Monday Night Game

Will October bring Tricks, Treats, or TPKs?!?

     

 

 

    We will return to the Ox Gives Way to Tiger Etc Campaign tonight.  Alibis and Heists, Oh My!  Session notes should be ready sometime tomorrow.  

    If you're bored and craving horror before my notes for tonight's game get published tomorrow, my Substack has some archival Call of Cthulhu Campaign Session notes up with more to come over there during the month of October. 

     If you liked the Haunted Houses of Ravenloft series so far, with House of Lament and Old Bonegrinder installments up now, I've been cooking up Donskoy's Keep, the adaptation adventure for the novel "To Sleep With Evil" by Andria Cardarelle.  My personal deadline to release it is 10/21/26.  Not sure I'll have my own playtest of it done before it goes out here on the blog, but my follow-up notes will be fun to compare to the adventure as written.  I wanted it to be here on the blog as my Halloween Treat to you, ethereal GM, and maybe you'll try it this Halloween.  Trick or Treat or TPK?!? 

#RPGaDay2018 Day Twenty Six

Day 26 Question:  What is your gaming ambition for the next year?

I have more than one ambition for gaming over the next year.  I'm looking forward to this time next year when I can re-read my own blog post to see how many of these ambitions I've turned into actions.

1.  Start running my LotFP YotG campaign again for my home table.  I've said before that I've been wanting to run the 5e adventure Curse of Strahd with LotFP rules and OSR sensibility, but I want to confirm that my players are on board.  Once I get confirmation I can get into whatever preparation I deem necessary to run that.  If they aren't on board with Curse of Strahd, we'll continue with the game where we left off.  The players were just about to ride into the city of Halwic to investigate the ongoing Mimic Crisis, recent rumors of a plague, and a devastating fire.  Halwic is FUCKED UP, YO.

2.  Run games online.  Specifically run either a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly game on G+ for the Flailsnails community.  Right now I have a pretty open schedule and could conceivably achieve weekly, but I want to give myself enough leeway in case my schedule changes and only allows less frequent gaming.

3.  This RPGaDay2018 writing challenge has been a good way to blow out the cobwebs and get into a near daily writing habit.  So for September I'm going to roll right into the #DIY30 challenge and get some progress on my pile of half-finished RPG writing projects.  So expect to see a post with more thoughts on that go up on the blog on August 30th or 31st.

4.  I want to run LotFP demos at a game store next year on Free RPG Day 2019.  It was fun to do that back in 2016.  I'm not sure what I'll run, yet.  It's a little far off, so I'll make a decision closer to spring.  A Stranger Storm from the Grindhouse Referee Book was a good adventure, but I might try another published adventure or even come up with my own.

5.  I want to play more in local gaming stores.  I'm not sure what form this will take, whether I try running something myself, play in something like D&D Encounters or something else.

6.  Playing in public.  I want to run a game in a bar, restaurant, coffee shop, library, or park.  Or maybe in the dining car of Amtrak!

7.  Play one of the games in my collection that I haven't played, yet.  It doesn't have to be a huge campaign.  This past year I had this as a goal and I actually achieved it!  I hadn't played Call of Cthulhu, yet, and we played a scenario of it this summer.  We've played three sessions so far and will probably wrap up on the fourth session.  Not sure which game I want to play...  I might make this into a blog post down the line!

8.  Sell some of the game books I know I'll never play.  I've been doing a bit of this already.  It started with giving The Dresden Files RPG core books to my boyfriend's co-worker about a year and a half ago.  He happened to be a huge fan of the fiction and had two daughters just the right age to get into roleplaying.  I've sold some stuff on Ebay over the last year.  All the World of Darkness 20th Anniversary Edition books I had accumulated, Don't Rest Your Head, Don't Lose Your Mind, A Penny for Your Thoughts, Vampire the Masquerade 2nd Edition, and some of the Chronicles of Darkness supplements I know I'll never use.  Still trimming that last category (CoD) down.

I've never been someone to make New Year's resolutions, and this question strikes me as akin to that.  But I believe it's good to write goals down for yourself and try to hold yourself accountable, so that's what I'm doing with this post.  Like I said up above, I look forward to looking back on this post in August 2019 and seeing how far I've come with these ambitions.

#RPGaDay2018 Day Sixteen

Day 16 Question:  Describe your plans for your next game.

After we wrap up this little Call of Cthulhu game, the next game I'm running will be my LotFP YotG campaign.  When we went on hiatus last August, I had been planning on running The Curse of Strahd with LotFP rules.  I'm still hoping to do that, but I want to talk it over with the group before committing to it.  Otherwise, I'll just pick the campaign up right where I left off.  The PCs are still investigating and hunting down the source of the Mimic Crisis.  BTW in my game Mimics aren't the D&D Mimics, they're changeling or shapeshifter type creatures.  Considering the game we played before starting LotFP was Changeling the Lost, I wanted less association with that campaign.  So when I started the LotFP campaign off with the adventure A Stranger Storm from the Grindhouse Referee Book, I went with the term Mimic instead of changeling.

I'm also planning to run some games online.  I'll be using LotFP, but I'm not sure what setting, yet.  Whatever I choose, I'll be running the games on G+ in the Flailsnails community.  So if you are reading this and want to get in on that action, go join that community and watch for my upcoming announcement.

#RPGaDay2018 Day Twelve

Day 12 Question:  What is your wildest character concept?

Pass.

Day 12 2016 Question:  What game is your group most likely to play next? Why that game?

After we wrap up Call of Cthulhu, we'll switch DMs and play D&D 5E briefly.  I'm usually the DM, but one of my players started DMing last year and he's itching to run games again.  5E is "his system."  He jumped in last year running the Starter Set adventure Lost Mine of Phandelver, but he's crafting his own dungeon this time around!  I want to get back to running my LotFP campaign "Year of the Goat."  Getting a break from DMing will give me a chance to do the prep for what I'm going to do next with "YotG."

#RPGaDay2018 Day Four

Day 4 Question: What is the most memorable NPC?

I think because I DM more than I play, I don't want to answer this question, either. So like yesterday, I'll dive back to a 2017 RPG a Day question.

Day 4 2017 Question: Which RPG have you played the most since August 2016?

Going by the number of sessions, it looks like I've played 18 sessions of 5e D&D (as a player,) 12 sessions of Lamentations of the Flame Princess (as a DM,) and I've played about 5 sessions online in a variety of OSR type systems in the Flailsnails G+ group.  Honorable mention game is Call of Cthulhu at 3 sessions with a 4th imminent (I'm the keeper aka DM for this game, we'll play as soon as I get my prep for the next session complete.)

39 games divided by 24 months = 3.5 games a month!  Not bad, but I hope to bump that up this year.  I predict the  Flailsnails group on G+ is going to facilitate my being able to play more games, I'm hoping to run something there, too.


 

#RPGaDay2018 Day Two

Day 2 (Electric Boogaloo) Question:  What do you look for in an RPG?

The easy out here is to just say I'm looking for something that doesn't suck, lol.  But what does that mean exactly?  Let's drill deeper into the Mind of Bast to explore the things that inspire me to run and play games.

1. Art.  My mother was an artist and my exposure to art started at an early age.  I've always understood the power of it to affect me in deep and mysterious ways.  The RPG author and artist Zak Smith has said that art in RPGs should be doing more of the work than it usually does (not a quote, I'm paraphrasing) and I agree with this notion.  So I'm looking for art that tickles my fancy.

2. Production values.  Did the author(s) artists(s) layout/graphic design artist(s), editor(s) and publisher(s) care enough to hold themselves to a rigorous standard of presentation and usability?  The more so that they did, the more I'll be intrigued by their efforts.

3. Genre.  My tastes lean towards the horror end of the spectrum.  Low fantasy, grim dark, and dungeon punk are what really blow my hair back these days.  I'll take a sprinkling of gonzo here and there as well.

4. OSR compatibility.  I'm running mostly Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Call of Cthulhu these days.  So if I'm looking at other publishers' adventures or setting supplements, it's with an eye towards how easily I can adapt them to the campaigns I'm running.


 

The Upside of Burnout

Where are the extra character sheets at Vega?

 Or, a new DM emerges from the player pool to run their first game(s)!
2017 was a less consistent year of gaming than I would have liked in regards to the campaign(s) I've set out to run.  I was humming along through March, then as I was putting energy into starting a small business, I was unable to run games regularly through the late spring and whole summer. I hit the wall/got burnout/started suffering from "DM's Block" back in August/September of the year to kind of add to the mix.  At the same time it was the beginning of great new things for my gaming group.   One of my players stepped up and started running D&D 5e (the adventure from the starter set, Lost Mines of Phandelver) as their first foray into DMing.  On 12/10/17 we played our tenth session using that adventure material, and probably have about two more sessions of play by my guesstimate (I haven't read the adventure.)  It's been fun stepping out of the DM role for awhile and coming at things from a player's perspective!  And watching someone grow into being a good improvisational DM has me both impressed and inspired to get back to DMing soon.  After this 5e adventure wraps up, the plan is for me to run a one or two session game of Call of Cthulhu (6th edition... I've heard the editions 1-6 are congruent with each other and that 7th has made either a refinement on or departure from that through
line depending on who you listen to/read.)  This will be my first time running/playing CoC.  I've been enjoying Lovecraft's work for more than twenty years, so I'm quite excited to get my paws into this game!  After that wraps up, I want to get back to running my Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign "Year of the Goat."