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
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.
We played Mausritter last night and it really felt like, well, playing. Setting matters, even implied setting, and it affects the kinds of stories we can tell.
Call of Cthulhu has some surprisingly (to me) narrative-focused rules for rolling dice.
Mothership has made some excellent changes to the Stress and Panic system. I'm very grateful to them for doing this.
Photo by Rebecca Swafford on Pexels.com Recently, I started running Call of Cthulhu for some friends. While I've played the game several times, the only time I'd ever actually acted as Keeper (GM) was running a duet game or two for my son. Additionally, rather than use pre-written content (scenarios), I decided to create and … Continue reading Saturday Night Eldritch Fever: Session 1
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.
Some thoughts on giving information to players, spurred by a Discord conversation with friends.
I have been thinking on how to include Christian mythology (used in the sense of "sacred stories", not in the sense of "false stories"). I have an extremely complicated relationship with Christianity, certainly, but I also want to treat people's belief systems with respect. My thoughts very much do not turn in the direction of … Continue reading Christian Mythology in gaming
For "Gates of Despair", I designed a simple mechanic to represent the influence of the Unseeable God on the minds of the folks there. So as to keep things extremely straightforward, the mechanic is just a track of conditions as you go down it. After discussing it in the Mothership Discord, somebody pointed out that … Continue reading Indoctrination and Sanity in Mothership
Technoskald's Forge 