Casting Shadows

Like yesterday’s prompt for #RPGaDAY2024 today’s standard prompt is asking us to share events from our gaming lives. In some ways this prompt was easier than yesterday’s as in the case of sharing an Actual Play video you can just do that without having to set-up and explain a clip from a session. On the other hand, it is just as hard because how can you choose? It can feel like sharing an episode from the middle of a series of TV, spoiling things for those who view them, or if you go for a first session, it might not yet be the type of ‘sensational’ play that you remember from later in a campaign. Of course, none of that matters if you go the harder route and distill a session into a spoken or written description… right?

Like yesterday, I spent a long time considering what video to share, and finding perfect ones with very lo-fi audio and/or video, and ones that are quite long, and ones that need a lot of explanation…etc. The longer I searched, the harder the choice got.

As a result, I was just about to sit down to type a summary of a session, when I decided to think about which playlists I had checked first. Those turned out to be Broken Compass, the branch of our Call of Cthulhu campaign featuring Craig Shipman of Third Floor Wars as a soul-sick psychiatrist, and Alien. I decided to return to just those three, no matter how much the All for One, Leagues of Adventure, and Mythras stuff was calling me.

I wanted to share the Psychiatrist’s branch of Call of Cthulhu: Turn of a New Leaf because while the play in that short playlist is a very different kind of horror than the other branches – so far – it showcases a good bond between player and GM, the play is allowed to dwell on long stretches of character exploration, and it shows the cruel underbelly of the overlapping end of the Prohibition era and the rise of the Depression era that we often have to simply assume in a lot of mythos gaming. It’s the slowest burn of the entire campaign, and its character is the most sympathetic. I hope you will go watch it and the other branches on your own, but in the end, I decided to share something with more of a classical gamer group.

This was also why I wanted to share a session of Alien, but as I was examining things like their crash landing on LV-426, their foiling of a rebellion on some forgotten colony world, and their showdown with a megalomaniac holding all the cards, I kept thinking of all of our laughter and shared sense of time, place, and belonging in the 90s action flick which never was…. Ravagers of the Frost King’s Tomb.

So, assured that the choice is good, I am choosing the middle of three sessions to share, hoping that you will want to watch the other two, but knowing that if you just choose one, this one won’t steer you wrong.