As per the poem by Robert Burns, many schemes have “gang aft agley” in 2020. When I last checked in here, at the very end of 2019, I was feeling very optimistic for my RPG plans in the coming year. Needless to say, significant barriers came up in the early months of the year to stifle my ambitions for getting back to regular gaming. I was right on the verge of getting ready to “go public” with recruitment for a Rappan Athuk game at my local store when the first (documented, at the time) cases of COVID-19 appeared in the United States just miles from my home, and going out to socialize suddenly seemed reckless.
Nevertheless, I’ve managed to make some lemondade from a few of these lemons: I’ve finally given roleplaying through online venues a try, and found that, while different from an in-person game, the experience had some conveniences. I was a player in several sessions of a Tomb of the Serpent Kings mini-campaign via Roll20 and Discord, and was lucky enough to play in a Zoom session run by the world famous Jeff Rients at the end of May. One game was audio only, utilizing Roll20 as a “shared screen” for viewing a super-simple dungeon map, and the other was simply a group video chat, all theater-of-the-mind. It was nice to see that neither game was “fancy,” with elaborate digital maps and tokens, carefully selected music, or any of those other literal bells & whistles that various Virtual Tabletop services often tout, and it was an experience that was, in many ways, like meeting a group at the game store. It’s given me the confidence to make an attempt at running an online game of my own in the next few weeks, since it doesn’t seem like in-person gaming will be “back to normal” any time soon around here!
Which, I suppose, brings me to looking forward– I’ve had Carcosa on the mind again! Jeff’s game utilized the “playtest” Lamentations of the Flame Princess rules found in the endpapers of Eldritch Cock, and it occurred to me that they would work perfectly for a Carcosa campaign, where there aren’t any Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, or Clerics anyway. So, if you have an interest in playing a technicolored weirdo in a gonzo robot-space-alien-dinosaur-tentacle-infused nightmare hexcrawl, watch this space for details. My take on Carcosa will probably lean more towards “80’s Barbarians, Lasers and Dinosaurs” than “Horrible Lovecraftian Nightmare Dread,” if that sounds appealing at all. I’m hoping to get a few sessions organized and running before I start grad school at the end of August. In the meantime, I’m “laying schemes” to prepare, and filling in a small hex map with a crashed flying saucer dungeon, fungal caves, wandering Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, and the occasional Rogue Robot.
I play so many games online because I can barely find people that want to play. I have convinced some friends though. We still use Carcosa as a place we can visit. I think once we finish Temple of Elemental Evil using Eldritch Cock rules we will go back. I know there’s still gotta be treasure there on the map! And I want a mutation gun dammnit!