Show notes
In this episode Keepers Murph and Jon are joined by our Discord friend, Ambermancer to talk about using classic monsters in your Lovecraftian games. This episode was recorded on January 30th, 2020.
Campus Crier
Black Star Magic! Investigators in the Yellow King RPG, from Pelgrane Press, gain the use of mind-bending spells! Playtesting is set to begin soon on the new QuickShock Gumshoe supplement. The book is said to contain 144 spells and 4 scenarios.
Close friend of the show and all around awesome guy Jason McKittrick is bringing back the Cryptocurium Inner Sanctum after five long years of laying dormant. The new offering has a preview of what is included in the three different tiers, with more info coming out on the 31st. Right now they are priced at $100, $200, & $300 dollars. And they look amazing.
Mike Mason is playtesting the new campaign from Tim Wiseman, Dead of Winter on Twitch.tv and then on YouTube starting on February 4th at 8pm. If you haven’t had a chance to watch Mike in action, then this is the spot to watch a great GM at work.
“The Dead of Winter is an epic story of intrigue, love, and horror set in 1929 across London and Russia. The strange reappearance of people long gone from the investigators’ lives precedes the arrival of two curious letters, both asking for help from unexpected sources. The investigators are drawn into a series of events taking them far from home and into the unfamiliar and potentially dangerous landscape of Soviet Russia where friends may be enemies and enemies might be friends.”
Speaking of the Chaosium YouTube channel, Mike Mason has been doing some interviews there the latest is with friends of the show and a good friends of mine, Christopher Smith Adair, Paul Fricker, and Brian Courtemanche!
This month is New Gamemaster Month! If you know someone who would like to run a game, or perhaps you yourself would like to, then there are a number of resources at the links below to help you out! The NewGmaeMasterMonth website has a series of posts that help to start and plan out your first session and each post is specifically geared towards Numenera, Unknown Armies, Trail of Cthulhu, and 7th Sea.
Monte Cook Games is releasing a horror game add-on for the new Cypher System RPG, called Stay Alive. You can pre-order the game now at their website for $44.95 and it ships in February. The art in this looks awesome, it’s Monte Cook Games written by Charles Ryan who has done writing for just about everything, and I’ve got a growing interest in the Cypher system so this looks pretty cool!
And for your meat-space games there is a new Kickstarter offering a solution to the lack of space at the gaming table. The Level Up is a raised gaming platform for miniatures that provides a 24”x36” tiled base that is lifted 6 inches from the tabletop. This project has funded already with 28 days left as of recording. It’s a novel and useful idea to provide more space and sort of acts like a shield as well.
Call of Cthulhu - the story illustrated by French artist François Baranger, available from Free League Publishing. It is an amazing collectible that is a must-have for any fan of Lovecraft or Baranger.
Discord Invitation:
Please come join the community on the MUP Discord channels: https://discord.gg/vNjEv9D
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If you haven’t heard yet, we have redesigned our Patreon and so far the feedback has been all positive! We are greatly appreciative of you, our listeners, and would ask that if you can please back us! Our next goal in funding will pay our worthy editors for their time! Also all backers, regardless of level will have access to the outtakes reel that we are going to put out on a special RSS feed from Patreon! To back us you can click the button on the sidebar of our website, mu-podcast.com or head over to Patreon directly at www.patreon.com/mup!
Graham’s Card Catalog
And in line with today’s topic, it's Ask a Mortician! Ask a Mortician is a YouTube series that covers everything you could ever, (and maybe never), wanted to know about what happens to us after death. Aside from the purely practical information about embalming and body preparations, there is a lot of history covering death and strange murders that have involved funeral homes and funeral directors. Some of this stuff is ready made for a scenario!
Main Topic -- Vampires, Zombies, and Ghosts... oh my!
Listen to the episode to hear Keeper Jon, Keeper Murph, and Keeper Amber talk about the wide range of uses for vampires, ghosts, zombies, skeletons, werewolves, and mummies.
Keeper Jon's classic monster ideas:
Ghosts - echoes of past lives that do not directly interact with the investigators, but the investigators need to observe and interpret the ghosts to gain certain clues. As seen in the Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House.
Vampires – the creature eats something other than blood, like salt, or emotions. A good example of a salt vampire can be seen in the classic Star Trek episode, The Man Trap. As for emotional vampires, it could be a coven of goth kids running a heron den. They feed other kids the drugs, and they "drink" the depression that flows out of them as they get high.
Zombies – a perfect example was illustrated by Lovecraft in his story, Cool Air. In it, Dr. Munoz (dead 18 years) is an intelligent undead creature, not driven to consume human flesh, but to further his life and pursuit of science.
Skeletons – they can be used as oracles and source of information, similar to the Library of Skulls in the classic Saturday morning TV show, Land of the Lost.
Werewolf - bend this classic monster to become a Mythos creature; use the lycanthropy of a human so it transforms into a dimensional shambler.
Mummy - long dead wizards with their spells written onto their wrappings. Also, since it was only a very few who were mummified, and their vital organs were removed and put into canopic jars, then they are immortal as long as at least one of their canopic jars is whole with its enclosed contents.
Listen to the episode to hear Keeper Murph's and Keeper Amber's recommendations.
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