What A Good Day To Listen To A 20 Episode Crossover Fanfiction Inspired Podcast Where Shadow The Hedgehog

what a good day to listen to a 20 episode crossover fanfiction inspired podcast where shadow the hedgehog gets a full emotional arc and also fights shigeo "mob" kageyama in one on one arena combat

#RPGaDay2024

RPG which is easy to use

I keep meaning to write up a full review of this game, but The Hunted by Chris Bisette is one of the best, most well-presented one-shot rpgs I’ve ever read. It helps that it is in my wheelhouse re: horror. But it’s simply dynamite. 

The Hunted takes inspiration from things like The Ritual, Midnight Mass, Blair Witch, and more. Basically you have a group of character archetypes going to a place and beginning to realize that something’s pursuing them. It uses a Forged in the Dark resolution system, but with some tweaks from other games. In particular it incorporates developing backstory into the mechanics. 

Several things make it great and easy to use. We have four playbooks and they’re tightly connected to each other and to the world. They each have a niche but there’s enough room on each of them to make them your own. There’s a good and clear explanation of what they’re about and a simple set of choices. 

You then collaboratively decide on the setting you’ve gone to, why you came to this place together, and what happened once you got here. There’s suggestions for each and you can roll if you want to randomly generate it. With these things in place the Guide directs each player to answer a question deepening the details. Finally we have two collaborative questions which set the obstacles: what has gone wrong and what mystery do you need to solve. 

Then play kicks off with the Guide spending a resource to make a move with the Hunter and kicks things off. The building process is great, builds on the details of character creation, and rolls seamlessly into play. 

There’s a loose structure to the play at this point– but we have a flag for a shift. Once players have dealt with one of the two obstacles it becomes the end of Act Two. This introduces a twist– which the table gets to decide together. The book has three ideas, each with questions players will answer. Then you roll into Act Three. 

The game moves through all of this quickly and it is easy to play and pick up. There’s great structural advice about how to run it (like working to make Act 3 half as long as Act 2). The mechanics don’t get in the way. Despite the pause of building a dice pool, it puts weight and gravity on every significant action. 

It’s a little thing but I also appreciate games which include the details of the playbooks in the rules themselves, rather than just on the character sheets. 

The Hunted is 33 pages of tight, easy to get into writing. It’s a wonderful game and really worth picking up and playing. You can see a session I ran here: 

ENOUGH social interactions. i need to go in the river

Saddie DeRoso disappeared ten years ago, leaving behind the charred remains of a home. Now, her brother, podcaster Nicholas DeRoso, thinks he's finally found her -- in an infinite suburb beyond material reality. Will he find her? And how far will he go to try?

Shelterwood: A Suburban Gothic is out now.

I truly adore audio dramas because so many of them are just. made for Free. there are people going "does anyone wanna hear this story I made" and not waiting for an answer. they will teach themselves audio production and sound editing and write scripts on fucking Google docs and then. then they just put it Out there. in the ether. on the net. for Free. normal people with day jobs as like, idk, hospital management or speech pathology or whatever the fuck. by day they're making people's coffee orders, by night, they are the tragic anti-hero in a space opera who have just found out a Demon Alien Organization has them on a List. and you don't even need a subscription to find out what happens next. God.