For the Love of Dog

Our Travelers left Littleville, continuing their Journey to the next Stop. Bruised, distraught, but feeling a spark of Hope, that light in the dark that keeps them moving forward...

So ends the first play through of The Electric State. An alpha pdf, so a fair few sections are missing and those that have been delivered are subject to change.

The Acid Test

Four on a road trip. Four in a car. Four feeling tension. But four share a destination. One in the rear dreaming of a world without Neuronics, one behind the wheel who has to keep moving, one next to him but a hundred miles away - their gears softly grind and one in the middle grinding their teeth, a glance over her shoulder, "Is it safe?".

The car enters town, the sun casting vibrant red light over the Sierra Nevada, streetlights flicker, then blaze, then go out.

Gumshoe and Pelgrane Virtual Con 2024, Part 4

Here we are on to the final games and some thoughts on how it went and what's next.

So, to Fear Itself Mr. Hector "Fiasco" Trelane tried to gather as many victims as he could to try this sometimes ignored, but brilliant iteration of Gumshoe. He'd picked out the classic scenario Ocean in the Forest from the 1st edition of Fear ItselfFear Itself

Players were gamers themselves, attending a LARP camp where there was a competition for a sizeable prize. But the enthusiasm started to boil over into naked aggression, the players showed ingenuity and won a few team games, before the whispers began and the horror descended!

Gumshoe and Pelgrane Virtual Con 2024, Part 3

We come to the final games and start with a cracker, Timewatch from Paul Baldowski, a scenario called Sink or Swim. Not only did Paul take us back 300 years and then another few billion, but he also provided us with memorable PCs Ambrose Bierce, Theo Burr, and Louis Le Prince plus, the debatable star of the show Kwasi Kwarteng. Paul graciously made these available for free see here.

A complex plot across just a few scenes and a few NPCs shows how much you can fit into a Timewatch one-shot! Much thanks to Paul for taking time out of a busy schedule to run this game, do check out his brand new game SANCTION, universal rules for challenge-driven games, like The Dee Sanction.

Gumshoe and Pelgrane Virtual Con 2024, Part 2

Moving on to The Fall of Delta Green and Mr Fabio, a Raspy Raven regular GM pulled out all the accents for his 1960s investigation into a hippie cult. The scenario is On a Bank by Moonlight. You can still get this free scenario, released as part of RPG Day in 2018.

It's hard to talk through this without giving away major spoilers, but it seems the group dived into the initial investigation with aplomb. Then things started to fall apart, as the authorities muscled in on the action and everything went to hell. Luckily no one was badly injured and apart from a major ear-bashing from their superiors, the group could class this as a marginal success. Much kudos to Fabio for his North American drawl in portraying the hippies at the commune.

GrogLove 2024

GrogLove/Law comes around quicker than you think, but is now a UK con that is a regular for me, usually running twice a year in Feb and Oct, it's the hard work and inspiration of Jim Jim, DaveP and Alex. It's also a tribute to them that this small London con is always so full of variety and enthusiasm as well as being brilliantly organised AND on my doorstep.

I'd left home in plenty of time, aiming to get to The Marquis Cornwallis for 10am. Unfortunately, a distraction looking for the latest 2000AD and Doctor Who Collection at a rammed Euston (nerd credentials confirmed!) and then a Discord PbtA point of order got me distracted, so I arrived around 10.15, sat at the wrong table like someone's discombobulated grandpa, before being gently led to my gaming table and Game 1...

So you want to have some fun? Break out the big guns

Here's a quick run-through of how I've put together my Esoterrorists scenario for a season of Gumshoe games on my discord. If it sounds ga-ga or fairly tongue-in-cheek, it's because it is. This is how a right-brained person and a specific individual i.e. me, put this together. I do not recommend this method for sensible scenario design. I've put my other scenarios together in a much more logical and structured fashion, but this is the way this one came out.

Step 1 - Steal

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

2024 McCfesto Part Two (Playing)

Now we come on to what I want to play in 2024, this is a tough one, I get more enjoyment out of running games, but I still have fun playing and it also means I'm learning how to be a better GM.

But I don't have much time to devote to RPGs, probably less so in 2024, so I need to choose wisely...

2024 McCfesto Part One

Here we go for a Raspy Raven and jwmuk proposal of games to write, run and play, inspired in no small part by Neil oldscouserrping who did a brilliant rundown of his 2023 plans and how they turned out... plus Paul Mitchener's Mitchfesto, a fantastic thread of his RPG ideas, ideals, principles, likes and thoughts. Both are well worth your time.

So I've decided to be a bit more specific and braver in setting out what I want to achieve myself in 2024 and I've split it into games I want to run, games I want to play in and community events on The Raspy Raven. Let's see this time next year, how it all turns out. So, for part one...

So I've been filling in various tabletop roleplaying game 2024 lists...

Number one is planning for a Gumshoe Season of Tabletop Roleplaying Games, we did this in 2023, and it's a lot of fun to line up the GMs and see their ideas fruit and then get all the feedback from players as they take part. My main rule is one GM per season per system. I think this works well, as it gives a variety of games and equal opportunity to established GMs, newbies and designers playtesting ideas.

This year we have Steve Dempsey playtesting the Dark Swords and Sorcery of Da'Zoon, Paul Mitchener the author of Liminal and Out of the Ashes, is taking us on a behind-enemy-lines mission, an assault on the cathedral of St. Cassilda. Carl Clare takes on Ken Hite's 1960s X-Files setting for Moon Dust Men, already very popular. And so many more ( I have my eye on a game of 13th Age based on Heart of Darkness), exciting times, the games go live on Friday 5th January, and more information to follow from this place.

So a second play-through of Fiasco, with tuba-playing Salvation Army members, gym bunnies, army buddies and a whole lot of gangs; Russian, Jewish and Turkish. Also features Dr. Fluffenstein. A great playset from Graham Walmsley.

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The Cast

The time was upon us, Magda Klein of The Fulgurators had to be stopped. Only one person could convince Magda of her wrongs, Shiny Nick and so it was that Shiny Nick found himself in Magda’s plush offices. “Just give me five minutes, Magda.”, implored Nick. Magda tilted her head to the side, smiled and surreptitiously pressed a button under her table.

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Nick noticed this but carried on regardless, “It’s in both our interests to have a conversation, people are homeless, people are dying, is this really what you wanted Magda?!” Nick was about to continue when the doors burst open and two uniformed guards marched towards Nick. Nick continued to plead his case, “I’ve known you since I was a kid, I sat on your knee. You can’t want this, surely? Just a couple of minutes, that’s all!”

The troubleshooters head into SBR Sector to discover why citizens are unhappy. Happiness is mandatory citizen.

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Bottel-O-BEA-2: Roland & Linda(?) are conspiring against Swizz-R-OLL-1

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It’s Grogmeet two days of RPGs with friends followed by MORPCon. AND it’s sunny in Manchester! This Grogmeet I’d offered four games, which is three more than I usually do, and whilst not panicking, as I’d run all but one of them before, I had a certain amount of nerves building up.

Here we go. We've just finished our world building and we're about to go silent for the next 90 minutes. I'm playing Dakota, best friend of Alice. I'm a teenager at a small but of the way town in America. I'm awkward, I'm not any kind of academic genius, I don't have many friends, apart from Alice and her friends, but I don't think they like me.

Okay, so far so good, standard outsider railing against small town America. We've used a few prompt cards to define our characters and also recorded a voicemail, our last to Alice before she disappeared. We have a secret that no one but Alice knows and we've roughly defined our relationship between the other player characters, it seems like most people don't like me, that's fine, Dakota is ambivalent.

A lot of our downtime had centred on investigations into Magda Klein, a member of The Fulgarators (A guild that powers and runs the failing train network in The City). We knew Magda was clearing the streets of the homeless and we also knew she had secured deeper areas of The Archive, much of this was from Bogdan Kaminski, an Archive administrator.

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Alt is pondering his encounter with Sam, an ex-partner in crime, friend, and now, seemingly, one of the Shifted (folk-ghouls conjured up by a superstitious populace). A razorblade-fingered monstrosity that spoke in garbled nonsense and did its best to try and decapitate him.

The group, Alt, Keys, Shiny Nick and Lex decide that their priority is to stop the evictions and stop Magda. As Magda is so focused on the Archive, it seems sensible to get leverage, to find out what she is after in the Archive. Nick approaches Bogdan, armed with a turnip marzipan gift and intent on plying him with a couple of pints of ‘shroom ale.

So a long-term ambition has been to play Sue Savage’s Matrons of Mystery. It’s a genteel take on Brindlewood Bay, a new wave of PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse) games, where the players define the ending based on the build-up of clues & secrets versus suspects and other factors. Other examples of this style of PbtA are The Between and Public Access.

I’d played Public Access run by ace GM Guy Milner, check out his blog and Patreon, and it was a bit of a revelation of how a group of players can define an adventure, building the story to a satisfactory conclusion with minimal prompts from the GM. But more than this, Matrons of Mystery is the first RPG that my partner has expressed an interest in playing, a fan of Columbo, Murder She Wrote and various other cheesy eighties comfort-crime shows, it really appealed. But I felt I needed to play it first, before being confident enough to run with a bunch of non-RPGers.

We are play testing Windheim, a new setting for Dragonbane. This will become our going forward Sunday game and we were all keen to create PCs from scratch.

I won't go into the detail of this setting but it's currently in Kickstarter, so check it out and back it if its your thing.

I'd signed up with the intention of running Trail of Cthulhu, The Wreck and The Yellow King RPG, The Night of Masks. When it comes to Gen Con, for me it's all about the Pelgrane. Not the evil flying gargoyle like creatures from the Dying Earth but the titular games company that continue to churn out wonderful RPGs from the pen of Robin D. laws, Kenneth Hite, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan and more.

I've been a fan since the release of Trail of Cthulhu and I now regularly see it as my “duty” to run a few of their games at Gen Con Online, in return for the years of wonderful gaming material they've produced.