Mysteries of Montreal

 RPG a Day 2024, day 22: Notable non-player character ? As all GMs know, the most notable NPC in any campaign is the one you make up on the spot , that the players love/loathe so much that they have to keep coming back. However, this post will mot contain such an anecdote. What I will discuss is the raft of great NPC found in The Two-Headed Serpent . The Caduceus Organization is central to the plot, and is the organization that send the Heroes out on missions. It has a wonderful array of NPCs that the players can interact with, from the quartermaster who gets them the kit they desire, the secretary/assistant who they must deal with to get in touch with the higher-ups, to the squabbling family in charge of the Organization. No spoilers, but I think my players really got to know these NPCs, and when he twists and turns of the plot hit, they were sometimes in a real moral quandary as to how to interact with these people. I recommend this campaign for many reasons, but it's the NPCs fr...

 Hey look, it's that blog that posts once a year! Whoo, must be 2023! This year was another bumper year for games. With a total of 17 session ran, and 76 sessions played. The trend of me getting to play more that I run, is continuing. As we seem to be coming out of the pandemic, more of the games I ran were actually face to face games. A trend I foresee continuing into the new year, however, the online gaming aspect, even for the local gaming group will remain something we fall back on, especially to allow everyone to play/run games. In terms of what games I ran? Well, there were a total of 7 different games/systems (8 if you count Pulp Cthulhu as different from Call of Cthulhu, but let's just say it's the same thing). All but one of these were one-shot games. Filling in space in the calendar, or allowing others to take a break in their schedules, with the exception of the One Ring (2e). This I ran as the mini-campaign in the boxed set, then a few sessions at the end of the...

 This past year has been many, many things. Most of which are outside the remit of this here blog, so I shall pass them by without another word.  What this year has been for me, and for many others, is an eye-opener in terms of how accessible gaming has become online. This has meant that not only have I run as many games as I would have in a normal year (maybe even a few sessions more) but I have played a lot more gaming sessions than I have in decades, AND a lot more variety of games than I have since just as long. Rather than list them all out, let's see the numbers. This year, I have played in a whopping 48. Forty eight gaming sessions this year alone. Just to give you an idea, last year I played in 13 sessions of various RPGs, and 5 of those were at Necronomicon. I think the year before I managed 2! What have I been playing? Well, looky here... Of those games played, I am very happy to have finally got in a game of Fiasco . It went very well, and am looking to get more gam...

I did not come up through the D&D route of RPGs, so the random table was not something I used at the table unless for very certain circumstances, mostly as outcomes to certain in-game happenings: Sanity loss in CoC; mutations in WFRP, that kind of thing. I of course knew about random encounter tables and the like, but I did not use them. For me, encounters had to fit with the story.  However, I was running a session of  ' Tails of Equestria ', where I was looking to beef up a session that was going too fast, so I overcame my hesitancy, and rolled on the table. The resulting encounter led to some cool role-playing by the players, and I was very happy with the way it worked out. This was enough to turn me round on what I had previously thought would be something that would just be too random to add to the story being told. Jump forward a year or two, and I've been looking through a bunch of OSR games, some of which contain nothing but a bunch of random event tables. My ne...

We've been working our way through the Two-Headed Serpent campaign, and we're reaching the Iceland chapter. Unlike Masks or HotOE, there are a lot less handouts for this game, as is more fitting with the Pulp style I guess, as there is less investigation to an extent. That has not stopped me however, putting together a dossier of images for the Iceland chapter, which includes images of the Snæfellsjökull volcano. It doesn't take much to find some images online, and age them, but there are no images of the volcano erupting, because it's extinct. However, I did quickly put together these images with a little photoshop. Please feel free to use them for your own game, and let me know if larger images would be useful. There is also this view, which would fit what the players see as they fly in to the peninsula. Finally, I found an old map of Iceland, where all the monsters of the sea are congregated around the  Snæfellnes peninsula. ...

Ok, so there were many reasons for going to a Con like this, but one of them is surely to pick up on products that you can't get elsewhere, or without spending too much on postage. With this in mind, I think I was actually quite restrained in my purchases. First off, I had a list of books to buy at the Chaosium stand (although I did spend my Cult of Chaos credit, and won one of these through the Extra Life Charity event prize draw). I was able to get the following: Pulp Cthulhu Two Headed Serpent Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic Doors To Darkness Dead Light Another tip to the vendors hall led me to find a couple of second hand book stores, who had all the kinds of books you'd want to find at a Con like this, including: H P Lovecraft : The Shadow over Innsmouth and other Stories of Horror, as well as a copy of August Derleth's: The Reminiscences of Solar Pons. The Necronomicon Press stand was there, where I hooked up with a copy of TED Klein's: The ...