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The World of Georic 1989-Present

Friday, August 2, 2019

#RPGaDay2019 Day 2: The Penywell Hangmen a la Dead Tree Edition

The word of the day for Day 2 of #RPGaDay2019 is "Unique"

One can argue that every unique RPG story is only a half-step away from being a worn-out trope, so  I chose to burrow through my gaming collection to find something that's as rare as possible.

Alas, I've purged the collection enough times over the years that there's nothing left that's truly ultra-rare.

I guess for "Unique" I'll admit that I have a bound copy of The Pennywell Hangman by Michael Wolf on my Call of Cthulhu shelf.  Probably the only guy doing this to admit that, although I'm ready to be proven wrong.

Why do I have a free pdf of a Call of Cthulhu adventure available at yog-sothoth.com printed up and bound, better than some of the Chaosium books I have?

For starters, I'm NOT a member of "ease of pdfs at the gaming table" crew.  So long as I'm lugging less than a milk crate of material with me, I'm fine with print, and I rarely see the true utility of tablets and laptops at the gaming table without adding an extra level of complexity.  Back in 2013 when I ran this, I was even more a Luddite than I am today.

Second, the scenario is over ninety pages of cool concepts but poor editing.  It was easier to flip around a hard copy with a few quick reference tabs stuck on it than write-up a keeper reference/toolkit.

Plus, I used this scenario to I join my "two" CoC groups of Doc Millheim and the Widow Carson into a short term super-group in 1923 New York City.... with plenty of time to got to know each other, discover more cosmic horror, got crazy, or die... with the survivors playing Masks of Nylarathotep in 1925.

It's a not a fantastic scenario, but anything involving murder/suicides, gypsies, army bases in New Jersey, future antagonists in tuxedos, zombies, Constitutional rights getting trampled by Great War era military conspiracies, and mustard gas can't be all bad.

The original write-ups of the three session scenario.  My edit-fu was weak on these:
Pennywell Hangmen, Part One
Pennywell Hangmen, Part Two
Pennywell Hangmen, Part Three

The Pennywell Hangmen is still available at YSDC.  

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