Inspired by some threads over on Story Games, I thought we might want to kick off a monthly thread showcasing links that we've found useful or inspiring. These don't have to be games related, as long as they can find some use in your gaming experiences. So please, don't link to the latest desperately funny YouTube video that we've all seen millions of times before.

Anyway, to kick things off, the latest Sons of Kryos podcast (#41) has some illuminating thoughts on starting games in media res. Always worth listening to, you can download episode 41 here.

So, last night during our Cold City game, we were taking about photographic sites and how they could be really inspiring. This prompted me to revist some site I've not looked at for a while. One which has always been very impressive is this:

Abandoned Places by Henk van Rensbergen.

Some photographs can and do give inspiration for scene in games and so forth. Anyone have any they would liketo share or instances where such things have seen use to good effect in game?

Cheers
Malcolm

There’s a gaming event here in the UK called the Student Nationals. In essence, it’s a role-playing, war gaming and board games ‘competition’ that takes place over a weekend. The idea of competitively judging people for their role-playing seemed a bit odd to me, but as I’d been asked by friends who were organising it to run games over the weekend, I’d be in there and taking part anyway.

So, I end up running good old Call of Cthulhu. The slot you are given is six hours, so I came up with a game set in 1920 Constantinople: Turkish nationalists, British troops on the streets, hordes of émigrés fleeing the Bolsheviks in Russia, all that sort of thing. The game wasn’t very heavily structured, as I really wanted to see how it would progress with more input from the players, rather than being the standard, procedural CoC investigate routine.