Cthulhu

Free BNHP PnP PDF

Lester
Bundle deal on all 10 titles

Forty-five years ago, I drove to Chicago for an Army entrance test. I scored high on the “fold this box in your head & choose the correct one below” questions. They wanted to enlist me as a mapmaker; I wanted to be a graphic designer, so I drove back home a civilian.

(If I’d known map making was my buddy Larry Elmore‘s Army MOS, I’d’ve been smarter & enlisted.)

Still, those box-folding-in-your-head skills have come in handy lately for print-&-play PDFs of cards & bookmarks. The format I’ve come up with lets you choose between printing one side only & folding down the middle for front & back, or printing on both sides with front & back matched up.

Here’s a link to a free PDF example, if you’re curious: Bookmark HP RPG PnP PDF

(For a bundle deal on all 10 BNHP titles, click the bundle image in this post.)

Horror in Lovecraftian RPGs often isn’t

Lester
Photo by Lan Gao on Unsplash

There’s a “Cosmic Horror” sale on at DriveThruRPG. I was curious to see whether Bookmark Cthulhu made it on the list and am happy to see that it did.

As a designer, I fall into the camp that Lovecraft’s protagonists seldom go insane. Instead, their dread grows toward a breaking point. His secondary characters may be insane. His protagonists face terror.

Don’t get me wrong, the groundbreaking sanity rules in the Call of Cthulhu RPG do a great job of portraying the growing fragility of the human mind as it gains more knowledge of the mythos. But it seems to me that most Lovecraftian RPGs since have mimicked CoC sanity rules only as a sort of mental Hit Points, losing the cosmic horror.

I went with a growing dread that increasingly risks your abilities with each new shock.

It also seems to me that a bestiary of Lovecraftian creatures robs some of the horror—and I couldn’t fit a bestiary on a bookmark anyway. 🙂 So there’s a random table of Lovecraft’s most-used adjectives, resulting in creatures like “an accursed, spectral, fungoid nightmare” or “a blasphemous, irridescent, gibbering thing.” What do those conjure up in your mind’s eye?

Given that its a Bookmark HP RPG sourcebookmark, the more Traits, the more powerful the being as a matter of course.

So, though Bookmark Cthulhu is “merely” a bookmark, I’d suggest that it better conveys Lovecraftian horror than many longer works.

Treasures of Forgotten Dungeons

Lester

If you’re a tabletop gamer with much of a collection, you know how easily small boxed games & card games can be overlooked & forgotten on the shelves. I even have a couple of fancy wooden cases—the kind with glass photo frames on the top & sides—to store the best, & still end up forgetting the excellent little games inside. Big boxed games just draw so much attention.

An Aside: 

It’s a problem that faces publishers, too, & particularly small-press POD publishers. Especially at brick-and-mortar stores.

When I first started designing card games a bit over a dozen years ago, I went to some retailers I’ve been friends with, to ask about stocking the things on their shelves. (Two reasons: to increase my own exposure, but also because brick-and-mortar felt left out of Kickstarters, which sold directly to consumers.)

They were happy to take them to small cons, but (1) in-store couldn’t afford to rob any display case space from trading card games like Magic: The Gathering & Pokemon, with their sales of individual cards, & (2) couldn’t risk putting card games on the shelves elsewhere, because of “shrinkage” (i.e. shoplifting).

They said, “Publish each of your card games in a big box that’ll take up room on the shelf. Stick in a score pad, counters, or whatever to justify all the empty space, & bump up the price. Then I can sell them. Or just don’t design card games.”

So for me, POD online it is.

But back to the topic of card decks getting lost on your own game shelves. The problem is even worse for single-sheet things like Postcard Dungeons—and that’s a cryin’ shame.

Postcard Dungeons started out as just that, a solo strategy dice game representing a dungeon on an oversized postcard. The game design is genius, & the presentation excellent. Since that first dungeon, the line has expanded into multiplayer & sci-fi, & has added some variant designs from world domination ala Risk to a coin-based Postcard Cthulhu.

But I forget the whole group of them sitting there on my shelf, sandwiched between some small-box games, even though they’re stored in a clear cellophane bag.

I’m not sure how to rectify that. With the card games I could maybe get a shadowbox as a wall-mounted mini game shelf. Maybe keep a tiny ring-binder for flat games like this one. Because they deserve to be revisited from time to time.

Here’s the publisher’s website: postcardgames.com

 

GM-Less Cthulhu et al

Lester

Cover images of Bookmark Cthulhu with Cut Up Solo Lovecraftian Dialogues and Cut Up Solo Case of Charles Dexter Ward You may have seen my mention of the “Cut Up Solo” oracle series by Parts Per Million. Each oracle is an automated spreadsheet of 5-word snippets from a public domain novel (such as Dracula) or series (John Carter of Mars, for example). It outputs a group of four 5-word snippets with each press of F9, and you browse the list to see what role-play scene it suggests to you.

It’s a great spur not only for solo play, but also GM-less group play. My old high school buddy Jim Cotton and I have adventured together on Mars, for example, and had great times with it. That was even the genesis of the mass battle rules on the Game Host’s Guidebookmark of the Bookmark HP RPG.

So you can imagine how happy I am to announce that PPM and I have launched a Cut Up Solo Lovecraft/Bookmark Cthulhu bundle on DriveThruRPG!

(A Dracula bundle is not far behind.)