This is a joint post to my gaming livejournal and my personal blog, due to the cross-topics being discussed.

This week, I saw that latest (last?) Torchwood series, Children of Earth, and read the first act in the Curse of the Yellow Sign series for Call of Cthulhu. I expected one to be marginal and the other to rock, and was surprised on both fronts. MAJOR SPOILER WARNING for those that continue...

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This would probably make a great soundtrack for a horror game. The heavy use of Middle Eastern-sounding music would also make it good for games set in that area. The more incidental-sounding tracks are generic enough to be used in any modern time period, whether that be the '20s or the 2000s.





( Read info on the setting, scene, period, and mood for each track of the album... )

In the process of transferring over my MP3's and other music files from an old desktop to a new one, I lost some of the info I'd inputted into the Itunes entries for the files, forcing me to go through them one by one. I've built up a library of music files categorized for game use, mostly instrumental scores from movies, TV shows, and video games broken down by genre (usually Soundtrack), grouping (usually Score), subroupings (definitions added on to grouping based on the geographic origin of the music), scene (what kind of action is going on), setting (what time period the music is good for), and mood (the kind of emotions the music tends to inspire). Right now, these are the fields I've built up:
( Click to see the kind of terms I'm using to describe the tracks and the definitions of those terms... )

So what I'm going to start doing is posting the data I built for each album, one at time, no more than one every day or so. Hopefully, this might be of some use to people who use music to set the scene for their games.

It's saying something that I had such a good experience at this year's KublaCon, because it had no business being anything other than a complete clusterfuck. The con staff scheduled and re-scheduled my two games around so much that I was completely stressed out by the time I ran them and had to deal with players showing up to the wrong room or two hours after the game began. Yet, the games I played in and the players that attended my games were so good that I can honestly say that this was one of the few conventions that was a consistently enjoyable experience.

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Despite what happened with my Sunday game, which I think counted more as a flawed success more or less, I can still say that every game was fun as hell. Somehow, I lucked out in playing with skilled GMs and, most surprisingly, sets of players filled with exceptional role-players who got into their characters as well as being friendly and witty. No one was That Guy at the gaming table, and I was grateful that I never had one of my own That Guy moments. I hope ConQuest turns out the same, with the caveat that it would be nice to play at least one game that wasn't Lovecraft-related.

Keith Herber, one of the leading authors that created the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game in its formative years, passed away yesterday. Simply looking over the listing of his work at Pen & Paper RPG Database shows how much he has added to both CoC and this hobby as a whole. What stands out for me from that list are his work on the 1920's Investigator's Companion and Escape From Innsmouth, both of which set the standard of classic Lovecraftian roleplaying gamebooks.

It was a shame that Herber died just as he was getting back into publishing CoC material for his new imprint at Miskatonic River Press. I didn't know Keith beyond a few discussions we shared on the yog-sothoth.com forums, but he always struck me as an intelligent, informed designer, one that got what CoC was all about and why it could be such an satisfying game to share with others. A fundable has been set up for Keith's widow Sharon at http://www.fundable.com/groupactions/groupaction.2009-03-14.8857145180 - I have contributed some money and would appreciate it if others who have enjoyed Keith's work would donate any small amount, which will go to defraying the costs of any funeral expenses that Mrs. Herber may have to endure.

In my last post, I tried to address the charge that characters are too incompetent in Call of Cthulhu by granting more points to spend in the BRP point-buy character creation system on characteristics and skills. Another way to deal with the problem* might be in using one or both of these house rules:

Professional Competence
To create characters that are more likely to be more competent at their occupational skills than those who studied the same skill as a hobby, each character assigns 8 occupational skills (which must be at a professional level of 60%) that they can flip-flop once per scene. The player can flip-flop as many times per scene as they choose, but only once in a scene on a particular skill. So a doctor with a Medicine of 63% can flip-flop a roll of 85 into 58 once during a scene, and then cannot flip-flop their Medicine skill again, but they can still flip-flop their other occupational skills (First Aid, Pharmacy, etc.) once during that scene. If the occupation has less than eight skills then the player can assign as many hobby skills as needed to bring it up to eight.

This is obviously based on Unknown Armies' obsession skill mechanic, where you can choose one skill to flip-flop. I set the number at 8 skills because that's how many skills are assigned to most of the occupations listed in the 6th edition CoC rulebook. I required that the skill be at 60% or higher so that players still have an incentive to place a proper amount of points into their occupational skills. For the math wonks, at 60% skill flip-flopping increases the chance to succeed to 83%, it increases at 70% skill to 90% chance, at 80% skill to 95% chance, and at 90% to 98% chance; so, it still rewards having a high amount in a professional skill (60-80) but doesn't require characters to be Nobel Prize winners and Olympic athletes with a bunch of 90% skills to be reasonably competent.

Insane Effort
In the spirit of Insane Insight, this rule allows a character to become so obsessed with a task that they lose all focus on reality but become much more likely to succeed at the effort. A player can flip-flop the result of any skill roll in exchange for losing 1 Magic Point and risking 1D6 points of Sanity. If a character goes insane as the result of an Insane Effort roll, they become fixated on succeeding at the task for the duration of the insanity or until brought back to sanity through psychoanalysis, drugs, and other treatments. Insane Effort cannot be used on Sanity checks, and can only be used in situations where the character is likely to develop a fixation on the task.

I don't know how they plan to do Pulp Cthuhu, but this is the mechanic that I'd use to create that setting. It puts it in the hands of the players if they wish to trade high-competence for less Sanity, and seems like it would establish a mood where the characters are both good at what they do but are still falling down the SAN loss death spiral. The big problem I see with this rule are in the Magic Points. I like using MP because, in my experience as a player, they are so rarely used, and because it creates a resource pool to keep the option in check. In truth, it's the SAN loss that would probably keep this rule in check, as anyone who tries to use Insane Effort more than 4 times in a scene will go crazy. I might fiddle with the refresh rate of Magic Points, so that they return at the end of a session or an adventure rather than every 24 hours, but I'm not sure.

* Please note that I don't think this is really a problem of mechanics so much as perspective. A game where characters bumble around and often can't succeed at their skills is in keeping with the way Lovecraft often (but not always) presented his protagonists, and the classic rules fit for the classic game. I just think that CoC is big enough to encompass a greater variety of characters and stories than just the source material itself, and I like these options as house rules when the Keeper wants to try something different.

In between creating characters for my DunDraCon game and another to play in an 1890s campaign, I've been doing a lot of character creation with Call of Cthulhu, and it has not been a happy experience. A common complaint about CoC using their traditional Basic Role-Playing (BRP) system is that characters are almost always incompetent bumblers, constantly failing underskilled rolls with even the most menial of tasks. I think a lot of this comes from a wrongheaded approach to the rules, where Keepers call for skill rolls in situations that should be an automatic success unless the player rolls a 01 for a critical failure, or when, outside of combat, a failed skill roll is interpreted as a complete failure rather than simply less than a full success (i.e. your failed Spot Hidden roll may still give you the clue necessary to get to the next scene, but it doesn't give you all the clues that could have alerted you to the cultist ambush in that next scene). That said, characters created under BRP do end up as poorly-skilled even for an average person, which might be okay if you're trying to play H.P Lovecraft in a Lovecraftian game, but less so when you want to break out of that mold and play an even slightly competent and well-rounded human being, much less a WWII commando. So I am going to try to create a typical Our Darkest Hour character from just the basic CoC rules (the ones in the 6th edition book) and those in the Basic Role-Playing book, and see if I can come up with a system that works. Here is the character I am trying to create:

( Read more... but it is REALLY long and wankish... )

So you know how I was saying there haven't yet been enough works to build a fictional tradition about our current wars in the Mideast so that inexperienced spuds like me can use it as background with any legitimacy. Well, that's already changing:
 

I'll admit that if I didn't know it had a slightly better pedigree, I'd think was just another bad Sci-Fi Original Movie based on the trailer. Still, the film looks very Delta Green-ish, especially as I've always been more interested in the military-espionage side of the background, and have been disappointed that Pagan remains focused on the tired X-Files law enforcement material. Maybe Targets of Opportunity will change that.

The PCs are a group of American soldiers in modern-day Iraq, not special ops but regular Joes (and Janes), reservists waiting for their tour to end. They are close to that date when their unit is suddenly ordered to assault an insurgent stronghold 70 klicks north of Al-Hillah. The unofficial word is that the bad guys have access to some kind of biological weapon which they plan to release on Baghdad, and there are a bunch of black ops eggheads attached to the PC's unit as escort for a rumored counter-agent codenamed ANABASIS. That's all the PC's know before they launch the assault, the insurgents release their weapon, and everything everywhere literally goes to hell.

The PCs wake up in an abandoned Battalion Aid Station or in the smoking remains of a crashed medevac chopper. Their last memory is of a bright light emanating from the insurgents' complex and the eggheads opening the ANABASIS container. Whether it is a hospital orderly feasting on the open skull of a wounded soldier or a medevac pilot stumbling around with unnatural purpose after being decapitated by the chopper's main rotor, it is immediately obvious that the dead no longer stay dead and crave the life of the few still remaining alive. They seem to be temporarily immune to the virus, perhaps due to their proximity to ANABASIS when it was released. Once they flee their immediate surroundings and are able to raise communications, it becomes apparent that the Virus has reached everywhere in the world. Out of the 150,000 American troops deployed in Iraq on land and sea, there are perhaps 10,000 left alive. They are alone, surrounded by both the undead and whatever hostile insurgents who have not been "infected", and whatever contact they can make back home is sporadic, dying, and full of bad news. But there is an American destroyer waiting at Trabzon, free of infection and waiting to pick up any survivors that make the long march to the sea.

For those that didn't catch the references already, this a zombie game based on the march of the Ten Thousand, a group of Greek mercenaries that were left stranded in the middle of Persia in the 5th-century BC, having to march through hostile territory back to the sea after the Persian leader who hired them died in battle. Their story was chronicled by the Greek general Xenophon in his work Anabasis. I figure this to be an All Flesh Must Eaten game, but any zombie-friendly system would do. As for the source of the virus, it could've been an old Soviet experiment found by the Taliban and smuggled out of Afghanistan for maximum carnage in Iraq (or you could just ignore the Anabasis references and set the game in the Hindu Kush); or the ANABASIS package was the actual culprit, a designer virus targeting genetic markers American intelligence identifies with "insurgent ethnicities" as a final attempt to "win" the war, with the "insurgent stronghold" being GRAY FOX types impersonating terrorists to place the blame on Al-Qaeda; or a lost ritual to Ubbo-Sathla found by insurgents among the rediscovered annals of the Hashshashin... whatever floats your boat.

And as for why I'll never run it... well, some might consider it in bad taste as hundreds of thousands to over a million people have died in that war, and continue to die to this very day. I rather do, but more honestly, I'd never consider it because, if I were to run this at a convention, there's a decent chance there might be an Iraq War veteran or two at the table. I'd feel very uncomfortable, not so much for using their personal history as the backdrop for a silly zombie game, but moreso because everything I'd have to say about the environment, what kind of resources would be available, to just how characters might react in certain situations, would be obviously bullshit. I can roleplay an orc because it doesn't exist and exists only in fantasy. I can roleplay a Nazi because there are acceptable cinematic examples of Nazis and a screen of "fantasy" can be placed between the real Nazis and the face-melting Tohts (with that screen being moved as close to or as far from reality as your historical awareness and sensitivity allows). But there just aren't enough cinematic versions of the Iraq War to play against... yet.

It was a good con, with only one game where I didn't have fun (and that was entirely my own fault). I picked up Pagan's new Mysteries of Mesoamerica in the dealer's room, and snagged a book on artifacts for the Masterbook Indiana Jones RPG system and the Weird Wars: Blood on the Rhine occult WWII game. Food was dirt-cheap, as the only time I paid more than five bucks for a meal was when I left the buffet table for nearby restaurants. There was an odd snafu where the power went out in the hotel just hours before my game started on Friday evening, but power was restored in time and I suffered no setbacks (though several folks got shafted as the game shuffler database was corrupted). Here's what I played:

( Read more... )

All in all, I had a good time, and got into plenty of decent (if not awe-inspiring magnificent) games. There is an Endgame mini-con coming up, and then there'll be my first and my favorite - KublaCon - in May.

Long time no post, I is the suxxor, etc, etc...

This year's Mini-Con at the game store Endgame in Oakland was pretty good. I accidentally ended up in two Spirit of the Century games, didn't get into the Call of Cthulhu game I tried to sign up for, and instead played in a very CoC-esque horror game (i.e. pretty much everyone died in the throes of insanity). I also dropped some ducats on Pagan Publishing for one of their latest releases.

The Demon Run (Spirit of the Century) - A very humorous high-octane adventure of a whacky spaceship crew trying to win an interstellar race where the the winner gets bragging rights on a galactic reality show and the loser gets vaporized into debris (by a mandated time of the slowest ship being detonated remotely every half-hour). This one was played entirely for laughs, which I got into the spirit of by running my mad scientist as Walter from Fringe. We didn't use a lot of Spirit of the Century rules, but that was pretty much beside the point as everyone at the table was an experienced SotC player and we were all really just trying to make each other laugh, to which we succeeded admirably.

City in the Skull (Spirit of the Century) - I didn't plan to sign up for this game, as it was another SotC game run by the same GM. These Mini-Cons are often the best (and sometimes the only places in the Bay Area) to try out uncommon games, so I like to keep my schedule varied; and, I didn't want the GM to get the idea I was stalking him. Yet the Endgame staff inadvertently signed me up for both, and I was glad as this was a blast. The scenario used the standard pulp-era setting, and I played an Iraqi driver/pilot/assistant to an archaeologist who'd unearthed a crystal-containing skull that ended up as a portal to the Plateau of Leng. I got to crash-land a seaplane, machine-gun a pterodactyl, and listen as my Iraqi accent quickly degenerated from an understated Sayid to a campy Apu. Although it was a great deal of fun, I kinda feel bad as I went into the game intending to play my character straight and not get all outrageous. Ever since I listened to the first episode of the gaming podcast Narrative Control and found out that a GM felt I nearly ruined his Wilderness of Mirrors game because I played my role too campy, I've been trying to see if I could tone myself down when it calls for it, and have yet been unable to do so. Do I have fun going a little off the reservation and injecting humor into my characterizations? Yes. Does everyone else at the table have fun when I do that? They seem to, and I often get compliments on it. But unfortunately, I can't shake the nagging feeling that I'm spoiling other's fun.

The House on Raven Hill (Basic Role-Playing) - I failed to make it past the waitlist for a Call of Cthulhu game, and was heading for home when I ran into my regular gaming bud Matt Steele and was informed that I had indeed not played in the game he was running that evening. So I took part in that, a B-movie grindhouse horror game of teens and young adults with dark secrets trying to spend the weekend at a creepy house in the Arizonan desert, with the last one surviving to end up with the keys to the manse. It started slowly and I was worried that we wouldn't reach an ending before the store closed, but things kicked into high gear in the last hour and then satisfyingly went off the rails as doors started eating some while pictures abducted others. Good times, and it was nice to finally see the full-bore version of the new BRP system in action, with all the bells-&-whistles the collected rulebook adds to the venerable guts of CoC.

Loot - I picked up Final Flight by Pagan Publishing in the hopes that it would provide some useful rules and inspiration for my upcoming DunDraCon game, which will also involve a pre-WWII era passenger plane and cthulhoid horrors: not so much with the rules, but it did give me some ideas for my game. It's ten dollars for all of 28 pages, which leaves little meat on what seems a pretty barebones scenario. Nevertheless, the scenario, although straightforward, looks solid, and I ended spending more that day on some teeny-tiny excuse of a crab salad at a froo-froo restaurant near the store. I also skimmed through Pagan's new Mysteries of Mesoamerica, which looks really REALLY good. Its respectable pagecount is split in half between real-world data on Mexican and Central American religions, archaeological exploration, and Call of Cthulhu linkage, and the other half consisting of three short but well-detailed scenarios. That and the copious amount of Blair Reynolds' gorgeous and evocative art made it very difficult to not simply buy it there and then, but I figure I can wait till DunDraCon as that's only three weeks away.

All in all, it was a very fun con, and I was glad to hear that Endgame plans to do four of these a year now. I was rather surprised at the almost complete lack of Good Omens people, who normally populate the Mini-Cons but this time, besides a few, I didn't really see them in attendance as GM's or players. Still, there were enough good games and plenty of solid players, and, the truth is that, on a consistent basis, this was probably the best group of players I've gamed with at a con in quite awhile.

I'm actually unsure about what the proper name of this convention is anymore (all the con materials referrred to it dually as PacifiCon and ConQuest). Another change was the location, which moved from a nice Marriott in Burlingame to an equally-nice (if maddeningly laid-out) Marriott in Santa Clara. Yet the biggest change was in the con itself, which has finally seemed to regroup from the change of ownership that rendered the RPG section of the con as amateurishly ad-hoc. Having gotten at least the illusion of a game-shuffler system with advance sign-ups like DunDraCon and KublaCon, as well as holding all the RPGs in their own seperate rooms, there is now no systematic difference between ConQuest and its more established brethren. About the only thing keeping ConQuest from reaching a similar level of greatness is for more GM's to attend and run games, and I feel that'll will grow in time.

( Read more what I played, what I bought, how I didn't almost attend, and why children may be the future but that doesn't mean I want to game with them )

Anyways, to sum up: good con. I look forward to next year's ConQuest, something I haven't been able to say in many years.

So here's what I did:
( Read more about my adventures in gay marriage, Obama pride, house hunting, and homicidal Ewoks... )

So let's say that I have a "friend" who may have hypothetically downloaded the illegal PDF's of the new Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual, because said "friend" thought spending over one hundred dollars to check out a system they're very unsure they'll ultimately use is an absurd waste of money (although I am sure this "friend" would be very willing to pay out for the hardcover books if this "friend" ends up running more than a single one-shot of 4th Ed). And said "friend" may have spent the last couple of days reading through the Player's Handbook, and skimming over the rest. What might this "friend" think of the new system?

A tentative "meh". Not a "meh, this thing sucks but maybe there's a glimmer of hope here" but more of a "meh, the system works but the feel is all wrong for what I want to do with a fantasy setting although there is enough interesting stuff to make it worthwhile to edit it into what I want from it."

PROS

• The core system is very streamlined and intuitive, and should be easy enough to pick up within a single session. I know this from experience based on the 4th Ed games I played at KublaCon.
• Characters of all classes have a deep set of abilities that allows everyone to have an almost equal hand in combat, meaning that no one need sit by the sidelines waiting to heal characters or for the combat to end to recharge their spells.
• The dynamic of healing surges, action points, and the difference between at-will, encounter, and daily powers all combine to create a game that gives players a great deal more tactical control over how their characters carry out their action, and this should trickle-down into some degree of narrative control.
• The model of "points of light in a world overrun by dark forces" makes for a more interesting campaign setting than the usual "you start in a tavern and go from place to place killing things and taking their stuff".

CONS

• Although the core dynamic is simple and easy-to-learn, it is instantly burdened with the plethora of special conditions that power many of the feats and powers. Even with just the core books, there's a lot to keep track of but it should be easily manageable; however, once WotC begins bloating the system with splatbooks, I'm sure that is going to change.
• That deep set of abilities for all characters also means that no class feels as special as it did in previous editions. When most if not all characters can stand well in combat, heal others, etc. it becomes easy for the characters to become faceless and homogenized based on their stats alone. That last bit is why I don't really think this is much of a con, but I can see it being a culture shock for veteran D&D players.
• Based on my experiences at KublaCon, it is very difficult to bring a character to a final death as long as they are near still-living comrades (particularly ones with healing powers) and not fighting against unusually bad odds (and have no way to run away). This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the system balances it out by making enemies with greater-than-expected hit points (unless they are mook-like minions) which bogs combat down into a long slugfest of attrition.
• The art is still the angular "SCA gone wrong" with lots of buckles fetish motif of 3rd Ed, rather than the pseudo-medieval Tolkienesque look of past editions. I list this as a con as I really like the Tolkienesque look, even if it is done-to-death.
• And my biggest con: starting characters are simply too powerful. I don't mean in stat terms, which is neither here-nor-there, but in terms of their status in the bad-ass hiearchy. A 1st level character in 4th Ed has almost as many powers, feats, and abilities as a starting character in Exalted, where the characters are meant to be superhuman combat monsters capable of levelling whole cities and punching the moon with their big toe. Whereas in previous editions, you were meant to be, at best, a veteran soldier or a novice spellcaster not too long from their bumpkin village roots, in 4th Ed you begin as a great hero with fantastic abilities. Now I suspect in play this does not seem so, as the low-level antagonists also have high hit points and access to superhuman feats; but that actually only makes the situation worse for me, as now you have characters that only look like ultimate bad-asses that end up taking forever to slaughter a measly kobold or two. I like the idea of starting small and building oneself into a paragon full of wonders, but 4th Ed wants to skip that part and get directly into the bad-assitude. That's not necessarily a bad thing (and, as some folks on web forums have pointed out, makes 4th Ed a good choice to revive the old Birthright campaign setting), but that's not really what I've been looking for.

So all in all, "meh"... hypothetically.

Not a lot of progress made over the past couple weeks, due primarily to KublaCon and the usual post-con lethargy. I spent all last week working on my scenario for the con, the con itself took all of the Memorial Day weekend, Tuesday was my weekly Shadowrun game, Wednesday I tried (and failed instantly) to start a regimen of diet and exercise, Thursday I got caught up in reading new comics and watching the Lost season finale, Friday I was lazy and watched Atonement (probably a good novel but pedestrian and pretentious as a film), and yesterday I was enthralled by coverage of the Democratic Party Rules & Byways Committee. In between all that, I did organize the Karotechia rough draft into a position where I can begin writing, which is what I plan to do over the next week. I am going to be more realistic, and set a goal of completing at least one of the pre-Karotechia sections (Ariosophy, Thule Gesellschaft, Ahnenerbe) by next Sunday.

My secondary goal will be to write up my Toteninsel scenario for publication. I don't plan to put it up anyplace other than the Delta Green: 1939-1945 website, but I do want it to be written in such a way as it'll be most useful for anyone that wants to run it.

This past weekend I attended KublaCon, one of the three main gaming conventions in the Bay Area. It was mostly solid, with one major hiccup. The only loot I snagged from the dealers was some dice (and a few glow-in-the-dark zombie minis from a boardgame supplement I won, having thrown away the rest of the game). I played in two demo games of the forthcoming 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, another demo of the forthcoming Hunter: the Vigil game from White Wolf, a game of Rippers from the Savage Worlds system, and what was advertised as a "modern supernatural" LARP which seemed entirely like Changeling.



So in summation: D&D 4E is mostly more of the same (both good and bad), Hunter: the Vigil looks awesome (without violating my NDA, I will say that all Delta Green fans with any fondness for the nWoD system must check this game out), not all LARPs are fun, Savage Worlds is still a kick-ass system that I wish had more thickly-realized campaign settings, and KublaCon remains my favorite. Now on to GOcon in July!

Whisperer in Darkness and The Haunter in the Dark have been added fully to the chronology, but I punted on the rough draft of the Karotechia chapter. As I got into it, I decided that it was silly to write a rough draft quoting almost verbatim the Karotechia information in the Delta Green books, as I'm going to have to rewrite all that anyways. Instead, I'm going to try to make a full-out and proper rough draft, consisting of all the research and most of the ideas I've developed on the Karotechia. This is a much more ambitious undertaking, but I hope to get the early sections on Ariosphy, the Thulegesellschaft, and the Ahnenerbe done in the next couple of weeks.

Speaking of which, next weeked is KublaCon, so they'll be no update till the following Sunday, June 1st. I don't expect to get much work done this coming week, as my time will be entirely focused on prepping my scenario for the convention. Still, my goals for the following week are to get those early sections of the Karotechia written into a rough draft.

I spent this past week mainly organizing stuff. I transferred my chronology (which currently starts in 1855 with the arrival of the Green Men of Agartha to Japan and ends in 1969 with the opening of Club Apocalypse in New York) into MS Excel, which is not the best format available but does allow me to filter the 916 (and growing) entries. I've also started go through my Karotechia notes, which are a complete mess. I wasn't able to add Whisperer in the Darkness to the chronology, but I hope to get that done this week. In addition, here are the other goals for the next week:

• Continue working on the chronology. Besides Whisperer, I'm also hoping to add The Haunter in the Dark.
• Continue organizing my Karotechia notes. I think I might be able to complete this task this week.
• Write a rough draft of the Karotechia solely from material in the gaming books. I might be able to add the extra material from the fiction as well.

In the next two weeks, I'll also be doing some serious edits to my convention scenario Toteninsel, which I will be running at the KublaCon gaming convention in Burlingame (just south of San Francisco). This will be the last convention I'll be running it at, and when that's done I'll edit it  for non-pregenerated characters and put it up on the Delta Green: 1939-1945 website.

Confession time: I have not worked on Our Darkest Hour, the WWII sourcebook for the Delta Green setting of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game and the purported purpose of this blog, in months. I haven't talked with anyone at Pagan Publishing about the project in an even longer span of time. I am not even certain if anyone in the initial team is still working on the book, as we have not discussed the status of our work since last year.

This project has been vaporware for years and by all standards should either be tabled or put into the hands of more efficient writers, but I've put far too much work and effort into it to just leave it at that. So starting today, I'm going to begin making a weekly update every Sunday on what work I'm doing and where I plan to be in the process by the following week.

Yesterday, I began working on ODH in earnest again, doing some editing to the master chronology of both factual and Mythos events I've been developing. I was in the process of adding events from Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness to the chronology when I left it off, so that's where I'll begin again this week.

My goals for this coming week are to add that story completely to the chronology, and then get to work on adding The Haunter in the Dark. I also hope to get my Karotechia notes in order so I can begin working on a proper writeup for the organization. In terms of research, I will also return to reading The Master Race by Heather Pringle, which I only half-finished some months ago.

Last night, I ventured out to Endgame in Oakland to take part in an alpha-playtest of The Dresden Files role-playing game, coming sometime later in the year or early 2009 from Evil Hat Games. The game is based on Jim Butcher's series of novels about occult investigator Harry Dresden, which was adapted into a short-lived television series for the Sci-Fi Channel. While my wife Jeannine is a big fan of both the series and the books, I only know it from the TV show, and my interest in the game lies mainly in the fact that Jeannine would be very interested in playing it.


Bottom line for me is that I can see the game working, but the "SotC mechanics packed into an occult investigation game" felt rather square peg into round hole to me. This may have been because I don't have a grounding in the books, because my first (and establishing) experience with FATE was SotC, because we didn't use enough social mechanics to see the genre-specific value in this system, or simply because this was an alpha-playtest. Ultimately, I'd want to read through all the Dresden books (I have Storm Front next in my reading queue), see the finished product, and play in a convention game or two with other GM's before making anything near a final decision on the system. And even then, from what I can see, I'd still buy the book for its massive Dresden-universe background material alone, and just run it with something like Unknown Armies or Savage Worlds if the system doesn't catch my fancy.