Excerpt from an internal Ordo Veritatis monograph: A polemic pamphlet describing the 1616 trial and execution of a woman for double filicide unknowingly portrays a textbook case of Outer Dark activity. (The accompanying illustration, on the other hand…) Margaret Vincent of Acton, just outside London, murdered her two young children, aged 5 and 2, during […]
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Page XX A column about roleplaying by Robin D. Laws “Okay, so now that the monks are locked inside the tower, I set fire to it. That’ll teach them to look down their noses at me! Burn, monks, burn!” “As soon as it’s my turn to guard the prisoner, when I’m sure the others are […]
Although DramaSystem, the rules engine underlying Hillfolk, builds game sessions that feel like episodes of serialized TV dramas, differences between the two mediums do sometimes lead to somewhat different results. One device you see all the time in TV shows rarely appears in DramaSystem. Very often on a TV show the writers emphasize the emotional […]
A Trail of Cthulhu scenario hook A man of means acquainted with your group’s dilettante character, or a likewise well-connected investigator, seeks help with his son. Widowed as a young man when his wife Cora died of pneumonia, Adrian Heppel has become listless, distracted, and barely able to fulfill his duties at the State Department. […]
If your town is anything like mine, escape rooms are springing up all over. This new fad gives us a ready-made reason for a group of ordinary people to be thrown together into a horror situation. Here are five Fear Itself scenario hooks that all start with the characters working their way out of an […]
We would never be so indelicate as to suggest that you, as member of a ragtag band of interstellar vengeance-seekers, would ever commit a homicide in the course of your implacable hunt for arch-criminal Quandos Vorn. Yet in the pursuit of this entirely justified enterprise, one might theoretically find oneself saddled with a recently deceased […]
Ordo Veritatis statisticians have shown a significant increase in Outer Dark manifestations during election campaigns. Politicians’ frequent resort to the psychology of fear to arouse passion in their constituencies increases the supply of that most demon-friendly of emotions. This syndrome most affects partisans, who during this period pay greater attention to views they vehemently disagree […]
Once again we look at a common small ship of the Bleed and see what your Ashen Stars characters can typically deduce about the people who drive it. Whenever your console pings the presence of an approaching small vessel, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s going to be a hauler. Ninety-eight of those times, […]
In Hillfolk the GM acts as the custodian of the overall narrative. You mostly do this when calling your own scenes. You use these to heighten tensions, add new fresh developments, and picking up previous ones that got dropped along the way. Less evidently, you can also intervene during player scenes. This requires utmost subtlety. […]
When Mutant City Blues came out, examples of super powered police procedural TV shows were hard to come by. Back then we had to imagine a hybrid of those two genres. With examples now popping up on network and streaming TV, you kids today have it easy! “The Flash” comes closest to the structure envisioned […]