Over the last year or two, I've played a good bit of Call of Cthulhu and related games. While I love many things about that particular game, I don't like the crunchiness of the character sheet. Investigators have nine attributes before we even get to things like Sanity, Luck, Magic Points, and skills! One thing … Continue reading Cthulhu Style Investigations
During a discussion in the Mothership Discord about reskinning the game for other settings, I came up with the following little hack. If anything, it's just a small set of house rules for creating classless characters and maybe simplifying the stats and saves. Please feel free to comment any feedback. It's completely untested, just a … Continue reading Micro hack of Mothership
Luck rolls represent the GM choosing to be surprised rather than just deciding what happens. I look at how a few different games do this and talk about my currently preferred approach.
Blorb is a neologism for a particular prep-focused play style that occasionally creates controversy because it means the game world is "real" even before it shows up in a session. Here are my notes on what I think it means.
Call of Cthulhu has some surprisingly (to me) narrative-focused rules for rolling dice.
I've been thinking about trying to do for Star Wars d6 what Cthulhu Dark did for Call of Cthulhu, or what Into the Odd did for Cypher: break it down to a minimal approach without needing to spend too much time thinking about game rules. As I was looking at this, I started to wonder if it doesn't need anything more than GM attitude. Here’s my first set of thoughts about the game.
TL;DR: My science fantasy supplement "Those Who Came Before" (written for Into the Odd Remastered and games derived from it) is published and available on Itch.io!
Cthulhu Dark and Trophy Dark have a different way to model harm, including mental harm, and this approach provides a fantastic model for other games. Even in horror gaming - I would say especially in horror gaming - we all should retain the ability to decide what to explore, and systems like the one outlined above give us the opportunity to do that.
How can we think about in-game communities in a way that motivates players and PCs? I'm looking at structures for my Into the Odd hack to center community defense and improvement.
The Sanity (Stress and Panic) system in Mothership doesn't appeal to me, and my friends playing the game have commented on it as well. What could we do instead?
Technoskald's Forge 