Mysteries of Montreal

 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 games in

As mentioned previously , Games Workshop are re-releasing older books in their back-catalogue. I really enjoyed " Drachenfels ",  so this was a great opportnity to increase my Old World lore, get my oldhammer fix, and read some good stories. As I mentioned in my last post on the subject, there is " Drachenfels " and " Genevieve Undead ", to which I have now added " Beasts in Velvet " and " Silver Nails ". If you only read one of these four books, make it Beasts in Velvet. There is so much going on in this book in terms of plot threads and characters for you to mine for your game, you could get a whole campaign out of it. This book makes the Old World come alive in your mind. Silver Nails is a great follow up, where the author shows us other little vignettes for the characters we have come to know and love, showing their further adventures. There is also pay-off in the final book that explains what was a non-sequitous plot thread in one

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