On the Ninth Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,

Nine monstrous shoggoths,
Eight ghosts a-haunting,
Seven mi-go’s buzzing,
Six vampires drinking,
Five meepin’ ghouls!
Four terror birds,
Three planetvores,
Two orks choppin’,
And dread Cthulhu dreaming ‘neath the sea.

 

I don’t know why I love shoggoths so much, but they’re one of my favorite things to come out of the Cthulhu mythos. It’s an amoebic-like, more terrifying version of a gelatinous cube. While it hasn’t always proven true in our games, a shoggoth can be an unstoppable force, mindlessly pursuing your party wanting only to devour them in it’s many mouths. It’s not something you can reason with, you can only fight or flee.

Shoggoths have shown up in Final Girl and Numenera. Expect them to continue to appear, especially in anything I put together.

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

On the Eighth Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,

Eight ghosts a-haunting,
Seven mi-go’s buzzing,
Six vampires drinking,
Five meepin’ ghouls!
Four terror birds,
Three planetvores,
Two orks choppin’,
And dread Cthulhu dreaming ‘neath the sea.

Wouldn’t you know it, our little horror-themed actual play podcast on occasion features a ghost or two. From haunts in Pathfinder that provoke suicide, to down on their luck taxidermists who don’t realize they’re dead, we’ve had a few run ins with the living impaired this year.

Ghosts can be scary for any number of reasons, from simple jump scares to expressions of personal regret or helplessness. The ghosts we’ve encountered lately have been more in the human interest category, though there was that one that made a PC commmit suicide: that was pretty funny right?

Given how often they turn up in practically every RPG in some form or another, I’d expect more haunting for the foreseeable future.

You can find ghosts in Scary on the Choo-Choo, A Rune Awakening, and Megan Encounters.

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

On the Seventh Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,

Seven mi-go’s buzzing,
Six vampires drinking,
Five meepin’ ghouls!
Four terror birds,
Three planetvores,
Two orks choppin’,
And dread Cthulhu dreaming ‘neath the sea.

TRF’s roots lie in mythos horror and foremost in the world of Delta Green. Therefore, no chronicle of beasties would be complete without the alien menace that featured so heavily in many of our early adventures and has made recurring appearances since then.

With their unknowable ends and alien plotting, these creatures can pop up anywhere, even the Ninth World. They’re still probably peeved about Pluto’s demotion to dwarf planet status as well, so we wouldn’t bring it up if you run into one at the bar. You might want to see if it can get you a good deal on lightning guns, which we hear work okay at banishing sons of Yogsothoth.

With our intention to begin an ongoing campaign in the new Delta Green RPG just as soon as the core rule book ships, we’d expect to hear more buzzing from the hills before too long. For now, they feature in PX Poker Night and The Madman.

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

On the Sixth Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,

Six vampires drinking,
Five meepin’ ghouls!
Four terror birds,
Three planetvores,
Two orks choppin’,
And dread Cthulhu dreaming ‘neath the sea.

Okay, well our campaign of Night’s Black Agents may have played a little fast and loose with the setting and the rules, but we maintain that everyone had fun along the way, except maybe all the ones who ended up dead. And let’s face it, any confrontation with vampires conducted by a crew operating for TRF is going to get a little messy.

It’s funny to have the embodiments of human temptation and excess form the centerpiece of what is esssentially a power fantasy. But the trick with Night’s Black Agents is that your nominal superpower of being a black ops badass is so carefully constrained, while your adversary has an menu of interesting tricks available to cut you down to size without getting her hair mussed. To beat them, you’ll have to think fast and act smart: something our team managed to do…most of the time.

This campaign will reach its thrilling conclusion next year, at which point we’ll have to come up with another crew of burned agents to torment. I hear Prague is lovely this time of year.

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

On the Fifth Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,

Five meepin’ ghouls!
Four terror birds,
Three planetvores,
Two orks choppin’,
And dread Cthulhu dreaming ‘neath the sea.

Ghouls are terrible smelling, corpse consuming monsters, but the way they talk is my favorite part. They belong to a lot of legends about beings living in graveyards, but that doesn’t always keep intrepid adventurers away. Nor are they bound to graveyards, as you’re likely to find them in many dark, out of the way places such as basements and the occasional decommissioned cruise ship. Weirdly, most of the ghouls we’ve encountered have been sympathetic, but maybe that just leaves a better chance for them to attack you in an unsuspecting moment.

Ghouls have shown up in Scary on the Choo-Choo, Old Gods of the North, Numenera, and Monophobia games.

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

On the Fourth Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,

Four Terror Birds,
Three planetvores,
Two orks choppin’,
And dread Cthulhu dreaming ‘neath the sea.

There are a lot of cool and weird beasts in the Ninth World, but I really love the Terror Birds. What’s crazy is that these beasts have root in our own (First World’s?) history. Terror Birds, or Phorusrhacids, were a clade of huge, carnivorous birds that could be 3 meters tall. The party only fought them off once in my Numenera campaign, but as luck has it they found a clutch of eggs and they tried to raise them to terrifying adulthood while saving the Ninth World.

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

On the Third Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,

Three planetvores,
Two orks choppin’,
And dread Cthulhu dreaming ‘neath the sea.

We’ve been big fans of The Strange here at TRF for a good long while. It’s simple, player-facing style of play makes it easy to run, while its setting allows for limitless opportunities to jump from one genre to another with breakneck speed. It’s a great way to get your fantasy, sci-fi and horror fixes all in one night, with the same character sheet. Our first campaign for this finished recording almost a year and a half ago and is scheduled for release in the spring. But for Christmas this year, you can expect a special treat from your favorite crew of homicidal Estate operatives.

What you won’t be getting, hopefully, is a visit from one of these enormous entities defined by their insatiable appetite for destruction. This answer from The Strange as to why we have yet to find signs of intelligent life among the stars makes for a terrific existential threat. Why haven’t we heard from ET yet you might ask: because a Planetvore ate him when his neighbor turned on their worlds first quantum computer.

We’ve only faced one of these so far: it drove one agent more than a little mad, not that anyone noticed. We’ll be sure to poke a few more with a stick before too long, for science.

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

On the Second Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,

Two orks choppin’,
And dread Cthulhu dreaming ‘neath the sea.

With characteristically good timing, TRF decided to go into Warhammer 40k role playing in a big way this summer, just as Fantasy Flight was announcing that they would be losing the license to play in Games Workshop’s playground. While this means there won’t be more content coming in their numerous and varied lines of grim dark sci-fi tabletop experiences, it hasn’t stopped us from enjoying the brutal combat of Only War or the brutal intrigues of Dark Heresy, and perhaps before long the brutal profiteering of Rogue Trader, all brutally of course.

And speaking of brutality, nothing embodies the concept more clearly than our friends the Orks. These often cartoonish foils for the Imperium of Man give players something suitably over the top to combat with their machine gun rocket launchers and chainsaw broadswords. So thank you Orks for your generous contribution to our role playing landscape this year. We’ll be sure to put your Christmas card in a red envelope so it gets to you faster.

We encountered Orks in Only War: Jungle Death Worlds are the Worst

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas

On the First Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,

Dread Cthulhu dreaming ‘neath the sea.

As the holidays approach, we wanted to continue a TRF tradition we began last year, spending the 12 Days of Christmas celebrating things we love in RPGs. This year our carols focus on our favorite monsters, creatures, and adversaries to bring into our games. Next year, I’ll finally figure out how to make the whole song about dice.

So many of the games we love to play are based on Cthulhu Mythos, so I’m not sure how much of an introduction he really needs. We started out the show trying to cram him and the mythos into everything we did, now we’re giving him a little more room to breathe. Cthulhu has been through many iterations as he has come more into public awareness, from Kawaii Cthulhu to Political Cthulhu, but hopefully we’ll never be foolish enough to stop fearing him. If we do, I’ll be sure to run a game that culminates in the party seeing him, in all his indescribable  glory and watch as their sanity finally slips away.

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas