RPG day

Come play one of four one-shot RPGs on our final RPG event of the year!

As these events are always popular, tickets are compulsory, and you’ll need either Standard or discounted Term 2&3 membership to obtain one, available from our page for £3.

Important note about cancellations: While we expect ticket-holders to make an effort to come, we understand life gets in the way sometimes and you might have to cancel. If this happens, the best course of action is to cancel your ticket through this page, and inform me by email ([email protected]). I will try to read  Discord messages but if you’re not on my friends’ list I don’t get notified and have to manually check for them, so email is preferable.

RPGs below:

1. Beyond the Pale

  The year is 1357. The once dominant Elven empire is beginning to show signs of decline, as unrest fills their populace. The High Elven government saw only one solution: to conquer the one place they were never able to: the woods of the Pale. The Wood Elves of the Pale, of course, objected, and the two sides are now at a standstill.

  You are denizens of the Pale, and you aren’t exactly keen on letting the High Elves take the land you call home. The stalemate between the two forces is still holding, but rumours have it that the High Elves are creating a secret weapon to turn the tides of battle to their favour. A weapon which is hidden within a pocket dimension of sorts, which your group happened to stumble upon… 

  It’s a wonderful day in the Pale, and you are dastardly saboteurs.

GM: Hong Yin Bosco Cheng (he/him)

System: DnD 5e (2014 and 2024 are both accepted)

Players should be familiar with RPGs and have a decent understanding of this particular system/ruleset.

Pre-made characters at level 5 are recommended, but in session creation is allowed. 

Trigger warnings: War, NPC death, allusions to pseudo-historical events

Accessibility: players need to be able to roll dice and read the numbers on them, or use a digital set of dice

2. Steel Remains

ABOVE US, THE CITY, SPIRE, STRETCHES INTO THE SKY. BENEATH US, THE CITY, HEART, STRETCHES INTO THE EARTH.

DOWN THROUGH DIRT AND ROCK AND WATER, DOWN INTO THE DEPTHS OF DARKNESS, DOWN INTO MADNESS AND SICKNESS, DOWN INTO SOMETHING ANCIENT AND OTHER.

You are contractors for Gwnn-Enforr Academy, who are sent from the city above into the cursed passages of the Heart. Rumor has it that new passages in Sump Station have been uncovered, so your team has been sent to delve through the haunted remains of the mass transit network and scavenge for techno-occult artefacts. 
 

GM: Eliana (any pronouns)

System: Heart: the City Beneath

Players should have a vague understanding of how RPGs work and play, though experience with a particular ruleset isn't necessary.

Pre-made characters will be provided for players.

Trigger warnings: blood, gore, claustrophobia, gaslighting, drowning, physical restraint, self harm, suicide, NPC death, PC death, organised religion, body horror, references to drug use, references to a pandemic

Accessibility: my handouts are available in large font sizes; I make use of the X card or Stoplight safety systems
 

3. Trilogy: The End Of History

An era of peace and prosperity for the galaxy has ended. In only a few short years, THE SCOURGE has wiped out nearly half of all galactic civilisation, and shows no signs of slowing down. Now is a time of monsters.

Hi! If you're a fan of a more fast-paced narrative ttrpg experience, or want to dip your toes into Pseudo-GMing and worldbuilding, this is the game for you. You will each create and play a CHARACTER- a member of the group of player characters, and an ANSATZ, a place or community central to the story of another player's CHARACTER. While play is happening within the ANSATZ you control, you will effectively be Co-GM, while your CHARACTER will take a back seat. You will all get to establish the history and (space) geography of the setting via CHARACTER and ANSATZ creation at the beginning, so if you have worldbuilding ideas you'd like to see realised or an OC you can’t put anywhere else, this is a good place.

Since this will be my last RPG day, I've decided to run something a bit more melodramatic- not miserable, this system is designed for heroic space opera, but please do come prepared for doomed relationships, betrayals, characters' worst fears coming to pass, all that good stuff.

GM: Jen (she/her)

System: Trilogy 

Players should have a vague understanding of how RPGs work and play, though experience with a particular ruleset isn't necessary.

All character creation will be done in session.

Trigger warnings: war, natural disasters and/or extreme weather events, NPC death, PC death
 

Accessibility: I have plain text files available of handouts

4. Whispers in Barbed Wire

The British Lee Enfield rifle holds ten rounds. 10 brass shells, in truth messages composed in smoke and powder. When fired alongside twenty other men and women in your squad, you're a member of a choir, hymns of doom and wrath soaring across mud-soaked no mans land to the poor, weeping boy clutching his mauser to his chest like the blanket of his childhood. When you clear the top of his trench after the whistle blows, and level the barrel at his tear-streaked face, it is a love letter. Intimate, to be seen by writer and recipient alone, a world shared between two that vanishes in the pull of a trigger. In the middle of a battlefield? It is a voice in a crowd, lost in its frenzy but indispensable, for without thousands like it, the voice of the masses is no voice at all.

So what is it now? The smooth, salty barrel pressed into the roof of your mouth, your tongue coated in the sooty taste of gunpowder and muzzle burn? 

It is a diary entry. An obituary. A farewell letter, and a warning to those stupid enough to take the recruiter's hand. It is a key, and the coins paid to the ferryman to take you away from this horrible fucking war. Men and monsters are in the poet's eye the same thing in this war at the Somme. They write that Haig's men are no different to cattle and beast, blindly pressed forward into the slaughter. 

Easy to say, when the true monsters don't stand right in front of you. Men dead twice over, rising from the piles of corpses in no man's land, eyes filled with insatiable, monstrous hunger. Unholy marriage of steel and flesh, spouting from wrecked tanks that wander ponderously into the lines on both sides, screaming men disappearing into their pitch-black hulls with gut-wrenching pops and crunches. Laughter, moans, and unearthly chants from the officer's quarters at night, keeping you wide-eyed and terrified at your post as you attempt to recall the last time the captain seemed to blink, or stop smiling. 

Your finger feathers the trigger, hovering atoms away like they do with the naked body of your first lover, a maelstrom of emotions stopping you from taking the next step, yet your need to escape, forget the present, taken away from the here and now into somewhere else drawing calloused skin closer to cool metal. 

Yet, as you're about to escape, something stops you. Your squad is already down to so few. You owe them. So the trembling finger stops, and the barrel leaves your mouth, covered in spit, your body shaking from adrenaline. The medic from squad Whiskey, Sasha, has apparently acquired gifts. Gifts of healing, poultices to soothe both mind and body, all in exchange for a little blood. 

Maybe just a drop will do. 

Helloooo, this is a story about struggling through New Somme, a hellhole where the occult has breached the veil after the mass casualties and death drew the attention of.. something. This will be a system where you'll probably die. Have fun :).

GM: Yang Li Siaw (he/him)

System: Never Going Home 

Players should have a vague understanding of how RPGs work and play, though experience with a particular ruleset isn't necessary.

Character creation will be done in session, but players should look at character options in advance.

Trigger warnings:  war, bugs and rats, blood, eyeballs, gore, harm to animals, harm to children, spiders, kidnapping, sexual assault, cancer, claustrophobia, freezing, gaslighting, genocide, suffocation, natural disasters and/or extreme weather events, physical restraint, paralysis, police violence, pregnancy miscarriage and/or abortions, self harm, suicide, starvation, torture, demons, undead, NPC death, PC death, organised religion, body horror, references to drug use, transphobia/homophobia/queerphobia, racism, sexism
 

Accessibility: Players need to be able to roll dice and read the numbers on them, or use a digital set of dice; I make use of the X card or Stoplight safety systems