If you did THE DRACULA DOSSIER Kickstarter, check your email.

Pelgrane Press is putting out a supplement called “The Dracula Dossier: Cuttings and New Additions,” and they’re giving out digital copies to Kickstarter backers. THE DRACULA DOSSIER is a truly excellent RPG supplement for the vampiric-spy Night’s Black Agents RPG, by the way. Well worth picking up, as is its primary supplement DRACULA UNREDACTED. This is all a Ken Hite joint anyway, so I dunno why you haven’t bought it already, frankly.

The Dracula Dossier Bundle of Holding.

…Look, whatever the amount on the The Dracula Dossier Bundle of Holding (RPG: vampire spy mashup that features, go figure, Dracula) ends up being, just get the whole damn thing. Totally worth it. You should also consider buying a print copy of DRACULA UNREDACTED, which is… difficult to describe. But worth it to have in your hands as a book, or the mother of all in-game props.

The ‘Dracula Dossier’ Bundle of Holding.

My only argument against you folks picking up the Dracula Dossier Bundle of Holding is that the physical books themselves are very, very pretty.  I picked this line up back when it was being Kickstarted, and it was great value.  You should definitely grab this one, if you have any interest at all in playing vampire meets post-Cold War espionage roleplaying games.  Which of course you do! How could you not? Continue reading The ‘Dracula Dossier’ Bundle of Holding.

2016 Origins Award nominations are out.

The Origins award is basically an award for the tabletop game industry, and not just roleplaying games. It’s a pretty big thing, in some of my circles (including the circles I wouldn’t mind rejoining, and the ones that I’d like to just actually join). I can speak to the Best Roleplaying Game category: Pelgrane Press’s Dracula Dossier Director’s Handbook is, in fact, fantastic (I don’t know the Cubicle 7 entries, but that shop puts out a bunch of good stuff regularly; so does Atlas Games, particularly when it comes to Feng Shui). So, check ’em out.

Via @RobinDLaws.

Ah, red mercury.

One of the more entertaining conspiracy theories of the last sixty years or so, not least because ‘They’ haven’t figured out yet how to make it all about the Joooooooooooos. For those who don’t know, ‘red mercury’ is supposedly this secret super-explosive that can destroy cities; people keep looking for it, and suffering from fatal (yet often highly entertaining*) hi-jinks as a result. This NYT Magazine article on the subject is well worth your time (no, really).  So is this Call of Chicago post from Pelgrane Press’s website on how to incorporate Red Mercury into your Dracula Dossier game, which is absolutely worth your time.

One last thought: Red Mercury = Red Weed = crossover of Dracula/War of the Worlds = gaming gold, baby. Gold!

Moe Lane

*Possibly it is unkind of me to laugh at the notion of somebody getting blown up while trying to extract red mercury from a land mine. And if that person was being forced to do that, then it is indeed unkind of me.  But the sight of your average “Let’s put a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv!” type jihadi suddenly discovering that he made a poor, and final, life decision? – Well, as the Discordians say: I am not yet a Buddha.

Looking forward to the Dracula Dossier.

From Pelgrane Press’s site:

As currently constituted, you may recall, The Dracula Dossier comprises two books: Dracula Unredacted, Bram Stoker’s suppressed after-action report on the 1894 Operation Edom attempt to recruit Dracula as an asset for British Intelligence, further annotated by three generations of MI6 agents and analysts; and the Director’s Handbook, which provides the 54 disreputable NPCs, 16 devious Nodes, and 13 dubious Objects (all those numbers will increase with stretch goals, obviously) to which Dracula Unredacted provides the clues. Each of those entries has three different states (usually some variation of “Innocent, Edom, or Conspiracy”); the 30 dangerous Locations each have two states (“Cool” and “Warm”); so there are a total of 309 different Encounters in the Director’s Handbook alone. And that, like I said, is before we start adding stretch goals, like, oh, the Order of the Golden Dawn, or Iceland, or Elizabeth Bathory. Ooops, I’ve said too much.

Seriously looking forward to this one.  Obviously, it’s a roleplaying game supplement (Night’s Black Agents, which is a game – unsurprisingly – that combines the spy genre with vampires); they’ll get the Kickstarter for it running eventually, I’m sure.