#149

Jul 25, 2021

Work

I took this week off. It would be nice to not need to work again but, sadly, I’m not financially independent.

Books

This week I read:

Gaming

This has been a good week for games. I ran two sessions of Call of Cthulhu, and then another of Troika.

I’d not run Troika for this group before, so it was good that we were able to create characters and get playing quickly; the system is nice and simple. It went well, and everyone had a lot of fun.

I based the session on the Traveller scenario Rule of Man Commemorative, in which the PCs are approached and asked to take a collection of antique coins to a third party. The sender doesn’t want to send the coins through the post in the normal way as they don’t want to declare the contents of any packages, because the coins have to be transported discretely: hence, they need a patsy to carry them as “personal items”. I also took some elements from RuneQuest (plant-based elves), fiction (Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time in particular), the scenario in the Troika rulebook, and also just whatever weird things I came up with on the spot. The players really bought into the weirdness and helped bring it to life.

RPG Blog

Since I’ve been studying the Traveller rulebooks to learn the system over the past month, learning a new system has been on my mind a lot. So I wrote a post about how to learn a new RPG system. Or at least, how I learn a new RPG system.

In brief: skim through the book, practice making some characters, read the book more carefully, run a one-shot, make cheatsheets, and then run that campaign.