TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas: Day 5, Trail of Cthulhu

On the Fifth Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,
Five TPKS!
Four ships still flying,
Three Green Boxes,
Two Draculas,
and a Final Girl fleeing to safety.

 

Man standing in the gloom looking at a corpse

There’s actually only ever been one total party kill on TRF: the scenario Castle Bravo for Trail of Cthulhu. As to be expected from Brian, Phil and Aser though, it’s not achieved by half measures.

Using the core clue mechanic central to the Gumshoe system to guarantee narrative progress, Trail of Cthulhu ensures that your intrepid band of investigators will make it to that payoff at the end of the adventure where the true horror of the situation can finally be revealed. Whether the PCs found all of the other clues along the way determines how well that last scene plays out for them: in Castle Bravo, we found most of them.

Listen to our Trail of Cthulhu episodes
TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas: Day 4, Firefly

On the Fourth Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,
Four ships still flying,
Three Green Boxes,
Two Draculas,
and a Final Girl fleeing to safety.

Firefly podcast logo

Okay, this is a bit of a cheat. But much to Aser’s chagrin, it turns out the game he’s GMed the most is for our sister podcast: Firefly Podcast.

Seeking to duplicate the thrilling heroics and interpersonal dramas of a crew living on the edge using the Cortex Plus system, the Firefly RPG is among our favorite narrative-focused games out there.

Check out Firefly Podcast

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas: Day 3, Delta Green

On the Third Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,
Three Green Boxes,
Two Draculas,
and a Final Girl fleeing to safety.

A man holds a book with a fearful expression in the forest, a man has a gun on a third person in the background

 

The game we pretty much credit for the creation of TRF, Delta Green brought together the podcast’s core working group with its take on mythos horror in the modern world. As potential Delta Green agents, the original TRF cast played out our first adventure on a backwater Air Force base in Nebraska. The rest is history.

No longer just a setting for Call of Cthulhu 6E, Delta Green is currently riding a successful Kickstarter towards a release as a stand-alone RPG using the BRP system. Look for it in Spring 2016.

Listen to our Delta Green episodes
TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

What’s Cool on Kickstarter

There’s many interesting items to be found on Kickstarter, but these are the coolest ones this week.

Little Ms. Crate
This subscription box intends to deliver cool STEM-themed items to young girls each month. If you know a 5-10 year old girl who is interested in STEM, this box is for her! You can even donate to send crates to charitable organizations to help girls whose families can’t afford the boxes. I think this box is a great idea, and looks like a great idea to help girls learn about what they really can do.

Examples of the contents in the Little Ms. CEO box includes business cards, a fake phone, and more.

“Each month’s crate is different, but each is designed by Little Ms. Crate’s panel of early childhood development experts and contains unique activities, games, stories, props, and profiles of women role models, which provide just enough structure and inspiration for hours of educational, self-directed play.

Little Ms. Crate is about refuting society’s many negative messages and showing our girls that careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and leadership ARE “for girls”.

Little Ms. Crate is about showing the connections between the impactful, meaningful careers that our little girls tell us they want when they grow up, and the math and science classes they’re taking right now.”

Continue reading What’s Cool on Kickstarter

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas: Day 2, Night’s Black Agents

On the Second Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,
Two Draculas
and a final girl fleeing to safety.

A man garrotes a vampire

Okay, this inside joke between Aser and Megan requires a bit of explanation. What shouldn’t require explaining though is how quickly the TRF cast behind Beyond the Threshold came to love Night’s Black Agents for its unique blend of supernatural horror, techno-thriller action and espionage drama.

Our plucky team of black ops realists have left a trail of destruction from Bosnia to the Bay Area and have been ready to draw down on each other as quickly as the bad guys from almost the beginning. It’s a game that seems tailor-made for TRF.

Listen to our Beyond the Threshold Campaign

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas: Day 1, Final Girl

On the First Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,
A final girl fleeing to safety.

Final girl cover shows a girl coered in blood with a knife facing a killer in a mask

Since we started recording, the TRF crew have checked out more horror movie RPGs than you could shake a severed limb at. Seriously, who would’ve thought this was a genre in and of itself? Of all the different slasher flick simulators though, none has grabbed and held onto our interest like a grudge from beyond more than Final Girl.

Sadly now out of print and only available periodically through places like Bundle of Holding, this quick-start GM-less game using a deck of cards has been a podcast standby pretty much since the beginning. Get your hands on a copy when you can

Listen to our Final Girl Sessions

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

What’s Cool on Kickstarter

There’s many interesting items to be found on Kickstarter, but these are the coolest ones this week.

Autumn Cthulhu: An Anthology
I love autumn, so this collection definitely caught my eye. There’s a great collection of authors who are writing Mythos inspired tales with the themes of autumn entwined. They’re also making an exclusive coin to accompany the book!

Cover of the book showing Cthulhu emerging in the background with an autumn tree in the foreground

“Autumn Cthulhu is a new fiction anthology featuring original tales of Lovecraftian horror set in the fall, published by Lovecraft eZine Press! I’ve been fascinated by autumn and Halloween since the age of six. I discovered Lovecraft much later… and ever since, I have felt that cosmic horror was a natural fit for this time of year. Colorful falling leaves, crisp days, rainy afternoons and evenings. A time of endings and melancholy.”

Continue reading What’s Cool on Kickstarter

A Quickstart Guide for Game Masters at Gen Con

In hindsight, GMing at Gen Con is not easy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a blast! But a 60,000 player convention has a lot of moving parts, and I would have loved a guide to avoid all the inefficiencies, mistakes, and general frustrations I experienced during my first few years.

So, without any further ado, here are some of the things that are in the Event Host Policy document Gen Con releases every year, but hopefully a little more concise:

GM vs. Gaming Group
If you are running an event by yourself, you are a GM! That means you’re only responsible for yourself and your event. This eliminates a lot of possible advantages, such as getting complimentary GM Badges or requesting a GM Hotel Room, but this provides a much faster, simpler submittal process and you don’t have the pain of herding the cats that are your fellow GMs. Good job on not being insane!

GM Badges
As a GM, you still must purchase a Badge as an Attendee, then request before mid-May a GM Badge for pickup at GM HQ. Once you pick up your GM Badge, you drop off your Attendee Badge and, after the convention, request reimbursement.
As a Gaming Group, you can request a number of complimentary GM Badges equivalent to number expected of player hours generated from your approved events divided by 72 hours. What does this all mean? If you plan to run 72 player hours of events (# of Events x # of players x # of Event’s Hours), you’ll get a free Badge.

Continue reading A Quickstart Guide for Game Masters at Gen Con

What’s Cool on Kickstarter

There’s many interesting items to be found on Kickstarter, but these are the coolest ones this week.

Cthulhu Holiday Ornaments
I have one Cthulhu ornament on my tree, and I can’t wait to add to the collections. These are pretty, made in house, and should get to you by Christmas! This is a short lived project, so get your order in ASAP!

All four ornaments hanging from a Christmas Tree. Each features Cthulhu

“We’re making Cthulhu Holiday Ornaments for your Cthulhumas tree! This is a very simple campaign, with one goal: to put a set of 4 snazzy mirrored Cthulhu ornaments on your Yuletide tree, wreath, or mantle. That’s it! No complicated add-ons or variations, and we’re planning on producing and shipping quickly, so you can have your ornaments in time to enjoy them for the holidays (at least if you’re in the US or Canada – shipping elsewhere will probably cause them to arrive after Dec. 25).”

 

Secret Hitler
You can probably figure out what this game is about just from the name. It looks like a lot of fun and I would love to play it at parties. Plus, you can pledge to get some exclusive Cards Against Humanity cards!

GIF showing all of the possible secret role cards.

“Secret Hitler is a dramatic game of political intrigue and betrayal set in 1930’s Germany. Players are secretly divided into two teams – liberals and fascists. Known only to each other, the Fascists coordinate to sow distrust and install their cold-blooded leader. The liberals must find and stop the Secret Hitler before it’s too late.

Each round, players elect a President and a Chancellor who will work together to enact a law from a random deck. If the government passes a fascist law, players must try to figure out if they were betrayed or simply unlucky. Secret Hitler also features government powers that come into play as fascism advances. The fascists will use those powers to create chaos unless liberals can pull the nation back from the brink of war.”

 

Sly Flourish’s Fantastic Locations
Inspiration is always essential as a GM. And locations can be hard to come up with. A book like this, full of great locations (that are system agnostic!) can be invaluable to a GM, to inspire their own locations or save a little work during prep.

A winding stair leads to an entrance that looks like a face with the door in the open mouth

“We RPG game masters have a lot of tools to help us run our roleplaying games. Our monster books and bestiaries give us piles of foes to throw at our adventurers. The various guides for game masters often give us non-player characters, treasures, and story-building tips.

One of the hardest parts of game mastering, however, is coming up with interesting adventure locations for our characters to explore. These locations need to be fantastic, detailed places that capture the minds of our players every session we run. Good locations are hard to improvise and often hard to strip out of a fully-fleshed-out adventure.

Sly Flourish’s Fantastic Locations is a book, available in PDF and print-on-demand, that gives you fifteen system-agnostic fantastic locations to drop into your favorite fantasy roleplaying game. Each location builds on a fantastic theme, such as a mysterious ancient structure under the ice, a cursed castle of a mad king, a fallen celestial fortress, and a dwarven mine that cracked into the tomb of a dead god. Each location includes artwork by Brian Patterson of D20Monkey. Sometimes this artwork takes the form of maps. Sometimes it’s an overlook of a specific location.”

 

Runequest: Classic Edition
Runequest is a classic old school RPG that has gone through several editions and was Chaosium’s first game. And as Chaosium approaches it’s 40th year as a company, they’ve decided to bring back the classic second edition of the game.

4 Runequest books, Balastor's Barracks, Creatures of Chaos 1, Militia & Mercenaries, and Trolls and Trollkin

“Here we are in 2015, the 40th Anniversary of Chaosium as a game company. In a few months Glorantha, Greg Stafford’s fantasy game world, celebrates its Golden 50th anniversary. We feel the time is right to bring the celebrated classic second edition of RuneQuest back into print. Gaming is going through a bit of an Old School renaissance as of late, and we want RuneQuest to be a part of it. We hope you’ll join in on the fun!”

 

Unspoiled! Podcast Laptop Christmas Miracle
Unspoiled is one of the first podcasts I ever listened to, and the one I’ve been listening to the longest. Natasha produces an incredible amount of incredibly entertaining content covering books, movies, and TV in short and in depth episodes. She currently could really use a new computer to help her with her full-time podcasting, and you should check out her amazing content even if you don’t want to pledge!

A finger is held in front of red lips in a shushing gesture.

“My increasingly well-known podcast UNspoiled! started four years ago, on a Macbook Pro and a Blue Snowball microphone that my co-host and I had to fight over to be heard. We continued like that for almost two years, upgrading only the microphones, until one day tragedy struck: my laptop slid out of my hands and slammed into the unforgiving concrete of a Philadelphia sidewalk. It continued functioning just long enough for me to purchase an emergency second-hand desktop Mac, which was at the time already 5 years old. Fast forward to today, and I’m still on that old Mac.

This old girl has served me well, but there are signs that she’s approaching her last legs. I already had a hard-drive failure in October of last year, which cost me months of recording time. Thankfully, my unbelievably generous listeners came together to help me purchase the $500 replacement hard drive, and I managed to soldier on. But even that upgrade hasn’t prevented her from slowing down when faced with some of the newer, more intricate software and online apps that I need to deliver the full range of shows and perks to my audience.

Now that I’m embarking on a mission to podcast full-time, it’s more crucial than ever that I have a machine that can withstand the rigors of intensive, constant, everyday use. Not only that, but having so much production to manage really necessitates a laptop; the sheer number of hours I’m putting in now makes sitting constantly at my desk a painful endeavor. ”

 

Still active!

Würm
What Lies Beyond Reason, a PF adventure path
Lovecraft, P.I.
Age of Legends
Bring Back MST3K
Leonardo
Jellyfish Aquarium
Cthulhu Tales
Yrisa’s Nightmare, A Pathfinder AP
Luma Dice

How Gaming Made Everything Better

I’ve come to gaming only recently compared to pretty much everyone else involved in The Redacted Files. However, as I take a break from editing what is scheduled to be our 65th actual play episode release, I have to think that I probably have the most of anyone in the bunch to be thankful to gaming for.

Simply put, I was in a bad place before I started gaming. I’d seen what had been a promising career and several fundamental aspects of my personal identity crumble as the last of my usable vision simply…went away. I was pushing away friends with whom I suddenly had nothing in common and was spending a lot of time just reading and waiting for something to happen. In all that media consumption though, I began listening to more podcasts again, and began reaching out to some of the folks who I found liked similar things about what we were listening too. What happened after that is nothing less then a turning point in my life, I started doing stuff again.

I started talking with some folks about playing a game on Hangouts, and maybe doing a podcast. I tried being more positive and open, and sharing the spark of optimism I was cultivating whenever I had the chance. And one of the people I found this way changed my life for the better, in pretty much every way imaginable.

I’ve played in so many games now, averaging at least three a week since the podcast hit its stride. And gaming has given me so much in return to for the time and passion I’ve poured into it. I’ve had the opportunity to meet so many amazing people that are part of this amazing community, had the chance to examine and poke at what makes me who I am in any number of interesting role-playing scenarios, and gotten the chance to tell stories that entertain. Most of all though, I’m grateful for Megan, without whom so much of all of this, of all of me, never would have come to fruition.

Thank you so much for reading. We here at TRF are overjoyed to be able to do what we do and that’s all because of our incredible listners and supporters. Thank you so much and have a very happy Thanksgiving.