r/TTRPG

Hi everyone!

I'm new to this subreddit and wanted to introduce a Virtual Tabletop I've built for Shadowdark. We've used it for our own table, and now I'm opening it up for everyone else.

Our approach is system-specific Virtual Tabletops instead of the "one size fits all" model. The tool already knows what Shadowdark is: Torches, mishap tables, the dungeon turn, the spell-tier DC, and the d12 hazards. You don't need to spend time finding all the mods/addons to get started; it's just Shadowdark out of the box.

Here are just a few of the things this VTT has:

• Character creation wizard: Ancestry, class, alignment, background, deity, languages, talents, starting spells, all in one short flow. HP, AC, attack bonus, and gear slots are all derived for you.
• Level-up flow. XP-gated button on the roster, talent/spell/HP rolls walked through and locked once accepted.
• Torch & Lantern Timer that burns even when every tab is closed; refresh, and it picks up exactly where it should be. It also has an animation and a flame audio loop.
• Wizard mishap tables: natural 1 on a cast auto-opens the correct tier's d12 mishap modal for everyone at the table; caster or GM rolls it.
• Priest penance: Failed casting? Pick from holy quest, ritualistic atonement, or material sacrifice, with GP tiers wired up.
• Battle map with fog of war. Rooms, doors, edges, terrain stamps, drawings, text labels, pings. Each character's torch illuminates its own line-of-sight cone; party lights layer on top of it.
• Procedural dungeon generator. Tiny / Small / Medium room layouts with doors and corridors, ready to drop tokens onto.
• Dungeon-turn tracker. Crawling rounds alongside combat rounds, plus one-tap rolls for encounter check (1d6), starting distance, monster activity (2d6), trap table (d12), and the hazard catalog.
• Initiative strip! (honestly, this is amazing) d20+DEX for players, auto-rolled for enemies, active actor highlighted across every screen.
• Campaign Tools: NPCs, Quests, Locations, Journal entries, Lore wiki, and Enemies catalog. Every entity has a "Show to players" toggle so the GM curates visibility; everything syncs in real time.
• GM prep: NPC generator (8 tables), name pools (people / shops / taverns / towns / cities / dungeons), GM oracles (Adventure / Rumor / Something Happens / Traps / Hazards), and a searchable Quick Reference compendium.
• The GM Library is a browsable, searchable rulebook view of Classes, Ancestries, Backgrounds, Spells, Equipment, Deities, Titles, and Skill Tags.
• In character party chat that shows thought bubbles and emotes above portraits' heads and tokens.

And much more.

I'd appreciate your feedback on what works, what doesn't, and what's missing. To get in, visit https://members.shawnsvtts.com, create a free account, and you'll have access to the Shadowdark VTT free forever.

Happy to answer anything here, and feedback is the whole point.

Ok looking to build a homebrew setting. Pretty “after the end” type place. One difference is that instead of swords and magic, a lot of combat is based on high-tech guns and combat blades, but the big one is anime style giant Mecha. I want to draw a lot from old school Mecha, like Getter Robo, L-gaim, Five Star Stories, and a bit of Gundam. There’s also some Dune inspiration, but enough of that.

I’m looking for some possible ideas for stats, mechanics, or other things like that. Also I just want to hear some feedback on the idea. If possible.

Let me take you on a journey...

The day is May 17, 2026. I'm in St. Louis for the annual Geekway to the West convention with several of my gaming buddies. We're in the lobby just before 11 am local time. GenCon wishlist submission is mere minutes away, and we are frantically organizing our wishlists.

11:00: I mash my "submit" button... and I am 601 in line. Holy rusted metal, Batman! That's an amazing slot.

11:03(ish): I receive (majority) rejections, but also a few acceptances. I feel loved, at least a little.

11:15: I've spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how any of this garbage was possible! The numbers just don't add up. How did he get me a ticket for that event, but I also got a ticket for it? Why would it let me get two of the same ticket? I give up and pile into the van to drive back home with my friends. I'll deal with this crap later...

We spend a portion of the next four hours of our drive back to Indy saying, yet again, for the umpteenth year in a row, that GenCon couldn't have designed worse software if their goal was to design the worst software ever. (Almost all of us work in software to some extent)

Some background...

GenCon is a small company, and they haven't always been the most viable. They seem to be thriving now, and that is a good thing! All that said, their event system has never been their crown jewel. Yes, they have software people on staff, but they aren't a software company. I try to keep that in mind when I feel as defeated by their software as I do today.

For those who don't know, GenCon's event system works roughly like this:

• GMs submit events for consideration (the GMs are the angels in this story... it's hard work)
• GenCon reviews and eventually approves those events
• The events are populated into a catalog for attendees to peruse
• Attendees then add events to a wishlist, which they can organize and modify
• On a Sunday in May, at noon EST, the whole world scrambles to hit the "submit" button so they can get queued into a line to have their events assigned
• (This is the really messed-up part) GenCon's system seems to process the event requests in the least equitable way possible...
  • By assigning #1 in line EVERYTHING they asked for, then doing the same for #2, #3, etc...
  • By the time it gets to #1200, almost no events are left because the folks at the front of the line took everything.
  • So, essentially, there are a handful of BIG WINNERS, and everyone else is a loser.
    • It's basically everything we hate about corrupt capitalism distilled into software that should instead be helping everyone have fun.
• (The nearly infinite ways it could be improved will be saved for another post.)

So that's how it "works." A few people are very happy, and everyone else is confused, disappointed, defeated, and despondent. But we're used to it. It's been this way for at least a decade. Likely far longer.

Some new garbage this year!

So, back to my friends and me trying to figure out our GenCon schedules. We've been sifting through the results on and off for a few days, and we've noticed a pattern... we have WAY TOO MANY TICKETS! The system has given me a ticket for an event and charged me for it, but it has also given my friend a ticket for me and charged him for it. So the system has "decided" that I need two tickets for the same event? And this happened several times in just my 5-person friend group...

It is a mess. Somehow, GenCon's software got worse this year. It did a bad thing it has never done before. It assigned all of us multiple of the same tickets. If I requested an event with a ticket for me and one for my buddy, and my buddy did the same thing, it processed both requests and gave us each 2 tickets. That then removes those duplicate tickets from the pool, so attendees later in the processing queue couldn't get them.

Are you friggin' serious!? Your system already makes life hard for people further down the queue, but now you add this new wrinkle so that they have even fewer options?

Is it a scam?

Here's what we believe happened. Just spitballing here...

GenCon has figured out that they can print money if they sell a bunch of extra tickets to things, knowing we have to return those extra tickets, and only being willing to give "system credit" for the returns. Essentially, the buyers rack up a bunch of costs they shouldn't have been able to get, then GenCon refuses to reimburse people.

When we return our extra tickets, they get put back into the system for someone else to buy. If those people don't also have credit, GenCon gets the revenue from the second purchase as well. Meanwhile, the people who returned the tickets and have credit will have limited options for how to spend it in the system, because all of the games sell out.

So GenCon is left with a bunch of "credit" in the system that no one can use.

That's just a guess... but all of the new ways in which the software "works" add up to this as a logical conclusion.

I mean, every other piece of software we use has been inshittified, why not this one too?

We have spent no less than 10 collective hours trying to make sense of the situation and rearrange our tickets and schedules. It has resulted in nearly $250 dollars of system credit (between just 5 of us). It has taken my hobby and turned it into work.

GenCon, if you are listening...

I would help you redesign your software at no hard cost (free VIP badge for life?). It would work better for event registration, guaranteed, because there is almost no way to make it work worse.

Hi! I'm developing Deadbeat, a TTRPG where you play as a musicaly powered undead soldier that uses their superhuman abilities to destroy enemies and look cool doing it. I am recording devlogs to mainly document my progress as I develop the game and hopefully other people find interesting.

That's it, I just want to make something cool and neat that I enjoy and maybe other people might enjoy it as well.

I am looking for adventure modules for any fantasy RPG with the following characteristics:

1. Setting: A monastery, fortress, villa, or library.
2. Genre: Investigative / Mystery.
3. Gameplay: Focused on puzzles, riddles, and uncovering secrets.

I am looking for something that uses Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" as a blueprint or model for the adventure. Any fantasy ruleset or system is fine.

I’ve been working on a ttrpg system for the past half a year or so, one based mostly on draw steel and lotm, but it’s basically a combination of a lot of my interests combined, if I chose to ever “release it into the wild” should I be worried of lawsuits or whatnot?

Also if anyone has any tips on world/ character building advice would be most appreciated, this is unrelated to the previous question.

for clarification, I’m not planning on making any money out of this, I just want to give the community more tools that I have worked on for a long while

(...The prophecy is being fulfilled. Visions seen through the smoke and revelations were granted unto the highest of high weed-priests...)

Doomsmoker is MÖRK BORG adventure of the sacred smoke covenant delivering sacred herb bales to the Dying Lands from Nazareth to Jerusalem during an impending apocalypse.

For centuries, WEEDIAN priests have cultivated sacred plants and delivered herb bales across the Dying Lands. From the days of THE FIRST CULTIVATOR until now, they have travelled in caravans sharing both their botanical product and music as a part of their SMOKE COVENANT.

The Dying Lands are soon to be snuffed out, according to some scripture. Only a few more Psalms will be read until all is gone.

Crossing the Sand Sea has always been dangerous.  The pilgrimage is more deadly now as Scythians, heretic insects, and demons roam the desert.  

The weed-priests have enlisted the help of believers and mercenaries to help them cross the desert for what will be the last caravan of the SMOKE COVENANT to bring SMOKE and RIFFS to the land.

This adventure is written for MÖRK BORG .  It is written to be simple to play and enjoy, hopefully for seasoned RPG players and stoners alike. 

This adventure features:

• 60+ full color pages, many original illustrations
• Point-crawl through 7+ Locations across a dangerous SandSea
• 1 new Item type
• 10 new Scrolls (new scroll type: Smoke Scrolls)
• 3 new Classes
• 1 Dungeon
• 6 new Enemies
• 2 new Bosses
• Random tables for musical practice, meditations (visions), and atmosphere/weather
• Lore at the intersection of MÖRK BORG, SLEEP's album Dopesmoker and the culture of doom metal
• Tangible sense of DOOM and DREAD  as the world is ending

Original soundtrack coming soon from burgersmoke records.  Follow here or on various streaming platforms for updates: 
https://burgersmoke.bandcamp.com/.

A while ago I wrote an article talking about how the Sabbat can be viewed as a sort of representation of counter-culture. And by that I mean the sort of caricature your average suburban mom would think about the counter culture during the heights of the Satanic Panic.

With that said however, where does that leave the Camarilla? For it is the opposite and equal force, the alpha to the omega. Given that the two are in total antithesis with each other, the Camarilla could thus be defined as a caricature of conservatism. Or at least what would've been seen as a caricature in back in the 90's. Let's not open the discussion of what's the current state of things.

So I think that would be the sort of thesis for this piece. We're looking at how does the Camarilla mash with conservatism, if they actually even do, what does that entail about the themes of the game and what does that mean for your table.

If that sounds like something you would be interested in, by all means, please do give it a read and voice your thoughts on the matter! I hope you will enjoy it!

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’m curious how other people see it.

I enjoy a wide variety of TTRPG systems. These days I probably lean more toward narrative-focused games, but that actually isn’t the point of this post. These are questions related to this post. I also sincerely hope that someone can share their own opinions.

First, some people asked me what the difference is between GM-less games and more traditional GM-player structures. Mechanically the differences are obvious, but I’m not always sure how to explain it clearly. I’d genuinely like to hear how other people frame that distinction.

Second, if we accept that a GM is not strictly necessary in GM-less games, I often run into another problem: participant initiative becomes strangely low. Players hesitate because they keep wondering, “Am I allowed to do this?” Ironically, I’ve also experienced the exact opposite problem in traditional games, where some players become too proactive — especially the classic “I already know this monster’s stat” kind of behavior.

So I’m curious how people deal with both extremes:

excessive hesitation in collaborative play

excessive assertiveness or metagaming in traditional play

Finally, how do you personally view the relationship between GM and players? Do GM-less and traditional systems fundamentally create different relationships at the table, or do you think the difference is overstated?