Role playing game & Podcast

Quite a different kind of post today about Role playing games and podcasts.

Tabletop Role playing game

I am both a game master and a player of Roleplaying games. A few years back it would have been tricky to explain. Now it commonly belongs to geek culture. Thank you Stranger things among other things…

As Halloween is coming this way, I wanted to share all the stuff I created for my players last winter and warmly recommend the podcast that inspired me.

Because sometimes you spend quite a huge amount of time creating things that only fit a small purpose or that have a small audience. It happens all the time with tabletop RPG (role playing game). So I thought I would show this here.

The Lovecraft investigations: the podcast

I am a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft and the horror fiction of the Chtulhu mythos. (Hence the halloween attitude each year as October comes.) That’s why the Lovecraft Investigations from the BBC written by Julian Simpson caught my attention and hears. I am used to listen to podcasts when I work manually. Or when I walk around town. English podcast are also a good way to train my English.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward podcast is the plot I used for my game. It is based itself on Lovecraft’s book.

The audio material was the first thing that motivated me. I wanted to use recordings so that my players would discover the story just like Matthew Heawood, one of the podcast main character: basically the story of what happened to this strange Charles Dexter Ward and his psychiatrist.

The fun fact is that this podcast is turning this classical story set in 1928 into a contemporary fiction with modern phones and the Internet. I myself had to take it back to the twenties where I needed the action to take place. I did quite some research to be sure things were technically possible at that time. And obviously I changed the story and added non-players characters as my players chose their own moves.

Online tabletop RPG

The other main aspect is that we are now playing on Roll 20. It’s an online platform that connects players with their webcams on a virtual common tabletop. We all have families and grown ups lives and no time to loose driving around at nights. Now we are able to play once a week in the evening.

I always put great attention to the ambience when I “gamemaster”. A virtual tabletop is ideal to create maps to describe the intended actions or to provide your players with backgrounds and ambient music. So here is all the stuff I put together for my players. But note that I hugely relied on image search and works of others for this personal project. Thank you people of the Internet. Finally, I will add that some places are real and I did document them, others are invented.

Roll20 Backgrounds