Cthulhu

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.)

No, Virginia . . .

Lester

“You can’t fool me. There ain’t no sanity clause!” Chico Marx

Bookmark Cthulhu is now live, just in time for the holidays! And in a break with RPG tradition, it has no sanity rules. What it does have is a system for steadily rising dread. That, and a way to rank Lovecraft’s classic monstrosities and create new ones of your own by using his most common adjectives.

Though madness is a common theme in Lovecraft’s tales, very few of his protagonists actually go mad. They suffer shock, they may feel themselves doomed, they may panic to the verge of madness, but they don’t end up in a sanitarium.

Instead, they suffer one of two maladies: loss, or dread.

In terms of loss, Lovecraft’s earliest tales take their protagonists to lands of dream, where some pass up a chance at happiness, and others find themselves unable to return. Many of his dream tales have no protagonist at all and simply relate a story of destruction. Dreamland tales are generally wistful narratives.

His later stories, however—what we think of as the Cthulhu mythos—occur in the waking world, where beings and forces more powerful and long-lived than humankind are discovered by a select few narrators. Narrators who tell of madmen and death, but who live to tell those tales. These are stories of existential dread.

The granddaddy of all Lovecraftian role-playing games is, of course, Call of Cthulhu. Its Sanity game mechanic is as legendary as it was innovative for the hobby. That steadily eroding Sanity attribute invokes a sense of peril that not infrequently results in death of players’ characters. The mechanic works so effectively, in fact, that most Lovecraftian RPGs since have mimicked it exactly.

But “customary” doesn’t mean “necessary.”

Bookmark Cthulhu replaces “eroding Sanity” with a “growing Dread” in every adventure. (Sort of like mental “hit points” compared to eroding abilities.) This feels truer to Lovecraft, and better suits the unusual mechanics of the Bookmark HP RPG itself. Which gives the sourcebookmark a legitimacy beyond simply mimicking what’s been done in games before.

Call me crazy, but I think it works. ¯\_(°°)_/¯