Tales Of The Lost Shepherd

The space opera part of the Pod Universe moves from imaginary movie to imaginary TV series. And due to the request for predictions, fame at last!

V5 Empire references

Some from New York By Night and other official sources, some old friends

Camarilla

Outsiders

The living

Strangers

Small tweak, use Rebecca Ferguson as Hellene

Hail to the Prince

Vampire: The Masquerade - Empire 2026

Vampire: The Masquerade fifth edition

Empire

When I am through with you
There won't be anything left

We have...

A Toreador jazz singer turned club owner looking for the soul in music

A Ventrue former labourer looking to move up in the world

A Malkavian seer looking to make a buck with their gift

A Tremere phlebotomist looking for independence from the blood trade

A Hecata scientist looking to challenge death itself

I’ll have to be sure to connect the first three and last two so this doesn’t feel like two games at one table. (Still better than five one-player games!)

Looking to be a less scruffy bottom rung of the ladder game than usual. I’m sure there will be plenty of ways to get them in trouble though, just starting in nicer scenery.

T minus 24 hours

The character sheets are printed, the rulebook and dice are in the bag.

Now we wait.

Idea still nebulous, as “I’ll run this because nobody else is” ideas always are.

After last year, might go more episodic in case of player churn.

Very aware that I could readily do like three other games. But, eh, only one Sunday slot this year.

Playing ALIEN

A chance to play ALIEN at GEAS on Wednesdays, so stood by the GM first to make sure they had a player before some others came over. Could have also gone for Cosmic Dark but looked like it had enough. (And there were also games with wizards and stuff.)

Looks like no major changes to character creation in the Evolved Edition, and it only takes a couple minutes even without the helpful creator. I’m sure this has nothing to do with a potential high bodycount.

So far I’ve made an Officer, two Roughnecks, a Marine, a Marshal and an Entertainer, so I can start with a hero, a useful support type, a flawed civilian with a key skill, a fighter, a different protag, or someone all but useless that I can inflict on the group later on, mwa ha ha.

No androids... or are there?

And the most difficult part - coming up with a name that people can shout in an action scene. A good ALIEN-y name should have one or two syllables and a hard consonant.

Adapting a property that may not adapt

The Pod Universe and the creators’ predecessor Are You Afraid Of The Dark Universe? look at cinematic universes, constructing settings for lots of stories, so the same kinda thing as an RPG setting and series / campaign planning.

And as we know some settings make better big settings than others.

Have you ever considered a setting and decided it really wasn’t viable?

Have you ever decided to go all in on that?

This week, a guest pitch for the Eraserhead Cinematic Universe.

Labelled The Worst Idea We Could Come Up With

With a chapter heading Why Eraserhead? Dear God, why?

“We are gonna try and do our best job with this terrible idea.”

Kinda makes me wanna...

Mission: Impossible at 60

Mission: Impossible first aired September 17 1966. A straightforward idea for a show even if the episodes often weren’t, the setup making a rotating cast for isolated episodes a key and advertised part of the design, full of charming gimmicks like the masks and “This message will self-destruct in five seconds” and an absolute all-timer of a theme and credits sequence. I’ve often said that the Tom Cruise movies are an adaptation of the credits more than the show.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Nocturne 2026-7

Reused placeholder chronicle title subject to change depending on emergent theme

Vampires hunt for blood in a world that looks like ours. They have their own societies, their own laws, their own conflicts, but they also walk among us, trying to hold onto their humanity - to some extent, at least.

Vampire: The Masquerade is a modern horror game where you are the monster. Knowledge of the system and setting are not required, the system is straightforward and the setting is full of mysteries.

CW: Horror and action violence, political and occult themes, metaphorical addiction, uneven power relationships, and blood.

Complaining about having to do a Vampire one-shot again

The age-old issue (ca. 1991) of preparing one-shots for an RPG with a complicated secretive background, for players who might never have played it or any other RPG either.

Setup for people I expect to know the game can go wild.

Setup for people I expect to know RPGs in general suggests a classic like a heist to show how differently vampires approach it.

Setup for possibly total newbies and... um...

Yes I could run a one-shot for something else, but I’m planning to run Vampire and I don’t like showing something I’m not planning to continue.

What to GM, 2026-7 edition

Start of GEAS getting close now. Saturday game shop tour and quiz, Monday one-shots, Wednesday pitches. And in between my regular games are Sunday and Tuesday.

Having had no other brilliant ideas, and having some character sheets left, prolly run Vampire. Likely Sunday afternoons as no Sunday evenings by default (boo!) and have Sunday evening game anyhow (yay!) but would gladly do it at Teviot but no Teviot booking either (boooooo!)

Have assorted setup ideas, but keep it basic for new players.

Vague plan for GEAS 2026-7

After last year and this summer, giving some thought to self-contained adventures whatever I run.

Which is an issue for Vampire, of course.

Fun facts about Violetta Rossellini

Going a bit broad on Violetta for Hunter: The Reckoning, spent lunchtime coming up with weird backstory details to drop in casually.

(This is a favourite bit for suitable games, dropping the kind of thing that would be the subject of an adventure in backstory, dating back to a retired Watcher in a Buffy game assuring a new slayer she wasn’t doing as badly as the one who destroyed the world. See also the time I stopped myself doing it in Vampire.)

My family moved to Portland for work when I was five. I went St. Sophia’s Academy. As such I did not get a prom. But I have attended some formal dances and have an invitation to the city debutante ball in three months’ time.

I have at least been to a few slumber parties. And the other girls didn’t always ask me to perform a séance.

I do not currently have a boyfriend. My mother keeps introducing me to young men from good families who she reckons will be healthy. I suspect that this is because I manifested my sight younger than she did and she hopes a grandchild will be more powerful still.

I was raised Catholic, which made it a little awkward when I saw the afterlife. Turns out the ancient Egyptians were right. Just for their time and place, but still.

I believe that death should bring release from pain. I can do something about that, so I will.

As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. (off looks) Apparently it comes from some Victorian politician before Spider-Man.

I have a fake ID, and also there’s one club where they never card me. (off looks) Yes it’s The Coffin.

So far as I know I have met five vampires. One of them is my great-grandfather.

There are a number of doctors in my family and I would like to follow their lead, but am more likely to end up in academia.

My favourite Taylor Swift song is Shake It Off. I know, people expect it to be Bad Blood or Look What You Made Me Do, but come on.

I once met the Devil. (She pauses and looks at one of the others.) So have you.

It was on a book tour.

Grand Theft Auto VI

A twenty-five minute first look at Grand Theft Auto VI premiered on Netflix ahead of YouTube (not a gull-on story like the time they got The Road director John Hillcoat to make a short film in Red Dead Redemption) showing off the various things you can do it in, including two whole examples of stealing cars. The first thing the protagonist couple do is head into and then shoot corrupt cops to get out of a drug deal gone wrong. We also see them have a meeting, deliver a getaway vehicle, do some James Bond underwater stuff and basejumping, and then a big bit as security for a corporate party under attack Die Hard style, which seems like a setup for a whole different game.

Visually it looks still kinda cel-shady and oddly clean so not my aesthetic as much as RDR.

The city looks nice, I could imagine Other Places doing something with it.

The couple are young up-and-comers, as the closing narration tells them these are their glory days, unlike V’s weary veterans or IV’s more sympathetic to me soldier dragged into the life or III’s vengeance-focused silent nobody. Or the little overhead sprites you played in the originals, which was as far as I really got as a player rather than an interested observer in a cultural phenomenon because playing crooks in a jokey way for that long doesn’t really appeal to me

(GTA Online has various subgenres with its expansions including the most recent Museum Art Heist scenario which is more my thing.)

But I do find the shift from a quick in-and-out power fantasy to big stories about the characters in between the various car chases and gun battles interesting.

RPGaDAY 2026 29. Labour

#RPGaDAY 2026

29. Labour

29. Labour: Thing you are most willing to work on for a game.

I often focus on visuals as my memory works more that way, so my recurring cast of Vampire: The Masquerade NPCs all have photo references and hardly any of them have character sheets.

Printing them out also meant I could map out who was standing with whom at Elysium.

This visual focus extends to cutting together video trailers and title sequences, making custom action figures and miniatures, commissioning art including mini painting, and even actually drawing myself.

Autocratik

Runeslinger

RPGaDAY 2026 18. Directness

#RPGaDAY 2026

18. Directness

18. A fast introduction of a new PC or player?

If I know players are likely to come and go I’ll try to have onboarding options and avoid cliffhangers. Emphasis on try.

Some games and settings are better for this than others, mechanically and narratively.

Overlooking the old “why do we trust this total stranger walking up to us in the middle of a secret mission?” and the magic power of the PC Glow...

D&D style fantasy calls it “West Marches” when every session begins and ends with the PCs in their base and venturing out from it. That cuts off things like multi-session dungeons and heavier ongoing plots unless you use the old un-narrative kludge of teleporting PCs in, but it’s a good idea for an open table.

Star Trek (a setting where characters can just teleport in and out mid adventure) would do this if it were realistic about its Luxury Space Communism and faster-than-light travel. Ha ha. Star Trek Adventures makes you pay player resources to get specialist NPC crew to go on camera, which is the model-the-show way of dealing with this. Star Fleet Battles RPG Prime Directive goes the other way and has a completely different command structure for its variant universe.

Mission: Impossible on TV started with selecting agents with relevant skillsets. I’ve seen someone suggest pregens in dossiers before.

(Note that the films acquire a consistent team as they go along, leading to narrative issues like needing something for both the computer geniuses to do.)

Last academic year I had a large amount of player turnover in Vampire: The Masquerade and that isn’t ideal for it or how I run it. Even then, if I’d known I could have tailored the chronicle setup to PCs being part of a group that could explain PCs coming and going and make sessions less serialised. Not ideal for personal horror or slow unravelling of mysteries but I could give it a go. Hmm.

My most setting-of-the-week one-and-done game is Doctor Who, which also has fast character creation... but following the series model really expects the PCs to be the one point of consistency.

If I want to go full “jump in any session” open table, I might go with a light superhero game like ICONS with a big team. Fast character creation, largely self-contained adventures. I’m sure threads would reappear at some point, but I can juggle and improvise so we don’t end up with too many “this should be a Penguin adventure but Batman’s player isn’t here” situations.

A large kitchen sink also helps if I want to come up with a largely standalone adventure every week.

Hey, Buffy is a light superhero game too! Albeit one that also expects a consistent Scooby Gang.

Autocratik

Runeslinger

The Pod Universe expands on Insidious

Guest pitch by writer and artist Kendra Wells turns Insidious upside down, gives it a good shake, with makes for a great example of brainstorming a setting from a handful of disparate elements. It overlaps somewhat with the Dark Universe version of The Exorcist in the improvised expansions as a horror setting looks at a confirmed scary afterlife and how religions might deal with it, which is an idea worth another look. Maybe it fits here better than there?

ST starting tips

Five tips, and a bonus, and a second bonus, for VtM but often for city games in general, from Sed8ed Princess

RPGaDAY 2026 10. Secret

#RPGaDAY 2026

10. Secret

10. A secret you hope comes out about a character?

Neither of my current characters have any big secrets.

Not normally, anyway. “I’m actually a time traveller from over a century in the future” is a specific issue for a current adventure. Which I hope doesn’t come out too much as it could destroy the space-time continuum. But a few people finding out makes for fun complications.

We just finished a short Vampire chronicle, a game where this is a natural focus, where the city had a lot of secrets and enough came out in the end to start an open revolt, so that was nice. And my character there, the Tremere occultist, had his share as well, though the other PCs did get to discover the shocking reason he had a Tremere enemy.

HE STOLE SOME BOOKS.

In my long-running Buffy play-by-post there are some secrets about the setting I hope to get to, and at some point the secret that one of the PCs is a robot (which all the players know but none of the other PCs do) really should come out - I’ve resisted a couple of chances for an anticlimactic comedy reveal already, but now have an idea to make it an actual central episode plot.

Purely in-character open secrets and really secret out of character secrets give very different feels to games. IC secrets allow leaning in for oblivious PCs - although I’ve met players who cannot resist acting on OOC knowledge. OOC secrets are better for mysteries, but the lack of openness can affect the group. Best not keep them up for long.

Also, Top Secret. I should run a spy game again sometime.

Autocratik

Runeslinger

John Wick: With The Animals

A video essay on the John Wick series with various asides but mostly about how assassin society works and how it could stop working. Sharing my biggest problem with IV while also having good things to say about some of its featured ideas, And a great point about markers and coins being overridden by the connections and relationships they abstract.

Lore and unreliable narrators

Jesse Heinig on untrustworthy lore in settings, with Vampire: The Masquerade as a prime example.

One of the great joys of running a Vampire chronicle for people who have never played Vampire before is tossing them into a stew of contradictory conspiracies. Vampires love to present themselves as erudite and sophisticated, but they have very little evidence about their own supernatural world.

So far my group has heard...

* Three different creation myths about vampires

* Two different theoretical ways out of the curse

* About the existence of bloodlines, but not specifics

* About the existence of the Sabbat, with some (useless) history

* About werewolves and ghosts

They also heard about wizards ("they died out in the Middle Ages") shortly before meeting a mage, and about unaligned clans ("mostly weirdos who have very limited power") before running afoul of a Follower of Set/Ministry vampire.

They met a vampire who can survive sunlight at dawn

They met a mortal who can just see through Obfuscate. No idea why

They ran away from mortal hunters wearing FBI jackets, who were obviously not real agents

They have failed several gambits to get blood, and are coming to grips with the fact that they will have to do some questionable things

They discovered that animal blood is not very satisfying, then met a Kindred who feeds on animals exclusively

They heard that the Prince is Malkavian, then met her and the coterie's Malkavian immediately clocked that she is not

The Malkavian learned to aura read and has no idea how to interpret it

Everyone seems to be having a great time. It's a World of Darkness where there is lore, there is history, there are societies, but a rule is only a rule until it's broken. Supernatural things work the way they do because of magic, and symbols, and metaphors, not because of science.

Soon they'll get introduced to Gehenna, the End Times, Gehenna cults, and the mythology of the turning of the age. Probably hand-in-hand with crossing paths with actual Sabbat, an Anarch Revolt in their city, and thin-bloods looking for a place to survive.

The huge, sprawling metaplot of the World of Darkness causes some players to pursue setting mastery, to have full fundamental knowledge of the "truth" of the world, so I've made it pretty clear through events that "truth" is highly subjective and context-driven.

Everyone's got goals and agendas, but at the end of the night, it really comes down to, what will you do to survive? How are you going to make it happen? Where are you going to get blood? And who's going to pay the price for your sins?