Put Pathfinder on pause. Looking into The Strange, Numenera, CoC 7th edition, and..... Call of Catthulhu.
I love D&D/PF like a cherished family member I've known for years, but these systems with fewer mechanics are increasingly appealing as my available freetime due to career dwindles.
(Okay, CoC doesn't fall into that bucket, just reading how they've overhauled it since 6th)
Mankind discovers there's an unfinished, alien set of portals/gateways. They lead to unusual places, recursions. Alternate realities and existences... Which can include things you may have on Earth as fiction. In otherwords, you can have a sesion of your game where you have to jaunt into [Your favorite novel/comic] to resolve an issue.
Entities called planetovores are trying to devour all these little realities they can reach and the overall goal is to not let them get a path to earth.
When players go to a recursion, your characters are changed. there's a folded piece of paper you slip over your character sheet which has the stats for yourself in the reality you just ended up in.
If Numenera allows you to make up anything and have it make sense in the 9th world, The Strange is an excuse to use dang near anything you're a fan of and have characters crossover/quest there.
@DForck42 I don't remember the specifics, except that one of the characters was a pacifist (it was a bad idea, but we hadn't figured that out yet) and wanted to bypass every encounter by talking. And occasionally, when he rolled well, the GM (who was just as confused as the rest of us) let him.
The kobold's old leader was super vain, and kept a wyrmling dragon as a pet to prove how strong she was. The dragon eventually escaped, and the players plotted to return her to the warren, where she could kill the old queen and take over. They feigned returning the dragon, and the dragon killed the old leader. After the dust settled, the dragon had taken a hit and used its breath weapon, so the players turned on it, killed the dragon, and demanded respect from the remaining kobolds.
There was a LOT of diplomacy to get the dragon to go along with that plan in the first place, and they did just about every correct step that they needed to for it to actually work.
@DForck42 I often am making moves offscreen (DW-style) when the timer "clicks." My group's gotten pretty used to the notion that whether the timer clicked or not can be the difference between them getting to the warcamp at a quiet time or when everyone's on alert, whether they beat their rival to a contact or find the contact soured/dead, &c.
Tyler’s Kickstarter funded in one day. Let’s reach for those stretch goals, folks: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tylerwalpole/blood-of-dragons-prelude
Time for another round of “why is international shipping so expensive?” This time it’s @GTGPaul with the info-bomb: https://greaterthangames.com/content/why-is-international-shipping-so-expensive-0
Taking out main NPCs without exhausting all their stress and consequences: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/108465/taking-out-main-npcs-without-exhausting-all-their-stress-and-consequences #Fate
A few days ago there was a Twitter conversation about the science of werewolves, and Ursula Vernon weighed in on behavioral inconsistencies:
@AlongsideWild @NeolithicSheep @reina_sabah @bones_canada @am_anatiala @MondayStory I think they act like what the human brain thinks a wolf is supposed to act like. It's just poor education.
