I suspect that there is not an adventuring party in the world that does not think that if they’re hired to guard a train, there will be a robbery attempt while they’re on guard duty. For that matter, the very idea is pervasive enough that it has parallels in almost any time and genre of role playing games. Any old school gamer knows that having a character sign up to guard a caravan in a fantasy world is not only a good way to make money and get to where you’re going, but also a good way to give your DM plenty of built in adventure hooks. Your DM needs no excuse to have you attacked by bandits and monsters. And if you’re playing in a futuristic setting, the starship convoy you’re escorting is sure to get attacked by bandits or a taskforce from an enemy faction while you’re flying.
Pinnacle’s For Whom the Whistle Blows does not disappoint in this regard. I’m not giving away too much when I say that the cowpokes who sign on to guard the train in the adventure end up dealing with a robbery. But dealing with bandits is only the beginning. What starts off as a simple train robbery (with the players playing the role of the good guys) ends up like 30 Days of Night with a little of The Descent thrown in for good measure. Like all good Deadlands adventures, For Whom the Whistle Blows starts with a basic premise common from any number of western stories and slowly and progressively heaps on terror after terror until it is truly a horror story. Read the rest of this entry »
I listen to a few role-playing podcasts and have sampled a few more and there is one topic that has come up in almost all of them, sometimes multiple times. Sooner or later, almost every podcast discusses ways of growing the hobby and recruiting new players. I’ve heard all manner of methods from approaching likely candidates to just getting the word out to trying to get a better representation of gamers in popular culture have been put forward and discussed numerous times.