Still playing WH40K Dark Heresy with the Tuesday group. Been going 15 months now. I think we are about halfway thru book 3 of a three book campaign.
Allegedly also playing a weekly Star Trek Adventures game, but we played one session in July and the next in October, so it is stretching the definition of ‘weekly’ quite a bit.
So, I finally managed to run some GURPS. Not the Travelleresque campaign that’s taking so long to prep I’ll leave it in my will, but the good old Flight 13 adventure!
Running this fortnightly, and have done 3 sessions so far. I got the players to make 100 point “everyman” characters suitable for a Dan Air flight from Newcastle to Amstedam Schiphol airport. Naturally the flight leaves on the evening of Friday May 13th 1988, and is called DA-13.
I started a FB chat group and fed lots of factoids about the time period to refresh everyone’s memories (we’re mostly in our 40’s and 50’s) before the session zero chargen.
After session zero I’ve managed to end up with some ‘interesting’ characters from my players, to whit 2 Doncaster miners on a stag do to Amsterdam (luggage was interesting), a female violinist who’s dad has a dodgy past travelling to New York for an audition, and a young woman who is going to Katmandu to climb Everest with one of the first commercial companies.
I’ve been dropping hints that this isn’t going to be a standard flight (where would be the fun in that?)
For session one, we’ve had the usual minor airport encounters (the nuns and lost child being memorable encounters) and some shenanigans in the flight (one of the miners is a smoker and couldn’t wait for the no smoking light to go out).
For session two things go wierd, with an unexpected storm, bright actinic type lights in the cabin, a pilot with a heart attack, and a delusional co-pilot. All standard parts of the adventure! After the players reluctantly stepped in and got control of the aircraft, they managed to get in contact with air traffic control, and landed it with the aid of an NPC (dual rolls for piloting, both had to fail for something serious to go wrong, but if one failed a minor incident happened). Problem is they’re in Austin, Texas and they already have the feeling all is not what it seems . . .
Even better, next session is on Monday 31st.
I’m still trying to find my feet with GMing, after a life of being a player. The best thing I’ve done - and best advice I can give so far - is be relaxed with pacing. Players can always move the action on, but starting at a slow, relaxed pace has been great for my anxieties, and its allowed the party to have a lot of interactions with NPCs. Having a published adventure also stopped my natural tendancy to massively over prepare (though I did go onto the weeds of British airlines in the '80s, created lists of news stories and chart hits, and did research on the aeroplane the PCs were in - a BAC 1-11 series 200 if anyone’s interested)
Speaking as someone who does exactly this – it can be great fun, but beware of yak-shaving. If the detail isn’t going to be useful to the game, finding it can be a displacement activity for actually preparing for the adventure.
I agree with you on the pace. Some advice to GMs says “keep things moving”, which is fine up to a point – but if the players are enjoying drawing out a scene, well, that’s what I’m there for.
I somehow ended up running 3 simultaneous games of 5e Witchlight (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday every other week). It’s a pretty fun setting that I’ve ended up running differently for each group. Lots of Faerie antics abound. This is the second module I’ve run in 5e and I think I’m finally getting the swing of things although the system is starting to get a bit stale in my opinion.
I’m also playing in Skulls & Shackles in Pathfinder, as well as just starting Curse of Strahd in 5e (each of these alternating with a Witchlight campaign).
I’m interested in branching out to new systems but don’t really know where to start so if anyone has any suggestions let me know!
Hmm. That’s potentially a very complicated answer.
Do you have specific genres in mind? Want to stick with fantasy, or try SF, or horror? If you’re playing 5e and Pathfinder you obviously don’t mind a bit of complexity, but you may not want the incompatible complexity of a completely different system.
Haha, I’m not sure I have a preference on genre but I think an entirely different system would be ideal. Playing the Great Pendragon Campaign was a blast but I haven’t touched it since the old forums and I’m not sure if any of my current players would be able to get into a system so drastically different (although I’ve been drifting ever closer to picking up physical copies of the books).
Some options:
What RPG system/game should I use for my one-shot? may also be of interest.
Thanks much! Call of Cthulhu is definitely on my list of systems to try and I’ll check out the rest you mentioned.
In my experience (although it was a while ago, on the turn of the century) you basically have weapons and martial abilities to gain time and leg it before: a) you are eaten alive or; b) you go mad
If there was anything I liked about it was how well the mental scars from previous encounters could be represented. Think of it like instead of gathering feats, you gain flaws. Which can add a lot of fun. My character after nearly 6 months of playing had bug phobia (entomophobia, perhaps? It’s been a while) and could not get close to the ocean.
It’s an anti-power-fantasy in many ways: you are going to give up your life/sanity, but to achieve something that matters.
I stumbled across this article, and actually, if you want to change to a more Horror - focused DND 5 ed campaign (and actually I think it can be transferred easily to other platforms), it has a lot of good tips.
Big showdown last night!!
(I think our DM was railroading the campaign to Thundertree just to show off his mini 
)
There are a lot of interesting shifts in D&D since I started playing 40 years ago… but one that I still struggle with is the idea that a group of low level (2-5th level) characters can tackle a dragon.
There is at least one dragon in each of the Starter and Essentials campaigns! I don’t get it! Dragons are like… 10th level heroes should struggle against them! Now, back in my day they didn’t have “young dragons,” they just had “Dragon.” But still. It’s wild to me that I can do that to my players now.
Coincidentally, my PCs are heading towards Thundertree in about… 3-ish sessions? We will see how they deal with the young green dragon themselves… 
I think it’s a deliberate thing - I mean, the name of the game involves dragons, there should be dragons in it. Reading through Pathfinder material I see a lot of dragon-adjacent monsters, so you can get some of that reptilicidal thrill without devaluing the idea of An Actual Dragon that you can fight at higher level.
If it helps my guys saw that dragon and ran. They did not get to fight it until well into the Hoard of Dragon Queen adventure which I segued into after Lost Mine.
Mind we are all the same vintage as you!
In all fairness…
we were negotiating for the first half of that encounter, and still we nearly had a TPK. We had killed a load of cultists the night before, and had stolen their attire, so we played the cultist card and we only got away because our mage was reading his thoughts before had changed his mind and decided to bathe us in poison; we had offered three diamonds, but when we showed that we had more treasure in reserve for him, he changed his mind as he thought we were playing tricks and wasting his time.
Our Dwarven Cleric had a spell of resistance to poison on him (the druid that sent us to deal with the dragon told us so), and stayed his ground with his high AC while the other three of us scattered around and hurt him from behind cover (specially with the halfling rogue hitting 3 sneak attacks in a row and the mage). I think our DM was benign and after we given it 90 or so HP of damage the dragon flied away (I think that was nearly 2/3 of its total or so)
We considered ourselves really lucky…
Our mage was down to 1HP, Our Cleric was at 5 or so at one point, and we used up all but one of our potions of healing… I think team work was key (and a benevolent DM whose dice are sooo rubbish, he struggles to get double figures 
)
Minor spoilers for players playing through Lost Mines and other adventures…
While there are dragons in many of the adventures that characters might have to face at lower levels, if I remember correctly, the aim is NOT to fight them but to talk them round, threaten etc. I think that is useful for players to learn - not everything needs to be fought. I played Dragon Heist with a bunch of new players and despite many hints, still decided to fight the dragon at the end, resulting in a swift TPK. After the session a couple told me that they were so used to ‘end of level baddies’ in computer games, they just assumed it HAD to be fought.
So there is nothing wrong with putting in creatures that could swat your characters in a single blow if reason for them being there is NOT necessarily a combat encounter.
Starting in 3rd edition, they spread dragons over a wider level range on purpose, letting even low level PCs fight littler dragons. Reserving half of the name of the game for rarer high level games was swapped for getting them in early and often. And if you want big mean ones, the top end dragons are tougher than ADnD ones.
Opions on how this works out are mixed, but I think it’s fine.
Another session on Monday, a horror game, on Halloween no less, so we laid on a buffet for everyone before settling down to play.
After successfully landing the plane (to rapturous cheers from the other passengers) they manage to hit the soft verge on the first taxi way. So after rescuing some circus dogs being transported in the hold, and one PC’s Shotgun from the secure locker, it was a 1 mile trudge to the terminal!
Exploring the darkened and mostly abandoned terminal reveals a traumatised passenger who is muttering about being attacked by children (and carrying an.44 Auto-Mag. Empty, good luck finding ammo!), an electrical engineer trying to contact outside authorities from the control tower (he suspects that the Soviets have invaded), and an airline employee who was attacked by a "murder/rape gang and just wants to get clean clothes and go home.
So far so spooky. Especially when one character notices that the storm clouds are “circling” the city! (Cue more fright checks, we’re all getting used to GURPS’ fright check mechanic!).
We left the party deciding to try and get one of the other planes started and “get the hell out of Dodge” (well, Austin), which is when I decided to employ standard tactic 5, and one of the nearby phones rings, with a message for one of the PCs with directions to “the resistance”!
I now have to decide how to creatively disable 5 parked airliners, making it look not-quite-deliberate!
Edit: found this session easier as last time one player had had a hard week at work so understandably wasn’t engaged. Everyone was in to it this time, and a pre game G and T helped me nicely!
Yes, luckily I started with needing the flight to leave on a Friday 13th. Then looked at various old airlines ( British Caledonian, and Pan Am were briefly considered), then where they flew from and to, and by that time Dan Air was calling to me. What plane would be used was the last part of the jigsaw!
Edit: spelling
