What’s Next in Achtung! Cthulhu?

 Roleplaying Games  No Responses »
Nov 272024
 
Rendezvous at Rouen has been out for three weeks now and making its way into players hands. While that satisfying glow of accomplishment remains, the draw of new adventures beckons.

I must answer.

Rendezvous was actually a detour; a short respite from a larger work I had been tooling with. I will return and finish it now: a new A!C adventure. At least the first installment of it. Me and my habit of biting off too much had sketched out a concept for such a large piece that it has to be broken into a trilogy of adventures. This will probably take me into most of next year to finish.

But in the meantime, check here for some updates on The Last Emperor. First mission in the End of Empire triology.

Rendezvous at Rouen

 Roleplaying Games  No Responses »
Nov 092024
 

My 2d20 project for Modiphius’ World Builders community program has been released to DriveThruRPG. While not my first publication with Modiphius, it is my first through their World Builders community program. Rendezvous at Rouen for the Achtung! Cthulhu game line is a Section M mission set in France right after the surrender to Germany in June, 1940. It’s a sequel to the Quickstart adventure A Quick Trip to France.

My original goal was to release it on September 30th in time for Roll20’s “The Next Adventure” program. An unexpected event got in the way of that schedule: Hurricane Helene. The storm ravaged western North Carolina where I happened to be. Thankfully, (and by the grace of God), I came through it unscathed, but my heart goes out to those lives that were lost and the families impacted by the devastation of the storm. I had been through hurricanes before, but never in the mountains. I now have first hand understanding of flash floods and mudslides, along with a healthy respect for the convergence of moving water and terrain. 

With more time to complete the project I decided to add some details, do a little more research into the city of Rouen and its history and put more effort into the maps. These extras I think were worth it pushing the final page count to 32 from my original target of 15 pages. 

For those of you who are thinking about writing your own World Builders content, I thought it useful to give you an idea of the effort it took to produce this mission. I used tools that parallel Modiphius’ process and added extra time in for activities like layout and proofreading. Most of the art in the game is provided by Modiphius as part of the World Builders program. Art is one of the sticking points for tabletop RPG design. Unless you are a gifted artist, commissioning artwork is prohibitively expensive and no AI is permitted in the program. Thankfully, Modiphius gives its World Builders community access to an art pack for use in development. I took advantage of this everywhere I could in the manuscript with only a couple custom pieces I created that portray the relics of Saint Vitalis that the player characters acquire during the game.

With that, here is the rough breakdown of time spent in the various major areas and the tools used to accomplish the tasks.

Project start: 9/18/2024

Principal writing: 9/18 to 10/20, 32 writing days.
Tool: Scrivener
Word Count: 11,101 (Final Draft)

Map design: 10/21 to 10/27
Tool: Inkarnate
Maps Created: Rouen city, Rouen Cathedral, Grotto of Anguish, Hidden Cavern

Layout, editing and formatting: 10/28 to 11/4
Tools: Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, utilizes the World Builders template

Upload to DTRPG: 11/5
Tools: DTRPG submission tool and editor

That’s about 48 days total time to go from an outline to the finished product. To give you a sense of where it started, here’s the original outline idea: 

Rescue from Rouen

Scene 1
Sneaking into center city
Contact with underground

Scene 2
Entering the cathedral
Finding the crypt

Scene 3
Opening the door to the catacombs
Chase through the catacombs

Scene 4
Rendezvous with the boat
Escape the monster of the Seine

Note that the original working title was “Rescue from Rouen”. While the creation process was taking place, “Rescue” changed to “Rendezvous”; better with the French theme; then “from” changed naturally to “at”. Looking back on this first outline, I was impressed that not much changed from the scene flow other than one minor detail: there is no door to the catacombs. 

For how much is packed into this short four scene mission, that wasn’t a bad total project time. I was happy with the effort and it was fun to do. Given that this adventure is meant to complement and conclude the original Quickstart adventure, I wanted to keep the price modest and accessible for players. You really get your monies worth on this from a time and page count perspective, but I’d rather have this in the hands of players who are excited about Achtung! Cthulhu and want to explore a bit more before diving all the way in. 

This was a fun adventure to craft. The research in and of itself was a pleasure. I know more about Rouen and its cathedral than I ever did. I hope this is an enjoyable mission for both the gamemaster and players!

Republic credits are no good out here…

 Board Games, Roleplaying Games  No Responses »
Feb 082014
 

“…I need something more real.” One of my favorite scenes from Star Wars Episode I is the first meeting with Watto at his shop. Bartering for a used hyperdrive component, the heroes run into an age old problem: currency exchange.

Most often in my RPG games, money has been either the generic Gold, Silver, Copper coinage; or for the sci-fi theme, Credits, all tracked on a sheet of paper. Nothing actually changed hands. There were no “Watto moments” where an issue with payment lead to an adventure or series of encounters. I’ve always wanted to get some tangible, tactile money exchange into my game. Something the players could hold onto, something as Watto would say, is “real”. However, such currency available to gamers in the past was either too expensive or of such low quality to be a vehicle for in-game jokes.

As in many things in today’s gaming world: Enter Kickstarter.

Recently, we have seen some quality hobby gaming coin sets come up on Kickstarter. Myself being a long time a-wishin-and-hopin for such reasonably priced options have jumped at the opportunity and backed two such projects. The fruits of the first have recently arrived.

Future coins is designed to supply in-game currency for Minion Games 4x title Hegemonic. However, they can very much be used for any purpose. My primary use for these will be in my sci-fi RPG’s, specifically Traveller and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire.

I was very pleased with the quality of the credit coins. The coloring, shading, and trim, is very well done. My only nitpick is the color for the highest denomination coin, 100,000, which looks black. The other denominations more than make up for this however, the shading between the raised text and the primary coin color give them a good depth and actually enhances the feeling of being a solid coin. There are both straight colors and metallics. For those of you who lust Ferengi-like after cold-pressed latinum, the 1,000 coin will more than satisfy.

If you are interested in picking up some of these for yourself and missed the Kickstarter campaign, not to worry, Minion has you covered and you can get your hands on some right here.

The other collection of coins I have jumped into is Conquistador Games Best Damn Metal Gaming Coins. This collection offers quite a bit of diversity in choice of era including Roman (my favorite), Spanish, Celtic and others, as well as fantasy and pirate themes. This particular kickstarter has not yet shipped, so if you are interested in picking some up it is possible that Conquistador or their partners in this project, Game Salute, will be selling additional coin sets later this year.

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