Episode 158: Englishman is Not Actually Valued For Its Own Flavor
September 18th, 2015 | Robin
Our recording chambers may be hot but our subject matter gets cold, cold, cold, as Among My Many Hats takes a look at the Wendigo.
In How To Write Good, the dialogue turns to dialogue tags, he said, informatively.
Ken and Robin Recycle Audio continues to pillage the very best treasures of the investigative roleplaying seminar at Gen Con, this time delving into red herrings, leaving room for player improv, and keeping your horror tropes fresh.
Then we circle back to Arctic climes as the Eliptony Hut rips the lid off the Franklin conspiracy.
It blew up Kickstarter. It slid into Gen Con on a gurney with both guns blazing. And now Feng Shui 2: Action Movie Roleplaying is laying down the kung fu, the gun fu, and the cybernetic primate fu, and rocketing its way to a retail store near you. Join our friends at Atlas Games in celebrating the long-anticipated release of Robin’s classic game, accompanied by the GM Screen: Fistful of Fight Scenes and Blowing Up the Movies.
Ken fans who did not partake of the Kickstarter will want to sink their fangs into the pre-order for the Dracula Dossier from Pelgrane Press, consisting of the Director’s Handbook and Dracula Unredacted. 
You say that’s still not enough Ken for you? Very well, my friend. His brilliant pieces on parasitic gaming, alternate Newtons, Dacian werewolves and more now lurk among the sparkling bounty of The Best of FENIX Volumes 1-3, from returning sponsors Askfalgen. Yes, it’s Sweden’s favorite RPG magazine, now beautifully collected. Warning: not in Swedish.
Would you like to sharpen young children’s memory skills while also introducing them to the cosmic dread of the Cthulhu Mythos? Then Recall of Cthulhu, Kickstarting from the fine folks at Toy Vault, until September 25, is for you. Amazingly adorable artwork of the Elder Gods and their ilk to delight the young and the young at heart. This classic matching game can be played by up to four of the most deranged patients in the Sanatorium, as well as young cultists aged 4 and up! 
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I didn’t hear Robin’s own “The Final Reel,” from Shadows over Filmland, mentioned as an improvisational mystery in which any suspect can be the villain. It strikes a good balance between an improvised and prewritten investigation.
I was expecting the Writing Hut to mention, at least once, Tom Swifties….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swifty
As to improve mysteries — to me they violate the essential contract of a mystery — that there is a puzzle that can be logically solved. Lost and the recent Battlestar Galactica were frustrating examples of things that claimed to be mysteries, but were being made up by the writers as they went along and much more frustrating for it. That doesn’t mean that a GM might not adopt an answer proposed by the PCs that fits the established facts and is better than what the GM had in mind — but the adoption should be invisible to the PCs.
Very much agreed – the pleasure players get from the mystery component of a game is from having worked out and beaten the GM’s complicated plot, even when it wasn’t actually all that complicated. I have sometimes modified solutions based on what players said, but I never discuss this with the players, because as far as they’re concerned they worked out the right answer.
Ran my first nights black agents campaign frame last week. My players loved it. My queation is how as a GM do you “damage” Network pools without seeming unfair?
Question: “how did the Franklin expedition carry 200 wax cylinders when they would not be invented for another 40 years?”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder
Many years ago, there was an issue of The Unspeakable Oath (#11) that had an adventure with the unusual premise that all of the (pregenerated) characters were members of the same Wendigo/Ithaqua cult in Toronto. The scenario opens with the discovery of the grisly corpse of a fellow cultist, who has obviously been killed by black magic. This sets off an investigation heavy with the kind of intra-party paranoia that I think both Ken and Robin would find morbidly delicious.
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Episode 158: Englishman is Not Actually Valued For Its Own Flavor « Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff