I've had supers games on my mind for some time now. When I was younger, I was all about Heroes Unlimited from Palladium Books. Hell, all the way up until around 2001 I was a rabid Palladium fan. I had just about everything they ever published, ran some very long-running Palladium Fantasy games, and for years in high school we combined HU, Ninjas & Superspies, Beyond the Supernatural, Mystic China, and TMNT and Other Strangeness into one giant game.  I experimented with the original Marvel Superheroes (FASERIP) RPG, but never liked how rigid the rules were--I'd witnessed Gambit, for example, charge entire cars and phone poles in the comics to do catastrophic damage, but in the game he could only charge small objects and do "Good" damage unless he achieved a Power Stunt, which required an obnoxiously good roll. It was a fun game, it was just too rigidly locked into place.  Over the years I've played a number of supers games and few really captured what I wanted...

Derek Stoelting wrote the new starter adventure in the Quick Start Kit, Tainted Blood . Here he provides additional background material on one of the locations from the kit. We'll let him do the typing. . .  I wrote the starter adventure in Elf Lair Games's   Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars Adventure and Quick Start Kit . One of the locations in the scenario is the Mandragora Book Store. My original write-up on the Mandragora went far and above what was necessary for the scenario. So, I cut it down to just what was necessary for the scenario. After all, I didn't want to completely overwhelm someone new to the game.  This should give you a little more flavor for your games. You can read the original background after the photo and there's more information on the Adventure and Quick Start Kit after the gates. . .  Landscape Photography of Gray and Brown 2 Storey House 82936526   ©   creativecommonsstockphotos   |   Dreamstime.com...

 Over the past few years, many of our fans have heard me describe O.G.R.E.S. as a "Rosetta Stone" for old school play. What exactly does this mean? How does O.G.R.E.S. relate to other games in the old school community, the OSR, and other forms of this tradition of play? Let's take a dive into the long evolution from the earliest days of gaming through to O.G.R.E.S. and the future.  Please understand that I'm not trying to claim some pretentious or arrogant lineage unlike that anyone else can claim. All of us in the old school community are presenting our own take on gaming, all of which connects to decades of scholarship by thousands of gamers and game designers. O.G.R.E.S. isn't presenting anything particularly new or unique in terms of play or rules. In fact, I've been on record many times that I disagree with the very concept of "innovative" rules systems , that all too often they create overcomplexity to no good end except so the designer can (o...

 I'm a big fan of "reskinning," in role playing games. I don't think that you always need to create a brand new system, subsystem, or character class to create what you want out of the game you're playing. It's far better to simply change the look and description of elements in the game you're playing to make them look the way you want. After all, mechanics are just that: mechanics. What does it matter, for example, if a monster stat block represents the vicious claws and stench of a ghoul or the rusty knives and unwashed mess of a filthy junk dealer hoodlum? With that in mind, I was watching the 2021 cgi animated series Blade Runner: Black Lotus the past couple days and it got me thinking about using Night Shift: VSW to do a cyberpunk or tech noir game. After all, not all horror and urban fantasy has to involve supernatural creatures. A dark crime thriller that's rife with technology in a gritty world where nobody ever sees the sun can also be a fanta...

 Recently I playtested our new Quick Start rules with one of my home gaming groups--my bi-weekly Friday group, several members of which had never played Night Shift: VSW before. It was a really fun and eye-opening experience. The majority of my running of  NSVSW has been with my Sunday group, who (often unknowingly) were playtesting elements of it while I was working out the rules.  In any case, the advenure ran very well and we had a great time. It did, however, reveal one element of the game that may perhaps not be as clear as it should be in the rules as written. That element is the Veteran's Tracking ability. I am considering on second print re-naming that ability to make its intent clearer, but until I get there, I thought I'd do a deeper dive here regarding what exactly the Veteran's tracking represents.  20386234 © Vladyslav Starozhylov | Dreamstime.com Supernatural Investigators Extraordinaire Both Veterans and Survivors are built on some ...

 Awhile back, I did a blog on Dark Superheroes with Night Shift: VSW . In that blog, I talked about using the Supernatural Species in the core book to represent mutants, metahumans, or whatever your preferred term for supers might be. That's a 100% valid approach which well replicates the idea of a superpowered being who is "born" with their abilities.  At the end of that blog, however, I mention a different (or complementary) take on the superpowered individual that I'd like to dig into a bit more here. If you want a superpowered character class, the Inventor is the ticket. At its core, the modification to the Inventor character class for a superpowered character seems simple: instead of building gadgets, you're buying superpowers.  On the surface, that's really all it takes. To capture the full flavor of a superpowered character, however, you need to make a few other tweaks to the class.  93798274  ©  creativecommonsstockphotos  |  Dreamstime.co...

 The Night Companion has a ton of sections on various tropes of horror subgenres to provide tips and advice on how to run games in these styles. To my embarrassment, however, I completely overlooked folk horror in those sections. Here's a section on how to add folk horror to your games to supplement the information in that book.  Free photo © Wilfred Stanley Sussenbach Dreamstime.com Folk Horror Folk horror uses elements of folklore, old wives' tales, and legend to add horror to a story. It focuses on isolation, on the fear of the unknown, and of the alien "thing in the dark" as other types of horror, particularly Gothic horror, but it puts its own spin on it. In folk horror, often the horror comes from the actions of the people facing the supernatural element as much as it does from the supernatural itself. Folk horror often revolves around dark cults dedicated to Satanism or obscure and twisted pagan roots. It almost always takes place in a rural setting far removed...

 These are just some ideas I've played around with in my home game. I had originally planned for them to go into the Night Companion, but frankly, that book ran long as it sits and we just didn't have the space. So I decided to throw out the sketchy notes I've got for people to use in their home games as they like. As such, here are a few new Night Clubs for your Night Shift: VSW games.  The Order of the Dragon The clandestine Order of the Dragon is the same order to which Vlad II Dracul , father of the infamous Vlad III "the Impaler" Dracula belonged. Originally, the Order was a chivalric order founded in 1408 and comprised of selected nobles dedicated to defending the cross and battling the enemies of Christianity—in particular the Ottoman Empire. Later, the Order was repurposed into a dedicated secret society promised to hunt down and destroy the minions of Satan, and vampires in particular.   The Original Order   During the first half of the 15 th century th...