Geoff Bottone's Blog, page 20

Call of Cthulhu Part One: Dead Man's Stomp

I'm running 7th edition Call of Cthulhu, and used the quickplay rules in order to generate characters with great speed and alacrity.

I should also note that this part, and likely the next one, are from before I started taking careful notes after game, so they'll both be a lot sparser on details.

I was originally going to run The Haunting, as it is not only a classic, but also a fun,

My Call of Cthulhu Game

I have been running a tabletop Call of Cthulhu game for a while now. I initially ran the group through Dead Man's Stomp (a classic that I love) from the quickstart rules, before deciding to have them face off against the Order of the Silver Twilight from Shadows of Yog-Sothoth.

I'm actually using the sixth edition of SoYS, with conversions, because I don't believe that there's a current version

The Final Flight of the de la Torre

GEOFF NOTE: This is the introductory text for the Invictus LARP, a rule book that I created for fun. It is meant to take place in the same world as the Mystwood LARP, but many thousands of years in the future, after Humanity has developed space travel and hyperdrive. It's a pastiche of Warhammer 40k and Traveller. 


This is the flight recording of the final moments of the Dreadnought de la Torre

Sisyphus and Tantalus

It was Sisyphus who discovered how to break the system, completely by accident.

Out of sheer, defeated boredom, he started pushing the terrible boulder along different approaches to the summit. The end result was always the same, as was foreordained by the gods, but at least the view sometimes varied.

One such variation saw him pushing the boulder over the loose and yielding scree on the

Simple Questions From Playtesters

It's been a while!

*brushes off the dust*

Last weekend, I went to METATOPIA, a game designers' convention in Morristown, New Jersey. The convention has a simple, and wonderful, premise: designers show up with their games-in-progress; they show these games off to players and other designers; they get feedback.

I got a lot of very, very good feedback this weekend, both for games that I have been

RPG Character Library: Dungeon ADVENTURE! 2!

Quite a while ago, I began participating in an experiment during a very dry period in my creative life. The experiment was as follows: Go through the RPGs you own and make characters for each one.

This proved to be an interesting process, as it got me to painstakingly go through many of the systems that I owned. Making some of these characters revealed hidden gems, while others made me want to

Even More Boldly Go Art: The SFS Oswego

I got yet another email from the fantabulous Dave Woodward of Badgerlord Studios, and...

(Do you remember who he is? If you don't, let me remind you! He's the guy who is doing all of the art for Boldly Go. You can see all of the hard work he's already done by clicking on this self-referential bit of text right here! If you want to hire him for things, I'm sure he would be both excited and

Boldly Go Character Art: Part 5

In this, the last post featuring the various crew members of the Oswego, you will finally meet the captain of our dauntless ship. Unlike the other characters in the game, this one is based on a real person.

I would also, once again, like to take this opportunity crow about the artwork of Dave Woodward of Badgerlord Studios. Do you need art for a project? How about a cool drawing of your LARP or

Burgundar: The Musical

I play Enoch, a gravedigger, at the Mystwood LARP. Mystwood takes place at two sites: The Keep, in Jefferson, ME, and Burgundar, in Harrison, ME.

Lately, in Burgundar, the town has been beset by a vile Chaos demon named Old Grom. As Grom is wonderfully played, delightfully scene-chewy, and possessed of a somewhat generic appearance (an old man in a black cloak and an eyepatch), he has started to

Boldly Go Character Art: Part 4

We're almost done with the roster for the Oswego. This installment features the last two members of our bridge crew. Then I'm going to follow that up with another post devoted to the dauntless captain of our heroic ship. (The captain deserves a post all his own, for personal reasons. You'll see why when we get there.)

As a constant reminder, the art in this post (and all other Boldly Go posts)