Shelf of Madness Archives

Building from my collection of mythos-related games and book, as well as my interest in integrating props into tabletop games, I’ve gradually developed a fondness for displaying my collection.  In some areas it’s modest, in other areas less so. ...

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Action Resolution – The Core Gameplay Loop

One of the things I want to include in this project are rules and guidelines that actually teach players and Keepers how to play the game. That might seem like a no-brainer, but it's amazing to me how many...

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Lessons in Fear – From the ALIEN RPG

One question that pops up from time to time is how to actually instill fear into horror games. There’s plenty of techniques for setting the atmosphere – especially for games like Call of Cthulhu (CoC) – but I recently...

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A Light Dawns: An Epiphany about Fate Core’s Character Advancement

Work continues on my efforts to create an adaptation of Fate Core to place investigative cosmic horror. One area of the rules that I remain a little unsure about is also one of the first pieces of Fate Core...

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The Dark Texts – What You Need to Know

I've reached a point where I feel comfortable posting some of the actual game text I've written in the hopes of getting some useful feedback. I've got a fair bit written, so there should be enough to get some...

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Basic Scenario Prep

This post is actually a more detailed response to a question on Reddit about prepping for a Call of Cthulhu scenario. Unfortunately, the comment limitations forced me to post an abbreviated response, so this is the more detailed...

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Game Features So Far

As I've mentioned elsewhere, in the past couple of years I have played two Call of Cthulhu scenarios with my family. The first game, The Haunting, did not go as well as I wanted. The second game, the Peru...

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