February 29

Delta Green : Storage Battles

I’m still a bit under the weather which means my creativity is in full flow again.

While I was watching some TV and trying to recuperate I had a flash of inspiration.  One of the programmes I saw was Storage Wars and followed a group of people bidding on the contents of abandoned lockers and seeing what trash or treasure was inside.

This got me thinking, what if one of these lockers was a green box?   A green box is a private storage repository established by operatives of Delta Green and could contain all manner of weird stuff.

Here’s a link to a random Green Box Generator: http://www.palinola.com/projects/lab/greenbox/

 

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November 10

Kickstarter – Cthulhu Wars : Onslaught Two

The Great Old Ones have returned to claim the ruins of Earth, and you are one of them! Cthulhu Wars is a competitive strategy game in which 2 to 8 players face-off to determine the fate of the planet. You’ll recruit cultists and summon monsters, cast spells, open interdimensional gates, and awaken your Great Old One!

Now this looks like a pretty cool Kickstarter that I would love to back it but it’s a bit too expensive for me and I don’t know if I’d get to play it with my current group, so I’m going to hold off on this project.

 

October 6

Kickstarter – Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game

Originally released as a softback book with a campaign supplement that followed soon after Delta Green for me combined two elements I really love; the Cthlhu mythos and the conspiracy genre.  Where games like Dark Conspiracy and Conspiracy X both shine in their own niches, only Delta Green brought the mythos bang up to date.  It is a very different beast than Cthulhu Now which was the official modern day sourcebook for CoC and it taps into the idea that aliens have visited Earth using spaceships.

Now they are releasing a stand alone game which builds upon the work that has gone beforehand and it really does stand on the shoulders of giants.  There are various pledge levels available, enough to suit each persons pocket.

April 30

RPG Blog Carnival April 2015 – The Combat Experience

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This month the subject of the carnival is The Combat Experience and it is being hosted by RPG Alchemy.

Love it or leave it combat is one of those parts of the system that has more than it’s fair share of table time so finding a system that the players engage with is something that is always something I look for.

At school I studied fencing and attended an after school fencing club, the romantic ideal of swinging a blade was what attracted me to the idea. Since then I’ve always checked to see how a combat system models something as simple as feints, parries and riposte.

When I started gaming combat was something I enjoyed, as it gave me an outlet to swing swords or blast away with rayguns.  I remember finding Pheonix Command and relished looking up on the various tables to see where someone had been shot.  While this appealed to me as a games master it was very time consuming for the players as I had to perform a few calculations and look up the result.

While Phoenix Command handles gunfights and the aftermath of being shot I was very disappointed by the hand to hand side of things; even with the hand to hand supplement things never got any better.  Millenniums End also had a novel way of doing things, align a template over a silhouette of a person and then you could work out where you hit.  This also worked for hand to hand and I remember an afternoon of two players consistently kicking each other in the groin for what seemed like ages; the happy spree was broken up when one of the combatants switched locations and axe-kicked his opponent in the head.

I even tried playing Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) but I was confused more by the game mechanics than the combat system, add percentage this to skills etc.

Warhammer 1st edition had a pretty solid combat system that was only slightly wonky but did cater for hit locations.

In the end I decided that I preferred a system that gave me the detail if I was after it, something the narrative games like FATE cater for and the system is a lot more cinematic and pulpy which is something I always enjoy playing with.

 

 

 

March 23

One year on

So it’s been a year since I started this blog and I’m pleased with how it’s turned out so far.

Once I started I realised how much I missed writing for pleasure; most of my penmanship has been dull technical stuff that while serviceable isn’t something that I can point to and say “I did this”.  Which is  very unlike this blog my main outlet for my creative urges although  my muse seems to be driven by my sickness, something that I find very amusing.

I thought it was also time to expand upon my origin story that I first mentioned here, while searching through a box of books it turns out that I had accidentally deceived you all and my first purchased RPG turns out to be the basic edition Marvel Superheroes RPG.  I purchased in 1986 while on holiday after being driven to find it by the amazing adverts in the back of the Marvel comics I was reading.

I think I forgot about buying it as I never seemed to know what to do with it or how to get other people interested.  Bear in mind this was before the days of the internet and gaming magazines in the UK were had to get hold of from the local newsagent.

What really grabbed my interest in gaming was a programme I saw on LWT back in the early 80s called “South of Watford” and presented by Ben Elton.  I remember watching him go to the Games Workshop store in Hammersmith and talk to the store manager before later on playing some D&D.  Five years later I would be in that very store and buying my first games.

Games Workshop then was a different store, one that sold other peoples material and long before the advent of the Games Workshop hobby which is what they’re best known for these days.  In those days you could pick up a licensed copy of Runequest, Traveller or even Call of Cthulhu.

Moving behind the screen.

After being a player for a short period of time I decided to try being a gamesmaster and looking back on those days I think it was my sheer enthusiasm that kept me going.  I was at one point gaming five nights a week running a different game each night with a different system.  It was during this time that I started to understand what I liked to run; science fiction piqued my interest more than fantasy did and I loved the four colour superhero genre.  Much Traveller and Marvel Superheroes was played along with a side dish of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The Critical Miss years.

It all started simply enough with an open call for players at a local comic shop; the owner knew me and the people organising the event and  I decided to turn up and try to play with a different group of people.  Let me tell you those first few weeks were a great time, we all brought games down to play and since we never really that organised you could never count on the same group of players for each game.  I took my chances and dusted out Paranoia second edition and over the course of several weeks I ran through the published adventures I had bought.  The players had fun trying to kill each other and deal with the game forms a friend had photocopied.

Slowly the group started to crystallise from the raw elements we threw at it, after a few months we lost a player and the venue; we found a new home in a building owned by the father of another player and we played in that cold cramped warehouse amongst the boxes of paper.  Summer came around and then we started to lose players until by the following October we were d0wn to a handful and we moved once again to my place.

I found myself running more games and with a stable group we could try to play campaigns together.  I was now playing twice a week with two different groups and this became once a week when the two groups melded together.   We lost more players as well; one went off to university, one moved away and one left for personal reasons I won’t go into here.

It was during this period I broke out Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and embarked upon the Enemy Within Campaign.

The present.

I’ve been playing with another group of friends online using Roll20 and that’s what caused the genesis of this blog back with this first post . 

 

 

 

March 11

Bundle of Holding – Bundle of Laundry

Based upon the novels and stories of Charles Stross this game of modern-day horror in some ways it could be compared to Delta Green, but you play covert agents working in the UK.

Agents of The Laundry fight Cthulhu Mythos horrors and bureaucratic supervisors. They can save the world, but they have to get a receipt.

The game uses the Basic Roleplaying system as used in Call of Cthulhu and has all the rules included so there is no need to buy a separate rulebook.

https://bundleofholding.com/index/current/name/Laundry

February 26

Kickstarter – Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion for Call of Cthulhu

One game I have enjoyed over the years is the Call of Cthulhu, partly because it is a game of investigation but mainly the era of the roaring 20s.  It even made number  in my top ten game list.

Over the years Chaosium have released numerous adventures and globe trotting campaigns including the spectacular Masks of Nyarlathotep. The adventure is very well written with all the important clues indexed and referenced for ease of play by the busy GM, the only downside is that there appears to be material missing; perhaps things man was not meant to know that didn’t make the cut.

A number of years ago, I saw that there was going to be a companion written for this game and released as one of the Monograph line that Chaosium were printing; for one reason or another it never appeared until the unfinished edition was released over at the Yog-Sothoth forums.  Now they plan on finally polishing the document and releasing it to the general public (no relation 🙂 ) .

Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion for Call of Cthulhu

An essential reference to a great RPG campaign-The Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion. Information, advice & adventures in 1 huge volume!

The project runs until 10th March so you still have time to get in on it.

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