Setting the Stage, Campaigns for D&D and Other RPGs

Maia is our guest today presenting her actual play campaign, Pinehurst Academy. Maia used the City of Mist system for her game. From the City of Mist website, "In City of Mist you play ordinary individuals with powers that emanate from myths and legends investigating supernatural crimes and mysteries in a noir City where the truth is always hidden behind the pervasive Mist." Maia has used a fairly straight interpretation of that setup with a twist, her story takes place in a suburban high school just outside of the City. The PCs are a bunch of first year students at the exclusive private school, Pinehurst Academy. The school has a yearly scavenger hunt competition for freshman to find a set of ten artifacts. There are only one of each artifact, so the scavenger hunt teams must also steal the artifactsMaia made an enormous amount of material for the campaign along with many custom rules for managing the more detailed parts of school life. If you're planning on running a similar campaign you should get in touch with Maia and ask for some advice.The Pinehurst Academy playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7m14mvokus1i6gbfAGSKc7oOheJfGQtzMaia's TTRPG links: https://beacons.ai/maiasgameroomMaia's Electric State narrative play podcast: https://beacons.ai/electricstatepodCity of Mist website: https://cityofmist.co/Our website: https://gocorral.com/stsWant to be on the show? Fill out this survey: https://forms.gle/U11TbxtAReHFKbiVAJoin our Discord: https://discord.gg/Nngc2pQV6C

This week's stars are Arin and Caleb from the Black Flare podcast. Arin is the GM for the podcast using the Delta Green rules system and Caleb is the podcast's producer and editor. They work together to create a phenomenal, slow-building horror story. Delta Green is an RPG for telling Cthulian Lovecraft stories in a more modern setting typically in the late 1990's or early 2000's. The PCs all have a connection to a secret government organization named Delta Green that deals with paranormal events. In the Black Flare podcast, the PCs investigate a mysterious disease that is occurring in one of Alaska's national parks.The Black Flare podcast is a great horror story with the feel of the X-Files show if it was an audio drama. Check it out on the Black Flare Podcast website or by searching Black Flare on your podcast app. https://www.blackflarepod.com/If you're interested in the Delta Green system you can check out the rules on the website. There's a set of start rules and an adventure you can try for free to see if you like the system! https://www.delta-green.com/Our website: https://gocorral.com/stsWant to be on the show? Fill out this survey: https://forms.gle/U11TbxtAReHFKbiVAJoin our Discord: https://discord.gg/Nngc2pQV6C

This week's guest is Amanda, another member of the Quelmar organization. Quelmar was featured previously in episode 32 with James, the original creator of Quelmar. Amanda is a Quelmar DM and is currently DMing a Quelmarized version of Hitpoint Press's Heckna!. Her interview focused on her homebrew campaign without a "proper" name dubbed the Delicious Homebrew.The Delicious Homebrew focuses on a world that has lost connection to its magic. One hundred years ago a powerful magician felt that magic was a net negative for the world. It was too dangerous and unpredictable. This magician sealed magic away and then hid the seal itself as well on a lost continent known as the Emerald Wilds. The players journey starts with a king giving them a quest to find a magical crown. The PCs found the crown, but rather than return it to the king they broke it, unleashing a hostile angel. After rallying an entire city to defeat the angel, the PCs interrogated it as it died. The angel revealed the name and identity of the magician who sealed away the world's magic, setting the PCs off on their true quest.During the interview we mentioned the Heckna! campaign by Hitpoint Press. You can check that out at this link: https://hitpointpress.com/products/heckna-box-setI also brought up the Bag Wars Saga from Knights of the Dinner Table which you can check out here: https://kenzerco.com/product/knights-of-the-dinner-table-the-bag-wars-saga/And if you'd like to learn more about Quelmar and the other cool stuff Amanda and the Quelmar members are up to Quelmar has a few of its own web links you should check outThe Quelmar Wiki: https://quelmarwiki.com/wiki/Quelmar_WikiaThe Quelmar Organization's official webpage: https://quelmar.com/Home.htmlAnd Quelmar's Discord server: https://discord.gg/9FZ4EJjOur website: https://gocorral.com/stsWant to be on the show? Fill out this survey: https://forms.gle/U11TbxtAReHFKbiVAJoin our Discord: https://discord.gg/Nngc2pQV6C

Somewhere there is a door.Today's guests are Emma and Maia, the creators of the Yeldplay actual play podcast which was nominated for a 2024 CRIT award. Yeldplay is the official podcast of the Yeld RPG to showcase the system's unique mechanics and style of play. The Yeld RPG lets your roleplay as children that find a door to the Magical Land of Yeld. The children can explore Yeld and return home, but eventually the door locks behind them on one of their journeys. Now they are trapped and must find seven keys to unlock the door. If they don't escape before they turn thirteen they will turn into one of the monsters of Yeld and be forever trapped.Yeld is a heavily structured RPG with seven boss dungeons (plus a bonus final dungeon) that already exist within the rule book. But don't worry, there's plenty of space to make up adventures of your own outside of the boss dungeons. Combat takes place on an 8x8 grid like a chessboard. Combat actions are fairly simple, stack as many dice on an action as possible, roll all the dice and add them up. The GM does the same thing for the enemies and whoever has the highest total succeeds. The game discourages killing enemies though as their ghosts will haunt you in the next adventure you and your friends embark on.Yeld has a rotating GM structure. Everybody that is playing has a PC and each adventure is designed by one of the players for all the PCs to go through. At the end of that adventure a new player is encouraged to come forward to GM the next adventure. The whole experience can be as collaborative or as singular as desired by a group. You could potentially have a single GM without a PC if you wanted. Or you could have everyone working together on all the adventures if that was a process you enjoyed. The important thing is that Yeld works with collaboration or with individual creation of adventures, but in the assumed design there is a rotation of responsibility.If you'd like to give Yeld a try you can check it out on their website. The 1st edition of the game is free! https://yeldstuff.com/The Yeldplay podcast can be found on your favorite podcast app, but if you prefer a weblink you can click this one: https://shows.acast.com/yeldplayThe Modest Medusa webcomic that has developed alongside Yeld and Yeld's art is available here: https://modestmedusa.com/Our website: https://gocorral.com/stsWant to be on the show? Fill out this survey: https://forms.gle/U11TbxtAReHFKbiVAJoin our Discord: https://discord.gg/Nngc2pQV6C

This episode features one of the other CRIT award nominees from 2024, Josh, who tells us about his game Last Fleet. Josh and his partner, Becky, are the main drivers at Black Armada Games which makes TTRPGs (among other games). Last Fleet is a Powered by the Apocalypse game that simulates a situation similar to that of the Battlestar Galactica show. In the far future humanity is on the run in the titular Last Fleet. Human planets have been taken over by the Corax, a fungal species that is able to infiltrate Earthling society through perfect mimics of humans. Now humanity is in a desperate bid to escape from the Corax, but the fleet is low on fuel and Corax infiltrators could already be aboard sabotaging the ships that protect the last of the human species.Josh presents his games through actual plays on the podcast, Black Armada Tales. There's a bunch of games that have been featured, but here is a link to the first episode of the Last Fleet arc: https://open.spotify.com/episode/37f5ee6Z05iebdPUNh3dGSYou can check out Last Fleet on the Black Armada website here: https://blackarmada.com/product/last-fleet/Or you can check out the general Black Armada website for their other games. That includes the latest Lovecraftesque release and a playtest for a soon-to-be-released, grimdark, scifi game called Ex Tenebris: https://blackarmada.com/Our website: https://gocorral.com/stsWant to be on the show? Fill out this survey: https://forms.gle/U11TbxtAReHFKbiVAJoin our Discord: https://discord.gg/Nngc2pQV6C

Udy tells us about his experiences with the Seventh Sea TTRPG system, the Scion system, and the focus for this episode, Pendragon! Pendragon is a generational RPG where you play a small noble house in England during the time of Arthurian legends. You play a knight or lady that is the head of your household with responsibilities to your subjects, your lord, and the king. As play proceeds, your character finds friends, makes enemies, gets married, has children, goes on quests, fights wars, and all that other good stuff from Medieval history and myth. Eventually your character dies and you transition to playing the heir you'd raised as the campaign proceeds. There are many campaigns you can play, but the main focus is on the Great Pendragon Campaign that details the events from the ~480 to ~570. This covers the rule of King Uther, King Arthur's rise to prominence as the boy who pulled the sword from the stone, Arthur's rule, his decline and death, and a small wrapup afterwards. The PCs can be directly involved in these events or on the fringes depending on a group's preference.Historical sources indicate that there was a King Arthur who ruled over parts of Britain in the 500's. Little is known about this real person. King Arthur became a legendary figure due to French moral fables written about the Knights of the Round Table in the 1100's. At that time Christian Europe was losing lots of wars to Muslims. Many Christian nobles were spending more time fighting amongst themselves instead of looking outward to what the Catholic Church considered a greater enemy. To prevent this infighting, many priests and educated men wrote stories with the intention of improving the moral character of European nobility. These stories used the Knights of the Round Table as a common setting. The hope was that if European nobles read these stories they would become moral people, stop fighting each other, and join the Crusades against the Muslims.Udy and I talked about a few different sources for the story of King Arthur. While there are hundreds of books to read on Arthur, both ancient and modern, the best English sources are probably Le Morte d'Arthur written by Thomas Malory in 1485 at the end of the Middle Ages or The Once and Future King written by T.H. White in 1958. If you're in the mood for something lighter and more subversive, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a lot of fun. There are many examples in film as well with my personal favorite being the 1998 Merlin TV miniseries.During the interview we briefly discussed a piece of art that one of Udy's players drew. You can check that art out here: https://gocorral.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/giant.webpIf you're interested in Pendragon the game is available on Chaosium's website: https://www.chaosium.com/pendragon-rpg/Udy also recommended the Pendragon Discord server for all those cool modifications people have made to the system over the years: https://discord.com/invite/CfvJzeXOur website: https://gocorral.com/stsWant to be on the show? Fill out this survey: https://forms.gle/U11TbxtAReHFKbiVAJoin our Discord: https://discord.gg/Nngc2pQV6C