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In episode 66, Jon, Murf, and Dan revisit the questions asked at the GenCon live show recording. This gives Jon and Dan the opportunity to answer the questions given by the audience. We then go into using space-faring science fiction as a setting for your horror games.
This episode was recorded on October 19th, 2014.
Campus Crier
That means it reached the level for the Brian Sammons edited Tales of Cthulhu Invictus anthology, and stretch goal 5, which adds in a new section to the book with patrons that can employ the PC investigators in their adventures.
Sadly goal 6 was not reached, which would have given us A Whisper of Crones, which was Chad’s scenario.
- We’ve seen a dearth of Mythos games seeking funding on Kickstarter lately. One of which is about to finish with successful funding.
That Which Sleeps
That Which Sleeps is a re-imagining of the God Game. Take the role of an awakened evil and manipulate a living, reactive world.
Human Resources – An Apocalyptic RTS Game
The robot apocalypse gets complicated when tentacle monsters crash the party. Humans are the resource in this epic strategy game.
H.P. Lovecraft: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Travel back to vintage Providence and face horrors lurking underneath in the first official game based on the work of the famed writer.
- It’s that time of year again–for the Delta Green Shotgun Scenario Contest.
As usual, the aim of this year’s contest is to write short scenarios. In keeping with the Man in Black’s original definition, mere scenario seeds are perfectly welcome, including evocative artifacts, species, themes and cults. Everyone is invited to participate and advertise.
- Entries can be of any length. However, any entry longer than 1500 words will be judged
- To submit an entry, email it to the contest administrator, epossing AT yahoo DOT com. The administrator will post each text with its word count to the DGML as soon as possible, and archive it on the Delta Green wiki with appropriate formatting.
- The last day for submissions is Sunday, December 7, 2014
- Another delay was announced from Chaosium for the Horror on the Orient Express Kickstarter Campaign. An update went out to backers on Oct. 16th that has pushed the ship date back at least another month. The problem is the Sedefkar Simulacrum item that was being fulfilled by an overseas printer. Apparently this is the second printer that was used for this one piece and now they don’t expect to have them at Chaosium in California until November. As a peace offering they gave backers a copy of the new Cold Harvest campaign book set in Russia during the time of troubles.
- Oscar Rios sent out an update for the Tales of the Crescent City KS Campaign early this morning as well. This update was directed to the international backers that are still waiting on rewards to arrive. Apparently Oscar has had some issues with his overseas re-distributor. If you still have not received your international rewards then Oscar would like you to email him so that he can personally get this resolved once and for all.
Card Catalog
Writing Exercises
Storyteller introduced us to a quick resource that is pretty awesome. This site has generators for players, such as Character Job/Occupation Generator, or Character Traits generator. It also includes resources for the Keeper as well: a Town Name Generator, Plot Generator, and a Scenario Generator.
Cryptocurium Spot
Nyarlathotep’s Bazaar! The itinerant showman has opened up shop at Cryptocurium once again! Limited edition items every week for five weeks all available for one week only!
Item #1 was a statue of Wilbur Whateley
Item #2 is The Hound Amulet. Release the Hound!
Item #3 was MU Archaeological Kit
Item #4 is the Elder Thing T-Shirt
Side Topic
Jon and Dan answer the listener questions at GenCon-
(
Dan is also adding in extra thoughts that didn’t occur at the moment since it was so early.)
Q- How long does it take to edit the podcast?
A- Dan- This is reliant on how long the recording is and the amount of noise needing to be scrubbed out. On average, a careful edit takes about 4 hours of editing for each hour of recording. That is if there is no noise. Removing noise can be a happy few minutes, or a number of hours due to undoing the prior attempt and trying again with different settings. Over processing leads to distorted audio that is worse than it was before trying to pull out the background noise.
This episode is going out late because it had some bad hiss from Skype that needed to be removed. The process adds time to an edit when you’re careful enough in not letting the audio sound like you’re under water.
Q- What’s next for the MUP website and forums?
A- Dan- What I want to do is to replace the PHPBB forums we’re using now with a forum system called bbPress. This will be integrated with WordPress, and I’ll also use another system called BuddyPress that will add in social networking capabilities. I want to make it as easy as possible for people to talk, arrange games, or whatever else the community wants to do.
Q- What do you do when someone derails the story, pulling an “Old Man Henderson”?
A- Dan- We basically both come down to a “roll with it” kind of mentality. If a player is trying to purposly make the game not fun, then there needs to be a conversation. I’ve found that most of the time when someone does something in game that’s bizarre, they’re trying to gauge the limits of how far they can go.
Q- What do you do with timid players who play so cautiously that they don’t engage with the plot out of fear?
Jon had a story from GenCon about this kind of thing.
Dan hasn’t run into this problem, actually. It’s usually rushing in without doing any research.
Q- What other live plays are you planning to release?
A- Jon- I’ve been running a game that we have been recording from session 4. I will be recording a description of what happened in the episodes that the recording didn’t work on.
A- Dan- I have 8 episodes of the next chapter of my MAPS campaign in the can. We also have some live plays that have been submitted from the community.
Suggestion: take a scenario do some analysis, and go over what each of our individual approaches would be.
Suggestion: go over scenarios in depth sometimes with spoiler alerts.
Both of these excellent ideas will be appearing on the show!
Main Topic
Era Discussion: Science Fiction
Jon-
My idea is to have a discussion/debate on aspects of science fiction in Call of Cthulhu, versus aspects of horror, (both physical and psychological). Lovecraft used all of those aspects in his work, and different stories accentuated each differently. How do we as Keepers use those aspects in our games?
Links mentioned:
The Star Wars Deck Plan Alliance
Ship Schematics.Net
Merzo Ship Scales
ArtShips
Traveller Deck Plans
Here is a Pinterest board with deck plans
The Void
CthulhuTech
Ashen Stars (Not horror, but it runs on Gumshoe, and you can probably use Trail of Cthulhu rules to make it scary)
Rogue Trader
Traveller
Metamorphosis Alpha
Gurps Trek
Gurps Horror
Discuss this episode
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In episode 66, Jon, Murf, and Dan revisit the questions asked at the GenCon live show recording. This gives Jon and Dan the opportunity to answer the questions given by the audience. We then go into using space-faring science fiction as a setting for your horror games.
This episode was recorded on October 19th, 2014.