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PacifiCon 2009
Evidently ConQuest is dead and it's long live PacifiCon now. It was all Cthulhu all the con as I ran a game of Call of Cthulhu (Toteninsel), and played in games of Call of Cthulhu (A Black Brothers Production, Here There Be Tygers, and Once Men) and CthulhuTech (Nemesis).
[post @ my personal blog...]
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The (Mis)adventures of Lt. Mason A. Schufeldt
Just finished reading The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, about the designer of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and serial killer H.H. Holmes. It was readable but overrated (I wanted more with the "Changed America" and didn't get it), but I was happily struck by a few scant words on the fate of ( Read more... ) -
Children of Earth and Curse of the Yellow Sign
This is a joint post to my gaming livejournal and my personal blog, due to the cross-topics being discussed.
This week, I saw that latest (last?) Torchwood series, Children of Earth, and read the first act in the Curse of the Yellow Sign series for Call of Cthulhu. I expected one to be marginal and the other to rock, and was surprised on both fronts ( Read more... ) -
Music for Gaming
In the process of transferring over my MP3's and other music files from an old desktop to a new one, I lost some of the info I'd inputted into the Itunes entries for the files, forcing me to go through them one by one. I've built up a library of music files categorized for game use, mostly instrumental scores from movies, TV shows, and video games ( Read more... ) -
KublaCon 2009
It's saying something that I had such a good experience at this year's KublaCon, because it had no business being anything other than a complete clusterfuck. The con staff scheduled and re-scheduled my two games around so much that I was completely stressed out by the time I ran them and had to deal with players showing up to the wrong room or two ( Read more... ) -
Fundable for Keith Herber's Widow
Keith Herber, one of the leading authors that created the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game in its formative years, passed away yesterday. Simply looking over the listing of his work at Pen & Paper RPG Database shows how much he has added to both CoC and this hobby as a whole. What stands out for me from that list are his work on the 1920's ( Read more... ) -
Professional Competence and Insane Effort
In my last post, I tried to address the charge that characters are too incompetent in Call of Cthulhu by granting more points to spend in the BRP point-buy character creation system on characteristics and skills. Another way to deal with the problem* might be in using one or both of these house rules:
Professional Competence
To create characters that ( Read more... ) -
Adventures in Character Creation
In between creating characters for my DunDraCon game and another to play in an 1890s campaign, I've been doing a lot of character creation with Call of Cthulhu, and it has not been a happy experience. A common complaint about CoC using their traditional Basic Role-Playing (BRP) system is that characters are almost always incompetent bumblers, ( Read more... ) -
The Objective
So you know how I was saying there haven't yet been enough works to build a fictional tradition about our current wars in the Mideast so that inexperienced spuds like me can use it as background with any legitimacy. Well, that's already changing:
I'll admit that if I didn't know it had a slightly better pedigree, I'd think was just another bad Sci ( Read more... )
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