I got to playtest Pelgrane Press's forthcoming Trail of Cthulhu RPG setting
Dreamhounds of Paris. It was pretty awesome, although it is a very challenging book to both play and run.
(Pelgrane are always making their stuff available to playtest, I'm sure they have more deets on their website.)
Anyways, I thought I'd share a cool tool I used to help me get inspired to run Dreamhounds last year. If you're not familiar with the premise, the website describes it like so:
From the 1920s to the coming of the Occupation, a new breed of artist prowled the fabled streets of Paris. Combative, disrespectful, irresponsible, the surrealists broke aesthetic conventions, moral boundaries—and sometimes, arms. They sought nothing less than to change humanity by means of a worldwide psychic revolution. Their names resound through pop culture and the annals of art history.
You play as the Surrealists! It's a lot of fun. And because you play as artists and the game is completely intertwined with the visual arts, I decided to use Pinterest in order to organize the player characters, so that everyone could see what they looked like, and also in order to capture the flavor of their art.
At the same time, I took the opportunity to collect Dreamlands monsters - neither myself nor my players were terribly familiar with the characteristics of the Dreamlands bestiary. I read
Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath a few years back but I have terrible retention for things like creatures with improbable names.
Pinterest is actually a very interesting tool to use as a Dungeon Master/Keeper/whatever. I've always thought it a pretty poor substitue for something like del.icio.us as a research tool/organizer, but it is absolutely great as a piece of inspiration. I may use it to put together my next campaign; I haven't had a chance to use it for something I've homebrewed, but I can definitely imagine how useful and fun it might be.
Follow Matt's board Dreamhounds of Paris on Pinterest.
