Speedrunning RPGaDAY 2024 in one day to get my blog-writing off the ground & introduce myself

I thought I might get this done in an hour. Counting editing, it's probably taken four. Good omen! 

If you don't know RPGaDAY, it's this:

What better way to give you a sense of who I am and how I write when under time pressure (which a lot of these posts probably will be), and me a sense of what kinds of things I might like to write about? 

1. I'm 99% sure the first TTRPG/s I bought this year were all of the ones in the Palestinian Relief Bundle at once, back in April. I tried to work out which of those I read first but I didn't keep notes and I've read a lot of them in previous aid bundles so it all gets a bit jumbled. I otherwise tend to get mostly free games (or in the case of large/defunct companies, 'free games'), and ask for paid ones as gifts rather than buying them myself, because I don't have much in the way of money at the moment.
2. Most recently, I played (ran - I'm assuming this counts) a game of my own design called The Face of the World. It's not in a shareable state, alas, but think FKR with a very basic dice mechanic based on Call of Cthulhu's Push system.
3. Most often played, assuming we're talking about only this year, has been another game of my own design and not in a shareable state - though a lot closer to one - Tales of Theon. It's a fantasy heartbreaker of sorts, a loving hack starting from Pathfinder and 5e core mechanics but blending in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Exalted, and a healthy dose of the GLOG (Many Rats on Sticks hack) on its way to becoming its own 'unique' thing tailored to my homebrew setting and a playstyle focused around social intrigue, faction-building, and occasional displays of catastrophic power. More generally, it's 5e, because I ran that as my main for 8ish years on a modestly consistent basis and have played in a few games run by other folks since.
4. An RPG I think has great art is Mongoose Traveller First Edition. All of the pieces have this monochromatic simplicity, somewhere between comic-book style and an echo of the sleek futuristic design of the texts themselves. Whoever decided to scrap that for the late-first/second edition art's 'generic early-2000s-computer-game-character look'... why? (Sorry, not very positive for a second there.)

   

   Citizens, I *think* by Rich Longmore?? These guys are just what Science Fiction Adventure in the Far Future looks like to me, now and always.

   
   
5. An RPG I think has great writing is Mage: the Ascension, 20th anniversary edition. Yes, there's a lot of purple prose, but as somebody who's read a couple of modern occultists' grimoires, that's pretty par for the course, and I think that's the context the book should properly be read within. 'Satyros' Phil Brucato is a master of using language to make the reader feel like magic is possible.
6. An RPG that I know is easy to use is Vincent Baker's Poison'd. There are a lot of rules-lite games out there, and it isn't on the easiest tier of those, but it gets a huge boost from the fact that it provides built-in, structured guidance on plot through the system of plot cards which it's assumed you'll be using and which interact with the mechanics, and built-in character motivations which are integral to their creation. I turned up to a session I wasn't especially excited for with nothing but a map of the Caribbean and a ship plan and it went so well that the players bribed me (with alcohol) to run another.
7. What exactly is an "RPG with 'good form'?" Does that mean consistent quality? I don't think that there are many with that... honest to god, 5e from after Tyranny of Dragons up to Tasha's is almost a contender for me just because each book was at minimum properly edited and had a theoretically interesting plot with no glaring holes, but the spotty balance  and ehness of some of the implementation (looking at you, Storm King's Thunder...) disqualifies it. Likewise, Traveller is really, really solid throughout editions, but its adventures are much more mixed than all the other material. So I think I have to give this to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Fourth Edition! I've yet to read even a tiny, thrown-together PDF from the Cubicle 7 team that doesn't make me want to use it. Of course, they may be cheating given that the game is both quite happy to kill PCs and gives them a lot of plot-manipulation points with which to avoid that fate, so 'balance' isn't as much of a concern as for a lot of games broadly in the Classic/Trad/OSR play cultures (which I'd argue WFRP straddles in interesting ways - maybe this could be a post?)
8. An accessory I appreciate (assuming that means a play accessory, a lot of these prompts could be taken several ways) is this unfoldable dice bag made for me by my much-beloved sister. I tend to find most table kit beyond a screen and books just clutters up play, but this does the opposite. I love it so much.
   
   
   

   

   No need to dig for d4s ever again!

   
   
   
9. An accessory I'd like to see  is much harder, for the reasons above. I guess I'd love to see a good solution to creating multi-layered physical map environments. Like some kind of series of glass shelves that could separate layers of a dungeon with which it came, and which maybe rolled on castors with a hinge so you could split it open down the middle to access stuff in the centre? I don't actually use battlemaps or terrain much, but god, if I had that I would.
   

   

   Crappy low-effort visualization by me

   
   
   
10. RPG I'd like to see on TV is pretty easy; the difficult part is picking just the one, to be honest. If it comes to it, though, Exalted is a game with superpowered characters who might appeal to people tired of Marvel's content-mill, a setting full of intrigue to bring in those still looking for the next Game of Thrones, and a lot of the soundtrack already written. It's got the anti-hegemonic edge that seems to be increasingly popular, but it often takes it a lot more seriously than anything I've seen out of big-budget shows with 'deep political messaging' so far. So I think it'd do excellently, and also bring something really unique! 
    
11. Honestly struggling to think of too many RPGs with well-supported (game-specific) one-shots, so I don't feel there's much competition when I say Eclipse Phase. The EP one-shots tend to be just a couple of pages long, which is honestly pretty impressive given how much they all cram in. There's one for virtually every taste; I personally love the body horror of Meatgrinder.
12. I haven't run many full campaigns since my attempt to hack Masks of Nyarlathotep into (funnily enough) Eclipse Phase fell through, so I'm not sure about my RPG with well-supported campaigns either... 'campaigns' plural is the hard bit, things like the Great Pendragon Campaign (Pendragon) and The Enemy Within (WFRP) are wonderful but they do sort of stand alone as the big well-supported campaign of their respective games. I might say Traveller (any edition) here, because whilst the quality of their campaign material themselves doesn't always match up to these greats, the structure of the core game makes it really easy to pad content and add side-plots, and the depth of the Third Imperium setting means that clipping off the edge of the map into uncharted territory is rarely going to be a risk unless the players are trying to derail things.
13. Evocative environments? What does that mean? [Editing: It was at this point I was beginning to realize this was going to take longer than expected] Uhh I'm going to court controversy and say that the weird coastline described in Ghosts of Saltmarsh for 5e, with its low-fantasy, crumbling, often-near-Lovecraftian surface world, sea covered in weird little undiscovered islands straight out of the Odyssey, and deep ocean full of soul-sucking sand and massive seaweed forests is really cool and woefully underrated. If it's just "tell us about an evocative environment," I don't know, I'm currently running a campaign set entirely on a city built around a 1000-ft.-high, 600-ft.-radius hollow adamantine pillar rising out of thousands of miles of trackless sea? Is that evocative? [Editing: memo to self, post on weird maritime aesthetics!]
14. Compelling characters. This year, the most compelling characters I've run for so far, as in the ones who most made me want to hear more of their story, are the ones in the aforementioned campaign. To pull out one example, one is a merchant-prince's dilettantish scion with strange magical (?) powers he can't fully control. His powers can be triggered against his will by shame, and given his entire family thinks he's useless but he also desperately wants their love and recognition that's rather a difficult line to toe.
15. A piece of great character gear in any game that includes it is any kind of climbing equipment. Yes! Give the characters a novel means of environmental interaction! Let them use spaces in ways that they weren't intended to be used, explore strange corners, at the cost of placing themselves at additional risk! Give me a reason to hide things only accessible/visible if somebody decides to scale the ruined tower from the outside! I love you! Eclipse Phase does this in notable detail, with such pieces as the Electronic Rope and Ascender. 
16. [A game that is?] quick to learn is uhh 24xx? Pretty much any 24xx. I particularly like 24blue by Deep Light Games in terms of value for speed, but YMMV of course.
17. An engaging RPG community has got to be the World of Darkness in general. I know of very few games or communities that consistently generate so much investment and have so much to discuss that aren't based primarily on another franchise (Star Wars/Trek or LotR). Now that the worst of the Chronicles/Old World of Darkness/x5 edition warring has worn off, what's left is a load of people who love and connect with a set of interconnected settings, and enough lore that you could write a PhD on it. And, always lovely to see, a lot of the original/early creators are still heavily engaged!
18. One memorable moment of play I've had this year (I'm going to go with this year) is when a Mi-Go collective in a game of Yuggothi Confidential I was running, trying to flee a human lab before a piece of Space Elf tech stored there melted a hole into Dimensions Unfathomable and allowed Something through, accelerated their ship-body at full speed out of where it was hiding at the fringe of said lab without first lifting off, melting a crater like a horizontal meteor straight through metropolitan Manchester and into the side of a hill somewhere in the Peak District, which then collapsed on them.
19. My sensational session for the year involved running for 22-ish hours. Started with a 4-hour session of Poison'd, then ran a '5thcrawl' - basically a hexcrawl run in a generic world created by very literal interpretation of only the setting-neutral rules of pre-Tasha's 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, without any creative license or external inspiration (apart from this very cool hexmap of pre-Adventus Saxonum Britain which I used for the setting, because 5e doesn't give much guidance on how to generate a generic map and this one has a good spread of terrain). That lasted 15 hours, 8 of them spent on one combat in one dungeon in which around 16 Lv 2-11 players fought a Warlord with a few potions and 5 xorns (eventually, a fair few died and most fled defeated). Finally, I took a break for an hour and a half - no sleeping though! - before plunging into a game of Dungeon at the End of the Multiverse for 30+ people from my gaming club, all playing characters from a collection of different systems (which is what DatEotM is designed to enable, in its own madcap way) as they fought against my favourite 4th ed D&D boss, Allabar the Opener of the Way. That lasted an hour and a half or so before they defeated it through the power of A) therapy (thank you, Get In the Fucking Robot) and B) swords. It was a bit of a fever dream. Then I went home and slept a lot. If you'd like to do this, I strongly recommend drinking a glass of coffee and a glass of alcohol every four hours, staggered so that the alcohol hits just before coffee jitters set in, with plenty of water in-between. (IamnotamedicalprofessionalandnothingthatIsayshouldbeconstruedasadvice.)
20. An amazing adventure that I've played this year is... gaaah I can't find it, OK so it's a one-pager about an island under a dome made by the gods that's pressurized to keep an alien mutation contagion from leaking out. It's pretty horrifying, was run very capably in 5e but honestly felt more fitted to a dark OSR type thing. Comment if you know it I guess?
21. A classic campaign I've become aware of this year - I'm not actually sure there is one, see my comments on campaigns above. I think this year I've become aware that one of my favourite 5e campaigns, Princes of the Apocalypse, is really crying out to exist in another setting (well, actually, I first talked about that last year - I think it'd work really well in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay with elemental cults corrupted by Chaos and a bit more focus on the intrigue side of things - but I guess I've confirmed myself further in that view.) I think the 5thcrawl could definitely be a great campaign, but it isn't yet. I'm quite surprised by how much I'm coming back to 5e with these answers - I don't generally especially love it, but I guess given how much support it gets it's more likely to have something that really does it for you even if the overall quality isn't high, and in this particular case it's popular enough that a lot of it will have the feel of being a 'classic' even compared to some things for other systems which are older but less well-known.
22. [The time pressure was getting really quite intense at this point; I very much had Other Things To Do...] A notable non-player character?  Going to assume this is 'in published material' and say... I don't think there are many? Very very very rarely do I read a character in a TTRPG book and go 'wow I want to run them' without first making up essentially fanfic about them. Will have to go outside this year for this one. There's a character from Preston, Lancashire, UK in a Mage: the Ascension book which as a Lancashireperson I think is quite cool! We don't get a lot of mentions. I love the blossoming internecine relationships between the framing characters a group of adventuring scholars hired to compile a bestiary, in WFRP 4e's The Imperial Zoo. I won't spoil the latter too much because honestly you should read that book even if you don't play WFRP.
23. Almost none of my players are remotely active in the online ttrpg space, so it feels a bit weird to big one up as being a peerless player, awesome as many of them are. I'd need to get their permission and stuff, and I don't have time so instead I'll say that I of the TTRPG live plays I've watched or listened to this year, Odoroshi, who plays Sybil Inswood on the Norfolk Wizard Game, has easily the best and most engaging portrayal of a character (the character is also very cool in herself).
24. I read Coins & Scrolls' piece on OSR: Joint-Stock Companies, Investments, and Schemes this year, it's been very helpful in multiple games, so if it doesn't already count as acclaimed advice I'm acclaiming it.
25. Desirable dice are all the dice, but I saw a great set on Tumblr recently that looked like handwritten notes spattered with blood, and I'm considering selling an organ. [Or I would be if I could find them for the image! Gah!]
26. I don't tend to go for shop-bought screens so my nomination for superb screen is just the one I'm making right now for Mage: the Ascension. I had a huge folding wooden screen sitting around uselessly and it's been very satisfying to saw it into three parts each ideally shaped for a GM screen and start working out which reference tables I'm going to PVA-glue to one side and how I'm going to decorate the other (I think it may involve glitter).
27. It's currently hiding at the back of one of my display cases until I'm skilled enough to paint it (at which point I'll probably have to hide it again,) but the Suzerain of Desire from Creature Caster is undoubtedly a marvellous miniature. I looked at this thing and went 'a lot of people will judge me if they see this, and I will never be able to transport it anywhere without it shattering into a billion pieces. I must have it.' It's everything creepily-sexual-kinky-body-horror that Games Workshop never gets right about Slaanesh, and if I generally have some issues with quite how unnecessarily horny Creature Caster models get, it works perfectly here.

    

    'Two hearts that beat as one' indeed. Image from the Creature Caster website; I assume it's digitally coloured?

    
    
28. I don't even know what a great gamer gadget would look like. Substitution! An amazing anecdote I have to tell at current is from my Poison'd game in the aforementioned 24 hour game. The pirates were caught up in a terrible, terrible storm, and one of them - a rather straightforward type - declared that he wanted to fight it. Obviously, I told him, that was impossible. The storm (though brought into play by a clergyman's curse) was not a creature. However, I said on the spur of the moment, if he was willing to have the Madness event card brought into play (the crew goes mad, and mad PCs treat figments of their imagination as materially real) then maybe it could be. He said yes, and fought a titanic storm-god on the prow, and by the time the crew had recovered only one of them (the cabin-boy) had been killed as a suspected assassin...
29. RPG simple dice is an awesome app. Simple but good. Lets you roll all the dice, any quantity or modifier, see your roll history, and create custom-size dice. 
30. The person I'd like to game with most is probably Professor Ronald Hutton, historian of folklore, witchcraft, and paganism. I want to get him in a Mage: the Ascension game. I just feel like he'd have fun! And from watching him speak and reading a few of his books, he'd definitely be fun.
31. A game that I miss is the Traveller game set up several years ago by a good friend. I played a smuggler recovering from a near-terminal illness, kicked in the teeth by life so many times that he mistrusted anyone, who with his amusingly Cyberpunk-y friends (a computer scientist and transhumanist with a suite of extra arms who served as our muscle, and a pilot with a rogue AI in his data storage chips) did smuggling and petty crime in a little ship's boat that travelled by clamping itself, remora-like, to the underside of jump-capable ships. I'm still in touch with all the people, and game with most of them, the GM just decided he didn't want to run it anymore and fair enough; secretly, though, I still yearn to know whether my guy's cunning plan to get himself shot in the knee in order to rescue a young business heiress (who was possibly the key to awakening an ancient alien intelligence) from a bizarre revolutionary cult one of whose priests he was slowly falling in love with, even if I don't quite remember what the middle stage of that plan looked like any more.

And done! Hopefully that gives you some picture of the kind of lightning you're playing with here...

Jago