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.
Brother Ramas
Starting with Last Voyage of the Ghazali, we now have several brilliant NPCs that drift in and out of the campaign.
Possibly because I’ve only recently played it, but I’m pondering a lot on Coyote and Crow.
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.
Obvious I suppose, but I remember this seemed quite revolutionary at the time, I’m talking about Call of Cthulhu.
Call of Cthulhu 3rd edition
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.
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.
Covert Enochian Intelligence
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.
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.
The soon to come Faerie & Folkore for Liminal
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.
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.
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.
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 🙏).
Cthulhu Dark by Graham Walmsley
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!
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.
The Final Revelation
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.
Gumshoe for sure, but specifically it’s been The Yellow King RPG. I’ve run most of the published material and even started writing my scenario for the Paris setting.
Visible Forms
But, every Friday is now Cassilda’s Song, our playtesters continued from the Paris setting, completing the Wars and are about to start Aftermath.
That’s easy, though I could have waited until tomorrow afternoon to make it Bees of the Invisible, but I’ll go with Liminal by Paul Mitchener. A Manchester-themed adventure called The Edge of Reality, with the edge being Alderley Edge, a renowned UFO spot and the site of many an ancient myth.
Liminal by Paul Mitchener
The writer and GM is Jonathan; he leaned heavily on his local knowledge, seamlessly blending it with The Hidden, the Liminal dimensions that contain fae, Werewolves, vampires and ghosts.
I’m doing Autocratik’s RPGaDay 2024, see the link.
Today the question is First RPG Brought this year?.
Luckily Drive Thru RPG is my friend and I found out it’s The Dying Earth by Pelgrane Press. It may have been the first physical game I brought by Pelgrane, possibly via eBay as I didn’t have the pdf, until now.
It’s been oodles of hard work but we are less than a week away from the start of Pelicon 2024!
Pelicon 2024
Pelicon 2024 is a “replacement” for Gen Con Online, focusing on all the offerings from Pelgrane Press and a few more associated games.
One of the many helpers to get us to this point, suggested I should do a podcast about the journey, well, maybe for a later date, in the meantime here are a few statistics - 42 games, 25 GMs, 182 registered players, and over 100 players.
After Session One of our CoriolisMercy of the Icons campaign, I am now into double figures when it comes to Darkness Points. So what? And what are Darkness Points anyway (also known as DP)?
The Darkness Between the Stars
So in Coriolis the GM “earns” DP as the players push their rolls by praying to the Icons, there are other ways, but this is primarily how the GM gets them. The GM then uses this meta currency to mess with the players; triggering events, powering NPC special abilities, jamming their guns, etc.
In which we finish off the Coriolis Great Dark quickstart and do a quick ponder on what was good, bad and ugly.
Moon Ruin
We’d left the team halfway down the Delve, trying to balance Action versus Supply. This is a common theme as we’d gone through the scenario, Player: Let’s do X GM: That’s fine, but it will cost you n supply. It’s feeling very algebraic and transactional at times.
A fun first session running through the Quickstart adventure, we managed to get through the surface interactions and down into the delve - on the whole, it worked well mechanically, although it's easy to get into a slightly repetitive mechanical mode for the Delving, but probably needs more practice to make this a bit more natural and pull other players into the action and interaction.
The Gas Giant Moubarra
There is quite a lot to track and manage in terms of Blight Areas, Shifts, Supply, Hope, Heart, Health and Gear so very lucky to have the excellent FoundryVTT module handling all this from Miguel, see here. I can see this working well at the table, for example, the GM slowly removes your pile of supply tokens one-by-one as you get deeper into the cave system.
This UK TTRPG convention is the brainchild of Simon Barns, usually he's found dabbling with Dragon Warriors, but he's broadened he's oveure to take on a range of "Old School games.
Dahn Sarf 13th July
None of this debate on the definition of OSR, if Simon Says, then it is. Though from the lineup it definitely looks like a homage to the past. Some fantastic classic systems and scenarios.
