roleplaying

A Call of Cthulhu Tale: The Last Stand of Barnabas Nambly

by

A while back I wrote an article recounting my first experience in Call of Cthulhu. Those campaigns were all set in the default 1920s setting, but there’s actually a second available time period: the 1890s Gaslight era. After having a blast with roaring San Francisco, my group chose to rewind the clock. This time we wanted to face our next eldritch threat in London on the turn of the 19th century. For me, the first curveball came when generating stats for my new character. The online generator gave me one of the weirdest builds any of us had ever seen.… [Continue Reading]

Don’t Trust the Milkman – A Call of Cthulhu Saga

by

This article’s a bit out of left-field, as it’s not about video games. Instead, today I wanted to discuss a tabletop RPG I’ve always wanted to try and recently got my wish. Except for a short one-off in my undergrad years, Call of Cthulhu has always somehow evaded my gaming tables. Like most social events, it would lay dormant and unable to find a group willing to get together to play. But thanks to the Covid-19 lockdown, my gaming group finally decided to give Call of Cthulhu a try via Tabletop Simulator. Since then, we’ve been hooked and played a… [Continue Reading]

The Medical Necessity lore nobody asked for

by

Remember Medical Necessity? It was a game development project where I had my first ill-fated experience as a project manager. In the end, we got canceled due to lack of progress during the first quarter of production. The only surviving product is the purchasable sprite sheet on itch.io. The design document and production wiki note that the default names for the player’s allied soldiers are Homer, Berenson, Collins, and Cunningham. And while digging through a lifetime of old boxes preparing for my move to Portland, I found the original action figures those names came from. Their plastic has gone gummy and… [Continue Reading]

Writing VS Roleplaying

by
Picture by tf2tightrope.

Who’d have thought that there was an actual difference between writing and roleplaying? Well, a lot of people, really. Those who read the Daily SPUF regularly might know that I do a lot of writing. By “a lot”, I mean at least 500 words a day, often more, and have been doing so for the last 3 years. Lately, I’ve been doing 1000+ words a day simply because someone around here has to keep the Daily SPUF daily rather than weekly. In fact, this desperation to make sure that the Daily SPUF has an article published every single day means… [Continue Reading]

The Lords of Brewer’s Grove – A Pathfinder Campaign

by
Picture by tf2tightrope.

Hi, there! I’m the temp writer and sibling of the almighty blog overlord; you can call me Skully. I’m currently running a 5th edition Pathfinder campaign with Medic, our brother and my boyfriend and I’m going to share a rough synopsis of our current predicament. First of all, let me introduce everyone. Medic is playing Rhyn’Go AmWoluff, a timid but spiritual Kitsune Druid with a wolf companion named Floof Greymayne. While she may be rather quiet and new to roleplaying, her character is quickly blooming. Our brother is the valiant Dwarf Barbarian who goes by the name SkullDave IronClaw; a… [Continue Reading]

On Roleplaying, Part 2

by

Medic recently published an article discussing the pastime of play-by-post roleplaying games. I’ve also been participating in RPs for the better part of my online career (so much that I’m one of those users in the example screenshot on the Wikipedia page I just linked), and I highly recommend that any budding writers give it a try. It’s a very risk-free opportunity to develop some good habits for becoming a better writer, especially if you suffer from either writer’s block or beginner’s fear, and it strips writing down to just the fun parts. You can craft a single character, the… [Continue Reading]

On Roleplaying

by
So much damn work, roleplaying these days...

I used to be an avid roleplayer. Text-based roleplaying rather than game/picture/whatever-based. You know, one person writes part of a story from their point of view, then the next person writes something, and so on and so forth. The themes? Anything really as long as it interested me. Strictly safe for work though, I’ve never really done (or been good at) writing sexy stuff.  These days? I avoid roleplaying as much as possible. My original forays into roleplaying go back to when I used to run Budding Writers, a small writing forum. We didn’t really do much proper roleplaying, it… [Continue Reading]