This was a Stars Without Number game. The crew was running from a patrol boat with their ship still cold, and the pilot slammed it to full throttle from a dead stop.

The captain ordered the engineer down to the engine room to squeeze out more speed. So now one guy is alone down there. A steam line bursts and scalds him. He seals it, and the next gauge redlines. A gasket blows and a fireball rolls across the far wall. He's running spot to spot with a wrench and duct tape, and every roll just barely keeps the ship in one piece for another round.

The pilot, meanwhile, decides the captain's "go fast" order means "maximum speed no matter how loud the engineer screams", and disobeys to push it harder. The engine burns out completely. The ship goes dead in space. The patrol boat closes in and opens fire.

The captain finally runs down to the engine room to help. He grabs the fire extinguisher, sprays the engineer in the face with foam, points at a connection and says "bypass that one," rolls badly, says "wait, maybe I had the diagram upside down," and then (his job "done") announces he's going back up to the bridge because there's more yelling to do there. The engineer, alone again, rolls well and brings the engine back.

The captain takes the credit. Classic.

Full session is here if you want it. It's a podcast called Dark Star Adventurecast.

Hi there,

I’ve been working on a really simple project for a few months: you’re shown two games side-by-side, you click the one you prefer, and that’s it. No scores out of 10, no mandatory account creation. In the background, every vote adjusts an Elo rating (the chess ranking system), and all these duels generate a global ranking.

The initial idea was that I find scores out of 20 (or 10) don't really tell you much. Saying "this game is a 17" doesn't mean a whole lot, whereas "between these two, I prefer the one on the left" is something anyone can have an opinion on in a split second. There are about 27,000 games in the database, with a pool of roughly 5,000 that actually appear in duels.

You can check it out here: https://www.gameforever.app/en/

Here’s what I’d really like your feedback on:

- Does the duel format appeal to you, or do you find it too reductive compared to a proper review?

- How do you honestly compare a game from 1994 with one from 2024? I feel like nostalgia skews everything, but I’m not sure if that’s a problem to be fixed or just an accepted outcome of a popular vote.

- Is there anything obvious missing that you’d look for when visiting a site like this?

I’m open to blunt criticism too - that’s why I’m posting here 👍

After surviving Death House, our party finally made it to the Village of Barovia and got the chance to meet some of the locals.

Our first real conversation with a Barovian went about as smoothly as you'd expect from three strangers who just escaped a haunted murder house.

Welcome to Barovia, I guess. 😂

Our campaign is called Thirst of Strahd, our sapphic take on Curse of Strahd where Strahd is reimagined as a woman. We started recording our sessions to preserve the story, help with note-taking, and have something to look back on after the campaign ends.

Here's the scene from Session 6:

🎥 https://youtu.be/FXvcyoAYIys?si=sPEhOABlCloGeE8X&t=3967

One of my favorite moments from Session 5 came after the battle was over.

The Writhing Heap had finally been defeated, and Gustav's spirit was finally at peace.

Instead of asking for revenge or justice, he made one final request.

"Find my children."

Sometimes the most memorable moments in D&D happen after the dice stop rolling. The quiet conversations and final goodbyes are often the ones that stay with you the longest.

Our campaign is called Thirst of Strahd, our sapphic take on Curse of Strahd where Strahd is reimagined as a woman. We started recording our sessions to preserve the story, help with note-taking, and have something to look back on after the campaign ends.

If you'd like to watch the full scene, here's the timestamp from Session 5:

🎥 https://youtu.be/aYJqsjlf_Hc?si=C0v2zORopKcx-b-A&t=9038

One of my favorite moments from Session 4 was the long-awaited reunion between Gustav and Elisabeth Durst.

After calling out for his wife, the room fell silent.

Then the wall burst open.

Elisabeth appeared and immediately challenged Gustav, turning what seemed like a ghost story into a confrontation years in the making.

Our campaign is called Thirst of Strahd, our sapphic take on Curse of Strahd where Strahd is reimagined as a woman. We started recording our sessions to preserve the story, help with note-taking, and have something to look back on after the campaign ends.

If you'd like to watch the full scene, here's the timestamp from Session 4:

🎥 https://youtu.be/Czq5q53ayAM?si=bpDqG7yUYvtZTFld&t=8562

One of my favorite moments from Session 3 was our campaign's first possession.

A cultist was targeted by a vengeful ghost and had one chance to resist.

She rolled a natural 20.

Then came the disadvantage roll...

Sometimes the dice tell a better horror story than we ever could.

Our campaign is called Thirst of Strahd, our sapphic take on Curse of Strahd where Strahd is reimagined as a woman. We started recording our sessions to preserve the story, help with note-taking, and have something to look back on after the campaign ends.

If you'd like to see the full scene, here's the timestamp from Session 3:

🎥 https://youtu.be/juTDwD_1uf8?si=PsTig9wm7rpUA9X3&t=12714

One of my favorite moments from Session 2 happened during our first fight inside Death House.

A swarm of monstrous roaches surrounded our paladin, Lucien. Most people would try to run.

Lucien's solution?

Trust-fall backwards into a burning fireplace.

Sometimes the safest place in Barovia is the fire.

Our campaign is called Thirst of Strahd, our sapphic take on Curse of Strahd where Strahd is reimagined as a woman. We started recording our sessions to preserve the story, help with note-taking, and have something to look back on after the campaign ends.

If you'd like to see the moment, here's the timestamp from Session 2:

🎥 https://youtu.be/8SQWM8_O_ds?si=Fnq1Muc8swKS5JUr&t=14099

We played a Lasers & Feelings one-shot. Premise: alien brain worms from the future are mind-controlling an entire planet's population, slowly migrating everyone toward a single point. We were a scout ship crew with a cloaking device and a grim reputation.

Doja's android soldier had no pants. He called this Porky Pig-ing it. He had a dot-matrix 3D printer in his back and a broadcasting device in his chest. His stated goal was "keep being awesome (here I go killing again)." He also had a blender.

The first action of the session: a fighter jet was pursuing our ship. He went to the airlock, hung out by his ankles in the vacuum of space, and opened fire with a laser gatling gun. The reference was Bender from Futurama. He rolled and the fighter came apart.

The brain worm alien identity test, which you'd need to pass to be recognized as one of them, goes like this: fill in the blank, when you go to an uninvited jacuzzi party, what salty snack do you bring? Our diplomat answered correctly. The table talked it over for about ten seconds first.

By the end of the session the android had lost a leg. The celebrity scientist we'd rescued had lost both of his to a collapsing time portal. The captain was still in the med pod where he'd been at the start of the session.

Nobody helped him.

From the Dark Star Adventurecast: https://www.darkstaradventures.com/adventurecast-episodes/bonus-laser-and-feelings

In our Stars Without Number game, one of the crew (Robert, our pilot and former clone soldier) was sitting at a bar waiting for another player to finish a social scene. Standard session beat.

A grenade crashed through the window.

Robert's player looked at me, looked at the table, and said "I dive on it." We did the roll. He got there. He had two seconds left on the fuse when he threw it behind the bar. The bartender died. The crew survived.

The crew still had the intel they came for. They also now have to explain why there's a crater in a dive bar in a small desert port town, and the local equivalent of the police is already asking questions.

(Our ongoing campaign: [Dark Star Adventurecast] https://www.darkstaradventures.com/adventurecast-episodes/rock-tumor)

I've been running the same tabletop RPG setting for nearly 10 years now.

One of my favorite moments as a GM isn't something that happened during a battle, or because of a lucky dice roll. It happened because real life and the campaign accidentally lined up in the most perfect way possible.

During the first few years of the campaign, one of my players played a necromancer. She was largely self-taught, which led to a terrible accident in her backstory. Through failed experiments, she caused her father's death, and when her mother discovered what had happened, events spiraled into another tragedy. Ever since then, she carried a ritual bone knife as a reminder of her past.

Eventually, both the character and the player reached a crossroads.

In the story, the necromancer needed to disappear for a while. She came from a small town that had grown into a prosperous settlement thanks to the work of her parents, two respected arcanists. Between her past and several events that had unfolded during the campaign, staying visible was becoming increasingly dangerous.

At almost the exact same time, the player told us she would need to leave the game because she was pregnant.

So we wrote her out.

Her final scene was simple. She stepped through a mysterious portal, and nobody knew exactly where it led.

Then real life happened.

Months passed. Then years.

She focused on raising her daughter, and our campaign kept moving. This is a living setting where multiple groups play simultaneously across the same world map, so while her character was gone, the world never stopped.

Five years later, the player reached out and said she finally had time to return.

And suddenly that old portal became the perfect narrative tool.

In the world, years have passed. Kingdoms changed. Alliances shifted. Entire story arcs came and went.

But on the other side of the portal, almost no time passed for her character.

So now she's returning to a familiar world that has moved on without her. Friends are older. Legends have been written. Consequences have piled up. The character is almost unchanged, but the world she left behind is not.

The best part is that none of this was planned.

A player needed to leave because she was becoming a mother. Years later, she was able to return. We took that real-life absence and turned it into part of the story.

As a GM, moments like this are why I love long-running campaigns.

Sometimes the most memorable plot twists aren't written by the GM.

They're written by life itself.

Im just going to talk about the Therapy episode from Tftsd. Its in C squad season 2 and ITS SO GOOOOOOD. I swear the therapy is the best way to discover your charecter. It also cracks me up SOOOOOOOOOOOO much that Dorkius was the only one who was mentally stable when I bet he has been traumatized. And It was genius to make the hallucinations hook up to there powers.

In the comments please share what you think Dorkiuses halucination would have been.

In our Lasers & Feelings crossover one-shot, one of the players was running Bits, an android engineer whose entire goal in existence is to learn to feel. Classic android character. He just wants to understand human emotion.

We reach the destination of our mission and find something nobody expected. One of the things waiting there is an alien civilization that has spent generations developing a religion. They have a prophecy. Their savior is coming to liberate them.

The prophesied savior is Bits.

They recognize him immediately. Centuries of waiting, and here he is.

His first act of liberation was shooting someone in the face with a Gatling gun.

He just did what seemed right, which is the only guiding principle available to an android who hasn't figured out feelings yet. The prophecy was not specific about methodology.

Triple crossover one-shot with Astronomica and 7th Star to the Right, out today: https://www.darkstaradventures.com/adventurecast-episodes/three-stars-one-shot-w-astronomica-and-7th-star

You find yourself trapped in a cage in a medieval town square, seconds away from being thrown to the monster pit for your alleged crimes. You have to talk your way out of a crime you invent at the beginning of the game… and when I say “talk your way out” I mean literally. Every NPC in-game chats with you and influences the outcome of the adventure, where every answer is created live by the artificial intelligence in the game. No playthrough is ever the same.

It works great as a party game, because of how fun and chaotic each session can be. Not to mention a great way to warm up for a one-shot adventure.

We'd like to get this community's impressions. What do you guys think about the concept? Would you be interested in trying it out?

We played The Witch Is Dead, a one-page RPG. You're woodland familiars. Your witch was murdered. You have seven days to return the killer's eyes to her corpse or the resurrection fails.

The town that killed her is a professional witch hunter settlement that knows the seven-day rule and has an underground chamber specifically for hiding their killers during the window. They've done this before.

So it's a heist. Small animals versus 2,000 people who've done this professionally.

Brian's magpie had an uncontrollable shiny-object obsession. Mid-mission he'd veer off for a button. He described himself as "the resident human expert" because he'd seen 18 of them. He eventually flew away from the high priest's courtyard silhouetted against the sun, the man's silver key dangling from his talons after a near-impossible Sly roll.

Before that, Rebecca's owl had flown over the same priest during an outdoor mass and pooped directly on his eye with a 9 out of 10 on Fierce. The game calls that "near impossible." She did it anyway.

Steph's rat ran a berry subscription business the entire session. Tiered CSA. Her character concept from minute one, and she never wavered. When we needed to convince the magpie to pluck the witch hunter's eyes, the solution was calling them berries. He believed it. Made the roll.

The familiars got the eyes. Elowyn woke up, stoked the fire, and immediately started brewing something. The animals burned the town overnight.

From the Dark Star Adventurecast: https://www.darkstaradventures.com/adventurecast-episodes/bonus-the-witch-is-dead

This would have been 22 years ago now. So there I was playing Starfox Adventures on my nintendo gamecube. On the mission where you have to rescue Garunda Te by feeding him frostweeds from the frostweed tree. There I am hacking away at it, when out of nowhere Tricky(who is fox's dinosaur companion in this game) spawns next to the tree absolutely huge(like 5 times as big approx) and is motionless. Me, being a bit weirded out goes over to touch him. BIG MISTAKE. I then become trapped INSIDE of Tricky while he spins around very fast and am unable to escape. It gets even weirder though. Upon doing research into this, there are NO KNOWN GLITCHES LIKE THIS. I can't be the only one who has encountered this surely? Has anyone else encountered this also? UNfortunately, back then I didnt have a camera or anything to record evidence of it, so I have no proof, but if anyone has amy proof, could you please post it here? Thank you.