Call of Cthulhu

Achtung! Cthulhu Kickstarter

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A few years ago I picked up Weird War II by Pinnacle Entertainment Group to supplement my The Day After Ragnarok book with World War II Savage Worlds rules. The rules were fine — it helped with the demolitions skill and gave me access to an armory of guns and vehicles — but just wasn’t weird enough for my taste. The history of the weird war was pretty much the same as the history of our war; the weirdness was at the edges and never infected the larger narrative in the way that, say, Delta Green did.

Elder Sign: Omens (App Edition)

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A tentacle-faced monster spreads its wing.

Fantasy Flight Games made its name creating huge, sprawling board games with hundreds of fiddly-bits and robust game mechanics that take hours to play. Fans who buy Arkham Horror or Mansions of Madness know they’re getting their money’s worth … and that there’s no way the game will fit in their pockets. With the Elder Sign: Omens app for iPhone ($3.99), Android ($3.99) and iPad ($6.99), they’ve taken a different approach: create a lightweight, fast-playing game that’s as atmospheric as its predecessors but can be played anywhere.

Delta Green available in PDF, Print on Demand

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Delta GreenDelta Green, the 1990s era game of espionage, intrigue, and cyclopian madness, is available in PDF and print-on-demand formats from DriveThru RPG. Released by by Pagan Publishing, the new high-quality PDFs scans of the original books. So far the sourcebooks Delta Green and Delta Green: Countdown and Delta Green have been released. Two short fiction anthologies, Alien Intelligence and Dark Theatres, are also available.

This is great news. Although it’s dated now, Delta Green remains a fantastic read, and it perfectly captures the conspiratorial/millennial anxiety that was so common in the late 1990s. The books have long been out of print, and at times have been hard to find, so it’s good to seem them back in print (or something resembling print)

Lose your sanity (and time) with The Wasted Land

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The Wasted LandRed Wasp Designs’ The Wasted Land takes Call of Cthulhu to the iPad and iPhone, transforming RPG horror into a turn-based squad game that seeks to prevent a German mythos cult from unleashing an army of undead during World War I.

The game unfolds in the No Man’s Land between the Allied and German fronts during The Great War. A team of British soldiers, led by the mystic scholar Brightmeer discover that someone is re-animating the dead. It’s a classic Call of Cthulhu storyline, ripped form the pages of H.P. Lovecraft’s own “Herbert West: Reanimator”, with classic CoC rules.

Nuke(m)Con 2012: Lessons from a homegrown convention

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The Blackrazor Guild held its semi-annual homegrown convention in late February 2012. About 18 people attended Nuke(m)Con 2012, some long-time members of the gaming group, others friends who join us from time to time. Nuke(m)Cons have become a standard part of our gaming group; we first started holding them because we missed our annual pilgrimages … Read more

Off the Bookshelf: Evolutionary Void, Realms of Cthulhu, iPad Book Readers

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The Evolutionary VoidAfter a long hiatus because of too much to do at work, I’ve finally gotten back to reading fiction … because of work. Specifically because of the iPad I’m trying out at my day job.

I work at a college, and we’re piloting the iPad to see how tablets might be integrated into the academic environment. Part of that is trying out the different e-reading software out there, and that gave me the perfect excuse to get a new book. Or rather two new books: The Evolutionary Void by Peter F. Hamilton and Realms of Cthulhu, published by Reality Blurs.

Munchkin Cthulhu: Drive your buddy insane, then steal his stuff

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Munchkin CthulhuMunchkin Cthulhu is the umpteenth expansion in Steve Jackson Games’ venerable card game line dedicated to killing monsters, stealing treasure, and stabbing your buddy in the back.

This time around though, the game is infused with horrors from beyond time and space drawn from the imagination of H.P. Lovecraft … and a new game-ending mechanic that eliminates one of Munchkin’s biggest flaws.

Game Day: Dreams of Distant GenCon

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Technically, there’s no Game Day for me this week — while the guys are getting together for some Battletech, I’ll be joining some friends from work for a Tivo-fueled Battlestar Galactica marathon. I don’t know if we can get caught up in one night … but we’re going to try. At some point I want … Read more