RPGaDAY 2026 overview

RPGaDAY 2026

These are always fun, seeing responses far and wide, especially on Bluesky this year. Got some inevitable New Bremen nostalgia in with the Vampire talk, also a fair bit of Mage as is active and long-running and a few others like supers and Star Wars. What will I be doing and talking about next year? We shall see!

New Bremen venues, what if

I was briefly imagining what a game chat like New Bremen would have looked like if we had players self-select into soft play and hard play characters, but stayed within the same setting. We had "unmoderated" chats where people went off and did whatever, but some of those folks might have stayed in the main community if they could soft play. I think the tag would need to be a clearly marked longterm choice, meaning no convenient ripcording out of hard play the moment something went wrong. Probably the Storytellers could have focused mostly on the hard play parts of the game if only because those required the most adjudication. Anyway, just idle thoughts about what could have been. Maybe subconsciously prompted because I ended up wearing an old Vampire T-shirt today.

Conrad Hubbard

And yes, I know some players effectively already did this by holing up in locked chat rooms.

--

RC

I feel like this would have addressed some issues.

One of the things I wonder about was also just a significant ratio of players to STs - where I wonder if there were enough people offering content to satisfy the intense demand. For some of the most popular venues - it would seem there was players present to consume content all hours of the day and no way to be able to reasonably have content ready to go for enough of them. As a consequence - for idle people who aren't against stirring the pot, they'd go off and cause a ruckus

Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF

Cassie Workman is Witchy AF, a comedy history of the occult, coming September 16

Via EP Lilly Wachowski

Update:

8o

Happy 60th birthday Shirley Manson!

Halsey, The Girl In The Tower

Halsey, The Girl In The Tower concert film

Tim Curry

"The way the world is, I think a silly evening in the theatre is a good thing, to take our minds off terror."

Vampire: The Masquerade V6 alpha

If that's what it comes out like then it will be okay after we houserule out about half the new ideas.

Dolly Parton

And I will always love you.

Spooky Cowboys

Am I thinking of doing a light spooky cowboy WoD game because of the light spooky cowboy band I just heard for the first time?

Bridge City Sinners

... Maybe.

Or, Mage session where Didi and Michael have to form a band to defeat the Crossroads Devil.

Lore from a certain point of view

One of the great joys of running a Vampire chronicle for people who have never played Vampire before is tossing them into a stew of contradictory conspiracies. Vampires love to present themselves as erudite and sophisticated, but they have very little evidence about their own supernatural world.

So far my group has heard...

* Three different creation myths about vampires

* Two different theoretical ways out of the curse

* About the existence of bloodlines, but not specifics

* About the existence of the Sabbat, with some (useless) history

* About werewolves and ghosts

They also heard about wizards ("they died out in the Middle Ages") shortly before meeting a mage, and about unaligned clans ("mostly weirdos who have very limited power") before running afoul of a Follower of Set/Ministry vampire.

They met a vampire who can survive sunlight at dawn

They met a mortal who can just see through Obfuscate. No idea why

They ran away from mortal hunters wearing FBI jackets, who were obviously not real agents

They have failed several gambits to get blood, and are coming to grips with the fact that they will have to do some questionable things

They discovered that animal blood is not very satisfying, then met a Kindred who feeds on animals exclusively

They heard that the Prince is Malkavian, then met her and the coterie's Malkavian immediately clocked that she is not

The Malkavian learned to aura read and has no idea how to interpret it

Everyone seems to be having a great time. It's a World of Darkness where there is lore, there is history, there are societies, but a rule is only a rule until it's broken. Supernatural things work the way they do because of magic, and symbols, and metaphors, not because of science.

Soon they'll get introduced to Gehenna, the End Times, Gehenna cults, and the mythology of the turning of the age. Probably hand-in-hand with crossing paths with actual Sabbat, an Anarch Revolt in their city, and thin-bloods looking for a place to survive.

The huge, sprawling metaplot of the World of Darkness causes some players to pursue setting mastery, to have full fundamental knowledge of the "truth" of the world, so I've made it pretty clear through events that "truth" is highly subjective and context-driven.

Everyone's got goals and agendas, but at the end of the night, it really comes down to, what will you do to survive? How are you going to make it happen? Where are you going to get blood? And who's going to pay the price for your sins?

Jesse Heinig

RPGaDAY 2026

#RPGaDAY2026

31 prompts for TTRPG writing in August.

Introduction, explanation and prompts from founder David F. Chapman.