Ring ring. It’s Cthulhu. Better Pick Up

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

Loads of things, but I (Sasha) want to talk about my favourite thing about The Bad Year, which is all the different ways you can play it.

So, The Bad Year is a collection of 53 system-neutral, one-page horror investigation adventures that look like this:

All the clues and the links between them are on one side of the page, with a more detailed breakdown on the other. The idea is you can open it to any double page spread and be able to run that adventure with everything you need right in front of you.

But wait! There's more!

There's also a small section at the bottom of the clue map called "Links" which lists every recurring storyline, NPC and location that features in the mystery, along with the page numbers of every other mystery they appear in. So you can easily find all the entries in one of 7 (seven!) recurring plots and run them as mini-campaigns (or just pick one recurring NPC and follow them through the course of their own really bad year, if you want).

One of those plots - THE GRAND OCCULTATION - is basically the A-plot of the whole book. It's told over 13 adventures, so you can easily run it as monthly sessions over a year, and it explains why exactly this year is so very bad.

BUT WAIT! There's even more!

You can, of course, run each one of the 53 adventures, one after the other, to get the full, year-long, interconnected detailed campaign. And, if you start it and end it in Halloween week, every single adventure will be themed to the actual week of the calendar year that you play it in.

The planning that's gone into this book is wild and there are some intense spreadsheets behind it. Both the clue map format and the one-shots-but-also-interconnected-campaign were @jonnywaistcoat's idea and I am endlessly impressed with them. I think everyone else should be impressed with them too. Maybe check out our Kickstarter if you think it sounds as cool as I do.