Category: The Gauntlet: Our Community

Do yourself a favor and play The Society of Dreamers by candlelight. Last night, Friday the 13th, was the second time The Gauntlet has done so (the first time was last Halloween), and it was incredible. The game already does a terrific job of making you feel like you are investigating a creepy, Lovecraftian mystery (about a hundred times better than CoC does), and the effect is magnified when you’re playing in the dark.  

Thanks to Daniel Lewis Ferrell Riley and Steve Mains for joining the strange, unsettling journey last night.

An update on the Meetup calendar…I’m not very happy with how Wednesdays are going since I transitioned it to campaign-length games. It turns out Wednesday is a very tough day to get a consistent group of people on a week-to-week basis. Also, I kind of miss the flexibility and spontaneity of our old Wednesday One-shots format. We’ll be switching back to that. 

Got my copy of Jason Morningstar’s Night Witches today and it looks gooood!

We had a ridiculous amount of fun with our mash-up of Sea Dracula and Johann Sebastian Joust. Here are some pics (and videos!)

Thanks to everyone who came out: Daniel Lewis Kristen D Russell Benner Scott Owen Ferrell Riley Jorge Salazar Daniel Fowler and my boyfriend, Rich.

Tonight we dance the dance of the animal lawyers!

Here are some pics from our Wednesday game night. We had a few key people missing from our ongoing campaign of Apocalypse World, so instead we played The Final Girl. Dan A Penny for My Thoughts at his table. 

I have (casually) discussed my fondness for The Final Girl on the podcast, so I won’t belabor it here. I suspect we will discuss A Penny for my Thoughts on next week’s episode, but maybe Dan will chime-in on this post and let us know how it went. 

Thanks to everyone who came out: Daniel Lewis Russell Benner Daniel Fowler Kristen D Scott Owen and Susan!

We had a blast with Hell for Leather today. We’ll discuss the mechanics of the game on this week’s podcast, but I wanted to touch on the story a bit here. We decided to ditch the standard setting (murderous game show, a la The Running Man) and go with our own creation. What did we settle on? A group of gluttonous brats who get kidnapped on their way to fat camp and end up in Candy Land, the denizens of which almost universally want to eat them. 

This game had it all. There was Plumpy, who ate his own gingerbread plum children from trees, since he blamed them for the death of his wife, who died while bringing them into the world; a grotesque, Jabba the Hutt-like Grandma Nutt, who trapped screaming peanuts into brittle as if they were Han Solo in the carbonite; a Nazi-esque police state established by an insane, paranoid Queen Frostine; a pervy Lord Licorice, who kept trying to lure the kids into his windowless carriage; the titanic woodsman, Mr. Mint, and his vicious mint beavers, all of whom bled in swirls of red and white; a kid who went full Apocalypse Now, rising-up from a chocolate river, and tearing apart choco-diles with his bare hands; a caramel swamp, at the heart of which lied Gloppy, a devious monster with a cajun accent; and a finale at King Kandy’s Castle that involved madness, betrayal, and a golden jelly bean. 

It was so much fun! And Hell for Leather was really cool. A bit fiddly, perhaps, but still pretty awesome (and a much better implementation of what Dread was trying to do with the Jenga Tower). But, like I said, we’ll discuss that on the cast. 

Thanks to Daniel Lewis for prepping, and to Steve Mains and Jeff Burke for joining us. 

Here are some pics from the last couple of game nights. Our informally organized Thursday group played a game of Ben Robbins ‘ Microscope. That one is a house favorite, and plays really well with just three people. I’m not going to go into what our timeline was, because it was a little too meta for its own good (but very fun). 

For Friday’s Mandatory Fun Club, we created NSFW Dungeon World Monsters (and a  few NSFW magic items, too). To avoid being put on some watch list, I will refrain from going into too much detail. But I will share with you our favorite monster:

Lube Cube

Special Qualities: frictionless, assorted flavors, water soluble

Instinct: To stop

Moves: Fill every crevasse; Cause a warm tingling sensation; Cause helpless slipperiness

Some notes: The lube cube was originally created by a nefarious wizard to help fit large, long monsters down tight dungeon passageways. 

Thanks to all the social deviants who came out: Daniel Fowler David LaFreniere Scott Owen Marcus Centurian and Ferrell Riley