Tell us what you have been getting to the table, or what you are preparing to play!
I’m lucky to be in multiple games at the moment.
- I’m running a BX-like sci-fi game set on an alien world inhabited by humans from every time and place. The players are enjoying the flexibility to make their characters anything from cowboys to ancient weavers to Bohemian peasants, as well as trying to grift their way through the complex and disordered societies they find themselves in.
- I’m running a duet game with my husband that’s a real butcher’s delight— a version of Justin Alexande’s Waterdeep Dragon Heist redux, but in the Dragon Age setting using a custom GLOGhack.
- I’m finishing up a playtest of an upcoming Necrotic Gnome adventure, Dungeon of the Undermoon.
- I’m a player in Locheil’s long-running apocalyptic Meopotamian heroic domain pbp game, Ashes to Ashes.
- I’m a player in my brother’s Renaissance-inspired family-based domain pbp game, where my player-family the Glamides have fallen far from grace and fight many of the other great houses to retain their status.
- I’m a player in an Arden Vul campaign that is currently on hiatus.
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Both of the games I currently play at happen in the OSR Discord server:
- Sunrise Quest started as my interpretation of Pendragon, but it’s since heavily departed from it. We’ve started using B/X and running modules in it as I grew less interested in the long term premise of Pendragon. We’re currently exploring the Sun King’s Palace. Every Saturday on the purplosr server.
- N. Bateman’s Wolves Upon the Coast game, in which I play in every Sunday on the purplosr server.
I can’t play or run more games, my brain does not allow for it 
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currently I’m in the following games:
GM
- running online open table Arden Vul w/Old School Essentials. Currently back on the OSR Pickup Games Server after a hiatus
Player
- AD&D in-person (but mostly played like b/x), a homebrew world that’s a big sandbox with some lovecraftian stuff
- AD&D in-person, heavily modified combat system to be something similar to hackmaster
- The Great Pendragon Campaign run by @jamiltron
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Sunrise Quest sounds like its had an interesting journey so far. Are there any vestiges of its Pendragon origins at this point?
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I have a mix of “when we meet” sort of games, and a few more regularly scheduled games.
Enemy Within
I've been running the updated Enemy Within using Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4e for maybe like a year now, in person, roughly once or twice a month. We're kind of through Death on the Reik, but its been so heavily modified who knows where the PCs are going.
I pretty much regret using WFRP 4e - I have all of the books and have had fun with it when playing here and there with some friends at cons, but the system is pretty chunky with lots of keywords that get referenced all over, and enough state that you have to track all the time that it is VERY easy to mess up and forget. I kinda with I had just gone with any random version of BRP.
Chronicle of the Cosmic Wound
This is a dark fantasy game set in one of my long-running settings. We're using a heavily home-brewed version of OpenQuest 3 with some stuff thrown in from Dragonbane, BGB BRP, and my own stuff. This is a twice-a-month open table game, although most of the players have been consistent from day one.
The players just crashed a ship onto a mysterious island that came out of nowhere and "shouldn't be there," so this session we'll see what they do to get off the island. It's got a folk horror vibe, and you can kind of think of the setting as Berserk-ish or probably more appropriately Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne but ripping off more 12th century Europe than later.
Gradient Descent
I am also running an open table of Mothership in the Gradient Descent dungeon. We have a bunch of regulars but also new people jump in here and there. This is technically the "off" week from Cosmic Wound. The players thus far have started experiencing some of the weirdness related to the "bends" mechanic and impersonator droids, but I won't spoil stuff for people who haven't played this.
Great Pendragon Campaign
I've been running the GPC using Pendragon 5.2 with @EvilTables and some other folks for a few years now, and we're still solidly within the anarchy. Unfortunately my schedule doesn't line up too well with the days we can play, and a bunch of us are often busy with other things, so we don't play as much as I would like, but its fun whenever we do.
One Shots
I am trying to get my monthly one shots back on schedule, we'll be playtesting an adventure I am also going to be running at GaryCon this spring.
Other stuff
Otherwise I'm signed up for Amagadeth which is a playtest science fantasy campaign ran by @Spinachcat that I am looking forward to, and I often drop into friends' games here and there when I have the chance.
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Yeah so you can read the play reports in my blog to get a sense of what happened, though I kinda stopped doing it a few sessions ago.
Basically, I never really cared that much for the way Pendragon is “meant to be played”, nor the adventures. I always found them too railroady and too focused on going somewhere and beating up a monster with your sword, or fighting in a war.
Last time, I ran a 2 year Pendragon duet (with other duets in the sidelines) and it was amazing, but thematically it was super distant from Pendragon. This time I decided I wanted to run the GPC straight, I wanted to give it a fair shot as it is on the book.
So I ran the Pendragon 6 starter adventure, I didn’t like it very much because it kept pushing the players along a very narrow path that basically had no choices and just had them witnessing big events, like Arthur getting the sword and stuff. I tried to patch that up with narrative, but it started feeling like it wasn’t enough. Still, I pressed on, mixed some of my own plotting here and there, and tried to make it so that the players had a bit of a bigger role.
That was also to middling success, because that was basically setting a bunch of seeds for future events that weren’t that interesting. I tried getting some hooks on my players via their family but it wasn’t good enough, and I was chafing under the lack of travel procedures (I would eventually realize I was tilting at windmills with this, I’ll explain later).
With the standard GPC boring me and the battles being very very uninteresting both for me and my players, I moved on to prewritten modules, and admittedly had some limited success with them. Unfortunately they were also too restrictive and I found the possible answers the players could give a bit too stifling. I decided to contract a few years of the GPC and just deal with them entirely on one go, but use that opportunity to test out other systems, because Pendragon was growing a bit too clunky - my players were ostensibly fine with it, but I figured what the hell.
We tested out different battle procedures and tried out HârnMaster (which I loved, but my players didn’t), SimpleQuest (which none of us were crazy about), and finally Moldvay B/X, which we settled upon. This group had already come from a previous game of mine, Sunrise Generation, which had used Mythras, so basically it boiled down to my players really preferring very very light systems.
Already frustrated with the adventures, the GPC, and the combat system, I elected to just finish the leap: go all-in on B/X and run OSR adventures on that same campaign pitch. It turned into an all-fighters game! lol
I turned the game into a hexcrawl, mapped out like half of Britain (a lengthy and boring process which involved me staring at 3 different maps and the sourcebooks for each region of Britain), figured out travel procedures, and ran an OSR adventure, Where the Wheat Grows Tall.
Basically, what I found is that to me, Pendragon is the emotions. I ported over the Personality Traits and Passions, the chivalric ideals, swapped XP for Glory, the whole deal; you can check my rules doc here.
This was also to moderate success. I had my problems with Where the Wheat Grows Tall, and I eventually found out that Pendragon is just not a very interesting setting to hexcrawl on, so me and my players have mostly defaulted to just me calculating the journey and focusing on random events and interesting locations that might occur on their path. But at least my prep got much smoother as I have a wealth of adventures to call upon, and I feel less of the siren song to roll every NPC’s stats as everyone is just “As Level X Fighter”.
I feel like most of the Pendragonness remaining in the game comes from my player. They’ve REALLY taken to rolling personality traits whenever they’re not sure what they should do, or when they feel like their character should have been tempted; last session one of them straight up used Honor to egg the others on, because this player understood that whenever your Honor is in check in Pendragon, you must act upon it.
And now I’ve thrown them into the Sun King’s Palace, and it’s been going really well honestly. Unfortunately one of the PCs died last session, but aside from that it’s provided an interesting bridging of the Pendragon reality to the “dungeons” reality, as it’s not really much of a “adventurers with a bunch of equipment will be rewarded” sort of dungeon.
I could go on and on about this but honestly I’ve strayed way too far off-topic for this thread =P bottom line being: I kinda don’t like a lot of Pendragon, I just found out I like the personality system and campaigns with a strong pitch and an interesting timeline. The game I’m currently planning, about Victorian theoretical wizards on the Grand Tour, should be the ultimate synthesis of everything I’ve learned thus far in these games.
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That’s an amazing writeup. Do you use the same personality traits exactly from Pendragon, or have you modified them at all?
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I use the same, but some of them very distinctly come up more often than others. My players use them basically as oracles haha
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2024 was kind of rough for gaming for me, especially as far as running stuff (I ran some odd one-offs here and there, but I basically don’t count those these days), however at the tail end of the year things settled down and I got to actually play some stuff for a change.
Specifically, I was in an Anomalous Subsurface Environment pickup game on the purple OSR server, which was a ton of fun, and due to importing a character with a weird class and the rules being just kind of hand-waved my character ended up an absolute monster in combat, which still doesn’t matter as much when the enemies bring a goddamn cannon. This game is unfortunately on hold as the referee is busy with other things.
The other game I am playing in (with Havoc in fact) is Wolves Upon the Coast, also on the purple OSR server. That one has been interesting - Wolves is a very dense hexcrawl in the sense that there’s always something around to do, and our first 5 sessions felt like they had 8-10 sessions worth of events happen, if not more. We’ve been playing using the sort of OD&D hack that Wolves comes with, and it’s been fine but there have been increasing rumblings about various rules, notably boasting.
A small, but still notable game, is a house game with my partners and their kid, using Echoes of the Labyrinth (a somehow even more stripped-down Tunnels & Trolls) which has been very interesting too.
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I run a game for friends about once a month, but it isn’t quite what I had hoped, so I am preparing an OSRstyle sandbox and hope to find folks who are interested in playing that near where I live.
The current game is a fun excuse to hang out with friends, but it sadly doesn’t scratch my adventure game itch (despite my efforts). A classic case of differing expectations and cultures of play.
For the sandbox I am considering using the work I did during the d23 mega dungeon challenge (which is about three levels). I still really like the premise (ancient prison rumoured to have a fallen star locked away who will grant a wish to anyone who will free them) and it doesn’t require that much work to get it to a level where I can bring it to the table.
In an ideal world I’d also start running games at the school I teach at again, but I don’t think my current situation allows for it. At least not regularly scheduled like I used to.
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I’m running Slugblaster after seeing the review on Quinns Quest.
It’s a lot easier for me to flow with than PBTA games. I love the storytelling that comes out of it and I like not having to prep anything. Never played blades in the dark before which it takes some rules from I hear. The book is an amazing resource for the campaign. All the story seeds are there.
Last session, the crew escaped a flooding section of the DARA research facility on Desnine through a portal to Quahalia.
They arrived in the realm of memories. The grit is seriously injured and needs medical attention.
They conjure up the memory of their previous run where they portaled through the quantum centipede (the nexus and bridge between all dimensions). Wind up time traveling and escaping safely into the dimension they landed in the session prior, only with their past selves also there. Decided to let the past selves live out their experiences and the present crew pick up right where they left off.
Session ended with a bill and Ted-esc warning from a future future crew member.
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So I’m just kicking off an Arden Vul campaign using Swords & Wizardry. We had a few sessions running through an unrelated module just to kick the tires on the system and a new (to us) VTT. First real session is Thursday.
Our group rotates GMs, so I’m also playing in a Traveller campaign (going on 3 years now) and a Tales of Argosa campaign set in a kind of 15th century Italian kind of world. One of our players is going to take his first foray into GMing with some kind of superhero system - as yet undetermined.
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I’ve been running a Dolmenwood campaign in OSE for about two years now on a semi-weekly basis. It’s been an amazing experience and the longest campaign I’ve ever run. I still enjoy every session. Even though I fell out of love with OSE as a system and have been looking to switch to Cairn eventually.
I also run the occasional one-shot to explore different games I’m curious about. Some of my favorites so far have been Mausritter, Mothership and Liminal Horror. Each one offering a unique and exciting experience in its own way.
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Mostly been running a Monday Night Dracula Dossier game. That has been 28 sessions running for a bit more than a year. They got a bunch of info from van Helsing’s old study in Amsterdam in the last session while waiting for an audit into some shipping companies that they instigated at the Port of Rotterdam, so we are building towards a climax, but it still has some legs to go.
Otherwise, not been playing too much recently. Hoping to get in on Havoc’s Gentleman Wizards, and will be joining the Wolves game on the Purple OSR server.
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After a ~5-month break, I’m back playing with my regular Sunday group. We are going through freakin Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, it’s great to experience this classic 
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