Here is a link to Session 3 of Urban Shadows: The Violet Crown. In this one:
Here is a link to Session 3 of Urban Shadows: The Violet Crown. In this one:
-Our PCs have a showdown with the fey of Hippie Hollow, who are up to some very unpleasant shit;
-the mystery of what is being hidden in the basement of the Texas History Museum is revealed;
-the vamp food truck front Night Noms is making its move on South Austin (because it’s less dangerous to feed on working-class Mexicans than rich, white hipsters);
-our Aware gets to reclaim some of his dignity from his ex-wife;
-the PCs trigger their intimacy moves by smoking a bowl and pouring out their hearts to one another; and
-there’s a bit of light puppy play between our Tainted and his Dark Patron.
It’s a party!
Thanks to the players: Jennifer Erixon steven watkins Michael X. Heiligenstein and Phillip Wessels
A short description of the Swedish rpg Oktoberlandet (The October Realm). If someone is interested…
A short description of the Swedish rpg Oktoberlandet (The October Realm). If someone is interested…
The second edition of Oktoberlandet was published by Fria Ligan (Free League) last fall. It is a Fate based system.
The game is described as magical steampunk in the realm of the Tsar and has many similarities to Russia in the early 1900 hundreds.
The game book is hardbound with cloth and has a very stylish front in the futurism style.
There are a couple of things I particularly like about the game. The first is that the game list a couple of hundred aspects and several stunts is defined for each skill. This is good as it sets the tone of the game and gives the players a lot of inspiration on how aspects can be defined (many players have a hard time coming up with aspects in Fate games).
Secondly I really like that all background material is written as fiction or as “authentic” documents. And the game designer urges us to interpret the texts. There are no right or wrong way to do that. It is up to your game group to define what is really true and what is false.
There are no humans in the world of Oktoberlandet. All characters are a kind of a fey creature. And it is a very hierarchical society. All feys are not equal. So there are plenty of room to play on political conflicts.
The book also contains a 40-page adventure called “The voice of the Tsar”.
Reposting here because I really value the Gauntleteers’ collective experience with online play and I’m sure I’ll get…
Reposting here because I really value the Gauntleteers’ collective experience with online play and I’m sure I’ll get good answers from you.
Originally shared by Robert Bohl
Anyone got a suggestion on what tool I should use for online play to model my game’s Struggle map?
The map itself is in an image below. The trick is, as we play, we’re going to need to drop chips that are individualized to each player (e.g., I’ve got black, you’ve got red, she’s got blue).
A couple of times I’ve run a campaign frame I call “Mystery Academy.” Teen characters get sent to a new and strange school with weird secrets and hidden threats. But the kids themselves have their own hidden talents- gifts, knowledge, ghosts or the like. This is my quick & dirty hack of Masks to do that kind of game.
We have a terrific LARP going into Codex – Joy called Bunk Beds.
We have a terrific LARP going into Codex – Joy called Bunk Beds. It was originally a 200 Word RPG Challenge entry by Adam McConnaughey. David LaFreniere and I really loved it and so we reached out to Adam about expanding the word count for inclusion in Codex. The end result is a game about kids creeping each other out during a sleepover and it’s really cool. We also commissioned a beautiful piece of art by Evan Rowland, which can be seen below.
Codex – Joy will be in our $4+ Patreon feed on September 1st!
These past Sunday’s I’ve had the pleasure of playing Dungeon World with The Gauntlet.
These past Sunday’s I’ve had the pleasure of playing Dungeon World with The Gauntlet. I think my character, Weary, has been the only character along for the whole ride since the We Hunt The Keepers series began some time ago. Gerrit Reininghaus’s character, Arcon, has also been along for much of it.
The seeds that Jason has planted from the very start have started to germinate wonderfully with each series that finishes within the overarching campaign. Each player has contributed a lot of fiction as to what may be going on no matter how short their time in the series was.
We started as seemingly simple mission to kill what I expected to be evil people or, at least people holding evil power of some kind. Has slowly unraveled over the course of the series as something far more complex and interesting. And what is even more interesting is that we have arrived at this rich and dense lore within the fiction with mostly emergent play entirely. Jason often doesn’t know what will happen next and only have a very rough structure along with ideas he wants to explore, the rest of it is a result of numerous contributions from many players now! And it’s soooo good.
It’s exciting every Sunday to find out more about my character’s backstory. A thief belonging to the Shadow Court which is essentially an assassin’s creed, Dan Brown-esk, inspired character that believed at the start of this story to merely be a weapon, wielded by the court as they saw fit. Entirely autonomous from the church which hires us to go kill these Keepers who hold Keys. Since then we have discovered that Weary is a Manchurian Candidate type operator who is activated for these purposes sure, but also that the Shadow Court is linked so intricately with the church that we cannot discern where one begins and the other ends. The institution has many facets and seems to be just be an organism that eats it’s own tail, forever.
This session we have only now found out some of the stakes questions we have had since the very start, with the revelation being intensely satisfying as the result of this delayed gratification combined with the knowledge that nobody saw this coming, including Jason! There are SO many cool revelations I won’t ruin them, as you can watch them from the start on Youtube now.
Furthermore the character’s who hunt these Keeper’s are also the bad guys, we’ve found out. And the dissonance between our mission and interactions with the church and each other have made for this meta fiction that I think would make for some interesting viewer consumption, since often times the audience has MORE knowledge than the characters–even Weary who has been there the longest is constantly realizing he knows very little.
And where he surely would have died many times without the group, though he is trained to be one single operative exerting the will of the Shadow Court. This relationship routinely places Weary in a position where he is both a pawn as well as to question his own purpose. If he is ineffective alone yet trained and conditioned to be alone, what is his place on this chess board. I often wonder if this was chess, what piece would Weary be? And every time I think I have it figured out, the fictional status quo introduces something that jars that notion from me.
It’s been so, so fun playing in this game. I hope to play with even more Gauntleteers and can’ wait for my schedule to open up come October to play more and more games with you all!
These sessions have just been giving me life entirely, thanks so much Jason Cordova! And, I think people who like APs would really enjoy listening to these sessions of ours, found here:
Oli Jeffery has an AW playbook in Codex – Joy called The Kawaii!
Oli Jeffery has an AW playbook in Codex – Joy called The Kawaii!!!!. I’ve mentioned it before, but the text is really dynamite, very enjoyable to read. Here is the Special Move (Sex Move):
The Kawaii don’t have sex, silly! Ewww! Gross! If you and another character have a sweet but chaste romantic misunderstanding that ends with either of you blushing, getting a nosebleed or coming up with a garbled, shouted explanation of why you don’t think they’re cute at all uh uh no way, the other character counts as part of The One and you give them +1HX.
OSR people! I need some recommendations. What is great right now in terms of adventures, modules or setting books? Zines and such are great, too; I’m interested in all your recommendations.
Here is a link to Cthulhu Dark: The HIstory of Mercy Falls 02!
Here is a link to Cthulhu Dark: The HIstory of Mercy Falls 02! Like all the sessions in this series, it is a standalone mystery.
The backdrop for this one is Mercy Falls in 1943. Most of the town’s young people are gone because of, or otherwise preoccupied with, the war effort. However, a young Marine injured in the war has returned to town early. The investigators are all women seniors, members of the Mercy Falls League of Women. They initially reach out to the young Marine to make sure he is comfortable, but eventually get dragged deep into a mystery surrounding him.
This one is unusual in that its central mystery focuses on an individual, rather than the normal “strange things happening all over town” Mythos story. It is still Lovecraftian, and has a Mythos monster at its core, but it’s strikingly different in pace and tone (probably a little closer to Twin Peaks in that regard, which is no surprise because this is part of Mercy Falls). We also explored a theme that is little-explored in media, which is the sexuality of older people. and what happens to these lonely, somewhat bored old women when a handsome, vulnerable young man arrives in town. It was pretty great.
Thanks to the players who helped tell this terrific tale: Kevin Lovecraft Lauren McManamon David LaFreniere and Tom McGrenery
