tabletop games – Page 4 – PopCult Reviews

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa Part Two

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

In our first part, I focused on the Guide to Character Creation and its incredibly robust tools that lead to unique player characters every single time you go through the book. Now, we get the adventure with the Guide to Carcosa. For the unfamiliar, Carcosa was originated by Ambrose Bierce in the short story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (1886) where a character described the city in hindsight after its destruction. Nine years later Robert Chambers would borrow the name for stories featured in his eerie fiction collection The King in Yellow. From there, authors who wrote in the cosmic horror vein of Lovecraft would fold Carcosa and The King in Yellow into the Cthulhu Mythos associating the king with the deity Hastur.

PopCult Presents: Screenplay – Corp Borg Episode 3

The third of our next six-part Screenplay series is here!
And you can listen to it by subscribing to our Patreon

PopCult Presents: Screenplay – Corp Borg Episode 2

The second of our next six-part Screenplay series is here!
And you can listen to it by subscribing to our Patreon

PopCult Presents: Screenplay – Corp Borg Episode 1

The first of our next six-part Screenplay series is here!
And you can listen to it for FREE!

Announcement – Screen Play: Corp Borg

Coming in March to the PopCult Patreon.

For their second series of Screen Play, Ariana and Seth embark on an odyssey across the bleak & bloody demon-infested world of Corp Borg, a rules-lite tabletop RPG inspired by the hit game Mork Borg.

For more info on Corp Borg click here.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Mork Borg: Solitary Defilement Part One

Mork Borg: Solitary Defilement (10d+5)
Written & Designed by…? (no specific names on the document)

You can get this set of solo rules here.

This playthrough also uses the Mork Borg Core Rules and the Feretory supplement.

OSR stands for the Old School Renaissance, which is a revival of a style of “classical” tabletop RPGs. This type of game is marked by four core ideas: 1) the GM is a referee of sorts and makes rulings and has the final say on the events in the game; 2) players have to be explicit in what they want their characters to do to avoid traps & hazards set up in advance by the GM, 3) characters are heroic but not invincible as death comes often, and 4) the events are not balanced, and players can wander into areas they are not prepared for. There is, of course, more unpacking of these ideas and additional concepts that come into play, but these are the base foundation of OSR. From my limited knowledge, OSR was a response to a period of more experimental story-centered games like Powered by the Apocalypse or changes made to stalwarts like Dungeons & Dragons that fans didn’t care for.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review – Ironsworn Part Two

Ironsworn (Tomkin Press) Part Two
Designed & Written by Sean Tomkins
You can download Ironsworn for FREE here.

Read Part One for a brief overview of the rules for Ironsworn.

To play Ironsworn, I used a remarkable and free online play resource called Iron Journal. First, I chose the Truths for my version of the Ironlands default setting. These are as follows in a more summarized version than the game presents them:

The Old World: There was a pandemic that ravaged our homelands, and people fled in droves; many were tossed overboard when they were found to be sick, and those who survived have carved out a home in this new, rough land.

Iron: The weather here is brutal, and the sun rarely breaks through the clouds. Those who make it here that can survive the long winters are said to be made of iron.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review – Thousand Year Old Vampire

Prologue
I did not grow up playing tabletop roleplay games. If you regularly read this blog, you know that I was homeschooled from Kindergarten through High School and then attended a private Christian college. If you know the type of people choosing to homeschool their children in the 1980s, you probably have a good picture of what I was dealing with. My parents did not make a lot of sense, and now I can reflect on it and realize they were just reactionaries. We have Focus on the Family and some of its satellite publications coming into our home. My parents regularly listened to Rush Limbaugh. I remember we also tuned into G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show. It’s pretty ugly when you look back on it.

Not a Review, but an actual thing you can download

So I have been playing with the ChatGPT AI and making some incredibly stupid, yet hilarious things to entertain me. This weekend I came up an exceptionally stupid yet entertaining thing, Oh, Hello the Tabletop Roleplay Game.

If you are not familiar, these are two characters created by John Mulaney and Nick Kroll that are so weird and awful and funny. They have had an off-Broadway show, an on-Broadway show, a p’dcast, and have appeared all over television. I made a game where you get to play as them. That’s fucking hilarious to me. You can read it and download it below. Let me know if you play it.

oh hello the ttprg Download

PopCult Podcast Episode 1

This is our first real podcast episode. This episode’s sponsor is Anchor who will help you make your podcasting dreams happen easy & for free.

In this episode, I talk briefly about the absurd pearl-clutching over cancel culture in media at the moment.

My lovely & talented wife, Ariana joins us in the studio as we go over our Top 5 Relationship Movies.

I review the recently released Justice League Snyder Cut.

And Ariana returns to talk about CollegeHumor’s Dimension 20 tabletop series and some of our own experiences dabbling in the hobby.

We would love to get your comments or feedback which you leave here on the blog or as voicemail on my Anchor podcast page.