That's ST, not DM.
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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One of the best part of shadowrun was picking irl city and giving it a fantasy+cyberpunk makeover: placing districts of note, choosing what factions operate there, riffing on landmarks..
Venice is where church agents, mafia goons and old money are bidding for awakened relics while gig workers are trying not to drown in half sunken apartments.
Detroit is, of course, a jungle of mega factories and spacescrapers. Robo-cops? Naah, there was a trial run, but the tin men always go psycho from sensory depravation. We'll stomp our ~~citizens~~ scum the old fashion way, thank you very much.
Moscow metro runs through literal hell. Also grab a molotov, Lenin has risen and calling for a revolution against the corpos. Why are his eyes red? Uhh.. communism?
Session 0 was always a blast. (Minus explaining new players how to use chummer5)
Let's not forget the endless conversations about which park is Werewolf territory and which is Gangrel Vampire territory. Then the slow realization that you don't live in a place cool enough to attract any supernatural presence.
The struggle when you realize all of the cool ghouls are downtown, and the only immortal for 100 miles is the energy vampire who was turned when he was still a shitty teenager. He works at the gas station on the weekends. Don't ever take his change - if you get too close he'll drain away that meager high you get when you take your first sip of coffee in the morning.
They all live in a house in Staten Island, Toronto
I led a game with a car chase via Google Street view. So much fun.
Sounds like fun, yeah. How did you approach that mechanically? Asking for a group of friends ;-)
Well, it was mostly narrative and started with a screenshare over discord. "Ok, this is what you are seeing. What do you want to do?" We pretended all the cars and stuff were where they were in the picture and I'd bump them down abit in the direction they wanted to go every turn. We didn't get too deep into how fast can the bad guys go with celerity and stuff because jumping in front of a moving car is a great way to get run over as one ghoul learned. The end of the chase was an abandoned shopping mall that they knew was in the area where they could be a little more blatant in their power use. Fun little scene.
I still have notebooks full of my late brother's Vampire games. He was an accomplished DM in many circles. Printed copies of real estate listings in NYC that he used in game. Dozens of npcs, lore from multiple clans. If anyone has a use for thousands of dollars worth of whitewolf VtM original books...I have a literal laundry basket full since nobody I know will play.
Ill play
You're narrating 40k wrong, anything can be explained as "Orks were here and thought of this"
Some of the very best game sessions I've ever had were ones that didn't use any map whatsoever. It's nice to have visual aids, of course, but I don't think it's always an absolute must-have.
I haven't played in decades, when we did we never had visual aides it was just describing. Okay some visual aides (usually used some dice) to show how the groups were situated but it was usually just the initial setup and we took it from there. Even that was rare though, I sort of wondered how often that happens these days, everyone seems to be talk about maps and such. I thought some of the great part of RPGs was using your imagination for it and the DM(or whichever term) would work with it. That said I can totally understand for more tactical games and this was in D&D 2nd Ed era when it was hard to come by those things unless you paid. The times we played say WoD I don't think we used that sort of thing once, so game system makes a difference too.
That doesn't work for 40k, to my understanding. It's a miniatures combat game
For reference I mean the 40k TTRPGs like Wrath and Glory and Dark Heresy, not the original wargame.
The cool thing about them is that you already have miniatures you can use (the classes in WtG are mostly tied to existing unit types in the warhame), and you can tie wargame and TTRPG storylines, but making maps is difficult.
Played a game where the GM just pulled up Google Maps when needed it was neat
I ran a game in near future New York and used Google maps and street view for guidance. Worked well. None of the other players lived here, so I think the visuals helped them.
The real problem with WoD games? The setting books and DM intros are always so good at crafting that beautiful eerieness of the monsters in the shadows, while the average group handles everything by clunking around like toddlers on stilts.
My group tried three times, then it was back to standard 'kick-in-the-door' style games. Roleplaying isn't the easiest thing, and it sucks. I just want a good werewolf or hunter game with some nice politicking and investigation. I'm not even asking for anything crazy, like an introspective mage or changeling meditation session! /cries_in_desperate_desire
What's "WoD"?
World of Darkness, a pretty popular family of games with Vampire the Mascarade as a figurehead, it reach peak popularity during the late 90's/early 00's, then almost vanished during the 2010's. But with the recent release of the 20 year aniiversary verion and the fifth edition it's raising again.
It's modern Urban fantasy, the setting is almost the real world, and the PC are monsters e.g. Vampire, Mage or Werewolf fighting each other to control the city. While the public part of the setting is known by everyone you play Chicago/New-Orlean/Paris/Rome by night (and can just look ~~gooogle~~ open street map to get a map) , the game has a lot of semi-secret lore, about the creation of the Vampire/Werewolf/the Magic world, and the secret of powerful and ancient being with each sourcebook adding extra lore.
A difficulty with that setting, is that there is always a player who is fan of the setting and going to argue that you'll never see this happening because [insert reference to obscure sourcebook] and that other player who actually went once to the city where you play so while WOD player don't have rule lawyer, they have lore lawyer which are a bit akin.
While I talk about rules, the system is IMO the good balance between rule light (It's still a traditional skill-based/dice-pool system with it's root in the 90's) and crunchy, the 2006 revision is my default system for modern games (I know-it, it runs fines and fit my need)
What do you guys normally play? Ive had PF1e groups that treat the whole thing like an engine builder, and I would not let them close to WoD. I have had groups full of filmmakers and writers and actors, that came up with factions and lore and maps for 5e and really wanted to run WoD.
Our best was 4e. The absolutely locked down mechanics let our poor permanent DM plan things out really well, and I got in some lovely character stuff.
Fate was also pretty good. The looseness let the DM sort of lead the sessions into quasi-not combats even if that approach was taken.
I really had a lot of fun making characters for our party in FATE but the DM had never run anything other than PF1e so we lost interest after one adventure :(
I had one really good game of Vampire. Lasted a couple years. We still talk about it sometimes, and its best scenes. Like how one PC saved an NPC by jumping out a 10th story window with her. Or the time they had a huge in character fight because the job they'd tried to do went sideways.
But I've also had a couple really bad games. There was one where they just didn't read and retain anything from the books. One of the players on like session 4 was like "wait. How do I get more blood? Do I like... Bite people?". My friend what do you think was happening in the other scenes when people were hunting for blood? They also didn't retain anything about the different factions, so they didn't really understand anyone's motivation. It was bad. Still feel bad about it.
I think the best WoD game I've seen was a 2 player game on a forum. Both of them put a lot of effort into their characters, and the DM just built a beautiful setting out of detroit. The way the spirit reflected the physical, and how the npc interactions built the story was just so cool to read.
Be the efficient DM you want to be!
Instructions unclear, I've prepped for the past two months and yet I'm in "make shit up" territory already 10 minutes into the session.
Sounds like the instructions were clear!
wtf are these acronyms?
The joke is that the 40k game is set in the far future which kinda blends scifi, horror, and fantasy elements. It's not very popular so to play it with high quality components, you need to craft them yourself.
D&D is super popular, so it's easy to pull premade resources.
Vampire the Masquerade is set in modern day, so you don't need anything crafted.
TTRPG = Table Top Role Playing Game
DM = Dungeon Master, which doesn't technically apply to a Warhammer 40,000 game, they're usually called Game Masters in anything that isn't D&D
RL = Real Life
40K: Warhammer 40K Roleplay
TTRPG: Tabletop roleplaying game
DM: Dungeon master/game master
D&D: Dungeons and Dragons
VtM: Vampire the Masquerade
RL: Real life
and WoD is World of Darkness, the 'master' setting that the various vampire, werewolf, changeling, mage, promethian, hunter, etc. games are set within.
1980s New York. Nearly everything I dm plays there. I have a map on paper for that.
we live in ohio and have just travelled from the Sin Sea to Columbanus
Columbanus sounds like something that climbs up your butt.
Searching for India
Indiabutthole?