Back in the 1980s, as a teenager, none of my friends were interested in roleplaying games, and there weren't any local clubs. So I couldn't try face-to-face gaming, and instead found substitutes. Fighting Fantasy and other gamebooks were a lot of fun. And another thing that kept me going was play by mail (PBM) gaming.
This was in a time long before the Internet became widely accessible. Play by mail gaming back then literally meant playing through the post, writing turns for my character,
Just back from a flying visit to this Scottish gaming con. It was held over the Easter weekend at Teviot Row House Students Union at the University of Edinburgh - stunning building by the way - see picture on Wikipedia. I could only go down for one day, and then only for a quick trip. I really wanted to go to the talk about Cubicle 7's The One Ring game, early on the Saturday afternoon. But I also wanted to go to the talk with all the team behind their Call of Cthulhu "Shadows over Scotland"
I play the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game online, by forum, at Play@YSDC. There are lots of games running there, from all time periods, so Dark Ages, through Gaslight (Victorian), 1920s (Classic era for Call of Cthulhu), Modern, and other eras / often futuristic. It's a really good way for playing if you can't fit in face-to-face gaming. I can roleplay with people around the world, and in multiple scenarios at once. We've just finished a modern scenario, from one of the "Strange Tales of
Coming to the end of another year it's a good time to recap on what I've been up to this year in the Cthulhu/Lovecraftian vein.
When I blogged a year ago I was playing in two online Call of Cthulhu games at the Play@YSDC website. One of those games continues, nearly finished now though, the Glendale Spirits game. The other game I was playing, the Doctor Who / Call of Cthulhu crossover has finished, and we're now (Time Lord + companions - all survived, wahoo!) onto the followup adventure,
There are quite a few Lovecraftian text adventures out there, for example Michael Gentry's "Anchorhead", Jimmy Maher's adaptation of Call of Cthulhu scenario "The King of Shreds and Patches", and Nick Marsh's "Lonely Places".
In the newly published "IF Theory Reader" collection of articles about the more theoretical aspects of IF and text adventures Michael Gentry has a piece called "Parser at the Threshold: Lovecraftian Horror in Interactive
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