Regular readers of this blog will know that I occasionally go back through old adventures, look for ones that don’t quite work, but have a good soul, and reboot them into something new. Rebooting an adventure is a very different creative process from writing a new one — by adapting someone else’s older work, you’re […]
Tag: horror
I’ve worked in the videogame industry since 1996, and some of the first games I shipped were on the Game Boy. That’s a long time to watch game design evolve, along with the hardware to push pixels. Somewhere back in the Xbox 360 era, I came up with a fun XBLA game concept — Dinosaurs […]
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 […]
“The next time you see sky, it’ll be over another town. The next time you take a test, it’ll be in some other school. Our parents, they want the best of stuff for us. But right now, they got to do what’s right for them.” I love the energy of action horror of the 1980s. […]
Over the last few years, I’ve written over a dozen free horror adventures that you can find on this website. They range from horror adventures that span unusual historical settings, to takes on rare genres (at least in RPGS) like 80s slasher films and 1950s retro cheese. In that time span, I’ve also discovered new […]
Horror makes for one of the best genres for one-shot RPG adventures. Horror adventures are usually short, with many of them easily able to be finished in just one night. Horror characters are usually archetypical and fun to play. Roleplay a crazy old cat lady for a campaign? No way! But for one night, where […]
Last year, I did a fun game design experiment where I asked Call of Cthulhu fans what some of the most underused and forgotten Lovecraftian monsters were. I then took one of those obscure creatures — the alien Insects of Shaggai — and wrote an entire adventure around them. Centering an adventure around a monster […]
This month, I followed the trail of some good one-shot adventures, and discovered two fantastic ones that are worth checking out… especially if you’re a fan of the undead (and honestly, what kind of GM isn’t…?) Spoilers ahead! Tomb of the Savage Kings – Classic Mummy Horror Dungeon Crawl Classics has a fantastic collection of […]
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 […]
