Ah, what a fun year of role-playing it has been! With so many games played across so many genres it was difficult to choose which game I enjoyed most. You can read about that here – but what about the rest?
I can’t go through them all but the year started with a different take on the Cthulhu Mythos in the game “Secrets of the Glen” a home-grown modern-day adventure from Keeper Hedge. My character for this game was Scott Cambell, an ex-oil rig electrician who was at home fixing microwaves more that doing anything useful – even his first aid certificate was out of date! Probably the most normal of investigators I created this year as he was just a regular guy who discovered the supernatural during the course of the game. The extra fun part was the inclusion of Fairy Folk to the story and Pixies who we later find our may or may not have a hand in the theft of a cow from the local farm! A very “out there” adventure but it was lots of fun to uncover the mystery!
I took a trip to the Cthulhu Dark Ages in a playtest for Keeper Orf’s exciting adventure “Sound of Heaven” which saw us tasked to investigate missing children and a mysterious abbey. The Character I created was a Tax Collector name Dolfic who I had great fun playing, as he was a larger person, I gave him a deeper voice modelled on various performances of Brian Blessed! In this game I was pleased to have watched some actual play videos of folks playing Cthulhu Dark Ages as, in those games, players had lost characters when a mob turned on them. We had a similar situation develop in “Sound of Heaven” and so I was able to escape!! Dolfic lives to fight another day and of course collect taxes! “Sound of Heaven” is due on DriveThru RPG in the new year and is highly recommended!
Pulp Cthulhu is always fun to play and when that is combined with the Wild West Genre it’s even better! “Something Down There” was a home-grown adventure from Keeper 4AcrossIsEmu using the Down Darker Trails source book. For this game I played the pre-generated character Virgil who was crazy strong and able to pick a horse! Unfortunately, a tussle with a Mountain Lion and a critical hit from them meant Virgil was injured badly so not being as tough as he should have been- he even had to run out on another player to save their own skin! It would be great fun to play a hulking great pulp cowboy again as he’d be great fun in a bar fight and less at home in a mine throwing dynamite!
The Summer months saw a series of games from Keeper Hedge who is taking us through Stygian Fox’s “New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley”. For these adventures I was able to dust off one of my most long-lived character’s Frankie B, a Private Investigator who moved to Arkham and made his home at the Blue Beetle club. This hive of investigators started to make inroads into the mythos scene of Arkham but also got to know folks so in the next adventure we were able to go to them for help. We’re still playing the mini-campaign and if possible Frankie B may step down as coming face-to-face with the business end of a wood saw blade nearly saw the end of him! Whilst you should expect characters to die during the course of a game, you can’t help but get attached to them!
Next time we’ll look at my part in the Masks of Nyarlohotep campaign in which I am taking part and other notable games of 2021!