32
Southern refugee in Seattle.
Gray ace, bi, monogamous, and single.
My cat's name is Artemis.
Avatar by: @rixsig-writes
I wanna brush up my GMing skills with some pre-built one-shot/short adventures.
What systems/adventures would you recommend I look into?
I'm open to a lot of different types of stuff, the point is mostly just that I haven't GMed in a really long time and I wanna get some practice in without having to put too much work into setting or plot.
I cape for it a lot, but you might try Beyond the Wall. The game's character creation works off of playbooks that, along with walking players through character creation, guides the table on making a small village setting replete with background NPCs. The book then provides the GM with some short adventure outlines that are designed to allow the GM to take the pieces from the character creation session and slot them into the adventure. In theory, you can make characters and play an adventure using one of the outlines in a single three or four hour game session.
If you don't mind playing D&D and diving into that franchise's history, the Basic and Expert rule sets were explicitly designed to teach player and DM skills. They're going to be focused on an older, dungeon-centric style of gameplay, but they provide advice that some modern starter sets lacks. There are also several intro adventures designed to teach the game. A warning, though - these are D&D adventures from the 1970s and 1980s. They're going to have all the issues that D&D wrestles with regarding colonialism, morality, and misogyny.
Oooh, that first one I will look into and see if it would work.
Probably gonna skip the D&D stuff though. I'm okay with engaging it as a flawed but omnipresent product, but I definitely don't have the fortitude to dig into the older stuff.
Thanks!
are there any specific skills you're looking to develop? Like prep, collaborating, not getting NPCs mixed up, coming up with consequences etc. ?
Working with players, describing scenes, getting into character as NPCs, improving. Basically, all of the non-prep, "heat of the moment" type stuff.
I haven't GMed in like a decade, and I'm trying to brush off my very rusty skills for a big epic campaign I started plotting out and prepping in my spare time. But I wanna make sure I can do the campaign justice, so I want to practice some of the "in the moment" skills on some one-shot or short adventures so that I feel more confidant doing it in the big one.
Interesting! I'm using ICON as my training ground for GM skills but it has a tactical combat portion that isn't really relevant to what you want. I wonder if games like Spire or Heart might be up your alley? It handles a lot of the consequences for failed rolls and I think that supports the GM focusing more on setting up the situations (Heart has Delves for this) and getting into character as NPCs.
I'd suggest trying Troika!'s Blancmange and Thistle adventure, found in the core book for Troika. It's a strange game, from the characters to the NPCs to the loosely defined setting (without a canon far as I can tell). It's not a 'thematically coherent' adventure, and doesn't want to be, so there are no mistakes you can really make while improving, just interesting choices. Troika also has a fair bit of 3rd party content that continues on the weird and wild energy, so if you/your players like it you can keep jumping from pamphlet adventures for as long as you like.
You could check out DURF, it's a fun and fast little fantasy RPG ruleset with lots of user made addons available on Itch. Character creation is super simple and combat is dangerous, so it can have a greater focus on non-combat solutions and exploration.
The creator also release a couple of low level dungeons, Lair of the Gobbler and The Rot King's Sanctum
