Glass Cannon Network has been a name in the tabletop roleplaying game actual play space since 2015, acting as one of the first major channels in a space that’s barely 10 years old. According to Glass Cannon Network co-founder Troy Lavallee, a big part of that success comes down to one decision: avoiding Dungeons & Dragons.
“[GCN] started out as ‘Let’s just play [Pathfinder,] the game that we know and the game that we love, because if we’re infectious about how much we enjoy this game, listeners–whether they even play the game or not, [will listen],” Lavallee told me over a video call.
“We’re always shocked by how many people listen who have no interest in ever playing,” he continued. “If we can share our infectious joy of playing, people will feed off of that, and that’s what they listen for. And then it wasn’t until the pandemic [in 2020] that we were like, ‘I wonder if we could finally start playing other games,’ because we saw that everyone else in the space was pretty much just playing D&D. There were a couple of offshoot things here or there, but it was [mostly] D&D, and then we were playing Pathfinder. I said, ‘Let’s start playing everything else.'”
And while no actual play has truly done “everything else,” GCN has done a lot. From Blades in the Dark to Traveller, and Shadowdark to Dune RPG, GCN has a ton of different shows, featuring both long-term campaigns and brief side quest stories, that cover a variety of playstyles, genres, and tones.
“That became our thing to separate us from everybody else,” Lavallee said. “If this group does D&D and this [other] group does Pathfinder, we do everything else.”
This isn’t to say that other major actual play shows don’t diversify their content. Just looking at the two most well-known channels in the space, Dimension 20 and Critical Role, you can find a wealth of genres and types of stories. But both channels primarily focus on playing D&D.
In an effort to increase the brand awareness of GCN, the network is taking its latest show on the road, performing live in nine cities through December. It’s doing so with a TTRPG that, while still more niche than D&D, has a name that doesn’t require knowledge of TTRPGs to have an idea of what it’s about: Call of Cthulhu.
“There are so many more people doing [actual play podcasts], and we’re very fortunate to be one of the groups that people really talk about,” Lavallee said. “But still, the gap between us and the ones on top is massive. And so, even for people in our position, it’s a constant struggle to gain awareness–the people that are ahead of us [are] supremely talented, and also had huge followings and big companies behind them with millions and millions of dollars to stand out. Nowadays, against that, it’s next to impossible. So, I’m just really excited for hopefully more and more people to learn about who we are. Whereas they may not know Glass Cannon or Call of Cthulhu, they [at least] know Lovecraft.”
Call of Cthulhu is a game in which players don’t really win in a traditional sense. It’s a cosmic horror TTRPG, based on the stories of author H.P. Lovecraft, that puts emphasis on survival and maintaining one’s sanity–players take on the role of investigators who must uncover how to escape whatever unknowable threat they’ve stumbled upon. With the right Game Master and a group of players willing to buy into the fantasy, it’s a terrifying game to play. But fun! Like playing a survival-horror game.
“There could be a [total party kill] on night one,” Lavallee said, who is the Game Master for GCN’s Call of Cthulhu Live. “It’ll be all-new characters on [the next] show, or there could be two or three characters that survive that come back the next night or come back later in the year in Indianapolis at GenCon. So it’ll be really interesting as new characters are cycled in and out, and old characters that go insane might need three months off to go to a sanitarium or go into therapy to get their sanity back.”
While you don’t need to attend previous shows of Call of Cthulhu Live to understand future shows, there will be a little bit of connective tissue between all the performances, which will rotate their casts of characters as player characters die and the tour moves on to other cities.
“Originally, there was a concept that [the Call of Cthulhu Live player characters] all belong to this sort of government agency that goes out and investigates the supernatural,” Lavallee said. “But what’s so great about Call of Cthulhu is that the best games are when the characters aren’t heroes. They’re like a cashier or a radio DJ, and then, all of a sudden, they come together and have to face the unnatural. So I [told the players,] you can be from any walk of life–in fact, the more random, the better. And some of the things they’ve sent me are crazy.
According to Lavallee, the players in Call of Cthulhu Live are all creating characters who experienced something strange growing–an event or phenomenon that they’ve been unable to explain with logic or fully write off as a trick of the mind. When the audience meets a new group of characters during each stop of the tour, that makeshift squad has been asked by some clandestine organization to investigate something or someone, and this mission provides a few answers as to what happened to those particular characters when they were younger.
Tickets for Call of Cthuhu Live are still available if you’re interested in attending a show. And if the tour isn’t showing up near you, but you still want to watch a GCN actual play that deals with investigators looking into Lovecraftian horror mysteries, check out Get in the Trunk–it uses the Delta Green system, and there are seven spooky seasons to listen to.
