I’ll be doing more than reviewing shows for this newsletter. Here’s a campaign framework for dark fantasy and horror settings. I also found some interesting horror links and some cool episodes I've worked on recently!

The Festival of Delights and Doom

Actors, mercenaries, poets, assassins musicians, cultists, and a thousand other stripes of society’s fringe elements have begun their pilgrimage to the Festival of Delight and Doom. An old and irregularly held bacchanalia, the Festival celebrates art, although in ways that verge on the heretical. Barely tolerated by the local government, the Festival holds hundreds of unique shows and performances in a sprawling mass of tents and quickly assembled structures, over the period of a month. One can see plays, concerts, and more exotic acts like magicians and contortionists, not to mention the occasional pit fight, death defying stunt, or summoning of esoteric beings from beyond time and space. A visitor can also find vendors of all manners of contraband, from drugs to forbidden tomes and stolen artwork.

The adventurers are part of this year’s Festival. Perhaps they have been hired to work on an existing show or they have their own show. After all, adventurers have many talents which can dazzle audiences and make a good coin. It’s also possible the show is only a cover for a more profitable but illegal enterprise, like fencing stolen goods or smuggling contraband of some kind.

This year’s Festival is different though because someone wants to end it once and for all. Some ‘accidents’ have injured or possibly even slain performers. A body has been found on the Festival grounds, and no one knows what happened. It’s scaring away some visitors and if it continues, the local government may shut the Festival down. The Festival organizers know of a threat but not the identity of their enemy. It falls on the adventurers to save the festival. The organizers promise a rich reward for stopping the saboteur but they lack the skills to investigate it themselves.

This campaign framework blends investigation with sandbox role playing in a single city. The players have access to the entire Festival and its huge cast of performers, workers, and organizers. Aside from the many shows and vendors, the Festival holds many parties and celebrations, some open to the public, but others by invitation only. The deeper the players dig into the secrets of the Festival, the more threats they face, not only from the saboteur, but from patrons who want to keep their vices secret and criminals fearful of any investigators.

The saboteur could be any number of antagonists such as:

• a powerful being, like a vampire or demon, who wishes to conduct a powerful ritual by ritually sacrificing a certain number of people over the Festival.
• A religious fanatic who sees the Festival as heresy
• A jealous performer who wants to shut down only a particular show for personal reasons
• An occult scholar who knows that every performance of a certain play curses the audience, but no one believes them

The adventurers investigate the crimes of the saboteur while navigating the chaos of the Festival. After the saboteur is identified, the adventurers chase them through the Festival before they can enact their plans.

If you want to discuss this framework, join the RPPR Patreon so we can talk about it on our Discord server. I’ll be happy to help fill in the blanks so you can get started running this campaign.

Episodes

​After Hours Preview - Synnibarr Previews part 1 and part 2 - if you missed it, we reviewed the new edition of the infamous so-bad-its-good RPG, Synnibarr! It's a trainwreck of a game, and you can listen to some of our revelations as we read through it and attempted to make characters.

RPPR Actual Play - Frontier Scum - Bring Me the Head of Lucifer Morningstar - Frontier Scum is an "Acid Western" RPG where the frontier is weird and dangerous. I ran a one shot with Thad, Jason, and a guest player, Luke from Ship of the Dead podcast. It's a blast if you dig weird western horror!

​The Mixed Six - The Final episode - We recently ended The Mixed Six, a podcast I did for almost six years. I'll be putting the entire show on archive.org in the next month or so, so keep an eye out for that.

Links

​McDonalds McDonaldland Specification Manual from 1975 - a truly terrifying book. Stare into the cold dead eyes of the hamburger clown and his court of monsters and criminals. - “A specification manual indicating how the various McDonaldland characters should look, for the purpose of merchandising.”

​The Best Terminator Knockoffs - A great compilation of every cheap knockoff of the Terminator. It includes a lot of movies even I hadn't heard of!

​A podcast I did talking about the direction of D&D - This was a fun chat about the direction of D&D.