# RPG a Day 2026 - 29: Labour tags: #articles #articles/RPGaDay/2026 ![[RPG a Day 2026 (illo).jpg]] I was looking through my collection of recently acquired RPGs, and because I have that pack rat urge when it comes to being an archivist of the hobby, there are more than a few beyond the ones that I've picked up purely for their collectability or because they represented something I thought the author ought to be rewarded for. There's another common thread that runs through many of them: **There is a distinct lack of session prep or game prep.** The ones that I'm most excited by, the ones that I most enjoy thinking about, and the ones that I'm most likely to play all share that in common. There are no hours and hours of obsessing over the setting or spending days thinking about putting together a session for a group. Instead, they run on broad strokes and then on character-centric, character-driven activity with a pile of dynamically generated situations and elements as you go. Yes, we're going to talk about the usual suspects here, but we're going to put in a few you haven't seen, too. ## Starforged Let's just get it out of the way up front, because you knew it was coming. We all just need to sometimes sit back and let it wash over us. **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]** may have more session prep than you expected to hear me talk about, but it's not actually session prep. Most of the prep that you will do for it at any point occurs during Session Zero. It's there that you set up the Truths of your world, which — if you haven't seen me do an entire setup in the garden here before[^2] — involves going through a list of questions about your world and either picking from a list of answers or coming up with your own. If you aren't playing solo, but instead playing co-op or in a guided format, that would still be part of the game with all of the players involved. This is one of the things that make Session Zero as a concept, especially the way it's presented in **Starforged**, so absolutely key. You have player buy-in from the very beginning because they have had a hand in the establishment of the world. You probably don't understand how much difference that makes, not just for long-term play but short-term play, until you've done it a few times. Someone, at some point, will come up with something completely off the wall when it comes to answering these questions. The best thing you can do is just say yes and roll with it. At some point, surprisingly quickly, that's becoming a *major* element of play because *that* player has pointed to *this* part of the world and said, "I'm really interested in that. Let's do this." Some other player will look at the list of Truths and feel a certain resonance toward exploring one of them. Is what is on the paper really true? There's only one way to find out. You go and look. That player will be motivated to find out and engage with the world around that question. It's one of the most elegant solutions to a problem popping up in games all over the place: that players are not engaged; they don't have something that they care about. In **Starforged**, they will engage off the hop because they have no choice; they care. This happens even before character generation. Immediately after establishing the Truths of the world, you can start talking about the characters that you want to engage with the Truths of that world. Is this session prep? Sort of. It does take time, and it does take some effort, but it's not just *you* passively sitting there in front of a book trying to digest everything it has to say about the world. You have to engage with it. You will be creating it. You are thinking about it even as you are engaging with it. None of it's really set in stone. If you start off by establishing the Truth that there are no AIs, and later you have a twist and you essentially decide that your character runs into a gas planet-sized AI casually discarded by the Precursors, that's not really a problem. That's just you discovering the world. Sometimes there are surprises. Sometimes what you know is wrong. Establish the Truths and it's time to actually build the sector, which essentially lets you come up with a few points of interest scattered around your local system. Mainly, it's an exercise in rolling on tables and getting inspiration. What is this place you found yourself in? What do you know about it? Where are the mysteries? Where should you look? Maybe you have something that you want to do, so you just pick some stuff off the table or just declare it's the case outright. If you're playing with other people, again, you do this as a group. You're guaranteed to have a fairly decently populated starting area to give you a place for your vows to set in, and then you're off to the races. Before a session, do you need to do anything in particular? No. Maybe review your notes as to where you're at. That's it. You're good to go. Rock and roll. ## Loner The other three million kilo gorilla in the room is **[[Loner]]**, which is funny because it is almost a notional inverse of **Starforged**. They are both highly fiction-forward games that cannot exist without the fiction leading the way, but **Starforged** gives you a ton of tables and set up to do, while Loner does give you a fistful of tables, but no session zero in the sense that **Starforged** does. If anything, it thrives on the fact that it gives you those tables, and then you mix and match them in unusual and unexpected ways. For example, looking at the fourth edition omnibus in the core rules on page 68, you have the start of the section with the Adventure Maker, which tells you right up front. > The **Adventure Maker** helps you generate a unique world and the adventure premise when you don't have a setting in mind, want to play an unfamiliar game, or just need a quick framework before starting. Let's do it real quick. One roll on the **Settings** table, one on **Tones**, and two on **Things** — with the Things column chosen on a d6 (mine came up B both times, so two trips down the same column): > [!info] **Settings** > - 🎲 **45** / 66 → **Lovecraftian Cosmic Horrors** > [!info] **Tones** > - 🎲 **21** / 66 → **Epic and grandiose** > [!info] **Things** > - 🎲 **4** / 6 → **Things B** · 🎲 **43** / 66 → **Advanced biotechnology** > - 🎲 **4** / 6 → **Things B** · 🎲 **31** / 66 → **Submerged archive** And there's a world, made in about the time it takes to whip out the dice in the first place. Grand on a scale that makes a god feel like a footnote, built from biotech that was never meant to be seen — the whole of it half-drowned in a submerged archive older than the water that hides it. No prep to speak of so far. Then the premise — one roll on **Oppositions**, two on **Actions**, and one more on **Things** (the d6 chose A this time): > [!info] **Oppositions** > - 🎲 **52** / 66 → **Doom cult** > [!info] **Actions** > - 🎲 **46** / 66 → **Endure** > [!info] **Actions** > - 🎲 **12** / 66 → **Battle** > [!info] **Things** > - 🎲 **1** / 6 → **Things A** · 🎲 **14** / 66 → **Medieval castle** A cult devoted to Azathoth has got its hands on the castle that holds the archive, and it means to use it to bind the horror at the center of the cosmos to our world more directly. Within the castle is a well, flooded and miles deep, within which is a pulsating, writhing piece of the god itself, which the cultists are interrogating in order to learn the rites and processes to bring Azathoth into our world as a cancer of reality. The protagonist has to endure the rites — the waiting, the wrongness — long enough to battle what the cult is calling up. Still no prep; the tables just handed the whole thing over.[^1] You're ready to play. Make a character and dive on in. No muss, no fuss. Life is easy and golden if you want to play a game. ## Chamber (for Agon) I'm pretty sure I haven't spoken of **[[Agon]]** before on Grim Tokens, which is a bit of a shame because it's a fascinating game with an interesting premise and some exciting mechanics that involve being both cooperative and competitive with your fellow players. I've probably not brought it up much because it is a GM'd game, and I do tend to avoid those. But in this case, when we talk about minimum prep and maximum payoff, it's totally worth bringing up. The version that we're going to bring up is called **[[Chamber]]**. Why does it come up here? Because despite the fact that there is a fair amount of implicit setting backload (it being 1968 and your protagonists being government agents tasked with dealing with an alien signal that's loose in the world), the GM really has very little to do in terms of setup. You create three starting leads, which are essentially clues you roll from tables. The agents can start with any of those leads and then discover one that leads to a different operation as you play. The point for the GM is not to focus on the dangers or trying to present a mystery. Weird shit will happen and you just let it. Focus on what the players are dealing with at any given moment, whether it's enemy agents or civilians in the way, or the weird-ass signal resonant materials that you're going to run into. Players are going to make stuff up, let them, roll with it. You don't need to come up with the answers before you start. Here's what the generator hands me when I actually run it — one each off **Objective**, **Leads**, and **Locations**, a pair of **Signal Anomalies**, and an SRM off the intel list: > [!info] **Objective** > - 🎲 **4** / 4 → **Follow a lead to Soviet СТРЕЛА agents, discover their mission regarding the SIGNAL or SRMs, and take appropriate action.** > [!info] **Leads** > - 🎲 **8** / 10 → **A desperate person claiming to be a CHAMBER agent, seeking your aid after their cell was lost.** > [!info] **Locations** > - 🎲 **8** / 12 → **A rock quarry, evacuated due to an earthquake** > [!info] **Signal Anomalies** > - 🎲 **4** → **Elemental aberrations — ceaseless rain, unquenchable fires, etc.** > - 🎲 **1** → **Hypnotic sounds, thunderous noise, light beams, flashes, or orbs** > [!info] **SRM Intel** > - **SCAFFOLD** — *[ INTEL REQUEST PENDING ]* Which compresses into the book's own shorthand: > [!info] **Operation** > OBJECTIVE: 4 // LEAD: 8 // LOCATION: 8 // ANOMALIES: 4, 1 // SRM: SCAFFOLD > > *You went in off a panicked call — a man claiming to be a lost CHAMBER cell, bleeding his story out by a payphone. He had a scar, a Soviet STRELA badge he shouldn't have been holding, and a reason to point you at the rock quarry the earthquake had already emptied. What was there burned with fires that wouldn't die, under a sky that hummed and flashed at you like it was trying to say something. Whatever the file marked SCAFFOLD actually is, the agency still hasn't decided whether you get to know. Good. You don't need the answer before you start — you go find it.* And that's it. That's the prep. The table just handed you an evening. ## Star Trek Adventures: Captain's Log Speaking of games you never expected to see, because you may not have known it ever existed, we have the solo-specific version of **[[Star Trek Adventures - Captain's Log|Star Trek Adventures: Captain's Log]]**. Is it obscure by most people's measure? Absolutely. If they do know there's a Star Trek RPG, they think of the big multiplayer one, possibly the old FASA one. But no, we have this lovely 6 by 9 hardback **Captain's Log** book, and it's actually pretty amazing. Is it heavy on the mechanics? Shockingly, no. In fact, it probably leaves more to interpretation than many people would prefer, but I like it a lot. What it does have is tables. Oh, so many tables. Vast numbers of tables. Tables for character generation, for ship types, for encounters, for a vast number of things. Species, inclinations. There's not a table that contains *"a perverse sexual lust for Horta,"* but I wouldn't put it past them to slip one in through an expansion at some point. That's okay because it makes it very easy to roll up just about anything that you're going to encounter on the fly as you encounter it, because the resolution system is fairly straightforward. The only time you're going to spend confused and thinking about what to do next is in the context of the fiction. However, if you're looking for how to generate a mission, it's on page 265.[^3] Speaking of which, let's generate a mission. **Era: Next Generation (2300–2401).** No Session Zero, no setting bible, no planning. Just rolls — one on **Mission Type** and then that type's own matrix, one each on **Incident** and **Theme**, a d20 for the **Advantage or Complication** turn, and a **Type of Encounter** with its sub-matrix: > [!info] **Mission Type** > - 🎲 **15** / 20 → **Show the Flag** > [!info] **Show the Flag** > - 🎲 **19** / 20 → **Transport staff to relay station** > [!info] **Incident** > - 🎲 **8** / 20 → **Investigate** > [!info] **Theme** > - 🎲 **17** / 20 → **Temporal anomaly** > [!info] **Advantage or Complication** > - 🎲 **15** / 20 → **Complication (roll twice)** > [!info] **Complication** > - 🎲 **8** / 20 → **Environmental Danger — the area around the crew turns lethal** > [!info] **Complication** > - 🎲 **6** / 20 → **Unexpected Attack — an outside force attacks** > [!info] **Type of Encounter** > - 🎲 **8** / 20 → **Different Time or Reality** > [!info] **Different Reality or Time** > - 🎲 **2** / 20 → **Three days in the future, where a bridge crew member has mysteriously died** And there's a mission, made in the time it takes to shake out a handful of d20s. A routine "show the flag" milk run — ferry a relief crew and a stack of technicians out to a relay station that's stopped checking in — blows wide open the moment the ship answers its broken distress call. The space around the relay turns lethal in agonizingly slow graviton waves that rip at the ship's architecture, which would be bad enough on its own, except *something* is hiding in the future and has clocked the ship and moved to attack. The main monitor flashes and on it is a broadcast from three days in the future. Three days from now, a bridge officer is going to be dead, and something is already making sure it happens. Don't decide yet who's behind it, or what wants the ship dead — roll that up when you actually meet them, mid-play, the way the game intends. Investigate the anomaly, work out which three days went wrong, and get the crew home. It doesn't matter where the table drops you; there's always[^4] a way through. ## CBR+PNK You want no prep out of the gate, ready to go, high speed, low drag action. Do you want to pull out something that is so slight that your players won't be able to be intimidated because all they're looking at is a pamphlet, a trifold? Well, do I have the thing for you. **[[CBR+PNK]]**. Now the trade-off for all of this go-faster nature is that it starts with a very constrained premise. The protagonists are cyberpunks who are doing their last run. You know, there's always that thing that makes you do one more, and this is the one more. Coming up with that one more thing is in fact part of the game for the player. You know what? Let's run through the setup process just because we can. One pass through the **Framework** brochure's on-the-fly /RUN tables — a roll each on the **Objective**, **Exterior** and **Interior Location**, **Target**, **Status**, **Environmental Issue**, **Payload**, **Origin**, **Streets**, and the **Engagement Plan**: > [!info] **/RUN Generator** > - **Objective** — 🎲 **4** / 6 → **Smuggle / Courier** > - **Exterior Location** — 🎲 **5** / 6 → **Slums** > - **Interior Location** — 🎲 **4** / 6 → **Apartment complex** > - **Target** — 🎲 **4** / 6 → **Scientist** > - **Status** — 🎲 **5** / 6 → **Imprisoned** > - **Environmental Issue** — 🎲 **5** / 6 → **Power outage** > - **Payload** — 🎲 **2** / 6 → **Critical data** > - **Origin** — 🎲 **2** / 6 → **Crowdsourced** > - **Streets** — 🎲 **5** / 6 → **Gang war** > [!info] **Engagement Plan** > - 🎲 **5** / 6 → **Transport** A crowdsourced job drops onto the Grid: some anonymous chummer has thrown up a bounty for a **scientist** who's been **imprisoned** in an **apartment complex** in the **Slums**, holding **critical data** that needs **smuggling** out. The power's out across the district, which reads as a gift — no cameras, no streetlight — except a **gang war** has turned the streets outside into a no-man's-land of muzzle flashes and burning cars. The play is **Transport**: get in clean, walk the scientist and the data out, and don't get caught between two crews who'd each pay to have you dead. Pick an Approach, mark your load, and see what breaks. Frankly, if you can't run a cyberpunk game for a few hours with that in your grubby little fist, I don't even know what you're doing here. You want to play that solo? It's got plenty of meat. You want to sit down at a table for a pickup game with a bunch of guys you've never met before at a convention and half of you are kind of drunk? It's rock and roll time, baby. Put together some characters and away you go. ## Exeunt The idea here, originally at least, was to show that the obsession with game prep that you find popping up all over the place as a reason for GM burnout and as too intimidating to actually start playing a game is effectively bullshit. It's not true. It ain't real. It's only the case if you restrict yourself to playing super traditionally architected RPGs that have spent the last 50 years trying to convince you that you need to buy 60-page modules and 300-page supplements, memorize them, and then sit down at the table to guide people through the story as someone else has written it. None of that's true. None of that is the case. If you believe that, please kick yourself in the rump. Then go pick up one of the games I've talked about here, all of which are pretty reasonably priced, all told, from absolutely free up to $30 or so. Sit down either alone or with someone else and just play the game. That's all you have to do. You don't have to prep, you don't have to obsess, you don't have to read 600 pages. Commit it to memory. All you have to do is play the game. To quote one of the most important phrases in TRPG hobby history: *"Play to find out."* I'm not going to tell you to touch grass. I'm telling you that it's time to find out. [^1]: Ironically, there is actively a **[[Loner - Cthulhu!|Loner: Cthulhu!]]**, which I could have pulled more specific tables from, but it wasn't necessary. This just happened to fall out. Ironic and amusing. [^2]: If you're looking for those places, they are **[[HPotS 000 - Building Your Truths|HPotS 000: Building Your Truths]]** (Ironsworn), **[[Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny - World Design]]** (Ironsworn), **[[Starforging the Jedi]]** (**Starforged**), **[[Forging the Path to Free Trader Beowulf]]** (**Starforged** & **Sundered Isles**, in a Traveller skin), and **[[Dark Dungeons Runs Deep - Dark Deeps]]** (**Sundered Isles**). [^3]: If you were looking for a book to hand to someone who had never, ever seen **Star Trek** in any of its manifestations, this would be a perfectly fine source book to get them into the series on multiple levels, when it comes to familiarity with the eras and the shivs and essentially every single part. This is a one-book, ready-to-go rock-and-roll text to a level that is a little bit absurd. [^4]: Usually.