This week I put out a new ttrpg called You Meet at a Fantasy Tavern, which is all about taking the awkward start of a new ttrpg campaign where you're still figuring out what the party dynamics are and how the player characters even know each other, and turning that into a whole game.
I originally wrote this for @binarystargames's minimalist game jam, and its a supplemental game meant to warm the players up for a campaign in a game with a more traditional campaign structure like dnd, or pathfinder, or blades in the dark, or lancer, or what have you. The premise of the game is a play on the old dnd trope where the party meets for the first time in a fantasy tavern (although rules as written the meeting place can be whatever you need to fit the genre of your game) and the players draw cards to ask each other questions and get put in Situations that flesh out the relationships between the characters and why they hang out.
Playtesting this game was a lot of fun and we kinda discover in playing that YMFT is also a really effective improv exercise that gets you comfortable playing in character with a new pc really fast and we came up some really fun pcs, like Fish Boy Detective here, which is the character I've most enjoyed playing in a minute.
Check it out there are still a bunch of free community copies available.
A Story Starting game