Episode 007 – Campaign Prep (or not)

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In this episode we talk about campaign prep – how each of us approaches it, and how that’s changed/is changing still. We touch on how to work specific themes into games, where and how we draw inspiration from media, and why we prepare games the way we do.

Also covered is the unique terror of GMing a boring game, David’s hard hustle to justify a tommy gun for his Call of Cthulhu character, and the power of a creatively rigorous gaming group to force you to be character focused.

UPDATE: Sorry to those who tried in vain to grab the episode right away last night…there were some issues with the file I posted originally. These have been fixed for the most part, but throughout the first 20 minutes or so there’s some uncool background noise that crept into the recording. Rookie mistake, won’t happen again. -Miles

Download Self-Critical Hits Episode 007 – Campaign Prep (or not)

Hosts: Jason, Caleb, Miles, David

Notes & Links:

• The not-so-horrible Black Swan, and the earnestly horrible Swanmay
• The good scary: Burrowers and Ravenous
• The set piece for the climactic battle in your western game: Natural Fort in Wyoming
• Insurance against committing the wrong-tech-for-the-era GMing faux pas: the important inventions by decade wikipedia page
• Fear the Boot…if you don’t know, now you know. They are kind of the OGs of this RPG podcasting thing
• Hamlet’s Hit Points, an awesome book, by all accounts. An excellent gift for yourself
• The Obsidian Portal page for Jason’s Call of Cthulhu campaign, Balm in Gilead
• For your health: the Copulating Blues and R. Crumb Draws the Blues
• Ryan Macklin’s blog post that was mentioned: Adventure Games and the Myth of the Arc
• A hero is you!
• Because we’ve still got the post-apocalypse on the brain in a big way: Fallout: New Vegas; Hardware; The Road; Apocalypse Nerd.
• For those with them iPhones: Papa Sangre, the video-less video game Jason mentioned
• The Games: Apocalypse World; D&D 3.x, 4, Forgotten Realms; Call of Cthulhu; Burning Wheel; d20 Star Wars; Battlestar Galactica RPG; Shadowrun; Vampire; Gamma World