August is RPGaDay month. Yep, a month solid of RPG-related posts, answering these questions:

Today’s question is this:

How do you find out about new RPGs?

I imagine I do it the way most people do now, if they don’t live in a city with an active gamer community. 

That is, I have two sources of information: fellow gamers buddies, and the internet. 

To be more specific, I have a couple of good friends who’re also RPGers, and who were more firmly ensconced in the hobby when I’d just come back to it. One of them actually suggested I submit an adventure scenario to LotFP back October 2015, which not only resulted in an ongoing project, but also accelerated my return to being actively engaged in the hobby. (I needed to playtest the adventure I wrote, and to do that I needed a group.)

So I hear about things from those guys, and they occasionally loan me rulebooks they think I’ll be interested in, or point me at things they think I’ll like. (That’s how I ended up backing the Yellow King RPG Kickstarter, for example.)

Then there’s the Internet. I don’t really hang out on a lot of RPG fora, or even spend a lot of time on Google+ (which, unlike the rest of the world, gamers seem to have adopted very eagerly, I imagine because Google Hangouts can be easily used for gaming). But I still somehow end up getting information off the Net.

A couple of ways I do this are:

• researching games that I hear about and would like to know more about, often on the usual RPG discussion boards
• listening to podcasts (including Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, Glowburn, Midnight Express, and the now-on-hiatus but lovely and inspiring RPG Gamer Dad podcast. I used to listen to the occasional “actual play” podcast to get a better idea about a given game system, but I find them less listenable as time goes by—though I still use them when I need to get a handle on an unfamiliar game system)
• checking out the Pay What You Want products on DTRPG and RPGNow
• in the past, watching the occasional Tabletop video on Youtube. (Wil Wheaton might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the actual plays of Dread and Fiasco were very useful to me at one time.)

I wish I could say that another way I get info is by wandering into my FLGS—my “friendly local games shop” but in Jochiwon, South Korea, there’s no such thing. There’s apparently a couple of board game cafes over in Daejeon (the people I know seem to frequent 메카), and a great RPG/boardgame cafe up in Seoul, but grown-up life (and the fact that I’m always stupidly busy) means regular travel to either of those places is even less practicable now than it was when when I lived in a suburb of Seoul, so I make do with these sources of information, and save my trips to Daejeon for dates when I know I will be running a game.