I'd probably join, but also I feel like I'm in 5 different rpg communities that don't get a lot of posts.
Just throwing this out there, but what if we had like weekly themed threads for different types of games or something?
I really like this. I come at this from a more NSR than OSR perspective, but I feel like I wouldn't go so far as to say that the difficulties of parleying and fighting should be matched - the situation is what it is. And even if not fighting is always the better choice, the players won't know that and won't always make the best choices.
I generally play these types of games with combat being what happens when things go wrong. Unless one side has a very clear advantage, combat is high risk for everyone involved and usually it's better for everyone to avoid it. Combat happens, not because either the player characters or the NPCs would choose it as their first choice, but because you play games about situations in which everything is likely to go wrong.
I haven't looked at that one yet, but I'm waiting on the kickstarter for issue 2!
Cairn (https://cairnrpg.com/) is free and fairly simple. I play it solo sometimes, though the rules don't give any particular guidance for that, though someone has made a third party set of solo rules: https://manadawnttg.itch.io/barrow-delver
I've had some luck finding people online to play with, usually over discord, which is also an option.
I don't have a space for a garden so I spent a lot of time this spring going out and looking at the wildflowers
This was from about a month and a half ago. I never get tired of California Poppies
Itch is great, I'll second that recommendation. It also has some really indie stuff you can't find anywhere else. I think it's DRM free in the way GOG is, in that the platform doesn't support DRM. A good number of games are free, and some are open source as well.
Also it has tabletop RPGs!
Yeah, I think one thing I like about it is that the distance between people making things and people playing the game is not that far. Lots of hacks and creativity, lots of sharing ideas, a good amount of creative commons stuff too.
I'm working on something for the A Town, A Forest, A Dungeon game jam and it's been cool to see a lot of other people making something for the first time for the jam
Oh yeah, Vaults of Vaarn looks really cool, there have been a number of great science fantasy settings recently (ultra Violet grasslands is the other one that comes to mind). I haven't gotten to play either though.
Well, I made this a while ago - I've been neglecting this particular worldbuilding project - but I thought I'd post it anyway.
I started out drawing the tops of mountains and then the rest ended up being a lot more detailed, eventually maybe I'll go back and make the style match better there.
The conlang is not particularly sophisticated, I've basically developed it enough to come up with proper names for places and people.
A lot of the worldbuilding I'm interested in is less building an entire world, and more like building a central location. This is a sort of fantasy post apocalyptic location (created first for a D&D adventure) inspired some of the dry inland regions of California near where I live.
Do snakes like knitwear? Is it still cozy if you're cold-blooded?
It is a monastery! Just maybe less historical
I've been teaching myself how to do art, mostly for TTRPG reasons, this is one of the things I've made lately I'm most proud of
I've seen temporary ones in libraries. Like they're only on certain days but are somewhat regular
This is all going to be more NSR
Cairn seems like an obvious one. It's classic fantasy that will be pretty familiar to people, it has a good number of adventures as well as adventures for other systems that have been converted, and also all the rules are totally free.
Mausritter (modern, but nice) and liminal horror (modern, but horror) are also good. These are all Into the Odd games, there are a lot of hacks of this system for different settings and I feel like you can't really go wrong there.
I'll also recommend Fallen, especially for solo games. It's more like gothic fantasy. It has some really good random tables. I use the oracle deck for other games all the time.