Category Archives: RPGaDay2017

Question 5: Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game.

Setting aside all the tv/movie tie-in games where they can’t really go wrong with the covers (Doctor Who, James Bond, Star Trek), most covers haven’t made much of an impression over the years.

I guess the following would be high on any list:

Call of Cthulhu 1st edition. There’s a spooky house, it’s night, you’re woefully ill-equipped for the task at hand.

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Question 4: Which RPG have you played the most since August 2016?

The group has had a number of games on the go since then. The standard procedure is to have two games running on alternate weeks; with the opportunity for some random stuff if people can’t make it, need a change of pace, whatever.

There was a lot of Lamentations of the Flame Princess; in a 17th century London milieu/melee where the characters are investigators on behalf of academia. A GM plan for us to complete all of the Lamentations scenarios one-after-t’other has resulted, in approximately half a year of gaming sessions, with one whole scenario done and dusted. Let’s say we’re very methodical. Still, onwards and upwards, eh?

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Question 2: What is an RPG that you would like to see published?

A few things spring to mind here: games that are just about to be released like Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha; the Stars Without Number Revised Edition from Kevin Crawford, already storming it on Kickstarter; and, also discovered on Kickstarter, a (not a game) called Dialect, about languages and how they’re born, how they die away.

All of that is coming soon and promises to be well worth the wait.

But I’ve also given some thought to the idea of things-I’d-like-to-see-as-a-game.

First up would be one I mentioned back during my first attempt at RPGaDay in 2015; Stargate & Cthulhu. I think that would be a great blending of genres. Indeed, if you just played early 1900s Stargate and upped the ‘cultists messing with alien tech’ side of things it would probably work pretty well within the existing Stargate rpg rules. Whatever they are. I own them and haven’t read them yet…

Anyway, I still think it would benefit from a proper game. I’m currently running something like it with Silent Legions, also from the aforementioned Kevin Crawford, but it’s not quite there yet in terms of system – though the eldritch-mythology creation section is tremendous. Also I haven’t told the players what’s actually going on, so…spoiler alert, I guess.

The other thing I imagine would make an interesting game of some sort, at least for a one-off or two, is the recent Ben Wheatley movie Free Fire, trailer here. Which is not to say that Ben Wheatley’s other movies might not make interesting games also, but this one in particular is a slightly retro days-before-mobile-phones plot where an arms deal goes wrong in a remote warehouse and then the shooting starts.

So I’m thinking small number of player characters, random location, set up to go sideways and everyone starts wounded. Limited ammunition, not exactly top class weapon skills, two, or three, factions and maybe everyone has different objectives: complete the mission, get out alive, kill adversary X…

Needs more thought, but there’s definitely/maybe something there.