Tales From the Shelf

Geek Native is an independent news site and community for tabletop roleplaying games, board games, anime, and geek culture. It covers tabletop mechanics, industry news, and reviews with a critical but welcoming tone. Whether you’re a player, a Game Master, or somewhere in between, it’s a solid place to find content that actually holds up. It also publishes practical tools for session prep and world-building -  things like spaceship name generators and lists of oddly unsettling phrases to throw at your players. Alongside those, there are columns on the psychology of gameplay and table dynamics. It’s been around long enough to build a genuine community, and it shows. Links geeknative.com - Website

RPG advice and discussion. Let's talk gaming! Actual play channel with multiple campaigns on Bandit's Keep Actual Play. Links youtube.com - Youtube channel discord.gg - Discord server patreon.com - Patreon page

That RPG Podcast is a podcast about tabletop roleplaying games and the art of game mastery, where we create roleplaying game adventures on the fly from prompts submitted by our listeners. We each have a story to tell. Sometimes all it takes is a single idea to kick off a great adventure. Join us as we embark on a monthly quest to bring your stories to life. That RPG Podcast is about tabletop roleplaying games and the art of game mastery, where we create roleplaying game adventures on the fly from prompts submitted by our listeners. At the heart of That RPG Podcast is Adventure Hook!, a tried-and-true method for building RPG adventures with only a kernel of an idea. Each month we take a listener prompt and help it blossom into a fully-realized adventure you can use in your games. Links thatrpgpodcast.com - Official website youtube.com - Youtube playlist spotify.com - Spotify feed podcasts.apple.com - Apple Podcasts feed patreon.com - Patreon page discord.gg - Discord server

Lore Warden is a battle chronicle tool for tabletop wargamers. After a game, players record the essentials: who fought, the forces involved, the score, which units were destroyed and the MVP.Lore Warden writes the engagement up as a piece of prose they can keep, share, and have read aloud. It is deliberately system-agnostic. Faction and unit names are free text and are echoed back exactly as they were typed, so it serves 40k, Age of Sigmar, Necromunda, Mordheim, historicals, BattleTech or a homebrewed ruleset equally. Army lists can be pasted in whole and unit names are picked out automatically, and added/edited manually. There are three ways to use it. A single battle produces one self-contained tale. A tournament tracks rounds, wins, draws, losses and total points, with Swiss pairings and a recap for each round. An eternal war is an ongoing group campaign, where forces evolve over months, eras are marked, retired armies are given a final entry and honours ledger, and the whole thing can be brought to a close with a finale when the group wants an ending. What separates it from pasting a game into a general chatbot is continuity. Lore Warden holds each commander's force and everything that has already happened to it, so a campaign reads as one narrative rather than a series of unconnected write-ups, and it does not invent units that were never on the table. Commanders who would rather write their own account can do that instead and still have it recited. Opponents do not need accounts. A battle can be shared by code or QR for the other player to attach their force, or entered on their behalf as a guest, and every finished tale gets a public page that anyone can read or listen to without signing up.  Written tales are free, thirty of them, for the lifetime of the account, along with one spoken recital. A subscription lifts the written cap and adds a monthly allowance of spoken recitals.

Simple tavern keeper making his way through the universe and talking about Dungeons & Dragons. Crispy's Tavern is a drama YouTuber who covers stories both inside and outside the TTRPG space on Crispy's Tavern: Tales and Tea. On the side, Crispy gives advice to aspiring GMs and posts cosplay photos on their social media.  Links youtube.com - Youtube channel patreon.com - Patreon page

High Guard Rules brings Classic Traveller's Book 5: High Guard starship construction and combat rules to the web. Ship Designer walks you through building a warship from the keel up — hull, jump and maneuver drives, power plant, computer, weapons, and screens — following the Book 5 construction sequence, with every calculation (tonnage, energy points, agility, cost) handled for you automatically. Combat Arena lets you pit your designed ships against another player, or fly solo against an AI opponent — resolving the full Book 5 ship-to-ship combat sequence round by round: Battle Formation, Initiative, Range, Pre-Combat Decisions (break-off, emergency agility, surrender), Combat, Damage, Breakthrough Combat, Pursuit, and a Terminal step for boarding, repair, and crew transfer. Ship Library keeps your saved designs on hand, and Meeting Room is where you find another player and start a battle. Whether you're building a fleet, sparring with the AI, or working through a firefight against another captain, this site handles the math so you can focus on the tactics.