At Gen Con this year, I played Night Mother’s Moon, a modern Call of Cthulhu scenario which sends the investigators on the hunt for a crazed man who is hiding from occult-obsessed gang members. While I had some problems with the adventure, there was an an exciting section where we had to plunge into abandoned […]
Tag: historical
I’ve written a lot of adventures for this site over the years – twenty-seven in all! Somehow, I also find time to run other adventures, too. I recently had a blast running Goodman Games’ Tomb of the Savage Kings for Dungeon Crawl Classics, my favorite OSR game, which was only improved by the appearance of […]
This month’s free adventure is St. Cecilia’s Blasphemous Bordello. It’s a creepy, investigative horror adventure set in the old west. But I’m going to use this adventure to talk about the problem with all modern-era big bads. The problem is this. With magic and melee deemphasized, the toughest RPG boss can barely last a turn […]
One-shot RPG adventures are great for players and GMs. For players, one-shots offer a chance to try something new — a new genre, different character types, or even a hot new RPG system. One-shots also offer fresh opportunities for GMs and can recharge the creative batteries. Adventure authors approach pacing, threat levels, and scene descriptions […]
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 […]
Last month I asked Call of Cthulhu fans for suggestions of rare monsters. I wanted to know which Lovecraftian monsters had rarely, if ever, appeared in a scenario. My challenge to myself was to write an adventure based around an obscure monster I had never heard of. I received lots of suggestions. The Hounds of […]
There’s a reason we only get a few great James Bond movies every decade. Spy adventures take a lot of work to get right. And in RPGs, spy adventures are one of the Tough Genres. I’ve received several requests last year to reboot one of the old 80’s Top Secret S/I adventures. I had never […]
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 […]
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: For the ice age to really work as a desperate and alien setting, you need to fully embrace the setting’s quirks. If the ice age just feels like a […]
