologically advanced than standard D&D, but more magic-based.
Other elements have ended up being introduced just because I like them or I’ve had a silly idea. Like I’ve chucked in a major connection to the feywild as an excuse to use lots of fey creatures and eladrin.
Or the wizard who was building a zoo full of magical creatures.
Playing: I’m in two campaigns that consist of mostly the same people, just with different DMs (who are playing in each other’s campaigns).
One is set in a small city during a mayoral election. I’m playing an aasimar hexblade warlock who’s obsessed with the Raven Queen. Basically the D&D version of a woman who was a goth as a teen and then kept with it into her 30s and became a Wiccan. Except instead of opening a shop selling crystals, she found a magic weapon and made a pact with its creator.
She’s just found out her girlfriend isn’t just an innkeeper and actually isn’t human at all. (OOC I’ve worked out she’s a dragon, but Kari doesn’t quite know that yet). So I’m interested to see where that goes.
The other has just started (we’re about 3 sessions in), so we’ve mostly done odd jobs for the city watch. In that I’m playing a shifter swords bard (my avatar is a portrait of her that my friend Chrissie drew). Rather than go with something sensible, I made her a raccoon shifter
She was adopted by an old dwarf blacksmith, but sucked as an apprentice, so she’s gone off to find adventure.
That’s further back than I can go. I stopped running homebrews in 1992 and have a list since then:
RuneQuest, 2300 AD, Champions, GURPS, DC Heroes, Space 1889, Call of Cthulhu, Toon, Mage: The Ascension, Amber Diceless, Godlike, FUDGE, Big Eyes Small Mouth, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, In Nomine, Laundry Files, Marvel Heroic (I think that was its name). I’ve also run oneshots of original D&D, Superhero 2044, and Hellcats and Hockeysticks. That only comes to 20, partly because my gaming has been heavily dominated by GURPS (15 campaigns).
What I was doing with both D&D and S44, by the way, was testing out an attempt to define a logically coherent set of rules that “saved the appearances” of what was in the original rulebooks. Neither was entirely successful, but I was able to run sessions based on both.
The last one I played in was a 13th Age campaign, which is… certainly a system. Good for narrative, absolutely terrible for stats and combat.
I am wildly jealous of everyone getting to play D&D 5e and Vampire 5th ed, both of which I desperately want to try! (I’m an old Vampire 2nd ed fan myself).
Like @PangolinPaws, I’m DM-ing a D&D 5e campaign for the first time, with session three (not counting character creation) on Friday. It’s been at least 25 years since I’ve done any D&D or other RPGs, but I’d had it in the back of my mind for some time. Then everything shut down, and it was a handy way to toss a few bucks to my small-town game store, and…
…well, so far, so good. We’re starting off with a lightly modified adventure through the Sunless Citadel, hoping to tie some secrets gleaned there into some character backstories. It’s relatively easy to run it all through a Zoom meeting, chatting through my phone, sharing images and sketching maps via my desktop. Definitely makes it nice when I need to fudge a die roll to keep things exciting. When I promised I’d try to keep them all alive until level 5, then they’re on their own, the first response was, “But then I’ll be emotionally attached to him!” That’s the idea, right?
