ACCLAIMED ADVICE.

Following the work of one Paul Baldowski, I’ve picked up several gaming approaches that align with what I enjoy and get out of TTRPGs.

I first came across Paul’s work with his standout RPG, The Dee Sanction.

PEERLESS PLAYER.

Incredible fun sitting back and watching the performance of Mr Spike aka Mike Percival Maxwell, who played a mild-mannered antiquarian, Percy Blake, who had lycanthropic tendencies who was mainly concerned with finding a replacement for his frequently torn tweed suits.

This occurred in a fantastic Liminal game from Jonathan that threw up Mancunian vibes alongside Quatermass and ancient English legends, wonderful stuff.

Notable Non-Player Character.

I'll go for Meepo, a kobold from Tales from the Yawning Portal, specifically The Sunless Citadel.

We discovered him pining for his pet dragon Calcyrx and though we treated him with disdain his weedy appearance and trusting nature won us over (helped by an excellent voice performance from our GM).

CLASSIC Campaign.

So many to choose from but I'll plump for The Two-Headed Serpent for Call of Cthulhu 7e.

We ran this over a year, our Sunday group reliving Call of Cthulhu after a break of 40 odd years for some of us.

AMAZING ADVENTURE.

Let’s combine the Fabled Lands with Tunnels and Trolls, let’s arm the GM with a Gandalf-sized tome of campaign and adventure information and let’s bring in three of his regular roleplaying group to supplement the two con newbies.

So Tunnels and Trolls was a big nostalgic rush, I’d got my parents to get this for me one Christmas when I was 10 or 11. My brother laughed at the “silly-sounding spells” and “stupid maths stuff”! But it felt personal to me, perhaps a bit more approachable, less serious than D&D and that art by Liz Danforth, whoa mama!

SENSATIONAL SESSION.

I’m going to go for something from The Yellow King RPG, the RPG of supernatural horror based on the works of Robert W. Chambers. This session is from the Paris section of Cassilda’s Song (Robin D. Laws's four-book campaign, which will be coming when it’s ready from Pelgrane Press.

I can’t give too much away as it is a playtest and may be very different when it gets a commercial release. I know, I know, well done Jim for choosing something you can’t comment on! But maybe I can give a flavour.

MEMORABLE MOMENT OF PLAY.

It’s been hard to top the exit of two players from Eternal Lies.

We’d played Eternal Lies until Chapter two, but unfortunately, three of our players had to take a break, this unfortunately meant the permanent hiatus of Eternal Lies… but it WILL return, one day.

AN ENGAGING RPG COMMUNITY.

There can be only one for me, The Grognard Files.

Coming back to the RPG hobby in 2015, that year or maybe a little later, introduced me to The Grognard Files podcast, I quickly went back and devoured the first episodes that mixed cosy nostalgia with a reawakening of a previously dormant life, I was Robert De Niro in Awakenings, to Dirk and Blythy’s Robin Williams, that movie ended badly, didn’t it?

QUICK TO LEARN.

I’m going to go for Index Card RPG, I try and play new games every now and again, but I rarely come across a game where it clicks all at once, yes, I am slow.

I played Index Card RPG for the first time at 2023 Grogmeet, run brilliantly by Neil Old Scouse Roleplayer.

GREAT CHARACTER GEAR.

I really struggled with this, I’m not a power gamer and I tend to enjoy RPGs where I am just an average Joe or Josephine, so games where I have loads of cool gear, leave me a bit meh.

Still, it’s RPGaDAY so I’ve got to come up with something, so it’s The Hand of Vecna.

COMPELLING CHARACTERS.

Heavily influenced by starting the Coriolis Mercy of the Icons campaign, nevertheless, I’m fascinated by the wealth of characters in Emissary Lost and other adventures. Free League does NPCs well.

Starting with Last Voyage of the Ghazali, we now have several brilliant NPCs that drift in and out of the campaign.

Evocative environments.

Possibly because I’ve only recently played it, but I’m pondering a lot on Coyote and Crow.

At its heart, it imagines an alternate history, where a race and culture develops into the future, with subtle changes in religion, spirituality, nature and war.

RPG WITH WELL SUPPORTED CAMPAIGNS.

Obvious I suppose, but I remember this seemed quite revolutionary at the time, I’m talking about Call of Cthulhu.

Back in the day we were used to playing dungeon crawls, perhaps large sprawling dungeon crawls, but contained to one location. Call of Cthulhu suddenly had us hopping on a plane to Butan or paying for passage on a steamer to Istanbul, everything seemed epic and world-spanning, we HAD to go to the ends of the world to defeat Great Cthulhu, or more realistically, to curl up in a bawl and cry for mummy.

RPG WITH WELL SUPPORTED ONE-SHOTS.

Another easy one, I barely have to get the neurons off the couch, it’s The Dee Sanction, Adventures in Magick and Politics across Supernatural Tudor Europe.

This game paved the way for building a community on my Discord, The Raspy Raven. I’d forgotten I’d backed it to be honest, until a chance encounter on that there Twitter cajoled me into running it. When I first went to look, there was just the adventure in the rules, which was a multi-session, Lost In Translation, Ex Libris, that had been in an Orlanth Rex/Vex Podcast and the newly released Window of the Soul.

RPG YOU’D LIKE TO SEE ON TV.

It has to be Liminal, the incredible urban fantasy RPG from Dr. Paul “Tweedmeister” Mitchener, landlord of the ever popular Mitchester Arms, drop in on Friday for a beer and a chinwag.

I cannot imagine a more perfect setting for TV than the juxtaposition of the Liminal world of The Hidden and UK grim. Not least because you have so much of the inspiration for this from the artist Jason Behnke, check out his Liminal Gallery.

AN ACCESSORY YOU’D LIKE TO SEE.

Possibly it already exists in some AI form but I’d like to have a scenario pdf or document reconfigure itself for different usages;

• for different lengths of running time

• number of players styles of the GM and players

• survival ratio

• modes, such as purist versus pulp

• Other things I’m yet to think up because it’s late and I’m tired

As an example, this could be as simple as changing the scene flow diagram in Trail of Cthulhu and hiding the sections to turn a multi-session game into a tight three-hour con scenario - it doesn’t have to be AI rewriting the prose.

AN ACCESSORY YOU APPRECIATE.

There was only one thing in my mind when I saw this, the All Rolled Up from the minds and hands of Fil and Paul Baldowski.

An All Rolled Up Dice Bag is a luxurious piece of material that can hold more than 100 polyhedral dice, 10 pens and pencils, index cards or a small notepad… also highlighters, a pack of opal fruits and the amazing neoprene dice tray. It comes in over 240 variations!

But mine is not just any old All Rolled Up, oh no, it had to be the Oilskin All Rolled Up.

AN RPG WITH ‘GOOD FORM’

What! What! Some debate in RPG circles as to what ‘form’ means, but I’ve gone for a game that no one has nary a bad word to say about, Dragonbane.

In our gaming group, we call it the goldilocks of fantasy RPGs, not too crunchy, not too narrative... just right.

RPG THAT IS EASY TO USE

Being a fan of investigative horror RPGs and in particular Cosmic Horror, I’ve got to go for Cthulhu Dark (possibly in the future Cosmic Dark as I know it is soon to be released 🙏).

This game is the perfect narrative-focused RPG for horror and has the best rule ever written... If you try to defeat any supernatural creature
by fighting it, you will die. To me this gets to the heart of Cosmic Horror, you don’t give great Cthulhu an uppercut, you avoid its gaze, hiding gibbering in a corner somewhere as your brain melts, if you’re lucky!

RPG With Great Writing.

I have to say Trail of Cthulhu brought me back to the hobby, about seven years before I started playing again. The standard of writing and plotting is very high, from the bleak purist scenarios from Graham Walmsley to the epic Eternal Lies campaign from Wil Hindmarch.

Pelgrane has a habit of delivering great writing, with the ultimate sandbox of the Dracula Dossier and more recently the four settings of The Yellow King RPG. I could go on and on, but I was happily reading these scenarios and contemplating how incredibly they’d translate to an actual game, whilst also acknowledging the very small chance this would ever happen.