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Shadows of NyOrlandhotep

Exploring the World of Horror Roleplaying Games. Discover in-depth reviews, tips, and strategies for games like Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Trail of Cthulhu, Fear Itself, Vaesen, and Swords of the Serpentine, as many other RPGs I love. Learn how to enhance your gaming sessions with scenario and campaign insights, advice, and practical tips.

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Showing posts from December, 2024

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Running a great RPG campaign without preparation: learning to improvise

on December 30, 2024

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Vaesen Review: Scent of a Killer

on December 15, 2024

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Call of Cthulhu Scenario Recommendations

I know Call of Cthulhu very well, and I have been running sessions for about 30 years. For the first post of this blog, I will summarize the recommendations I have been giving on Reddit and Discord for Call of Cthulhu scenarios. I will first discuss campaigns and then individual one/two-shot scenarios. This text (with one exception) will not include Trail of Cthulhu material, as I will leave that for a subsequent post. A. Campaigns The Masks of Nyarlathotep: it is a seminal campaign, an example of how to design a campaign for both Call of Cthulhu and most traditional RPGs. It uses an ingenious sandbox-of-sandboxes structure, with many interesting locations, NPCs, and suggestions of set pieces to include in your campaign. I ran Masks to completion once, and I am in the process of finalizing two other runs, I can tell you that no two runs feel the same. Soon I will write about what I learned from running Masks. It will easily take 1.5 years of weekly sessions to run it . It is...

Vaesen Published scenarios: roundup review

I recently finished running a series of Vaesen scenarios, arranging them to align with the seasons. I ran all the published scenarios in the Corebook, A Wicked Secret, and Seasons of Mystery, and I ran one scenario from Mythical Britain and Ireland. Meeting with my players just four times a year, I matched the scenarios with the season we were in. Here's the order I chose and my thoughts on how they played out: Silver of the Sea (aWS) A Wicked Secret (aWS) Fireheart (SoM) A Winter's Tale (SoM) The Night Sow (aWS) A Dance with Death (SoM) Dance of Dreams (Corebook) The Devil on the Moor ( moved to a cold rainy Spring) (SoM) The Hampstead group (moved to Stockholm) (MBI) Song of the Fallen Star (aWS) (I added in parenthesis the book in which each scenario appears: aWS - A Wicked Secret, SoM - Seasons of Mystery, MBI - Mythical Britain and Ireland) In my experience, the scenarios work well in any order, but I recommend organizing them by seasons, even because seaso...

Ten tips to improve your Call of Cthulhu games

I know I can be a bit long-winded. This is a shorter post with 10 practical tips. These are all taken from running thousands of sessions of Call of Cthulhu over decades. They work extremely well for me. I hope they work for you too, make your games more immersive, dramatic, and suspenseful. 1. Roll for Sanity Before Describing the Horror Want to instantly add anticipation and dread? Call for the Sanity roll before describing what triggered the Sanity roll. It works because: You build suspense before the reveal. Players know something horrific is coming, but not what. You deal with the mechanics before the reveal. Players can focus on the fiction after we are done with the mechanics. You can tailor your description of the horror to match the result of the roll. Bonus Tip: if all the investigators who witnessed a horror have a bout of madness, you may decide not to describe it at all, just state the investigators have a bout of amnesia, and don'...

Create Tension and Drama in Horror RPG Combat

Combat in tabletop role-playing games often evokes tactical manoeuvres and calculated decisions on hexagonal grids populated with figurines. While this may be common in Dungeons and Dragons or Shadowrun, I believe horror RPGs must take a different approach. In horror, combat is not a test of "character build" or tactical skill—it’s an eruption of chaos and violence that heightens tension and immerses players in the story’s dread. Achieving this requires more than just deadly mechanics. Combat must be grounded, emotionally charged, with transparent mechanics that easily translate into fiction, and capable of occasionally generating unexpected results, while mostly conforming to expectations of fictional outcome. Based on my experience as a GM and insights from systems like Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green , Vaesen , Trail of Cthulhu, Fear Itself, this post explores how to strike that balance and optimize combat for horror RPGs. These are certainly not the only syste...

Convergence: Reviewing and Improving the best scenario ever

Ok, maybe not the best ever, but close. In this post I will discuss one of my favourite rpg scenarios for any system, Convergence, by John Tynes. It was first written for Call of Cthulhu and is now available for Delta Green. As usual in my reviews, I will start with a short bullet list summary intended to give a general opinion of the scenario without any spoilers. I will then go in depth (with spoilers) and add some suggestions to improve the scenario (yes, I am arrogant enough presume I can improve upon what I consider one of the best scenarios ever). TL;DR: Positives: How can I make it more positive than saying it is really one of the best horror scenarios ever? Slowly creeping paranoia that turns into extreme paranoia Immersive body horror One of the scariest set pieces I’ve ever had the pleasure to GM in an RPG Negatives: Very unforgiving: likelihood of a TPK is only reduced by GM “niceness” The need to constantly escalate leads to a couple of over-the-top scenes Lacks ...

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