u/dope_danny

So when it comes to TRPG's i try a lot but i'm a Call of Cthulhu man at the end of the day. I'm not big on power fantasies or "heres a bunch of random stuff from different time periods thrown together" settings so the investigation focussed gameplay of CoC and its obsessive attention to detail on time period stuff really nails what i'm looking for.

While part of this is the elegant simplicity of the core gameplay loop i.e "roll a D100 to get below the a skills 1-100 value you are rolling against to do a thing" another is its fantastic line of setting books.

Want Wild West? heres Down Darker Trails with in depth rules related to old firearms, horse riding, how dine' culture was at the time and how to display it respectfully rather than stereotypically and so on. Want victorian london with coppers chasing down Jack the Ripper making sacrifices to Dagon? heres Cthulhu by Gaslight. How about a game set in Britain after the collapse of rome where your hamlets Jarl has sent you out beyond the island of safety and light that is your village to investigate a strange monastery with a historian written naming convention guide for which viking or norman king rules your region or wessex? heres Dark Ages Cthulhu.

Theres others. French Revolution, Regency England, Ceasar's Rome, modern day Tokyo and so on. Want to do a full Eternal Darkness knock off? go nuts. Hell they just released one where everyone plays scouts in the 1990's. But theres still some people are waiting on years after their announcement.

The most famous of which is "Colonial Cthulhu" announced in the back of Down Darker Trails back when it launched in 2017. People buying the Wild West Cthulhu being the ones most likely to be down for "Puritans fresh off the Mayflower find out theres a reason the natives stay away from those strange ruins" type stuff was the thinking we were told at the time and after films like The VVitch interest in the setting only grew.

But that was 9 years ago and we have had stuff like Cthulhu by Gaslight get entirely new from the ground up editions in that time but Colonial Cthulhu has never shown up. Theres plenty of rumours why but i have never seen any hard confirmation. So to this day its seen as something of a white whale with CoC players where people seem to want it more because of how long its been known about but at the same time most seem to thing its probably been quietly cancelled years ago and stuff like the Scouts book simply took its place.

Personally i love these setting books. Rather than just go "eh set it whenever" each is a carefully curated way to take the core rules but transplant it from the 1920's america default to all these other extremes and theres still others on the way like Medieval France that have people excited for what new custom rules and items they will bring. But to this day Colonial America is the setting people seem to want mostly because we seem to have accepted at this point its just not happening.

Whats your go to game series, videojuego or dice rollan variety, that has a "coming soon, no date available" release everyones waiting on but probably know is dead?

I think it was first mentioned in the back of Down Darker Trails and was expected to be a middle ground between that and Dark Ages Cthulhu but a few years ago i vaguely recall some mentions of a reshuffle and maybe writer changes but did it ever get confirmed it was still in production or cancelled or not?

I was listening to this weeks Jeff Gerstmann podcast where cranky oji san par exellence himself was describing how bad the pr emails hes getting from companies trying to get him to look at games and he noted how some games will now market themselves as "friendslop" which he found odd but the worst he got recently that made both his and my face wrinkle in disgust was "its like vampire survivors meets rick and morty" which feels like something said in a spitballing meeting by idea guys never ever meant to see the light of day.

I've seen a fair few "its the Dark Souls of [insert genre with zero combat]" as a lazy byline to try and attribute trial and error experiences and that still might be the worst one i've seen used regularly. Whats the worst one that comes to mind for you?

I've always had a habit of buying a few starter decks from dead card games. Theres an appeal to me about a "Set" game rather than a "Solved" meta. A game nobody plays and knows how to one turn KO every game or give up because they didn't pull their perfect first hand and theres a limited pool. You would think that would mean i like those "heres a box with 300 cards and you build a deck and play just with these" but something about the starter decks and one or two booster sets before it went bust gives them a different allure to my mind goblins.

Most are just kind of variants on what you would expect. You play monsters that fight your opponents monsters with none monster spells to effect the board. From .HACK to Metazoo its the default form of the card game in practice right? but every so often you get one that shakes it up and digging through my attic for something in my warhammer pile of shame i found one of those thats really grabbed my interest: The X Files Card Game.

Published by US Playing Card Company and developed by NXT games in 1996 The X FIles card game is a "Investigative Card Game" based on the first two seasons of the show. Were i to describe it through the lens of stuff both current for the time and today it seems like they put Call of Cthulhu the TRPG in a blender with Guess who.

Each player has a 60 card deck but they dont play the whole thing. They pick an X file from the deck which is your opponents sole objective and four agents. Then you shuffle the rest as your "bureau" and play a hand of 7 cards. This is where it gets interesting.

See in the deck box are two rulebooks. Beginner play and Advanced play. Beginner play is simple. You have your Bureau deck zone, your field zone, the hospital and your x file. Take it to advanced play and you get a conspiracy zone and a whole new token based mechanic. The kicker here is that unlike other games that offer simplified rules a lot of the cards will have a two effects. One listed for basic play, the other for advanced. So you get good enough at guessing X files with the boys and guess what? time to move on to the high difficulty tier. Which i imagine did not contribute to a games longevity when having to compete with the pick up and playability of Magic but its certainly interesting to me at least.

The core loop of the game is using the field as your playground to play locations and agents to build your profile on the x file so you can go "Is your file related to Aliens?" which each File having 4 criteria which each have 5 subsets e.g "is it a conspiracy, alien, occult, primordial or government type file?". On top of this however is your opponent playing adversaries aka the freaks of the week from the show and bluffs to distract and outright gaslight your opponent to try and make them make incorrect guesses to slow down their investigation so you can try and guess their X File first.

I've shamelessly tricked some friends into playing later this week since i have a couple of decks and the show seems to be getting caught in the growing wave of 90's nostalgia as the 80's tide goes out and i'm interested to see how it goes. Sadly the game was cancelled after two booster sets by 1998 even thought there was early test prints of the completed 3rd set that are apparently a holy grail of american tcg collectors but the decks and two existing sets are not super rare or expensive given how crazy X files mania was at the time of release. It would go on to become the ruleset for a scooby doo card game and from 2020 onwards a few youtube channels popped up to lead to a big resurgence including fans working on printing a new expansion set called "Alien Investigations" so it might be the best time to look into this in the last 20 years. If this interests you finding two starter decks aint that hard to find sealed. Personally i think i'm just eager for more none boxed card games where you are making a deck from booster pulls but its not about who pulled the big shitkicker monster first.

Whats a niche card game you think is worth the tcg sickos of the sub looking into?

I was showing off to a friend these Magic the Gathering “planes artbooks” which are basically collecting the card art and promo art for all the sets -at the time at least- set on that particular plane in mtgs multiverse.

As a more casual player there was a few they knew like Innistrad, everyone’s favourite universal versus lovecraft monster mash but there was a few they had never heard of. One of which was a favourite of mine they had no idea about because they never heard much talk about it called “Streets of New Capenna”. She asked what the deal was and the answer was pretty simple: the vast majority did not like it.

New Capenna is best summed up as 1920’s fantasy new york. All art deco architecture, mobsters, flapper girls and skyscrapers and trains right out of Metropolis and for me? Thats my shit. They even made a full musical album to accompany the plane. From the more serious stuff like the whole story of mobsters using angels blood to make a drug called halo to silly shit like a giant made of skyscrapers straight up called “The Titan of Industry” its a real vibe i loved even if few others did.

There was a fair few reasons. Art deco in general is a rarity to blend with fantasy, there was some wierd stuff about how they included mobsters but no police people thought was related to american politics at the time and in general despite the multiverse setting too many felt it took things too far.

People look back on it a little kinder after the “fortniteification of magic” with universe beyond and planes that went wild west, wacky racers or straight sci-fi but its still never getting the love stuff like Innistrad ever will. Which i mean i get it but personally its always a little bitter sweet to play cards from the set -or one of its commander decks i think you can get online cheaper than any others- and have people go “man ive never heard of these characters”.

Whats a setting or location in a game or movie or whatever you love but know will never get much play because your opinion is not a common one?