A Slight Aside

Apology and What’s to Come:

Now, this is the beginning of the last part of the Manhattan Knights. These characters would once again fade into the background as we moved on to another part of the story, in another part of the world. These last few adventures with the White Tail Tribe and Sleepy Hollow and now the Monoliths was merely to waste more time while I awaited new books. Also, I wanted to advance the timeline in New York to equal Aysle (Aysle ended at Day 142-ish) and also advance the characters to a similar level (13 Acts versus 9 Acts).

Looking over my notes, it looks like I’m missing an entire gaming session. This happened back in September so, I can’t just magically produce all of the events leading up this blog post. So, I will have to ad-lib the first session of the Monoliths. I kind of hate that this post will be rather lackluster as literally 4 hours of role playing and storytelling is lost, and the only notes that survive are from the b-session in which the players plan an attack on the big boss and then it devolves into 2 hours of fighting.

Thank You

Thank you to the handful of readers that have continued with this series from the start. I know I picked up more during the Aysle story and I lost a handful when I went back to Manhattan. But the few of you who come in and read every week have made it more than worth the time.

Just a reminder that after this session we start the third world, the Nile Empire, and that game gets a slight start, but then has to pause for the holidays and then in January we got a few games under our belt and things took a turn. Unfortunately, the game was then paused due to the quarantine and Corvid-19.

Now, I have continued gaming, but it has moved online, and TORG uses a lot of cards to run the game and those don’t lend themselves well to gaming online. So, the Torg game is going on break soon. I have enough notes to take us for at least another month or two, but after that it might have to be D&D stories or perhaps, we’ll talk about future games I’m working on?

Future Games:

So, with the quarantine I have been getting into other media—[in case you haven’t guessed by now I have decided that I will do the last Manhattan Knights post next week, right now I want to talk about these Sunday posts, and gaming in general]—I have recently discovered the fun of mixing Actual Play sessions with Radio Plays and it has really had an effect on me.

Right before my job closed down for the Covid-19 I bought a copy of the 6^th Edition Shadowrun. I loved reading the book, despite the problems with the rules and the sheer number of people complaining about it online. Either way, complaints aside reading the book brought back memories of how much I love this world.

Now, I first discovered Shadowrun way back in the 90’s and it was one of the games I bought as a kid but never got to run. But I read the 1^st and 2^nd edition books until they fell apart. Decades later I would end up buying and running in the 4^th edition of the game. My 4e game was amazing and went off the rails quickly. But now I was hooked.

These last two months I’ve been reading a lot of rules books, but being in quarantine I needed something other than TV. That’s when I discovered the podcasts.

Podcasts, Radio Dramas, Gaming:

First off, I started listening to a show called Crit Squad, which is a mash up radio play of Shadowrun. It was amazing, it was a three-year story that just ended at the beginning of the year. Great story, great characters, and the use of sound effects and music. Perfection.

They got me so jazzed up to write and run Shadowrun that I immediately started some new notebooks and created a series of storylines to make a sandbox game. I listened to all of Crit Squad in a matter of weeks, then started the Neo-Anarchist Podcast and the Arcology. And I’m almost done with both of those as well.

These podcasts would then lead me to Call of Cthulhu and D&D podcasts, and that would lead me to buying way more books than I should have, but I have lots of time for reading.

Shadowrun Plans:

So, with Shadowrun I dug out my 4e books and I read the 6e book and I read a lot of things online with people complaining about rules and it became a bit of a mess. So, I started Frankensteining 4e to 6e… and then I finally decided to drop a bunch of money I shouldn’t have and got my hands on 5e. So as of right now I am writing a game with the 5e rules in mind but I’m still thinking I want to add in a bunch of the 6e simplification.

I really love that 6e made initiative and combat rounds easier. I always hated the “multiple passes” in a round thing and “simple and complex actions.” As of right now I’m grafting the systems together and I would really love to use the 6e combined skills system as well. Basically, the game goes from having 49 skills to only having 19. Unfortunately, changing the skills means changing the math for character creation and advancement.

But you’re not here to listen to me wax on about math and rules. I do have a pretty interesting set of stories brewing. The way I view Shadowrun is the players are going to run off in whatever direction interests them. You need to have multiple hooks, stories, and events happening so they can latch on to different things. And you need to be able to adapt quickly. As such I am making sure I have a bunch of background stories all running at the same time, so if a player skips something, it still happens but without their influence and then they have to deal with the aftermath, or ignore it. But I’m digressing.

Call of Cthulhu

That I am a huge fan of the Mythos and Cosmic horror would be an understatement, and my discovery of the Shadowrun podcasts eventually led me to the best of atmospheric storytelling games. Call of Cthulhu. I am currently powering through the BEST troupe of podcasters, the How We Roll crew from the UK. So much fun, they mix modules, one-shots, and longer campaigns to create a fairly cohesive world.

Thanks to them I discovered Pulp Cthulhu, a two fisted version of the game with more heroic characters (and kind of how I used to run the game back in my youth). Besides the joys of pulp Cthulhu and various modules and writers they also introduced me to the Podcast the Friends of Jackson Elias, a podcast run by the writers of the 7^th Edition of Call of Cthulhu.

And YES, I am also reading my Call of Cthulhu gaming books again and thinking I might want to run a pulp adventure. I’m keeping that a little less of an obsession, but I will be working on a campaign of Pulp C.

Quarantine Blues

So, yes, being stuck at home is starting to catch up to me. I mean I have been a homebody for most of my life. I never really cared if I stayed in or went out. But with these times, I do have admit that constantly being stuck at home is having an adverse effect. I hope that my readers are holding up?

The podcasts have really helped me out. When I find TV annoying or I have trouble concentrating on a book… or when I have to do school work and I’m sitting at my computer and I just have no “want” to write or even think. I put on a podcast and listen and I laugh when the players do stupid things and I cheer when they are successful, and sometimes I even get emotional when a beloved character dies (Crit Squad is good for messing with your emotions).

The various podcasts, rules books, and other such have kept me somewhat busy. When I feel really lazy or that I haven’t accomplished “enough.” I’ll switch up tasks and that has helped me feel like I’m moving forward.

Rounding it up:

So… next week we’ll have an adlib Manhattan knights since I lost the notes, then maybe we’ll talk about the games I’m planning and I’ll set up the next batch of Storm Knights:

The Nile Avengers.

That game started off rocky but has the potential to be really great. Worse comes to worse it could also be a great set up for a pulp Cthulhu game. Oh, I want to mention that all of the links in this article go to the base sites for the podcasts I mentioned. Other than the pulp Cthulhu link. It seems Chaosium doesn’t have a splash page for Pulp C, so I linked to the webstore. Just wanted to make it clear that I do not have any affiliate links with Chaosium and I do not get paid if you buy something on that link. It is merely there so you can click on the Pulp C book and read the background for yourself to see if it would interest you.

Stay Safe.