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Showing posts from January, 2018

Teen Detective and Best of Fiends

By a strange coincidence I've just read two takes on the teen detective genre (think things like Veronica Mars and Riverdale) and they are both interesting in their own way and both improvements over Bubblegumshoe . Teen Detective is by Richard Williams (who I do the Across the Table podcast with) and Best of Fiends which is a work in progress from Stuart Chaplin (and which is currently unavailable generally as far as I know, I asked Stuart whether I could take his notes, which is how I got a copy). Teen Detective builds off Cthulhu Dark but I think I'm going to have to read my latest copy of the rules again because it doesn't feel like it has that much in common with it anymore. The closest intersection is around destroying evidence in an investigation. Instead Teen Detective uses a system of gaining Edges over people by investigating the mystery. You also have a pool of points that allow you to get through moments of failure of imagination or inspiration. Yo

Cthulhu City

Cthulhu City is simultaneously a brilliant idea and a coffee table book that is too long, detailed and boring. What's great about it is the idea of characters being pulled into a strange city, with the traces of the Mythos everywhere while the population studious ignores it. The city is hard to leave and even when one escapes it supernaturally sucks the characters back in. It's like the best paranoid novels written about cities from the birth of the metropolises. What's boring about it is the level of detail that is piled onto of this core. There is a description of the city, it's different parts, its politics and history, the secret societies and all the in-jokes of Cthulhu as the various New England locations become parts of the sprawling metropolis. It all feels like a berserk preparatory research for a novel I'm not going to read. It's clearly aimed at people who are engaged with roleplaying culture but aren't necessarily going to be playing gam

Three Faces of the Wendigo

This is a collection of scenarios for the Cthulhu Hack that focus on the influence of the Wendigo or The Evil That Devours. The foreword has the interesting anecdote that the collection was conceived at Dragonmeet 2016 and released for Dragonmeet 2017. Pretty good going! The three scenarios are: Wolves in the Mountain , Lonely, Dark and Deep and Tainted Meat . Of the three Tainted Meat is the most substantial and satisfying. Lonely, Dark and Deep is a short piece about a hunting party in the woods that encounters and essentially fights the Wendigo. The thing is does well is use pre-generated characters to create reasons why the characters are going to tarry too long in the woods until the fateful encounter and also the tensions between them. Wolves in the Mountain is one of those scenarios where cultists are both deranged in their behaviour but also capable of forming and executing long-term plans with patience, co-ordination and cooperation. The PCs are lured into the m

Bastion Ein Sof

I picked this up at Dragonmeet 2017. It's an alternative setting for Into the Odd . If you not familiar with that game then it's default setting is a city-state called Bastion, there's an alternative steampunky setting called Electric Bastionland that still seems to be in playtest. Bastion Ein Sof is set in aftermath of the destruction of "Electric" Bastion whic h is refers to as Old Bastionland. If indie rpg lore isn't your bag then more simply this is a setting where a huge steampunk city has been destroyed by spirit beings known as Angels. The only survivors exist (literally) in the shadow of equally immaterial beings known as Giants. The players take on the role of adventurers seeking to steal the blood of Angels to appease the Giants and acquire treasure and wealth for themselves. One of the interesting things the setting does is to create an incentive to adventure is an idea called the Giant's Debt whereby at the end of every session the party must s