Usable as either a set of screen inserts or reference sheets, the Cthulhu Hack Gamemaster’s Screen features the essential tables and notes you need in one place for handy reference.
Using the same clear typeface as the Core Book, it works (eyesight permitting!) even when reduced to A6 size for the Hammerdog Games Mini-screen:
An update on new releases, adventures and events for The Cthulhu Hack, as I’m conscious things have been a little quiet.
Key at the moment is work on a collection of three adventures with two other writers all themed around the same entity, taken from different angles and in very different settings. I sincerely hope that I will have this finished and published by mid-year, and it should be available in PDF and print.
On the back-burner, but in development, I have the GM Screen and Character Creation Cards. I have prototypes for both and they’re undergoing tinkering to get them in a state suitable for wider distribution. I haven’t absolutely commited yet to the format of that distribution; these will both be available as PDFs, but the physical versions might well follow if I can find a cost-effective printer.
In the background somewhere, I’m redrafting sections of the core book. This might be a v1.1 release or it could work itself into a v2. Only time will tell. I was driving toward a re-write for another connected project, but that has not been progressing as rapidly as I’d hoped.
Next major event will be UK Games Expo at the beginning of June, when I’ll be running a couple of games, but focussing primarily in my role on the stall meeting you, the gaming public. This will be just over a year since launch and I have been very happy with the uptake and reports back. I have appreciated all the feedback and the many reviews.
I will be tagging along with All Rolled Up to Gen Con 50, later this year, where I’ll spend Thursday afternoon running short sessions of The Cthulhu Hack. I also hope to run other games, spend some time on our stall, and maybe get a chance to wander around!
On a podcast front, I had a discussion with Paul of Cthulhu from the Cthulhu Breakfast Club at AireCon. Last week, I recorded a long chat that will be available soon, with sub-titles, in connection with Netcon, a Spanish virtual convention, where a box set is up as part of a whole collection of prizes under the All Rolled Up banner.
In unrelated news, I’m spending much of April writing twenty-six articles on Swedish-spawned dark fantasy role-playing game Symbaroum over on The Iron Pact, as part of the A-to-Z Challenge. While a bit of a distraction, my theme has been to add an element of Mythos and horror to the game – so, it should get me in the mood for more writing on The Cthulhu Hack.
Just a brief one, as I noted The Cthulhu Hack got a mention alongside The Black Hack in the TableTop Games 10 Top Roleplaying Games of 2016.
In addition, someone rightly pointed out that in Cthulhu Hack 2016 and Beyond I did not mention the GM Screen amongst the upcoming releases.
OK – now I have mentioned it. I had a rough version of a screen in-hand for my game at Dragonmeet (the artefact in the middle of the picture with the map cover), but that really was something of an Alpha prototype for me to toy with. The prototype gathered some key tables from the core rules and From Unformed Realms. It proved useful in running Save Innsmouth, to hide some brief notes and the game booklet itself.
I hope that any official and final GM Screen will serve a more original and pivotal function on the table. That remains a work in progress for the time being, with no specific release date.
I also didn’t mention that I have an adventure supplement planned for late Spring that will gather together three short adventures themed around the same non-Mythos entity. I can’t go into much further detail than that at the moment.
The call for adventure last year offered some interesting ideas – and one of those formed the kernel of a concept for this supplement.
This is still early thinking, but a full text for one adventure exists and I had a chance to discuss the second at Dragonmeet with another writer. I will round the collection off with the third contribution, which currently runs to an undeveloped outline.
All of these adventures will clock in around 5,000 words – so, they should all be punchy numbers ready for a session of play.
The “Kit” I used to run a session of Save Innsmouth: Chapter 0 at last weekend’s memorable Dragonmeet, minus the All Rolled Up game roll and The Cthulhu Hack dice tray.
The players each had their character’s image – and name – out in front of them on a simple clear plastic stand. I wrote the name on with a dry wipe Correctable pen, which means I can reuse the pictures for a future con game. The images themselves came from a random Google Image search – then I made them all black-and-white.
The character sheet in the image is the laminated version from The Cthulhu Hack Quickstart. Very handy – although, I actually used A4 blow-ups of the character sheet design to keep things clear and simple!
The prototype deck of Character Generation cards worked out really well. As players in the game have commented (on my Google+ Cthulhu Hack Collection), they meant you could quickly reference the character’s key Special Features and it could work really well as a rapid random character generator. Each card shows whether it’s an Ability or an Advantage – so, separate them and deal two Abilities and an Advantage to each player.
Every possibility I will use Kickstarter or similar to fund the production of these card decks – so, keep an eye out for that one.
And, the Gamemaster Screen – well, that’s a seriously prototype piece of kit. At the moment, I just have a bunch of tables from the core rules on the reverse. It has got me tweaking some of the tables, but at the moment I have a lot of thinking to do on what best to add on here for the benefit of an overworked GM!
A lot of things to think about for 2017!
