RPGaDAY 2026 30. Pride

#RPGaDAY 2026

30. Pride

30. A game event that you are still proud of.

Some of the high concept episodes of The Watch House, notably the time two of the PCs found themselves behind the scenes of the TV series they were in the cast of, the time Natalie became a fairytale princess, the flashforward to a hellish possible future. You can trace where I swiped and adapted from, gotta know your classics. (And see how many Supernatural did after us.)

And some the players brought in that caught me by surprise as well, like the Milli and Ziggy bodyswap, Andy the werewolf getting split into human and superwerewolf with his player stepping up to play both, and Matthew’s player dropping the spell to make Natalie see her possible new boyfriend in a negative light going wrong as he grumbled jealously about how cool he was...

And some of the developments in season arcs as well, like a villain reveal, a starting Big Bad being written out, heel and face turns and more.

Autocratik

Runeslinger

RPGaDAY 2026 10. Secret

#RPGaDAY 2026

10. Secret

10. A secret you hope comes out about a character?

Neither of my current characters have any big secrets.

Not normally, anyway. “I’m actually a time traveller from over a century in the future” is a specific issue for a current adventure. Which I hope doesn’t come out too much as it could destroy the space-time continuum. But a few people finding out makes for fun complications.

We just finished a short Vampire chronicle, a game where this is a natural focus, where the city had a lot of secrets and enough came out in the end to start an open revolt, so that was nice. And my character there, the Tremere occultist, had his share as well, though the other PCs did get to discover the shocking reason he had a Tremere enemy.

HE STOLE SOME BOOKS.

In my long-running Buffy play-by-post there are some secrets about the setting I hope to get to, and at some point the secret that one of the PCs is a robot (which all the players know but none of the other PCs do) really should come out - I’ve resisted a couple of chances for an anticlimactic comedy reveal already, but now have an idea to make it an actual central episode plot.

Purely in-character open secrets and really secret out of character secrets give very different feels to games. IC secrets allow leaning in for oblivious PCs - although I’ve met players who cannot resist acting on OOC knowledge. OOC secrets are better for mysteries, but the lack of openness can affect the group. Best not keep them up for long.

Also, Top Secret. I should run a spy game again sometime.

Autocratik

Runeslinger

RPGaDAY 2026 7. Mercy

#RPGaDAY 2026

7. Mercy

7. A moment of mercy received or given?

One of the things I often include when running something like Vampire is a choice between the right thing and the expedient thing. Ideally with some nuances in there too so it’s not just obvious.

My 2024-5 Vampire: The Masquerade game ended with some of the PCs deciding that the young hunter cell taking out prominent Kindred in the city were in the right and trying to get them out safely.

And other PCs disagreeing because hunters are still a threat and warning the Camarilla, who sent a hit squad.

And playing in the French Revolution game, Matthieu’s last act was to rescue Charlotte Corday from prison awaiting execution - with the assistance of a vampire loyal to Marie Antoinette, who asked the coterie to save her children as well. From his perspective saving two kids was the expedient choice as well as humane, even though saving royals also felt unjust and a possible threat to the republic.

Autocratik

Runeslinger

RPGaDAY 2026 4. Charm

#RPGaDAY 2026

4. Charm

4. An enjoyable moment of charm gone right or wrong?

There’s nothing like a Fancy Party Episode or other large social event to get people more dressed up than usual and being noticed in unexpected ways.

I have them occasionally in a lot of my games. Sometimes it brings the drama as relationships shift, and often it brings the funny as there’s a misunderstanding or somebody gets flustered.

“Do we get dressed up?”

“Of course.”

“I’m in.”

Angel 3.13 Waiting In The Wings

Which is a Fancy Party Episode which does indeed shift several cast relationships

Of course they’re a sometimes food. Pride And Prejudice has people writing letters and visiting each other’s houses as well as some fancy party chapters. ;) (Comics creator Trung Le Nguyen provides helpful and often hilarious commentary over one of the biggest Bluesky threads I’ve ever seen, collected here in 135 pages.)

Big social events are also good for changing the status quo, introducing new characters, having enemies meet in a situation where they shouldn’t start a fight, and more.

(Lots of NPCs can get hard to track. In some games use a map and tokens for scenes like this more than for combat.)

William and Charlotte got together in The Watch House in the middle of some other adventure when she pointed out they were while he hadn’t quite gotten around to asking her out. That can happen too.

Autocratik

Runeslinger

Vampire: The Masquerade - Till Death Do Us Part

Our summer game concluded with a possible victory over somebody worse than us. I didn’t get the righteous death this time, despite trying by going to an enemy to try to reason with her. Ah well, there’s always next time!

V5: Stolen 2.01

Vampire: The Masquerade

Stolen

2.01

Signs And Wonders

Beck

Robin

Vince

Beck manages to return safely as the pursuers turn on each other. He recognises Darvell, the Sheriff, at the back of the Camarilla group.

As they drive back to his haven, the girl introduces herself as Alice, and he can hear her heart pounding in fear. She’s alive.

“You’re a Thin-blood?”

“My father was.”

“You mean your sire?”

“No.”

20 Buffy plots from Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party

Happy birthday to Hayley Williams!

Her new album Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party (content note: swears) contains several tracks that I would fit into a Buffy The Vampire Slayer soundtrack, and the traditional title idea jam:

Adventure Calendar 2025: Fairytales

The complete collection of adventure ideas and plot hooks and a few items based on folk and fairytales

0: Fairytales

1: The Snow Queen

2: Cinderella

3: Jack And The Beanstalk

4: Jack Tales

5: Dick Whittington And His Cat

6: Puss In Boots

7: Snow White

8: The Pied Piper Of Hamelin

9: Peter Pan

10: Sleeping Beauty

11: Beauty And The Beast

12: Little Red Riding Hood

13: The Three Little Pigs

14: Goldilocks And The Three Bears

15: The Princess Bride

16: Aladdin

17: Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves

18: Sinbad

19: The Little Mermaid

20: Rapunzel

21: Midwinter

22: The Town Musicians Of Bremen

23: The Frog Prince

Addendum: The Emperor’s New Clothes

24: The Nutcracker

Season’s greetings!

Adventure Calendar 2025 16: Aladdin

Adventure Calendar 2025

16: Aladdin

A genie story rather than a fairy story, but still a pantomime favourite with Disney versions as well. Aladdin runs a bit like Jack And The Beanstalk as a poor lad tried to make his fortune when he comes into possession of a magic item.

Its main addition to culture is the lamp of three wishes, and the often capricious nature of being careful what you wish for.

The genie here is pretty on side rather than showing malicious compliance, but many PCs have learned to be wary of freely offered wishes. Characters having to consider this appear throughout SFF - see Faust, The Monkey’s Paw, Wishmaster, Vengeance Demons in Buffy, the time Mulder gets three wishes in The X Files, a few Q episodes in Star Trek and many more.

As You Wish

How would the PCs react to a wish freely and properly granted with no loopholes or catches?

Adventure Calendar 2025 8: The Pied Piper

Adventure Calendar 2025

8: The Pied Piper Of Hamelin

Dick Whittington made his fortune catching rats and that reminded me of another story about a highly successful rat catcher who had more trouble getting paid: The Pied Piper Of Hamelin.

A town has a serious rat problem, and a guy in a strange costume comes and says he can make all the rats leave, the town elders agree to pay him if he can, and he plays a magic pipe and the rats line up and follow him out of town. And now the town elders go back on the deal. So the piper switches to a different tune that night and leads all the town’s children away, and they are never seen again.

The lesson here is pay your freelancers.

We’re entering the Scarred For Life part of the fairytale collection here, aren’t we?

Sure, there are versions where the town elders pay up and the kids return, or the piper takes them to a nicer place where people pay their bills, but those are adjustments. There are also versions where he leads the rats to the river to drown and you are left to draw your own conclusions about what happens to the kids.

We had a picture book of this when I was little, and the piper was colorful, elfin and a little bit sinister.

Disney actually made this as a short in 1933, with one of the nice endings, but see also this classic creepy stop motion animated film by Jiří Barta (trailer) and the not much less creepy version from Cosgrove Hall. Compare the version with Donovan for a less devilish take.

There’s also a DC villain turned hero in The Flash rogues’ gallery and the time a Dire Wraith does it in ROM: Spaceknight.

Rat Catchers are of course the archetypal not-really-heroes of Warhammer Fantasy Role-play, but come with a Small But Vicious Dog rather than magical pipe. Skaven seem to prefer drums and bells, which feels like a missed opportunity.

For magical rodent problems that definitely aren’t panto fare, see the story of Bishop Hatto.

And pipes in general are a bit sketchy in fairytales...

Catch A Rat Today

Ah, the most basic MMO mission, get ten rats out of a basement. But where are they all coming from? Is there a Rat king or other guiding intelligence behind this? Is it targeting specific victims? Maybe a nightclub attacked using Animalism in Vampire...

Adventure Calendar 2025 7: Snow White

Adventure Calendar 2025

7: Snow White

Seven. See what I did there?

Founding Disney Princess, Snow White has the rightful heir to a throne cast down by her stepmother, threatened due to vanity and forced to escape, taking refuge with Dwarfs (not Dwarves) and saved from apparent death by true love’s kiss.

This story has had plenty of deconstructions and reconstructions, including Snow White And The Huntsman taking direct influence from Warhammer Fantasy as well as Snow White: A Tale Of Terror, several central roles in Once Upon A Time, and the recent live-action-ish Disney remake.

(There’s always been some horror in the mix, the Disney version models the Queen’s transformation on Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.)

How much agency Snow has varies from version to version - the Disney version is actually pretty active, though she doesn’t get into any sword fights.

But you can still get miniatures for them.
(This set is from the 40s or 50s.)

Also there’s a kinda evil or just unhelpful magic mirror. I’m all about that.

Who Is The Fairest

A vain monarch takes against one of the PCs or someone close because they just happen to be better at something the monarch takes pride in. Reason to drive them out, and possibly a self-perpetuating problem...

Adventure Calendar 2025 5: Dick Whittington

Adventure Calendar 2025

5: Dick Whittington And His Cat

Dick Whittington And His Cat is and odd one because Richard Whittington was a real person, a merchant who became Lord Mayor of London. But it wasn’t a rags to riches story and didn’t involve using his cat to solve a rat problem and make a fortune as a result.

The story starts our far less fantastical than the likes of Jack And The Beanstalk, but it gets mixed with Puss In Boots at some point too.

The Streets Are Paved With Gold

The adventurers hear of a city where they could really strike it rich. A gold rush boom town or the like. (Cue The Simpsons joke.) What will they actually find when they get there? And will they help any other poor souls drawn in by the same stories?

Adventure Calendar 2025 4: Jack Tales

Adventure Calendar 2025

4: Jack Tales

Jack is an archetypal tricky everyman found in the UK and also in Appalachian folklore. An underdog getting into and out of trouble with his wits and trickery, having run-ins with authority and the supernatural.

He’s basically a player character.

Jack And The Beanstalk has a young naïve example, so feels like a separate thing.

Fables had Jack being the same guy (as it did with the romantic foil Prince IIRC) getting a spinoff series where he actively spread stories to empower himself, with inevitably mixed results.

There’s also a Samurai Jack episode called Jack Tales as a reference but he isn’t the same storied Jack, it’s just a nickname and his usual method of solving problems is more direct in an equally player character way.

Jack And The Keep On The Borderlands

How do PCs deal with an archetypal PC? A band of adventurers follow rumours to a dungeon and find it’s already been cleaned out. Someone already rescued that dragon from that princess. They start to hear tell of a legendary hero going around doing the kind of stuff they should be doing. When they finally meet this guy, whether he’s a thief blessed with some wits and a lot of luck or a literally archetypal adventurer and the exemplar of the role they play in the world, will they ally with him or try to get him out of their way?

Adventure Calendar 2025 3: Jack And The Beanstalk

Adventure Calendar 2025

3: Jack And The Beanstalk

Chosen because it’s the local big panto this year, Jack And The Beanstalk is the one where a poor boy is talked into selling the family’s cow for some magic beans, but they’re real magic beans so that’s okay, and they grow a giant beanstalk that could provide enough beans to be the basis of a revived farming business but instead he climbs it all the way to a castle above the clouds where he robs the giant owner, escapes back down and cuts the beanstalk down so the giant falls and he can keep the loot, including a talking harp.

It sounds really weird when laid out like that..

It’s adjacent to the various Jack stories about an underdog trickster type, this Jack does win with a bit of trickery but a lot of luck.

Castles in the sky are a classic fantasy motif, and magic items like fast-growing vines and animated musical instruments as well.

What I most wonder is who just sold him a perfectly good magic bean?

The Magic Merchants

Disguised godlike types giving gifts to the kind and punishments to the guilty? Or just getting by on the barter economy?

Adventure Calendar 2025 2: Cinderella

Adventure Calendar 2025

2: Cinderella

The lead Disney Princess, the story of Cinderella is also popular for pantomimes as it has a beautiful and somewhat feisty heroine, a villainous stepmother and ugly stepsisters, a fancy dress transformation suitable for a costume design showoff moment. No fight at the end but you can’t have everything.

The motif of finding the heroine through a lost shoe goes back as far as a Greek story told around the BCE/CE turnover, but Cinderella mostly codified in France with Charles Perrault in 1697, after an Italian version in 1634.

She generally only has so much agency and ends up needing a lot of help, though some versions give her a more active part. See Sapsorrow, the version dramatised in The Storyteller, where she escapes a terrible fate and makes a new one for herself with a magical disguise and some dress theft.

And a happily ever after

The lack of a fight at the end makes this less immediately adaptable to standard RPG shape, but the mix of magic, fancy royal events and attempts to subvert it lends itself to toying with it as the PCs are the ones trying to help or hinder something like this. See Witches Abroad for an example.

I’ve actually addressed Cinderella for Relics, with the Fairy Godmother’s Needle as a quietly powerful item that can remake clothing and allow someone creative to spin up beautiful fashions and flawless disguises. I also found that there’s no standard origin or name for the Fairy Godmother so I made her Aglaea of the Three Graces.

You Shall Go To The Ball

The PCs get a chance to attend the fanciest formal event of the season - whether they want to or not - and perhaps get mixed up in romances and schemes, and maybe see someone there who needs some PC shenanigans style help.

Adventure Calendar 2025 1: The Snow Queen

Adventure Calendar 2025

1: The Snow Queen

The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen

As the example I cited in the intro post this seems as good a place to start as any. Scottish Ballet is doing it this year and The Ice Tower is currently in cinemas about an actress playing the queen and a fan getting caught up in the world.

It was also the starting point for Frozen though the result is pretty different - see early designs here that are more like a blue Cruella before making Elsa a beloved superhero.

The Snow Queen isn’t a traditional story, it was published in 1844 in a book literally called New Fairy Tales, but it’s familiar enough now.

It starts with the Devil creating a mirror that shows only the worst in everything and breaking it in an attempt to invade Heaven and that’s just the prologue. One of the splinters goes into a boy named Kai’s eye and this makes him a target for the Snow Queen, so his friend Gerda sets off to rescue him. On the way she has various side adventures and is helped and hindered by royalty, talking animals and the like.

It’s very much the kind of story you might get from playing Once Upon A Time. So for RPGs it would be an easy adaptation to kitchen-sinky fantasy, while the motley assortment of heroes trying to rescue someone from a sinister powerful type’s fortress is one of the most basic story outlines we could take.

The Devil’s mirror could be a plot hook all on its own - I could drop it into Relics or some World Of Darkness games with ease.

Cold-tinted glasses

A pair of antique spectacles made with glass from the Devil’s mirror, allowing a user to see the flaws in everything. Useful for engineering and proofreading and the like, but likely to leave you with a negative view of the world.

Adventure Calendar 2025: Fairytales

Adventure Calendar 2025

0: Fairytales

For my seventh year doing festive adventure ideas daily (click December 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 in my blog archive) and this year a number of stories sorta kinda related to Christmas - fairytales.

The Princess Bride poster

Has it got any sports in it?

Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...

Doesn’t sound too bad. I’ll try to stay awake.

Oh, well, thank you very much, very nice of you. Your vote of confidence is overwhelming.

The Princess Bride

Here in the UK theatres put on pantomimes for families around this time, a uniquely British mix of classic fairytales, vaudeville humour, audience participation and crossdressing. A lot of the stories will also be familiar from the Disney canon. Ballet companies bring out the likes of The Snow Queen as well for the Christmas season, so those are fair game too. Now to find a list with enough of them...

If I run out I will borrow from The Storyteller, not least as it included a story about running out of stories.

RPGaDAY 2025 11 - Flavour

#RPGaDAY2025

11 - Flavour

Having already talked about games set around taverns and other eating and drinking establishments this month...

Different systems can change the feel of a genre or the focus on a setting, but the GM and players provide and choose the flavour on top of that. What do we include or exclude, introduce, want more of?

11a - 5, 5, 1

Why, Confident, Adventure

It’s the start of what we might call “adventuring season” in a setting with public heroics - a tournament at Camelot, the superhero Olympics, something like that. Or some equivalent like the first game in the year for a sport, Battle Of The Bands for a game about musicians, and so on.

(For an odd example I did this for my long-running Buffy game The Watch House with the Watchers in training having to show how that training was going through various tests, like a school sports day with added monster attacks.)

The PCs get to meet and get the measure of other parties, friendly or otherwise, and show off what they can do. And if some other kind of plot happens that can shake up some expectations.

And since I just remembered to mention Flavour, there will probably be a nice meal at some point.

Or we could go all in on that and make the goal of the challenge to bring back a rare spice?

Plug for the adventure The Anaitis Ingredient in Dead Rock Seven for Ashen Stars, where the PCs have to protect a cooking competition from a time warp attack.

Runeslinger

RPGaDAY 2025 2 - Prompt

#RPGaDAY2025

2 - Prompt

Why is Prompt day two? Why? WHY?!

Ahem.

These are prompts to thought, something I’m happy to make sets of when, ha ha, prompted.

As I am now demonstrating with the extra roll prompts.

In sessions there are often prompts to action. What do you do?

Prompt can also mean turning up and getting things done on time. Which is a superpower I’d like to have.

2a - 6, 3, 5

How, Proud, Accessory

A prompt borrowed from a Buffy comic: A new craze sweeping the school, a status symbol everybody’s so proud of having. How did it start? Is something weird going on? I mean, obviously...

Autocratik

Runeslinger

Today is my birthday - give me genre-switching retellings!

Today is my birthday - give me genre-switching retellings! on RPGnet.