TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas: Day 8, Ghosts

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.

A hand appears through opaque glass

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

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas: Day 7, Mi-Gos

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.

A mi-go holds a brain and text reads "Never let mi-go"

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

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas: Day 6, Vampires

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.

Lugosi as the classic Dracula

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

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas: Day 3, Planetvores

On the Third Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,
Three planetvores,
Two orks choppin’,
And dread Cthulhu dreaming ‘neath the sea.

A creature opening it's maw to devour a planet

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

TRF’s Twelve Days of Christmas: Day 2, Orks

On the Second Day of Christmas
My GM gave to me,
Two orks choppin’,
And dread Cthulhu dreaming ‘neath the sea.

A horde of green orks with a yellow sky

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

Review: Delta Green Agent’s Handbook

Delta Green Agent Handbook Cover. Shows a man looking fearfully to the side in the woods, while carrying a book.

The designer of Red Markets and long-time contributor to Role-Playing Public Radio Caleb Stokes once remarked that games like Call of Cthulhu are, contrary to popular belief, just as escapist as your stereotypical sword-wielding adventuring fantasy, only in a different way. I couldn’t agree more, and I love them for it. I first came to tabletop role-playing a little after I’d just gone blind. Well, I’d been pretty much blind as far as most people were concerned for quite a while. But Where before I’d been able to make out shapes, perceive color and detect motion, now I truly, functionally could not see. I felt frail and small and decidedly mortal. And then I found a podcast feed from something called The Unspeakable Oath, with actual play recordings of a game called Delta Green.

This variant of Call of Cthulhu starred members of a conspiracy within the United States federal government who conducted investigations within investigations, concealed evidence while trying to find the horrible truth, discredited witnesses of the unnatural, and served as the only effective defense against things man was not meant to know. It was a hard game, one that challenged you to play smart and watch out for any angle because the odds of emerging with your body and sanity intact were already vanishingly small. And therein lies the escapism: with the whole world, the uncaring cosmos arrayed against you in all its apathetic splendor, you play a puny human that goes out into the dark to fight the monsters with nothing but a Glock, a fake ID and the knowledge that you can only ever forestall the inevitable, because if you don’t do it, no one else will. Fuck the odds, humanity is still here and will be until these agents are dead at least, because that’s what it means to be Delta Green. It was a setting whose fatalism and sense of gallows humor appealed to me. So imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the books from which these games were run had been published more than a decade before and long since disappeared from store shelves. That would change of course, with the advent of electronic sales and print on demand, Delta Green could be had again, but too there was talk of more. Delta Green would rise again.

And now it has, in the form of an entirely standalone product with its own line of hardcover releases scheduled through this year and the next at the very least. Born of Kickstarter and gifted with the depressingly rich world of Post-9/11 covert operations to muck around with for background, the new Delta Green RPG promises a thrilling new world of modern mythos horror for your agents to die in: nihilists rejoice!

Continue reading Review: Delta Green Agent’s Handbook

Megan and Aser go to GenCon 2016

Megan and I have been wanting to go to GenCon for a long time. This gathering of all things gaming and everything remotely related descends on Indianapolis for an extended weekend of gaming, gorging and oh so much spending. Indianapolis seems to love it: probably because this plague of locusts tips better than most.

Megan and Aser at start of GenCon

I think we’re modest folks by and large, but we were pretty ambitious for our first major con. Our plan called for GMing three games and about two hours of game demos for Monte Cook Games, not to mention a few panels, all while staging out of a hotel in the outskirts of the city, we had this. Luckily for us, we had help, which honestly bailed us out of a jam or two in the four days we were there. Matt and Mike of MAMS Gaming have built up a truly spectacular organization of GMs that run events at GenCon with a level of quality and service that really stands out from the usual fare. I’d say this even if They weren’t podcast regulars and we weren’t running games for them. If you’re going to GenCon, I highly encourage you to check out their games to see if they’re running anything you’re interested in.
Continue reading Megan and Aser go to GenCon 2016

A huge thanks from Megan and Aser

Megan and Aser hold out a Cthulhu statue after their wedding.

Megan and Aser hold out a Cthulhu statue after their wedding.

Megan and Aser would like to thank all the people on social media that have sent them their best wishes and congratulations. We hope TRF has helped you find a fraction of the happiness it has spawned in us, for you would then be very happy indeed.

Megan is in the process of moving to California, to make it harder for them to electronically eavesdrop on the happy new couple’s whispered conspiracies, so the release schedule will be disrupted for a time yet. But oh dear reader, when the time is right… Well, that would be telling. 🙂

Narrative Combat

While many if not most modern RPGs tend to favor some other aspects such as investigation, discovery or collaborative narration, the time often comes for the knives to come out. As someone who tends to enjoy these sorts of systems more, but still enjoys a good melee, I thought I’d share some thoughts on combat’s roles and best practices for the more narrative-minded GM.

Don’t Overdo It
-Not every session needs a fight, don’t force one just because it feels like you’re missing out. More importantly, the threat of conflict can sometimes prove more tense than the grimmest firefight, and avoiding it as harrowing a conclusion as a pitched cavalry charge. For your players cast in the role of protectors, their characters can be treated to all sorts of ordeals other than stand up fights: identifying potential threats for instance, or simply being a fish out of water.

Don’t Drag it Out
-I loved techno-thrillers growing up, and what separated a page-turner from a snoozer was the author’s ability to keep the dance between combatants interesting and know how to satisfyingly end things just before that breaking point. When you aren’t in a dungeon crawl killing things to steal their stuff and gain experience points or meticulously modeling the 37th day of the Battle of Stalingrad then, there’’s nothing wrong with a retreat (panicked or planned), a surrender, or even an act of God: where thematically appropriate of course.

Make it Feel Real
-This isn’t so much about accuracy to any sort of reality or fictional continuity, but a basic reminder to keep your players immersed in the story you’re telling. This might be leaning heavily on movie tropes if you have no other background or more reliable common point of reference. Don’t just move miniatures around the tactical grid or tokens on the virtual table, tell your players how the bad guys are walking, talking, using cover, shooting around things. Tell them how well-trained their character thinks the opposition can be, and as always, be ready with the cinematic details.

Don’t Be Afraid to Fudge
-Your job is to tell a story. Don’t let any game element get in the way of that, not even the dice. The one exception to this is your PCs: pay attention to what they’re doing and what they want: don’t get in their way either…

Make it Count
-So you’ve paced the campaign to have one or two pivotal clashes between the good guys and bad, you know just what the bad guys will do and how they’ll do it in a timely way, and you have a few aces up your sleeve; now you can begin to make the PCs care about fighting. Give them something to fight for, something to risk, often best provided by the players themselves. Now set the stakes appropriately high. The rest writes itself.

Lessons for Improv GMs

I have to admit that in my time as a GM, I probably haven’t put forth the sort of effort that many might expect. The thing is, that I think I’ve done pretty well for myself and my groups by weaving the story as we go. That said, there are things that I’ve come to learn are very important to consider when running games by the seat of your pants.

  • Take Notes
    This should go without saying, but I’ve often failed to take adequate notes. This means that in long-running games where there are extended gaps between sessions, you run the risk of losing track of important details or useful plot hooks. Continuity counts when creating a world your players can sink their teeth into. Also, it’s one of the ways your world can seem more fair than it might actually be… 😛
  • Stay Vague, Until You Can’t Anymore
    It’s long been understood that any engaged group of players regularly comes up with more dire circumstances for themselves than their GM ever had in mind. Keep this always in your thoughts as you build toward where you think you want the story to go. Listen to your players’ character dialogue, and you can transform the jump scare three encounters into the smugglers’ hideout from a randomized event into a callback to something the ranger muttered about when the party first set off into the woods.
  • Play Dirty
    I’ve often heard complaints from GMs about how their elaborate plans for their players demise were foiled by a decision to take the walking tour through town instead of the train full of cultists. When you’re making it up as you go, you by definition don’t have this problem. Let the players build the gallows, just keep the rope handy for when they step onto the platform.
  • Play to Lose
    With wha I just said in mind, remember that this isn’t a competition. Your opposition is supposed to give way, not to the players, but to the inexorable, inevitable force of the plot. Failure isn’t only not fun, it’s counterproductive. So, turn those failed die rolls into opportunities to make the story interesting. After all, who’s to say what was supposed to happen if that trap was triggered, you and only you.
  • Act Like You Didn’t
    And keeping what I just wrote in mind, don’t ever let your players think you’ve given them anything. Reward them with more challenges. They’ve just overcome the cavern mazes of the Northern Highlands: reward, the sword that makes defeating the dragon that makes its lair at the heart of the subterranean labyrinth even remotely winnable. If you can sound like you’re disappointed they got it, that’s all the better.
  • Keep the Spotlight on a Swivel
    Because you’re scenario isn’t foreordained you can easily adjust your narrative to allocate attention to whichever character has sort of been standing in the back, running things remotely. Everyone likes their time at the center of things, and keeping generic encounters for your tech guy and face in your back pocket. Waiting for the insertion of the right flavor text can do wonders for party dynamics.
  • Be Prepared to Get Very Specific (or Cinematic) at the Drop of a Hat
    Practice describing things. Look around the room you’re in right now. Is it small? Is it well lit? Is it a train carriage with three rows of four seats split lengthwise by a narrow aisle with the California countryside slipping by the windows in the early afternoon glare? Does the masked assassin take a shot to the shoulder, or does her shoulder explode in a spray of blood and bone as the vector’s slaughter accelerator fills the air with a cloud of needle-sharp projectiles. Just because your sketching in the picture as you go doesn’t mean it can be without interesting details. In fact, adding just the right details to trigger your players imaginations can make for an even more memorable scene for each of them than a long paragraph read from a published module, even if every single one is seeing something completely different.