One of my favorite old-school videogame RPGs was 1992’s Darklands. Set in medieval Germany, the game was brutally difficult, seeped in superstition and folklore, and — way ahead of its time — a massive sandbox you could explore. It was also incredibly buggy, had UX issues, and required some some serious autoexec voodoo to get […]
Tag: call-of-cthulhu
It’s been a busy 2020 on the 1shotadventures blog! This year, 9 new free adventures were published for systems ranging from D&D and Call of Cthulhu to GURPS and Savage Worlds. Special thanks to everyone who gave me feedback or dropped a note to here or on Twitter. I originally started this blog because I […]
The slasher film is a popular take on horror. In RPGs, slasher adventures are utterly underrepresented. For Halloween this year, I went on a search for a great ’70s or ’80s style slasher killer adventure. I almost came up empty. I found RPG-adjacent storytelling games like The Final Girl and Slasher, and I also found […]
One of my favorite pieces of movie trivia is that the famous mine car chase from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was originally planned for Raiders of the Lost Ark. If you read the original Raiders screenplay, you’ll find the scene at the very end. After Indy and Marion recover the ark from […]
The ice age is probably the most ignored RPG setting. It’s also one of the best historical settings for Lovecraftian horror. Let me make my case: Every element of the setting makes for sheer desperation. In the ice age, civilization is viscerally surrounded by the dangerous unknown. Night IS dark and full of terrors. This […]
Pulp RPGs are cursed. I’m not an RPG historian, but I’m fairly positive that is a 100% true statement, at least for me. Every pulp RPG I excitedly purchased had an ill-fated ending. I was crushed when I realize the TSR Indiana Jones game only let you pick between seven characters to play. You better […]
I envy the evil overlords who are about to start construction on their newest dungeon. There are hundreds of fantastic blogs, Reddit threads, and books on how to best construct a world-class dungeon for roleplaying games. Sinister ghosts however get the short end of the stick. There’s sparse advice for GMs on how to create […]
Horror RPGs appear to be going through a resurgence, at least according to my own convention statistics. It’s easy to fill up a game of Call of Cthulhu these days, even at a small convention, and my GURPS Horror historical crossovers do well too. As most horror writers will tell you, the best horror is […]
One of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories is “The Temple”. It’s a straightforward but moody account of a German submarine crew dealing with one horrible problem after another – a cursed item, an engine malfunction, mutiny, madness, suicide, and then finally its lone survivor staring straight into The Impossible. It has all the hallmarks of […]
I was drawn back into Call of Cthulhu when one of my friends started running one-shot adventures for his teenage son. Suddenly, even old, barely-remembered adventures like The Haunting were magical again, and we were all having a blast tromping around abandoned cabins, fleeing cultists and Deep One-infested lighthouses, and laughing as we inevitably went crazy and died horribly […]