Onwards and upwards...

Since my last post I've done a few things.

Running & Playing

Ran session two of Midnight Sub Rosa for Pelgrane Press' Trail of Cthulhu.

As someone who likes a visual reference both as a GM and a player I decided to make a "map" of sorts for one of the scenes not depicted in the adventure.  Whilst I could narrate the scene (and I did) I find it helps to have something visual to help guide that narration.

In session one there were no dice rolls, safe to say that there were dice rolls aplenty during this session. Fortunately the investigators recovered the occult text and returned it to Miskatonic University; and now must come to terms with all that they've seen.

I also ran The Expanse RPG using the Salvage Op PDF adventure.

This was the first time I'd used the AGE system that Green Ronin have published. As I understand it the version for The Expanse RPG is subtly different from how it's implemented in ModernAGE etc.  I enjoyed the game and the system and can see me returning to it in the future.

So far that's two new games I've run and I've got more games planned.

Alongside those my two D&D campaigns continue to move along nicely, plus I got to play in a game of the new Judge Dredd RPG run by Ross and playtested a new Eberron Adventurers League scenario with Rich, Shane, Ian, Iain and Pete.  All good stuff.

Writing

I've been struggling a bit with this, probably due to too many other things occupying my brain (see above) and missed my planned DMsGuild release in February. It's fine though because...

Out of the blue, thanks to a random reference by Kevin Y and John D to a certain film about immortals with swords I wrote this.

"Less Than Two" A One Page RPG about immortals who wield swords.

I woke up on Sunday morning with the game largely formed in my head. About 6 hours of effort later it was written, had artwork and I'd made it look all fancy thanks to Affinity Publisher. 

So I decided to publish it!  It's "Pay What You Want" with a suggested donation of $2.

It's available on itch.io here and on DriveThruRPG here.

I've also come up with an idea for a series of horror / mystery adventures. Will likely use Gumshoe given my familiarity with it. It's a question of whether that's a hack using the SRD or whether it's using Fear Itself and/or Esoterrorists to take advantage of the DriveThru Community Content licence.

Either way I've given myself 6 months to at least publish the first part...

First though is finish at least one of the DMsGuild products I've got loosely drafted.  Starting with one about a broken time-control clock.

Mapping

I've decided to pick up an Inkarnate license ($25 for a year).

Main reason I chose Inkarnate over other platforms is that the price includes Commercial Use and with that comes a LOT of assets.  If Dungeondraft had a larger Commercial Use asset list included by default then I may have opted for that instead.

Think I'm getting comfortable with it as an app but notice there's a real lack of tutorial videos out there for it...  So if anyone knows of any please get in touch!

Events

Ok so the main bit of news is that we've cancelled 2021's Tabletop Scotland event.  Full details are on the website here.

In short, our venue is currently a vaccination hub for Perth and there is no end date for that.  As a result the venue management team contacted all event organisers to let them know that they were cancelling all 2021 bookings.  We'll confirm 2022 dates when we can.

In the meantime, I co-organised a D&D Game Day over on the Dungeons & Dragons Scotland Discord Server on Saturday 13th March 2021 (today as I write this). Good variety of games offered up and whilst I didn't play in any of them I'm keen to see what the feedback is like on the event. Maybe we'll do another one?

At the very least I hope it enables the D&D Scotland community to embrace more conventions in general.  Not least of which is AlbaCon in October.  Proper planning for that will start soon.