RPPR Episode 107: Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man Post-Mortem

sense-coverNews: The playtest draft of Boiling Point is out. If you backed the Kickstarter, please check your messages to see how you can access it.

Synopsis: We finished a playthrough of Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man, a Call of Cthulhu campaign set in the Dreamlands, so like with every campaign we finish, this episode is a post-mortem of it. I discuss how I approached running the campaign and the players talk about what they got out of it. We also have shout outs and anecdotes.

Shout Outs

Song: Demented Dreamlands by Krytpics.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:22:49 — 56.9MB)

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You might find these episodes interesting:

  1. RPPR Episode 100: Where Did the Time Go? (Part 2 of 2)
  2. RPPR Episode 131: Brutalists Campaign Post-Mortem
  3. RPPR Episode 133: God’s Teeth Campaign Post Mortem
  4. RPPR Episode 144: The Vulture was Right
  5. RPPR Episode 158: Gen Con 2018 Wrap Up

11 Comments

  1. Yay! Gold-to-sponges strikes again! I did enjoy that Gen Con game.

    Also, I totally can not wait for the next installments of The Mitchum Cleary Saga. Truly the hero(?) we deserve.

  2. meh. no amount of talking can make me like Sense. it’s boring, it has no pacing, it has no structure, it has no horror, it has no surprises beyond the momentary vignette kind that lead to shrugs of the shoulders. I don’t understand why it exists and RPPR didn’t make it come to life for me any more than reading it did. what’s the point of buying a campaignbook whose every scenario wrriteup is blandly utilitarian?

    and Ross even left out the bit where Mitchum had to eat the corpse! c’mon.

  3. Welp, I guess they will have to settle for the players enjoying the game rather than trying to appease Crawkill

  4. I liked what you made of the campaign. It shows its strength when shit just get crazy. I was very thrown off by the Companions appearing at first, but I kind of see why you used them, now.

    And I believe that the Halloween-game with trick-or-treaters you’re reminiscing is Preemptive Revenge.

  5. Thanks for turning me on to the Batman and Robin serial with The Wizard — that’s golden.

  6. So, I may have just re-listened to the campaign over the course of the last 2 days, after listening to this to get some further insight or refresher on the post-mortem. It was still enjoyable to me (huge fan of the dreamlands and nightmarish dream journey genres in general) and this is definitely an insightful after game discussion. I plan to buy “Sense” and “Dreamhounds” now.

    I cant wait to hear the Mitchem Cleary Chronicles continue (Apologies for probable name butchering.

  7. oh danthe57

    you so cute

    you may need to take a deep breath and exhale deeply and intone, “just because crawlkill thinks a campaignbook is stupid, just because he’s read the book it was based off of and thought it was terrible, just because he hoped RPPR would bring it to life and just because they didn’t manage it, just because he’s given reasons for his feelings, that doesn’t mean he thinks it doesn’t deserve to exist”

    inhale: exhale

    so sorry for expressing my feelings as an educated audiencemember of a campaign on the post where people talked about how they felt about that campaign

  8. Though I don’t agree with everything Crawlkill says about this campaign, I too found it lacking in certain aspects like pacing, structure and the lack of NPCs I gave a damn about (unlike Know Evil and New Arcadia which had tons). I do enjoy the idea of the dreamlands, though Unknown Kadath is by far not Lovecrafts best work. FInal Revelation is way more my type of mythos.

  9. So on Tuesday I went to Ikea, on Wednesday I listened to this episode, Thursday I snagged a copy of Horrorstor (physical copy, the illustrations were a great way to foreshadow and be extra creepy), Saturday night I finished the book. Great recommendation and for the first 60 pages I had to keep pausing and think about what they were saying about the layout of the store and it’s effect on guests. I kept thinking, “yeah, that makes sense”.

  10. I enjoyed listening to it even if I probably won’t run it ever. There’s some tidbits I think I can incorporate in the Nevernever in my Dresden Files game. So if nothing else, funny banter and fiddly bits to throw at my players.

  11. I always thought of this as more of a setting than a campaign book. The story to me just fell apart with the PCs being pushed to go back to being broke junkies instead of taking their riches and living like kings in a land of magic. Though it gets points in that you can play it twice and repeat nothing.

    I will say that I don’t remember my favorite parts of the Dreamlands here, those being the place of forgotten? lost? failed? dreams and the other more directly surreal lands.

    For the Dreamhounds game I’d suggest this book:
    http://www.amazon.com/This-Must-Be-Place-Montparnasse/dp/0020423810

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