The Bundle includes ELEVEN investigations of cosmic horror — and 10% of your payment (after gateway fees) will be donated to Beechwood Cancer Care, which offers specialist support for those living with a life-limiting illness.

As someone who might have picked up The Dee Sanction or backed one of the Kickstarters, this is your opportunity to get pretty much everything for THE OTHER GAME at a bargain price. If you opt for the threshold price or higher to access the bonus collection you will have NINE whole adventures plus a copy of The Dee Sanction.

Writing The Cthulhu Hack for the last five years provided some essential lessons in style, content and mechanics that fed into the release of the Core Book for Dee. Investigators have the same opportunity for discovery and fatality as Agents of Dee with a skew into cosmic horror. Many of the adventures feature the same kind of shades of grey decision making, that tests the morals and the mettle of the characters.

STARTER COLLECTION (US$5.95 – retail value $25)

• The Cthulhu Hack Core Book (retail price $7.50)
• Gamemaster’s Reference ($1)
• Nocturnal Rites Quickstart + character sheet
• The Dark Brood ($5)
• Forgotten Duty ($5)
• 3 Cthulhu Hack mini-sourcebooks (total retail $7.50) — which includes From Unformed Realms ($5), Rhan-Tegoth ($1.50), Strange Materials ($1)

BONUS COLLECTION(threshold starts at $14.95 – additional retail value $52.50)

• The Dee Sanction Core Rules ($9.50)
• NINE Cthulhu Hack investigations in five books (total retail $43) — Haunter of the Dark, Mother’s Love, Three Faces of the Wendigo, Thro’ Centuries Fixed, Valkyrie Nine

That’s a total retail value of $77.50 including more than a dozen adventures plus two fast and flavoursome tabletop role-playing games.

Check out the Bundle of Holding soon—the offer ends on 21st October

In addition, you can get the first three adventures, supernatural supplement The Sight, character journal The Book of Days, and the bestiary expansion The Leaf Ire all at a similar discounted price in this limited time offer.

Coincidentally, the September Historical Settings Sale ends about the same time as the current Kickstarter for The Dee Sanction: Adventures print edition!

If you haven’t got in on the crowdfunding yet, Adventures gathers all five current adventures plus a stretch goal sixth—In Fertile Soil—into a perfect-bound format with brand new art from Evlyn Moreau. For £8 plus shipping, you get a 48-page print copy.

Or, if you time it right, at 2PM on Sunday (September 12) we will release the last ten Distinguished Agents—offering you the last hardcover Core Rules from the original Kickstarter AND the print edition of Adventures for £25 plus shipping.

So, you have about five days left to grab one, the other, or both!

I’m excited to say that The Dee Sanction won the Judges Award of Best Role-Playing Game against a challenging shortlist – of Osprey Game’s Jackels and Free League’s Vaesen.

The award plaque now takes its place next to the 2019 Judges Award for Best Role-Playing Game Adventure awarded to The Cthulhu Hack: Valkyrie Nine.

I’m humbled and thankful for all the support offered over the last year by everyone involved in bringing this game of Elizabethan supernatural investigation to life.

Don’t get me wrong, there does need to be some kind of structure otherwise how can you hand off a system to a random GM and imagine they will find there way. But, too much structure and control can lead to weaker creativity as folk worry themselves about keeping things Rules As Written.

I know a fair few of you will be chuckling and shaking your head at that point, seasoned veterans who haven’t run a game Rules As Written since 1982. However, I can’t write a game on the basis that everyone reading it will be as confident. In putting The Cthulhu Hack together, I have had many questions about detailed mechanics and a wish for lists of carefully balanced monsters—for many, that consistency matters, and they’re not wrong to want that.

As I say, it’s a fine piece of juggling to get it right without getting it too right.

For The Cthulhu Hack, having something too right didn’t make sense because the Mythos doesn’t. It shouldn’t make sense and it proved difficult to communicate that sometimes. In a wide world of games where massive monsters represent surmountable goals, how do you communicate the existence in insurmountable horrors?

Thankfully, The Dee Sanction isn’t too far from the cosmic horror, either. The world is filled with ordinary people facing the emergence of extraordinary challenges. The unravelling of the fabric of the world has cracked open the gates of Hell and far stranger realms and allowed egress for creatures of myth and folklore.

The Dee Sanction core book will not only present a short bestiary of creatures and common enemies but also provide some low-level guidance on how to customise them and create your own. You will have the means to present your Agents with relatively generic antagonists coloured by flare and personality rather than complex rules, as well as creatures fiendish in construction that will challenge through their wealth of powers.

Sometimes balance, other times less so. But somewhere in the mix, there should be a sense to the chaos.

It isn’t entirely intentional, but I’ve never liked heavy. I mean, I can read hundreds of pages, but can I keep them all inside my head. And would I expect anyone else to do the same?

The Cthulhu Hack has two mechanics—Saves and Resources.

In the mix of throwing ideas around for how you might make it even simpler, I decided to roll the Saves with the Resource dice. I mean, it probably isn’t far from something like Cortex or similar, in that you throw a bunch of different sized dice. However, I wanted something that emulated my early idea about vague competence, the roll-a-7 mechanic of 214.

Roll a die and try not to roll a 1 or 2. On a d4, that’s still 50%. I mean, when I played 2nd edition Call of Cthulhu back in the mid-80s, most of my skills were lower than 40% never mind 50%! Why not keep it that simple.

I also liked the incredibly stripped-down damage mechanics of Numenera and Gumshoe, so why not have weapons do 1 Hit and you have 3 (as a beginning character). If you need more granular damage, add Consequences that render a weapon more or less crippling when it inflicts injury.

Simple. At least, I hope so. I’m still finessing. But, definitely light.

Every day during August, I’ll be writing something new on The Dee Sanction and aim to connect the word prompt of the day with the development of the game. Check out the concept, the list and the graphics over at AUTOCRATIK.

The concept appeared notably (but not uniquely) in The Black Hack as an easy mechanism to track consumables without keeping a precise tally.

Seeing that concept triggered the thought in my head that you might extend the role of the mechanic into other dwindling resources, like Sanity and the capacity to keep yourself together during an investigation. The Cthulhu Hack has Resource Dice that covers this.

In both instances, you roll a die and a result of 1 or 2 results in a drop to the next lower die on the scale—like down-shifting from a D8 to a D6.

I mentioned that the original mechanic for The Dee Sanction required the player roll a 7 to succeed. Well, someone with basic training could succeed on a 6 through 8. Well, in thinking about other mechanics, it occurred to me that you might sort of go with a Usage Dice approach instead. Roll a 1 or 2, things work out but not so well. 3 or higher, then you succeed.

Anyway, the root of the (brief) post is that each game owes something to those that come before it and that’s no bad thing. You can’t copyright mechanics—only the scene dressing/product identity that surrounds them—so, why not get some reuse from things that work.

Every day during August, I’ll be writing something new on The Dee Sanction and aim to connect the word prompt of the day with the development of the game. Check out the concept, the list and the graphics over at AUTOCRATIK.

The first draft of the Oblivion Index, for The Cthulhu Hack, is accessible to Patreons supporters — at Investigators, Dwellers and Bearers tiers— through a recently published post.

The core of this one popped into my head quite suddenly. Thankfully, I immediately took notes — I have a habit of not doing that and losing all the good ideas in the passage of time and sleep. Or just from walking through a new doorway.

It’s a work in progress dealing with the business of eldritch tomes in The Cthulhu Hack and how to handle them (really, really carefully). While in playtest, patrons can expect to see updates, as playtest and revelation strike.

It was an interesting writing exercise.

RPG Geek had a 48 Hours RPG Supplement Contest that — if the name doesn’t give it away completely — requires that you make something cool, from scratch, in a 48-hour period. This supplement was my thing; but, as the last element (provided by Cthulhu Hack stalwart of Wendigo fame, Richard August) was written in 2016 (for another system/publication) and the image isn’t public domain/Creative Commons (but, used with the kind permission of talented artist Daryl Toh, who you can support on Patreon), I wasn’t going to meet the entry criteria.

Nevertheless, it spawned new Cthulhu Hack material put together in about 48 hours, hatched from this great game design challenge and assisted (as usual) by a pretty decent level of Saturday creativity (in the midst of supporting #VirtualGrogmeet organised by Chris Hart from The Grognard Files).

I just thought I’d mention it, as Patreon also serves to support my general creativity, including The Dee Sanction. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, my day job seems to be consuming more, not less, of my time – which has left creative writing taking a distant backseat. The support of patrons helps a great deal to spur me on in those moments I can glean.

In the pursuit of further playtesting, another sheet has appeared in short order – this one tailored to the current mechanics that echo a simplified version of The Cthulhu Hack. There has never been a shortage of tabletop paperwork!

More on the mechanics of the game to come!