Saturday, July 6, 2013

Lovecraftian Play-by-Posts

If you're anything like me you enjoy thinking about games and indulging in little bits and pieces of games across the week.  Since I love the sight of my own written word - you may have guessed this by seeing my daily posts - I've also been involved in play-by-posts since 2006 and have racked up 10,401 posts across a dozen different games that I have either run or played within.  In truth I've only ever played at www.callofcthulhu.org.uk due to a mixture of easy lay out (each game has its own sub-forum) and its very friendly and inclusive users.  Besides which they combine horror with investigation which is something that I don't get to focus on because my players have other tastes that are happy to tilt that way occasionally but not constantly.

At present I'm running four games - two of which will soon be ending and which I will be replacing with two others.

Welcome to Silent Hill contains two separate adventures where two different characters try to survive the town and its psychological mindscrews, Order cultists, and general violent monsters that aim to destroy them.  Two adventures have thus far been concluded with a resurrected madman called Jack and a distracted mother whose daughter drowned in Lake Toluca (and who later drowned herself as penance).  At present a violent thief was sucked into foggy and dark Silent Hill after stealing a book from the Order (Father Vincent) and a private investigator has entered the town in search of his client's wife who went missing a few years after the PI found her cheating on him.

Misery Orphanage is set in a country area, UK, during World War II where a group of orphans have to survive an encounter in the cellars where they find a doorway into what appears to be a burning section of the Middle Ages.  The matrons of the orphanage appear to know what's going on but no one else down there does.

Home Front Mythos is set in Norbury, UK, during World War II where a group of characters head to an air raid shelter but a direct hit on the top of the underground shelter knocks them to the ground.  By the time they clear the rubble (while the air raid continues), they find the shelter within emptied out and a hole burrowed into the ground that leads into a series of tunnels that leads to a man's cellar where a group of shelterers are kept naked in a large cell.  The shelterers appear to be drugged ... but it turns out to be so much worse.

I will also be running The Last Express by the end of July where players pick up passengers aboard the Orient Express in August, 1939, shortly before the onset of World War II.  It takes inspiration from the computer game of the same name where the Orient Express is a hotbed of intrigue, romance, wheeling and dealing, and occult involvements.  Every week of real time will progress the game by fifteen minutes and the players can freely move between various compartments and most of the train cars interacting with each other and the NPCs.  Rather than playing the part of investigators, per se, each character could be friend or foe - cultists, arms dealers, spies, family members, businessmen, and ex-nobility could all number among them.  The game has plenty of opportunities for people to board at each train station so feel free to drop me a line over there to join.

I will also be picking up Raiko's Masks of Nyarlathotep game in which I used to be a player and am currently in the process of figuring out which of the old players would like to come back as it stopped about a year ago in the second chapter.  If anyone would like to pick up an established character (some only have about 8 - 12 pages of quite entertaining readings) then feel to say so in the Chit-Chat section.

Anyone else tried their hands at play-by-posts?  Had fun with it?  Gotten frustrated?  What web-site do you use?

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