u/alexserban02

I do enjoy D&D. I enjoy long campaigns and epic storylines. I have been fortunate enough to have multiple groups throughout the year that have suffered me through multi year campaigns. Unfortunately, at one point I have to admit that regardless of the group and the story, these campaigns became harder and harder to run and well... to enjoy.

I don't think it is a particular hot take to say that high level play is problematic and hard. I always found it to be lacking.

For a long time I tried to find solutions and I looked at 3rd parties, I developed my own homebrews and Iooked at how things were handled in the past. That's how I learned of BECMI. And something clicked. I became enamored with the ideas presented there, it was mostly what I have been looking for. But even BECMI, with all its ambitions had problems and things were wobbly starting from the Master set and became even more so with the Immortal set.

Even with this, I think it is the best approach D&D had to high level so this article will look in depth at why that is and perhaps more importantly, why it failed. We will also try to provide some alternatives for those of you who, like me, will find that conceptually BECMI hits the right cord.

I hope you enjoy the article and I am very much looking forward to see what your experience with it and with high level play is!

I think I drank some water after Horia with this article...

FKR is his schtick, but I guess it can't hurt if I also take a crack at it. I was discussing Cairn a couple of days ago and thinking about a future campaign I wanna run a campaign with it. I was also thinking how as of late I have been liking minimalist systems more and more. I am running a Realms of Peril campaign and I had a streak of some really good sessions, with some really interesting and outside the box designed encounters. And I really was curious why I can't manage to enter that sort of mental space and design similar things for D&D or other more traditional and crunchy TTRPGs.

And so I started to read a bit more into FKR, cause that is the proverbial freedom holy grail in TTRPG design space, so if I were to find an answer it would probably be there. I was also interested to see where these minimalist systems fall into the whole D&D - FKR scale. And while I was at it, I thought that all of this is quite interesting and with a bit of polish it might be worth sharing with you all. Cause I do think that part of why minimalist systems such as RoP or the examples I stuck by for this article, Knave and Cairn work as well as they do, is due to their FKR-esque tendencies. So yeah, I do hope you will enjoy this piece. And as I said in the article, please do share your experiences with minimalist systems, with FKR and anything in between!

So, I don't know how things are outside Romania in terms of the D&D and TTRPG community, where the hobby already has implemented itself into broader pop culture, where there are huge yearly events such as Gen Con. Back when I started, in 2016, the local community was quite small and there weren't any events till 2018 amd 2019, both of which garnered maybe around 100 people, or slightly above.

Things changed however in these last 10 years. The community grew, there were more and more spaces dedicated for the community and more and more events.

Among them, starting from last year thanks from efforts from Bucharest Geek Hub, Taverna Aventurilor, Hobby Planet and Nerd Castle there is now also a D&D/TTRPG corner at East European Comic Con, here in Bucharest. Like with all Comic Cons, this is the biggest geek sphere event in the country and even if it was present in Romania since 2013, it was just recently where a place was found for the TTRPG community. I can't think I am able to properly describe how happy this thing makes me be. And I do want to thank those responsible and the EECC organizers for giving this community this chance to get on a bigger stage and really test the waters in regards to how interested people truly are.

Circling back. I got to see this community grow into what it is now and I hope I will see it continue to grow more and more. And I leave you a question, that being, what is your experience and feel of your local communities, of your local cons? I am honestly dying to learn more.

I wasn't there for the vampiric edition wars, back when Requiem was announced as a replacement of Vampire the Masquerade. I have read about them, I have been told about them and sometimes I saw sparks of them on various groups and subreddits. All of this to say that I am an outsider. I started with Masquerade, but I also dabbled into Requiem and I enjoyed both of them quite a lot, but for somewhat different reasons.

This article would've probably been more suitable back when that particular conversation was slightly more relevant, when the spirits were hot, but I still wanted to offer the perspective of a latecomer who has love for both. Cause I do think both are really good games and where people draw issue is with the different flavors of horror they promote. Macro-horror vs micro-horror, world spanning vs personal. That sort of thing.

So yeah, I do hope you will enjoy this sort of deep-ish dive into the whole thing, it's mostly an opinion piece with some light elements of analysis. More so, I hope you will find it useful, I hope it will make you curious about the two games and their contrast! Have a good one and savor the night, everyone!

Ah, I don't know about you, but I missed Horia and his articles. We were talking a couple of days ago about how we will most likely welcome in the near future another writer to the team to help us with some reviews so that we may provide them a bit more consistently, especially as we dive into heavier systems.

Horia said that he wished he could help a bit more, but reviews aren't really his area and he only wrote one quite a number of years ago for an old blog in Romanian. Blog that no longer exists.

Still, the bells started ringing in my head, the lightbulbs lit up and I took my explorer's hat, worked on my best Harrison Ford impersonation and jumped into a digital archeological adventure!

As you are now reading this post, you are safe to asume that The Wayback Machine came in clutch and I managed to find Horia's old article! Hooray!

We translated it, revamped it slightly to fit our review structure and huzah! A wonderful review of Mythras!

Honestly I did get the game a couple of months ago and I have been meaning to give it a try for a while, but I got slightly intimidated by the combat and put it off. After going over Horia's thoughts on the game and seeing how much he glazed it, I am thinking about jumping in and starting to read it with the first chance I get. And in my books, that's the mark of a good review, so for those of you on the fance about it or simply curious, do give it a read, for it might be just what you need to muster the will to try it out!