#RPGaDay2024, The other topics… Days 13 to 18

Third time’s the charm. Once again, I’m doing the speed round, catching up on days 13 to 18. My regular daily posts have all been on the topics of Skala Wyzwania’s alternative prompt challenge list. These are my somewhat shorter answers to the regular prompts. I hope you find them entertaining.

Day 13: Evocative environments – When I think of games with evocative environments, my mind immediately goes to games by Free League Publishing. Thanks to my good friend and current regular player in our weekly campaign, José García, I’ve played Symbaroum, Coriolis, and Alien. I also own Dragonbane, Forbidden Lands, Twilight 2000, Vaesen, and The Walking Dead. I love their games, from the ideas, setting, and art to the mechanics. Their games generally present very evocative environments, even when adapting an existing game, such as Twilight 200, to their adaptations of TV and movie franchises.

Day 14: Compelling characters – In my appreciation, the main characters in any game should be the player characters. Interesting NPCs are great, but the moment those NPCs are more important than the players, that’s a problem. I feel that Forgotten Realms, and to a degree Dragonlance, suffer from that because of their close ties to the novels that made these characters so famous. As a longtime fan of Mystara, I have always enjoyed its excellent NPCs, but they never seem to overshadow the PCs. They did not have plot armor because a novel would be coming up on the publishing schedule.

Day 15: Great character gear – As a younger gamer, I used to love long gear lists and many weapon tables like the endless guns and weapon listings in Rifts. As I’ve matured, gear bloat has lost its appeal to me. I love the simplicity of the Usage Die mechanic, which I first encountered in The Black Hack (you can read about it here on the SRD). Having said that, there is a great free book of gear, the Basic Fantasy Equipment Emporium, which you can get for free in PDF format and PoD at cost. I was also recently informed of a great 3^rd edition equipment book, Kenzer and Company’s Goods and Gear: The Ultimate Adventurer’s Guide. That’s a good old-fashioned big book of equipment with many illustrations and endless descriptions of every conceivable item.

Day 16: Quick to learn – You can’t go wrong with the original Minimalist game TEWRPS, the World’s Easiest Roleplaying System. One stat, Strength, one die, a d10. Not much simpler than that. It was the first minimalist game I ever purchased and the precursor of many that followed. For a more modern game, I’d go with TinyD6 from Gallant Knight Games.

Day 17: An engaging RPG community – Allow me to toot my horn. Puerto Rico Role Players on Facebook is a great RPG community. A respectful, inclusive environment where we share information and ideas and tabletop role-playing games. We do in-person activities. Which were curtailed by COVID-19, but we are doing it once again. Out of Puerto Rico Role Players grew a sister community, Dungeons & Dragons Puerto Rico (use the link provided; don’t search for it as there are other similarly named groups and pages). Members of the former started the latter, and it also strives to be an inclusive, respectful community for those who enjoy D&D.

Day 18: Memorable moment of play – I’ve written about a few in the blog. The fried chicken event. The portable hole in the bag of holding incident. There are many more. Last year, I asked my players about this, and they came up with many more. I am lucky to have played for so long, since 1986, and the current weekly game has been running since 1993. A recent memorable moment of play was getting to play Ten Candles last year, run by the very same José García I mentioned above on Day 13. It is an engaging game played by candlelight, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

There you go! See you on the next speed round.

Want to know more about  #RPGaDay? Check out David Chapman’s Autocratik blog post for RPG a Day 2024.