For the last, er, twenty-five years or so, I’ve run a Cthulhu game every year at Warpcon. In recent years, they’ve been playtests or first drafts of material intended for publication – scenarios like A Cigarette, a Blindfold and You or, for that matter, Cthulhu City began life as con scenarios. But the early scenarios […]
Tag Archives: Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
Over on my twitter, I sometimes post entertaining or suggestive errors as typos of the day. Yesterday, I accidentally typed “manticore” as “manticorn”, which prompted… The Manticorn According to rumour, the Manticorn was once a fearsome manticore, an ancient and especially cruel creature. In time, he came to repent of his dreadful habit of hunting […]
Fear Itself and most other GUMSHOE games use a Stability system that’s inspired by the classic Call of Cthulhu ‘mental hit points’ approach – your character has a big pool of Stability that gets ablated over time by horrific encounters, until you’re eventually forced to ‘heal’ or get taken out. This approach works well for […]
One of my favourite techniques for livening up a campaign is to hand out a bunch of disposable characters for the players to play for a single session. It’s certainly not original to me: Ken’s often spoken of the genius of the Raid on Innsmouth scenario for Call of Cthulhu, which gives the players command […]
Dracula Daily emails you once a day with the text of whatever elements of (the redacted) Dracula happened on that date. So, a day’s email might be a single entry from Jonathan Harker’s diary, or some pieces of correspondence between Lucy’s suitors. Or nothing at all, if no letters or diary entries are dated that […]
The redoubtable Tim Baker asks over at the Piazza forum for some tips and tricks for integrating One Unique Things into convention games. One of the delights of running 13th Age is the high-wire act of taking the players’, ah, interesting ideas and working them into your scenario, so here’s how I do it. Before […]
It’s once again the time of year when the Ancient of Pelgranes flaps its hoary wings and takes flight across the Dying Earth, when Simon runs his annual 13th Age game and – entirely co-incidentally – asks me to write up a monster. This time, it’s Underkrakens. Now, Underkrakens are described in 13 True Ways […]
When brainstorming for new See Page XX articles, one comes up with lots of ideas that aren’t enough for a full piece, but might spark something if you put them out into the world. So, here’s a grab bag of ideas that almost, but not quite, made it. Maybe they’ll take root in one of your games. […]
Sense Trouble’s an unusual General Ability – it’s called for by the Keeper, not the players, and it gives information instead of accomplishing a task (even if the only information it gives is “Agh! Run away!”, which, to be fair, is highly useful in a Cthulhu game). It’s hard to know how much Sense Trouble […]
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From the upcoming Ocean Game sourcebook… Steerage There are bugs underneath the skin of the world. Scratch, and they come out. Scurrying around in darkness. Fly the light. They start out small. You’d mistake ‘em for silverfish, those little crawly things, like little white termites. But they grow. It’s when they’re as big as fat cockroaches that you […]