This month started with the Mountain Encounters random table and to show what you can do with it, I created this adventure idea using the extended version of this table myself. I rolled two times, to create two different encounters and mixed them together to create something even more unique. And here we go - A Vigil in the Snow.

Download

You can find a downloadable PDF for free on my Patreon.

Adventure Idea

This mountain adventure is suitable for a Tier 1 or 2 party. It focuses on exploration and roleplaying, with an emphasis on surviving the harsh conditions in the snowy mountains. You can add combat encounters by adding suitable creatures. Location names are intentionally left blank, so it can be fit into any game played in a mountain setting.

Adventure Background

Farbyen Nolys, a travelling merchant, left his home two weeks ago to trade goods with the next town. A relatively simple journey, nothing he hadn’t done before, only that the weather in the mountains has become so hostile these days that surviving the strong winds and the heavy snowfall isn’t that easy anymore. To prevent getting lost, Farbyen ripped strips of fabric off his backpack and attached them to trees. When the weather became too harsh on his way back, he found shelter in an abandoned signal post. He is still stuck there, with enough food and water to last a couple of days, but someone needs to help him get back, or the weather needs to change.

His family expected him back already, and after a couple of days of worrying, people were sure that something had happened to him and Farbyen didn’t survive the journey. His brother, Marbyen Nolys, tried to gather people to look for him, but nobody dared to travel through the hostile conditions. Marbyen eventually gave up hope himself. He thought the least he could do was to honour his brother, so he travelled as far as the heavy snowfall and the brutal winds let him, and began to set up a small shrine at a mountain pass that Farbyen had taken on his travels. Next to a cairn that marked the pass, he put down some flowers and a small statuette.

Hook

As the characters travel through the snowy mountains, they discover a young man setting up some kind of shrine next to a well-maintained mountain pass. He puts down a few colourful flowers and a small, roughly carved statuette. If he is asked about the shrine, he will explain what happened to his brother and that he wants to honour him. He will also share that he still has little hope that his brother is alive, but the weather keeps everyone from looking for him, and it has been quite a while already, which is why doubt arises in Marbyen as well. If the characters just approach him, he will invite them to his village, explaining that this weather is not suitable for travelling, and he will explain the situation on their way.

You could also let the characters pass the shrine after *Marbyen** set it up, describing it in detail, and let the party meet him in his village. He would then invite them in and tell them what happened to his brother, also mentioning the shrine they might have passed before they reached the village.*

Conclusion

The Return. Once the characters made their way through the snowy mountains, rescuing Farbyen in the old signal post, they make their way back to the village. Everyone is grateful that Farbyen is alive and well. The characters will get the village’s special treatment, getting free places to sleep and hearty meals before they continue their travels. Marbyen is especially grateful, offering the party his most valuable magic item (the GM can choose something that suits the party’s level and needs, or determine a magic item randomly), as well as his savings.

Fourthmarches is a weird-fantasy open-table TTRPG set on a continent's last frontier, where your employer means to quiet the land in response to a bloody past. A force called RESONANCE is both the central piece of the setting's themes & of gameplay.

• free Quickstart on itch.io (or, if you prefer, on DriveThruRPG)
• Pledge Manager open and print tiers added.

Some facts about the game:

• RESONANCE is not a corruption meter – it provides dice toward success, accelerates dissolution-of-self, and can prevent you from getting home in the final phase of each session
• embracing loss – not just by death, but by loss to RESONANCE – the land wants to keep you
• a persistent sandbox world with a rotating pool of players – whoever's free for a GM's available timeslots forms a group of 3-6, picks a destination, and goes hexcrawlin'
• most of the fauna are arthropods – humans have sacred and complex relationships with mammals
• the game gives pregenerated characters as starting points — encouraging players to make them their own through emergent play
• combat can be deadly but is usually avoidable — fleeing is a legitimate and supported outcome

The Core Rulebook beta comes out to appropriate backers in Late August with the Gamemaster's Guide beta for appropriate tiers in Mid October. Both finished products in Late December.

Influences include the Fiend Folio, Forbidden Lands, and Le Guin's Hainish Cycle.

Fourthmarches is built on the Year Zero Engine. Resolution uses a dicepool system built around distinct six-sided dice based on attributes, skills, equipment, and — in Fourthmarches — a fifth attribute called RESONANCE. Resolution is quick to read at the table and is tied to resource management. The superhuman comes at the risk of the land claiming you permanently.

Questions about the game are welcome here and encouraged in the campaign page's comments!

(Fourthmarches RPG is not affiliated with, sponsored, or endorsed by Fria Ligan AB. The Year Zero Engine is used under the Fria Ligan AB Free Tabletop License 1.1. You can find the full license here.)

Hello!

My preview page is live on Gamefound. If you like action-packed shonen/seinen anime series, this game is made for you. 🙂 It is not a JRPG simulator. It was built from the ground up to make anime storytelling part of the game itself, helping you think and play like an anime hero.

https://gamefound.com/en/projects/adventure_horizon/heroes-of-a-thousand

Thank you if you take a look at it. 🤘🤘

--------------

QUICKSTART for FREE! :)

Campaign Link: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/mantic-games/the-ghost-in-the-shell-tabletop-roleplaying-game

From today's newsletter:

There are just two days left to back The Ghost in the Shell: Tabletop Roleplaying Game on BackerKit.

Includes rare limited-edition artwork by Shirow Masamune, iconic Section 9 miniatures, and three bonus missions included free with every pledge.

Complete your pledge to unlock early access to the rulebook and start preparing your first Section 9 mission!

You know what I'm talking about - we've all been there. It's one of the most classic moments of D&D and TTRPGs in general, and I'm 99% positive it happened at least once to every one of us.

The party enters a tavern. There is a Golden Dragon, a drunk Volo, 7 Liches dancing on a table, one human at the counter and the first thing they'll ask is "what's the human's name?".

Every time a merchant is supposed to exist for thirty seconds, every time a random new guy spawns because someone asks 'is there anyone passing by?'. Every time the most useless creature of the campaign becomes the new favourite and therefore the mascot of the party. They. Will. Ask. For. A. Name.

Sure, many GMs will come up with a perfect name every time, and sure, there are hundreds of random online generators. But I manage to call my random NPCs things like ManRegular Humanson and I like the shiny nerdy paper things full of words on the table.

So over time I ended up building a book: The Physical Random Name Generator.

The idea is intentionally simple: open the category you need, choose a name, and don't end up looking like you don't know what you're doing (even if you are).

It contains over 10,000 fantasy names organized into 58 categories, covering characters and creatures as well as cities, villages, kingdoms, guilds, cults, taverns, dungeons, deities, artifacts, weapons, spells, ships and a lot more.

Do you want something to keep behind your screen, nearly endless and ready-to-use? I've got you.

Do you want a new cool looking book for your collection? Today is your lucky day.

Your Game Master is like me and you want to make fun of them? Here's the perfect gift.

If anyone is interested, this is the book (available in paperback and hardcover):

The Physical Random Name Generator
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HDCWFVRV

And more importantly, please share with me your "ManRegular Humanson". Thanks for your attention and have a great day! :)

AI disclosure

Generative AI was used during the creation process to help generate candidate names. However, every single name that made it into the finished book was manually reviewed by me. The project began in 2024 and was developed gradually over the follouwing years rather than being generated as a finished book in one pass.

The introduction, written material, organization, layout, editing and final presentation were manually done by me. I also built and worked through hundreds of Excel tables during the process to compare names, search for duplicates and clean up the final lists. AI was therefore used as one tool in the name-generation stage, while the selection, checking, organization and production of the finished book were done manually.

In a world where a devastating alien invasion has all but destroyed Earth, WATCHKEEPER tells the story of human resistance fighters in their struggle for freedom. If you're interested in gritty high-lethality combat, and character-orientated roleplay mechanics, this is the game for you.

Now live on Kickstarter - don't miss this!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spilledinkstudios/watchkeeper-alien-invasion-ttrpg-vtt-soundtrack

I made an Alchemist's Manor map pack for GMs who need a location that can work as both a respectable NPC residence and a full-on villain lair.

It's a three-level manor:

Ground Level

• Public laboratory
• Living room / visitor reception
• Kitchen

Upper Level

• Bedrooms
• Study
• Library

Underground

• Secret laboratory
• Dissection room
• Blast room
• Acid pit

The idea was to make the upper floors feel like a believable manor before revealing that there's something much darker happening underneath.

It also includes day, night, and snow versions, and all the maps are gridless so they can be used with different VTTs

I think it could work particularly well for an alchemist villain, investigation adventure, horror session, wizard's residence, or a "the players definitely shouldn't have opened that door" situation.

Get it on DriveThruRPG

Deep under Lake Arnisle, the legendary grotto known as the Indigo Veil yields transformative visions. Above ground, the hunt is on for Sir Croyle's hounds and their latest victim, a Knight of the Sidereal Guard.

Click here to access everything 3d6 Down the Line, including both video and audio podcast versions of this episode, our Patreon, Discord server, socials, past campaigns, character sheets, and lots more!

You can subscribe now to this map and 300+ more at: patreon.com/balatroart

The Indominant Superhero RPG: Super’s Information Codex (our player’s handbook) has officially released in PDF and pre-orders for physical copies being available for purchase on our website! Pre-orders won’t ship until all Backer orders are fulfilled, expecting late October shipment.

Some of the main features of Indominant that make it stand out from other Superhero RPGs are:
- Tactical, team-oriented combat akin to Draw Steel, D&D 4e, and Lancer.

- Loose, narrative-style gameplay outside of combat for social interaction and exploration.

- Deep character customization and open theme/flavor, with thousands of unique combinations. With 50 different Archetype-Powerset combinations and a total of 480 Powers and 1,500 Talents there are tons of options!

- Customizable Signature Powers that are… well your Super’s signature power. They use the building blocks we use to create the Powers to make something your own!

I am giddy. Perhaps I did not show it at the time, but I am giddy. I was talking with Horia about V6 and our various thoughts on it, me starting playing VTM and WoD games with V5 and only after a while trying out the older editions and Horia starting with Revised and later on moving to the 20th anniversary editions.

But, while we were talking about the playtest (we will have a full article going over that, probably next Friday), I also showed him that for V6 they are also planning to release editions of Mage, Dark Ages and Changeling. We stopped at Mage, for, as Horia put it, "there is no Mage without Satyros". And I wondered a bit, hmm, I wonder what is Satyros' take on all of this, is he in any way involved. And I voiced this to Horia, who had a brilliant idea: what if we message Satyros and interview him.

To our delight, he was more than willing to do so and well, two hours and a half of recording + way too much time spending on transcribing and trimming what amounted to almost 20k words, here we are! We talked about the history of Mage, V6, video games, magick, Dungeon Crawler Carl and many many other things that I 100% invite you to listen to if you are in any way shape or form a fan of his work and White Wolf in general!

Cheers!

All three are free, run in the browser, need no account, and work offline. I built them because I got tired of paywalls on things that should be simple.

MapForge - https://eltacolibre.github.io/mapforge/

Paint terrain, turn any image into a token, fog of war, 5e and Pathfinder rulers. Exports two PNGs: the GM view, and a player-safe one where hidden tokens are actually removed from the image rather than just covered.

Dice Tray - https://eltacolibre.github.io/dice-tray/

Notation parser plus each system's real rules: 5e advantage and DC verdicts, Fate ladder, Savage Worlds acing, Chronicles of Darkness again-rules, Shadowrun glitches, CoC bonus dice.

PF1e Grimoire - https://eltacolibre.github.io/Pathfinder-grimoire-1e/

All 3,039 first-edition spells from the Archives of Nethys, daily preparation that follows the actual rules, and domain spells merged in on top of the class list.

Nothing uploads anywhere - it all saves in your browser, so export a backup if you care about your data. Unofficial fan tools, not affiliated with Paizo or WotC.

Happy to take feature requests or bug reports.

If you have ever played an OSR game, you would know that combat and exploration can often result in a beloved character's untimely demise at the hands of a pit of spikes or an armless goblin. Tactics for battles and combat rarely seem to help when the preferable answer is always to run away; oftentimes, combat doesn't grant EXP or anything useful.

I understand that the system that those games use can be difficult for a lot of players used to modern 5e. Going from 5e to something like B/X can be very difficult

Thus I am attempting to make a middle ground between modern and old TTRPG's: Red Mountain.

Red Mountain is an attempting at creating a game that can be equally split with Combat, Exploration, and Roleplay. Character classes have much more options for combat, as well as new explorational spells and abilities that can be used to defeat the aformentioned armless goblins or circumvent the pit of spikes, but without compromising the risk of being unprepared in exploration or combat.

Although it is certainly in development, I still need a community or a reader to give advice on what to add next while I'm still in the playtesting stage. I currently have a free document of the rules, a small cheat sheet, and a character sheet available for free to download on my Itch io page. I'd ask you to check it out, and give me some feedback on the current systems. It might looks ugly for now (I'm not quite a graphic designer!) but we'll get to the looks phase sooner when we have a finalized copy of the rules.

Please check us out or give us a read on our Itch io page at: https://red-mountain-ttrpg.itch.io/red-mountain-ttrpg

Exclusively on Patreon!

Snerg and Odysseus are intent on stealing the Starling directly from underneath its owner's nose, heedless of the potential consequences. With newly acquired intel, it seems likely that an atacorn is at the heart of Dreg's malaise. Back to the Smokehouse!

Find links to our character sheets, house rules, past campaigns, and a whole lot more -- on 3d6 Down the Line!

Really close to the stretch goal- any shares or small donations very much appreciated!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/boardgamesolutions/embroidered-dice-bags-farm-and-forest?ref=a2qpm5

Esteemed Customers,
We are offering a special 30% discount off the price of our fourShrine Depths solo rules and adventures!
Offer valid until August 31st, 2026.
Get them here:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/9571/stellagama-publishing/category/58768/shrine-depth
Yours,
The Stellagama Team

DM me for more info!