By Blake Ryan

In the popular game Minecraft, areas of darkness (at night and underground) spawn monsters. The idea of a simple environmental condition creating creatures or even problems got me thinking…

You can use some change in the environment to create an ongoing problem, either small or large in scope, and a temporary period of time or from that moment on. These can be used for any game with supernatural elements, but I shall give examples for Monsterhearts, Urban Shadows and Monster of the Week.

As you will see this is an escalation to the ‘normal situation’, but does not have to dominate the entire game play. However, this can be used as the starting incident for what made the characters unusual in the first place-what made them different from regular folks. Thus it may serve as the start of a campaign rather than an escalation for season 2. It should prove to be a more hazardous journey for PC’s and provide additional options for MC’s.

Suggested Inciting Incidents 

• Halley’s Comet – March 1986.
• Huge solar flare – August 1998.
• Mayan Calendar change of epoch – 21st December 2012.
• Super Blood Wolf Moon – 21st January 2019.

The inciting incident may be all over the news, completely ignored by most, or heralded by the Aware, the Witch and the Spooky.

Suggested Changes to the situation

• Any – One NPC contact per Character either inverts their goals or loses virtues/positive personality traits. 
• Monsterhearts – When you gain a String, an NPC has a vision and learns one of your secrets. MC chooses the NPC, PC chooses the secret. 
• Monsterhearts – When you go Darkest self, you create a monster in some way. A poltergeist, a familiar or even a clone (who is not yours to control).
• Urban Shadows – One faction starts a Join or else! recruiting drive.
• Urban Shadows – If you Let it out, a rival faction starts looking for someone who owes you a debt, and you dream of it/read it in a fortune cookie.
• Monster of the Week – Monsters literally spawn in the lightless areas. They don’t have to be huge or powerful, but it will build up quickly.
• Monster of the Week – Monsters of the same type start developing hive mind. First feelings and visual impressions, then two way speech over long distances.​

Superhero games have always been near and dear to my heart. When I started this series, I thought I had a decent handle on the games out there, but every installment surprised me with something new. The Gauntlet Hangouts initiative, Gauntlet Comics, has embraced many different superhero rpgs as well as non-supes adapted for a superhuman universe. 

SECRET ORIGINS
Over the decades I’ve run serious and extended campaigns in a half-dozen superhero systems. This weekend I pulled together all of the core books I had for different superhero games. I ended up with twenty-eight: from Aberrant to Wild Talents. And that’s just hard copies - I have many more in electronic format. And that’s just core books not the secondary material: citybooks, villain books, modules, alternate settings, WW2 books, power guides, and so on. Honestly if you told me I couldn’t run Fantasy games anymore, I’d turn to superheroes. I’ve done some of my favorite work in that genre - exploring themes and ideas more concretely than in many other games.
 
Yet superhero games still feel like more work to me. I’m a fairly improvisational GM, sketching perhaps a few pages of notes for a session and spinning off previous work for many sessions. When I run a supers game, on the other hand, I dig in. I feel obligated to generate the news, to come up with colorful secondary characters ahead of time, and to develop fully-fleshed mysteries. I don’t want a supers game to be just about the fights - I want something more. But I want spectacle. At heart I’m still a kid getting up early Saturday morning to watch the Superfriends despite having seen the episode many times.

This offers the second half of my original look at Steampunk & Victoriana RPGs. Here you see some of the genre trapping used in new and novel ways, rather than falling back to the old tropes. They're still there and dominant, but some new paths have been opened. See the first half here.

11. Private Eye
(1993, Victoriana) A German-language game where players take on the roles of detectives in the Victorian era, ala Sherlock Holmes. The name's a little odd to me as I usually associate the phrase "private eye" with Noir. I've listed this as 1993, but this is actually the publication date of the 3rd edition. I've had a hard time tracking down other information on the game. A Google-translated document I found suggests the earlier editions were amateur-press or fan produced. A larger, hardcover fourth edition appeared in 2008.
 
12. Tradition Book: Sons of Ether
(1993, Steampunk-esque) Mage the Ascension presents a war over shared reality, fought between mages who want to move the world towards their view of reality. The bad guys have a monolithic view of that reality, while the "good guys" of the Traditions have a freer and more fragmented approach. The Sons of Ether are one of these traditions, with a love of mad science and an aesthetic borrowed from Steampunk. The background for the Sons of Ether sourcebook cites the usual suspects - Babbage and Lovelace - and the author has clearly read The Difference Engine. I'd say this is the first time we see a distinctly "steampunk style" faction in an rpg. The art has all the classic motifs: goggles, gears, Victorian dress, and so on. MtA itself isn't steampunk, but it smartly borrows from a rising trend. White Wolf's always been good at incorporating those ideas and laying the groundwork for future use. As the Mage line evolved, you would see more and more of these aesthetics appear in the game and art.

I continue revisiting my history of RPG Genre lists this week. Steampunk & Victoriana was my second series and I hadn't figured out a final approach: how much to say, how many to include on each list. As a result, this one ended up way too large. So I've split it into two parts, with the second half next week. Warning: LOTS of problematic stuff here. 

LIGHTING THE BOILER 
This list begins to trace the history and development of Victoriana and Steampunk RPGs. I did this earlier with Horror RPGs. I focus on tabletop games, though many video games could easily fall into this category (the classics Thief: The Dark Project, Arcanum and Final Fantasy VI). Because these two concepts have been tied closely, I opted to link them for this list. I could have presented them individually, but the lists would overlap heavily. Victoriana’s reasonably easy to spot, but Steampunk offers more of a challenge.
 
There’s a good deal of debate about what constitutes Steampunk - resulting in many argument panels at various conventions. I think of it generally as a set of design and aesthetic elements - generally recognizable symbols. If it had a political or social content at the start, that’s been streamlined away in favor of “the look.” Like other subjective genre elements it has a continuum, with some books, movies, games and TV shows embracing it fully and others just throwing in some knobs and goggles.

by Jesse Ross and Jason Cordova

We have just concluded the Trophy incursion-writing contest. Congratulations to the winner, Linda Codega (Southern Holler), and the three fabulous runners-up: Gabriel Robinson (Gift of the Sea), Natalie Ash (The Huntsman’s Feast), and Michael Van Vleet (A Warm and Pleasant Hum). You can read these and all the other entries on The Gauntlet Forums. 

We recorded a special podcast episode to announce and discuss the winner and runners-up, which you can listen to right here. We also announced that we will be Kickstarting THREE Trophy books early next year, and those three books are the focus of this blog post. 

​Here they are! These are mock-ups, and the images aren’t quite finalized, but you still get a good sense of what the books will look like. Each book will be 7”x10” hardcover, approximately 120 full-color pages, with a partial cloth binding, foil stamp, and ribbon bookmark.

What we were previously calling “original” or “core” Trophy is now called Trophy Dark. Trophy Dark is a game of dark fantasy and psychological horror, about doomed treasure-hunters exploring an environment that doesn’t want them there. It’s designed to be played as a one-shot, perfect for convention play or as a tragic side story in your regular, long-term game. 

Here’s what the Trophy Dark book will include:

• A new ruleset, expanded and clarified from what was originally published in Codex - Dark 2. 
• Tips for running a great game of Trophy Dark.
• A handy, step-by-step sequence of events for running Trophy Dark (similar to the one found in Girl Underground).
• Guidelines for creating your own incursions. 
• Over a dozen incursions, from Codex and elsewhere, written by a diverse group of creators. 
• Ideas for using Trophy Dark as part of another game (such as a funnel for Trophy Gold, or flashbacks and side stories for other fantasy games). 

Trophy Gold is a game of desperate treasure-hunters exploring the lost and forgotten places of the world. It takes the core rules of Trophy Dark and expands them for use in a more traditional, long-term fantasy campaign. The game mashes together story game and OSR principles to create a gameplay experience that is fast, flexible, and deep. 

Here’s what the Trophy Gold book will include:

• A new ruleset, expanded and clarified from what was originally published in Codex - Gold.
• New rules for journeys between incursions, and expanded “back at home” rules. 
• Tips for running a great game of Trophy Gold.
• An example-of-play transcript. 
• Guidelines for creating your own incursions plus guidelines for converting existing modules to Trophy Gold. 
• New backgrounds, occupations, and equipment. 
• Over a hundred different ritual and saints, based on the classic B/X D&D magic-user and cleric spells. 
• Brand new incursions, unique to Trophy Gold. 

Trophy Loom is a setting book for the world of Trophy. It will outline all the major places, people, and strange creatures of the shared world of Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold. There are a few key details you need to know about this book:

• It will be completely system agnostic, so you can use it with Trophy Dark, Trophy Gold, or any fantasy game system you prefer. 
• It will be comprised largely of tables. Each location will have some general information common to any game set in the world of Trophy, but will otherwise be comprised of tables that include rumors, historical details, and myths about that location, so you can “weave” your own version of the Trophy world. 
• The Trophy Loom tables will be written in a highly-innovative way: some will be crowdsourced by the folks who make up the awesome, vibrant Trophy RPG community, and others will be written by specific creators from the OSR and indie communities. If you’d like to participate in the crowdsourcing, you can do so right here.

We’re very excited about Trophy Dark, Trophy Gold, and Trophy Loom. We have been working on this project for a long time, and we have been so humbled by all the folks taking this journey with us. These books are going to be very, very special, and we can’t wait to share them with you! 

Get updates on everything we’re doing with Trophy by following us on Twitter @trophyrpg and signing up for the mailing list.

As I mentioned last post, for the next several weeks I’m revisiting the first installments of each of my Histories of RPG Genres. Horror was the first one I did, spurred by an offhand comment by Robin Laws on a podcast. Looking back in comparison to my later genre histories, I’m shocked at how long it took for horror to become a thing. It isn’t until the early 1990’s that we get regular releases of horror rpgs. I wonder if that represents interest or more that Call of Cthulhu had such market power.

IT RISES REVISED
When I first wrote this list, Call of Cthulhu 7th was on the horizon- a game and system which has had many editions, but remains roughly the same game. At the time I wasn’t sure if CoC could remain interesting in a time with many competing horror rpgs, including brethren Lovecraftian rpgs like Trail of Cthulhu, Lovecraftesque, and Cthulhu Dark.
 
Call of Cthulhu kicked off horror gaming as a standalone genre. You could point to Tegel Manor as the first real haunted house product, but it doesn't put the horror elements at the center and still focuses on the dungeon crawl. For this list I'm looked at products lines offering a full horror rpg or major twist to an existing game. I lump some interesting sub-products under their main entry (if they're produced by the same company). Some things, like S.H.A.D.O.W. over Scotland, offer a horror diversion for the main system, but don't rise to the level of sourcebook or core rules.
​

3. Chill: Adventures Into The Unknown (1984)
I'll honestly say that two things kept me away from Chill when it came out: the goofiness of other Pacesetter publications and the Holloway cover. I knew it was a horror game, but from the outside, it looked to be just hanging on Call of Cthulhu's coattails. It took a broader approach to horror - covering all of the classics. Many reviews suggested the original rules focused more on fighting monsters than offering horror or frights. For a nuanced perspective on this, see James Maliszewski's retrospective here. I like the idea that Chill serves as a middle ground between D&D and CoC. I offers the concept of a patron organization, S.A.V.E, independent of conventional authority. Chill would see a rebirth with Mayfair's new edition in 1990. It was rumored that another version would be coming out a few years ago from OtherWorld Creations, but I'm not sure of the status of that. (Note: since the original writing, a new edition has landed). 
 
4. Ghostbusters (1986)
I loved the Ghostbusters movie. Within a week of seeing it I tried to cobble together a GB game. I ripped apart the closest thing I knew, Stalking the Night Fantastic. That resulted in a crunchy, dense system which, shockingly, didn't work. I couldn't figure out the problem, why I couldn't get the feel I wanted?
 
Then the Ghostbusters rpg came out and I went "d'uh." This was the first rules-light game which worked for me. I'd seen others, but they felt thin. This game actually emulated the feel of the movie. It changed the way I thought about games. Ghostbusters was fun and clever, with the horror taking a back-seat as it needed to. It remains among the best "funny" games out there, striking the right balance between goofiness and playability. On the other hand, it had the effect of associating short rules with a light tone and subject matter. Simple games worked for comedy, but not for "serious" gaming. The Ghostbusters system went on to power WEG's Star Wars RPG and many, many others. Interestingly, Chaosium actually designed that mechanic for GB before they handed the game off to WEG.
 
Ghostbusters took an interesting tact for the time, replacing movie stills with cartoony art. That likely made approvals easier. It had the side benefit of leaving room for the players. It offered a new world of Ghostbusting, rather than sticking to the film and those characters. It also had one of the first custom dice seen in an rpg, a d6 with the iconic GB symbol. The boxed set included lots of secondary materials: forms, equipment cards, IDs. WEG released three modules for GB. In 1989, with the release of the second Ghostbusters movie they rebooted and expanded the game as Ghostbusters International. This time they released a module covering the film. Again WEG only slightly supported the line, offering three modules and two sourcebooks. By 1990 the game line had wrapped.