Mysteries of Montreal

Melted and damaged mannequins after a fire at Madame Tussauds . London. 1925.

Google Watership Down , and you get reviews of both the book by Richard Adams, and the film and animated series based upon it. A story of rabbits. It's slightly more than that, it is a story about anthropomorphised rabbits, and their mythic journey to a new home. A story of liberation and self-determination that strikes a chord with many diverse readers. Google Watership   Down   Trauma , and you'll get another story. My story. Children who were taken to the cinema to watch a cartoon about bunnies (rated U for universal), who were subjected to a tale of death and horror. Rabbits are choked by snares, get into bloody battles, and are snatched by predators. This film was released in cinemas when I was 3, so that was the age I watched it. It is one of my earliest memories. It scarred me. That it was partly based on the author's experience with Operation Market Garden gives us an idea of what we're working with here. Why am I talking about this on a gaming blog? Well, due ...

Another Tales from the Loop blog post? In such quick succession after the last? What is going on here? The short answer might be that GMing in Face to face sessions leaves me with time in from of a computer with energy to share things. When GMing online, screen time is prep on Roll20 and in Discord.  Another answer might be that in preparing offline handouts, I have artefacts I wish to share, whereas online games are just images snagged from the pdfs. Whatever the answer is, I came here to share this pdf . This is a trifold pamphlet style handout I game my players at the start of out Tales from the Loop campaign, "They Grow up so Fast". I doubles as a quick introduction to what the Loop is, MAFF, and also gives them access to the map that is in the book, as an in game artefact. Of course, strip out the MAFF logo, and change the map, and you can use it for any of the three cannon settings for Tales from the Loop. Or indeed your very own setting. Enjoy, and let me know if you ...

After Covid, it has taken us quite a while to return to a fully offline gaming group. Mainly because at the end of the lockdown, we were playing a game of Witchlight for 5e that required us to stay online, as the GM of that particular game was much more available online than off.  That campaign ran for what was basically 2 years, but is now completed.  Now that we are back to a face to face set-up, there are games that I did not want to run online that have now moved up to the front of the line. Some were because I didn't think online was the best interface to use: like Kids on Bikes; or Masks of Nyarlathotep (I have far to many props to waste on an online game), and some were because there were players that stepped back from online play that I wanted to include in the game.  One game that I was putting off was Tales from the Loop, and that was because of both above reasons. Now we have started a campaign of this game, the UK based set of mysteries " They Grow up so Fast ...

I am inspired to write this post, due to this recent post , recalling the 20 year anniversary of The Watch House. This was more than just a game to many of us who were playing in it, but I can only say what it meant to me, and so, through the haze of time and aging memory, I will try to do so. I first went to university in Glasgow (Strathclyde Uni), but in all my time there, I didn't look up any University role playing clubs. The are likely many reasons for this, but they're not really that interesting. When I moved to Edinburgh, however, I did look up the local University Gaming club The Great Edinburgh Adventurers Society, GEAS. Still going strong . When I joined, I was, what I would consider now to be essentially a very trad gamer. I had played with the same group since Secondary school, and though we had played many different games, we mostly fell into the same routines with each game. Geas was a real eye opener for me, and in my time there, I played in a number of games, a...

 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...