Mysteries of Montreal

As I mentioned ever so briefly here, back in the review of games played for last year, I have been involved in the playtesting of FiveEvil. This is a game based on the d20 system of the "fifth edition of the most popular TTRPG on the market", aka 5e. FiveEvil takes this base game that many people know and love, and modifies the system and rules to allow the game to work for a horror setting.  The game is currently under development through Handiwork Games . 5e is often used as a system to run any type of game. Mostly because it is the biggest game in the TTRPG space, and has therefore has the largest player base. However, any time the though of using 5e to run a horror game comes up online, this raises the hackles of the horror game community, as at its heart, 5e D&D is a heroic fantasy game where character  agency is front and centre, whereas horror games require putting that character agency on the back burner, and put them in situations where they do not feel in contr...

Although I have yet to read it in full, it would be very remiss of me to let this go across my radar without linking to it here, on my Cthulu blog. HPL's racism is very much in the limelight in the current debates on his work. This essay, by gamer writer and thinker, Morgue , goes into details of the racist phrases and issues within HPLs great work, the Call of Cthulhu, and disects it, finally asking the question, "can the racist elements of “The Call of Cthulhu” be challenged and reimagined without doing great violence to the text?"  Well, can it? I'll avoid the spoilers and just link you to the whole essay on taleturn .

I was recently notified of this little free to download RPG, that may be of interest to some of you: True Love Match . To quote the author : True Love Match is the game of romance and reality TV. You’ll need six people, a couple of rooms, and a few hours. It might mess you up a little.  I have yet to read or play the game, but knowing of it's source, I can but recommend it. True Love Match originated in my sheer fury at the cruelty of  The Bachelor as an entertainment format, and a sudden insight that I could mash together Emily Care Boss’s Breaking the Ice and Gregor Hutton’s Best Friends into a  Bachelor game.  As someone who is also left completely baffled by the popularity of the bachelor, even within my own household, this certainly seems to be something I could connect with. So, what are you waiting for? It sounds like the perfect game to spend an evening playing!