GMS_XPLSN

it’s august and golly i’ve made virtually no posts here for some time. but now i have some time on my hands and the devil makes work. or something.

in an earlier post i listed the games i wanted to run this year, having set myself a modest goal of running:

• vampire: the masquerade 5th edition
• werewolf: the apocalypse 5th edition
• dungeons & dragons 2024
• deathmatch island
• vaesen – mythic carpathia / mythic britain & ireland
• mork borg – Chris Bissette adventures

so far i have managed to run:

• vampire: the masquerade 5th edition. ran a two shot (or was it three?) detroit game for my weekly online group. threw them in to the aftermath of the prince’s assassination and the clean up crew enacting the ‘phoenix protocols’. went well, but reminded me that vtm needs an existing social hierarchy to rail against.
• werewolf: the apocalypse 5th edition. started a new campaign with my weekly face to face group. had the wonderful idea of setting it in my local area in 2018 when we had a series of massive wildfires, then fast forwarding to covid and the lockdown. it sounds great on paper – blow up the werewolf sept hierarchy in a cinematic fiery battle then battle plague banes. but i refer you to the point above about vtm needing a functioning social hierarchy. werewolf needs a sept to direct the action, otherwise there’s just too much going on. right now i’m focused on rebuilding the sept and introducing characters to act as quest givers.
• mork borg – treasures of the troll king by Chris Bissette. a good time, highly recommend. my players missed a lot of the paths by just going straight for the slumbering troll king. they eventually killed him by making him vomit continuously and finally drowning him in a puddle. it was more gruesome than i expected. that and the players expressly solved every problem with violence.
• the witch is dead. a Grant Howitt one page dungeon where you play a cute woodland animal witch’s familiar seeking to avenge their murder and hopefully resurrect them. ran this last night when half of my werewolf group cried off. barty the crow and terrance the rat sacrificed themselves to kill daring captain swineheart the cold blooded murdering witch hunter who killed the kind and beautiful goody ethel brownteeth. after some spectacularly bad rolls they impaled themselves on hedgehog spines as the thatched cottage they were in was consumed by flames.

incoming games

i’ve mentioned the incoming vaesen mythic carpathia book, part of a kickstarter i backed last year and packaged with the four part campaign book city of my nightmares and the new starter set. i’ve run vaesen a couple of times before, using a ‘monster of the week’ format. i think it really needs a cohesive narrative – an end goal and end game for the story – which the published books haven’t delivered yet (the lost mountain saga by Ellinor DiLorenzo does have more of a focus, and beginning, middle and end, i believe). the core book lays the groundwork for a great conspiracy regarding the fate of the society and a questionable ritual to awaken the sleeping vaesen, with page 197 stating that the truth will be revealed in future vaesen supplements… none have covered it yet.
So whilst i want to run city of my nightmares i also want to stitch it into a larger plot that takes the characters to carpathia, britain and across scandinavia. easy. it’ll be fine.

i’ve also got the alien: evolved kickstarter due to deliver at roughly the same time, including the new starter set and the rapture protocol adventure (and mini’s). i have an idea for a cinematic adventure – rotation – where the players are the replacement crew being rotated on to a mining colony, and oil platform on a sea world. that’s realistically going to be a 2026 goal though.

finally i have some world of darkness books on preorder to inform my ongoing and projected games: wyrmtide and the moonlit path for werewolf and tattered facade for vtm. then i am not buying any other new books this year.

absolutely

guaranteed

100%

pinky promise