u/Right_Hand_of_Light

Hi everyone, I hope you're all doing well! This show has been sustaining me since I was introduced to it a year and a half ago. I love it so much. I was wondering if any of you have found other stories that feel similar, preferably books but I'm open to all sorts of things if they're good. My experience is that when I find something that really resonates me, no matter how much I want to, I never find something that's exactly like it and just as good, and I have no illusions that I'll do that with She Ra, either. But maybe I can find other stories that do some of the same things right?

We'd be here far too long if I got into everything I love about the show, but some top level highlights are the excellent sapphic protagonists, the complex emotional stakes and characters, and the themes of kindness, love, and friendship. Some other things I enjoyed were the cool ladies with swords, the unique science fantasy setting, and the happy ending.

Some stuff that does feel similarly for me:
This is How You Lose the Time War, A Memory Called Empire (And its sequel), Spear, by Nicola Griffith, On a Sunbeam, by Tillie Walden

Some stuff I've been recommended that doesn't seem like what I'm looking for:

Gideon the Ninth, Isle in the Silver Sea

I'd be really honored if you could please recommend me some other things to check out. She Ra means the world to me and I would be honored if you could recommend some other stories I can hold near my heart. Thank you very much :)

Hey everyone, I hope you're well. Right now I'm very much in need of a particularly good book. I feel myself teetering on the edge of a slump and I'm looking for something specific. I absolutely love the She Ra remake. I first discovered the show a year and a half ago and I've been rewatching it since. It's been doing a lot to sustain me through some really difficult times.

I've learned from experience that when you find a story you love you can never find something just like it, but I'm hoping that might be a good jumping off point for finding the book I need right now. So I would really appreciate it if any of you could please recommend me some books that might feel similarly.

If you haven't seen the show or even if you have, the most important stuff I'm looking for is:

• Fantasy/sci fi/science fantasy
• A female main character
• Sapphic romance (I'm not looking for romantasy but it's nice to have some characters I can relate to. A complete absence of romance also works in a pinch)
• Complex emotional stakes and characters

Other things that would be nice to have include:

• Themes of kindness, friendship, and the power of love
• Cool ladies with swords and emotions (Adora is wonderful)
• Unique setting (the show has a really unique fusion of high tech and magic that I love)

For reference, some books I've read and liked that would fit my desires are This is How You Lose the Time War and the Texicalan books. I really loved both of those, and I reread Time War a lot. I've also enjoyed stuff by Becky Chambers and Ann Leckie. Priory of the Orange Tree was fun.

I've been recommended Gideon the Ninth a lot but the vibes don't seem quite right there. I'm sure it's a good book but unless the blurb and reviews are a strong misrepresentation it doesn't seem like what I'm looking for, here. I recently tried Isle in the Silver Sea and that also didn't work for me. It felt like it was trying to be a lot more meta than I wanted.

I hope all of that info helps you understand what I'm looking for here, and I hope that such a book exists. Feel free to ask any follow up questions that might help. When I find stories that are meaningful to me I tend to revisit them a lot, so I will really treasure any good ones you can point me to along these lines. Thank you in advance for your thoughtful responses. :)

If you were telling someone what you're doing today and one of those plans is getting together with friends to play Traveller or Shadowdark or a similar game, what do you tell them?

Regardless of the system I'm playing, I always tell people I'm playing D&D. It's a good shorthand because just about everyone knows what it means, whereas a phrase like "tabletop RPGs" or the name of the specific game are only likely to mean something to someone who's also involved in the hobby, and even then they might not know the game I'm talking about. Possibly it's my mostly offline experience but when it turns into a longer conversation I've never once had someone get confused or upset when I clarify that the particular type of D&D I'm playing today is actually a space game rather than the trademarked game of that name.

I'm really curious what other people say in the same position, so thank you for sharing : )

Hey everyone, I hope you're doing well. I have a question for all of you. I've been doing a few more casual games before I run a big campaign, and I've noticed what might be a bit of a complication: my players mostly don't like playing priests. It's not that they never do, some of them occasionally will. But for a mix of reasons including aesthetic preferences and some complicated IRL histories with religion, I'd say they're one of the least played classes in my group. My group is also just not that into party composition. I get that maybe OSR games tend to put more of an emphasis on that than other games, but we're getting together to have fun and I'm not going to tell my players that one of them has to play a class that doesn't sound fun to them just because it makes the numbers right.

In a lot of the games we've played together, this isn't a very big issue. In 5e there are short rests and several classes that can heal enough to get by without a full time healer. I myself loved being a paladin with lay on hands. Blades on the Dark treats health and damage pretty differently so there wasn't an expectation of a dedicated healer. Traveller has its own stuff going on.

But from my experience of Shadowdark, it seems like there's an expectation that the party will have a priest, at least if they wanna have any healing. From what I've seen in Kelsey's design streams it seems like not stepping on the toes of the core classes is a priority, and I respect that. I've played more than one game with the core options are outclassed by everything that comes later, and that's not fun. But I'm a little concerned about how that's going to play out with my party and the priest specifically. As far as I can tell the ranger has access to a bit of healing (off topic but I love this version of the ranger), but that's pretty much it.

In the games I've played so far we've had one where there was a priest, and taking damage was pretty survivable, and several where there was no priest, and if an enemy got a single attack in, the character in question was on death's door, if not dying. I'm sure this will be mitigated a bit by gaining levels, but only so much, as the monsters get tougher too. I also know that running in an fighting everything isn't supposed to be viable, and credit to them, so do my players. They've repeatedly found ways to avoid a fight, or else to avoid a fight with even odds. But let's be honest, fights still happen, and traps and hazards also deal damage. And if characters are down to 1hp, playing smart probably means that they don't keep going if they don't have a means by which to heal. The thing is, I don't think a stop and start, rest and keep going rhythm is very fun for anyone. It has a way of killing momentum.

I've considered a few houserules to help mitigate this, like introducing a toned down version of 5e's short rest mechanic to let them get a few hitpoints back a couple times a day if they take a breather and/or giving cure wounds to a few other classes like paladins and neutral wizards. I don't wanna step on the priest's deal but I figure priests have so much going for them that a few other people being able to heal a bit would fall far short of rendering them obsolete if a player actually does want to play them.

What do you all think? My players are all excited for this new campaign and I am too. I probably won't start off by implementing any of these rules, just in case things work out on their own. But I'd appreciate your thoughts, especially since I've been turning this over a lot lately. Thank you : )

PS: As a bonus question, if you know, where does the D&D priest/cleric come from? I can think of plenty of characters from fantasy and myth who fit the other archetypes, but not this one. There might be people of the cloth, but I don't remember any of them as wielding magical power. (I know some people will argue for Gandalf but I don't think most people who read The Hobbit or LOTR walk away thinking of him as anything other than a wizard.)

Hi everyone, I hope you're all well. I'm the same lady who was on here a few weeks ago asking about prewritten hexcrawls. After talking to people and thinking about them I decided I wanna make my own. I knew it wasn't going to be easy but it sounded like fun. So I sat down with some dice and the rules from the book and got to work. But I've started to run up against a wall and thought I might ask some of the kind folks on here for some advice.

I needed a starting point so I decided to plop down a little village to be the hometown the players were starting out from and figured I'd start that on grasslands. From there I started rolling a new hex out in each direction, checking for points of interest. The map started to look a little stringy, with some terrain types stretching out for miles. It seemed a bit odd but I figured fantasy worlds are supposed to be strange, and I could always go back and tidy up.

I started accumulating points of interest and coming up with plausible interpretations. That fortress in the mountains is a dwarf fortress. All these cult settlements were in the far north cause they were banished from more densely settled regions. They I discovered something great. I was getting a lot of places where a secret circle of wizards met. Cool, I thought. One of the underlying truths of this would was that there's a wizard Illuminati. Maybe my players will figure it out, maybe they won't. Maybe, if one of them plays a wizard who gets notable enough, they'll even be invited to join. This seemed like a really cool example of random generation giving me an idea I probably wouldn't have come up with on my own. I felt great.

But then I just kept rolling secret wizard sites. I know a secret society is supposed to have people everywhere but this was starting to feel entirely out of hand. In general I started to notice that points of interest began to feel a bit repetitive. And the terrain was going from unusual to incoherent. All of this is stuff that I can edit, but that's beginning to feel like a daunting task. At least DC 18.

So I wanted to ask for help. I have a feeling I'm doing something wrong, or at least that I have a lot to learn. If anyone here feels confident designing hexcrawls I'd love to hear your thoughts. My goal is to create a mostly coherent world for my players to explore and adventure in with some cool secrets to be discovered and unique locations to venture to. I know I probably won't do it perfectly the first time around and I'm OK with that, but I wanna make something I can be proud of. Thank you very much for your help :)