Weekend at Dracula’s At Gaelcon, I ran five sessions of the Dracula Dossier campaign in the longcon format. I’m not the first to try cramming the monster into a weekend: Steve Ellis blazed the trail there. This article is half convention report, and half general advice for those brave souls who want to try following […]
Tag Archives: Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
Fear Itself 2nd Edition introduces the concept of an Escape Pool (p. 70), a set of rules for fleeing a horrific situation instead of following the trail of clues into the darkness. It’s a simple idea – the player characters build up a pool of points by discovering clues, spending investigative ability points, and passing […]
A Dispatch From Cthulhu City. Cults are a major part of Cthulhu City. The setting mashes Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth and Kingport together with the Mythos’ other great cities – the City of the Elder Things, the City of Pillars, Carcosa, Pnakatos, Rlyeh, the Marvellous Sunset City of the Dreamland – and each of those cities […]
The streets here are a concrete labyrinth. I try to go one block east, towards the ocean, and find myself crossing another bridge over the grey waters of the Miskatonic, and I’m back on the north side of the city, climbing up towards the civic monstrosity that squats atop Sentinel Hill. Transport Police, their faces […]
In the past three weeks or so, more people have written op-ed pieces about Brexit and the ensuing fallout than actually voted in the referendum, but oddly, very few have discussed its effect on vampires (other than a few passing swipes at George Osbourne). What might Brexit mean for Dracula and your Dracula Dossier campaign? […]
Dracula Unredacted is many things. Weighty, certainly. Terrifying, possibly. (Brilliant, modestly.) Welcoming – not necessarily . Now, you may be blessed with players who are already avid Dracula fans, or players who are salivating at the thought of all that delicious cross-referencing and speculating, in which case they’ll happily devour the World’s Biggest Campaign Handout and ask […]
Most roleplaying games have some sort of diminishing resource that limits the player character’s ability to keep going. The commonest example are hit points and similar measures of health – if you’re running low on hit points, you need to stop and heal up. F20 games like 13th Age also treat some of your characters’ […]
Many years ago – the fabled year of 2003, or so – I wrote a largely forgotten book called OGL Horror for Mongoose Publishing. It was designed to be a toolkit for running modern-day horror games, using (somewhat awkwardly) the d20 system. As it was based on the Open Gaming Licence, Pelgrane was able to […]
We are controlling this transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus […]
I ran two Trail of Cthulhu sessions over the weekend (a stealth proof-of-concept of a possible upcoming setting). At a three or four hour convention game, the pressure of time means every scene has to count. There’s little time for backtracking or encounters that don’t go anywhere, and that pressure’s compounded if you’ve got a […]