2024 McCfesto Part Three
2024 McCfesto Part Three (Community)
Here we go, the final part of my plans/manifesto for 2024, this time we are looking at my Discord, The Raspy Raven, and the wonderful GMs and Players on it. In particular, we have a few community projects and plans for more in 2024.
A bit of History
So first and foremost The Raspy Raven exists because of The Dee Sanction the wonderful historical, supernatural OSRish game from Paul Baldowski. This is because I unwisely decided to run all the published scenarios and whilst fun it was pretty intense and draining. I also share the blame with Chris Sharp but I also forgive him as he's produced a wonderful module for Foundry VTT and I was silly enough to offer to playtest it.
The server proliferated from around 5 people to 50 in the space of a few months.
Since then I've run similar "let's play to find out" seasons, to answer questions of "is this system any good", or "what is the best setting for a system", or just "we like this" - this included 2d20, Free League, Gumshoe. Then we moved on to more intangible things - Cyberpunk, Wild West and a smaller Heist season, where everyone built a scenario from scratch using a starting paragraph.
A real highlight of our Wild West season was having the designer of Liminal and Out of the Ashes Paul Mitchener run Kevin "Swords of the Serpentine" Kulp's Owl Hoot Trail, we had Kevin and another of the creators in the game, Matthew Breen, it was a wonderful adventure and great to see the joy on Kevin and Matthew's face as they played in the game they put together, ten years ago. Kevin, being the hero he is also went on to hack and run a version of his Swords of the Serpentine game, Six Guns and Serpentine, fun times!
The Birth of Community
Then we decided to create different community areas, the first was a monthly turn-based game of En Garde, this was the brainchild of Chris and he still produces his monthly newsletter and manages the turns of around 50 grogs. We've had wars, duels, scandals and plenty of biscuit-related shenanigans from my PC Lazare de Bourbon, long may this continue!
Our next community project has been a bit stop-start, it's the Raven Marches, we decided to run a West Marches campaign for around 30 players. We chose Knave as the system, but it's been bogged down with scheduling issues, so we hope to relaunch early this year. We had a lot of debate around the best way to manage the world-building Kanka or Google Docs. Kanka has the better structure but has a horrible interface, I've seen it work very well in campaigns, but others are still to be convinced. Mainly we need more GMs to run games regularly, if you are interested let me know!
Our next community project is a little controversial, it's Night Witches and in particular, the scenario The Unwomanly Face of War. This will be a multi-table event over four hours, where four sections of a squadron play through various missions, we have roughly the numbers, but finding a date, a day, and a time that works, for twenty people, will be horrific!
I know some will say it's not an appropriate game to run given the situation in Ukraine, but we are not glorifying war, we are focusing on the individuals, their relationships, the bravery of these women under harrowing circumstances and a unique period of history. I encourage you to listen to Jason Morningstar talking about his game and the reasons he took it on and also the actual play write-up from Katherine Ross. That said, this is probably the first and only time I'll talk about this game.
Further Seasons
Lastly, we come to the seasons, a large part of what our discord is about.
We are due to kick off our 2nd Gumshoe Season; This year we are running 12 games in 12 days, 12 different systems, 12 different GMs. It is a mix of Raspy Raven GMs, game designers and newbies running games and we hope to have around 50 places to sign up to. The games range from published scenarios to complete homebrews and in some cases, yet-to-be-released Gumshoe systems.
Interested in joining us?
First, join The Raspy Raven and let us know what you're here for. The games will be released on Friday 5th Jan.
Our next season will be in April, this is a mini-season, just 7 games and it's based around a few "rules"; First it must be a homebrew or an improvised scenario. Second, it must be, however loosely, inspired by The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Lastly, it has to be Graham Walmsley's the Cthulhu Dark system, or a derivative e.g. Cosmic Dark, Trophy Dark/Gold, there are probably many more out there!
Beyond that, we've discussed a Liminal season, a repeat of our Freeleague-a-rama, a Cold War season and a D&D 3rd edition season, I'll likely hand over the reins on these.
I'll need a break.
Raspy Raven GMs
We also have some regular GMs who run a series of games, including Rob aka UK Gamer Podcast who is king of the hacks plus his own original games. Whatever season we are running, Rob can usually find a hack for it. Check out his games on Drive Thru RPG here. He also has a Patreon here. Oh and a YouTube channel here. The latest review of his is The Walking Dead, which Rob is running for a couple of groups in a few weeks.
Next is Simon, chief whip cracker of the Casket of Fays, an amazing and free Dragon Warriors zine. He's run a variety of games on The Raspy Raven some may say OSR is his thing, but there is also punk Cthulhu and he's currently looking for Dr Who companions. He also helps organise a variety of Dragon Warrior/OSR cons. He is energy personified!
Then we have Fabio not only a skilled Call of Cthulhu GM, currently going through the classic scenarios which have morphed into the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth but also with Julie the owner of Morgue Miniatures, check out their last Kickstarter here.
Finally, there is Graham, who's created a nice, somewhat civilised afternoon RPG session running and playing in games of Trophy Dark, Beyond the Wall, various homebrews and Dragonbane. Graham also does a lot of the art for our seasons and has produced some wonderful games and resources on his itch.io site, see here.
If you have an idea for a community project or a season or just want to join in, then drop us a line at The Raspy Raven and hopefully, we'll see you in a game soon.