Gaming Podcast review: 23 Tatters of the King (YSDC)

The Bradford Players have now got another audio game recording series running with the Tatters of the King, available from Yog-Sothoth.com or iTunes. This has now reached 13 episodes on open release at time of writing with media partrons of YSDC able to get advanced releases.

Content
The campaign is based around the King in Yellow from Robert Chambers' stories and is published by Chaosium. Even by Call of Cthulhu standards this is quite a dark campaign with a lot of adult content and a strong tone of despair, so is not always comfortable listening.


For those who have listened to the earlier Horror on the Orient Express audio game there is the welcome return of Val's character, Mrs Betty Sunderland, and Fin has another of the Goodenough family. The character generation session is highly entertaining, particularly when Paul of Cthulhu unveils Septimus Vane, with his extensive back story. There is a lot of decent roleplay in the sessions recorded and I've found that listening to other groups gaming has made me think about my own gaming sessions.

The music provided by Aliicorn as a dedicated soundtrack is very evocative and suitable for the game and this is available in full to patrons of YSDC, so there are plenty of reasons to sign up.

Technical
The recording is done in surround sound and is put out as a 128kbps mp3 - this does give good sound quality and it is possible to hear 'who is sitting where' on the podcasts. The downloads are pretty quick from YSDC and iTunes.

Overall
Strongly recommended for fans of audio games, with the standard proviso that it will have large numbers of spoilers for the adventure used.