Creator / Seth Skorkowsky

Hi, I'm Jack the NPC.

Seth Skorkowsky is an author, Game Master, and web video reviewer of Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Traveller, and KULT tabletop games. His Video Review Show is devoted to not only providing reviews on various games that he's played with his group but also storytelling advice, roleplaying advice, and funny stories from his career as a Game Master.

One of the most persistent elements of his game reviews is the presence of JACK THE NPC, who is played by Skorkowsky himself. Jack the NPC provides running commentary on the games from a player's perspective, often including notably funny events from the playthroughs as well as Self-Deprecation to Seth in a case of Acting for Two.

The books he's written include:

• Tales of the Black Raven
• Valducan
• Ashes of Onyx

He is the winner of the 2019 Gold ENnie Award for Best Online Content.

He was also one of the people asked to do DVD commentary for the 2022 re-release of Mazes and Monsters.

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Seth Skorkowsky provides examples of:

• Acting for Two: Much of the humor from his videos involves Jack the NPC snarking at Seth Skorkowsky the Game Master and vice versa, played by the same person.
• Affectionate Parody: Seth doesn't take tabletop gaming or himself very seriously so most of his skits have a light comedy element to them. Many times, he'll also show how utterly ridiculous adventures can go by simply sharing how his players went in odd directions.
• Almighty Janitor: The "Scott Brown Incident" is essentially the plot being derailed (in an awesome way) by the player characters calling in a real estate agent for a gang-infested building, only for the realtor to turn out to be a badass who frightens most of the gang off himself.
• Alter-Ego Acting: Seth Skorkowsky also plays Jack the NPC as well as his entire gaming group.
• Artifact of Doom: The Bonesaw, which is a sentient sword and Big Fun that, nevertheless mocks its owner as "The Peanut Head." Even when it's complimenting him.
  • The brass head in The Auction, though the bad guy takes his sweet time activating it if the investigators take too long investigating.
  • Both the Idol of Thoth and Thoth's Dagger, which were in adventures played by the same player characters. Jack explained that they were just cleaning up Thoth's junk.
• Ascended Fanboy: Cyberpunk Red actually mentions the "Scott Brown Incident" in one piece of artwork.
  • Seth finally got his first published scenario in Call of Cthulhu with "A Mother's Love" which takes place in none other than Innsmouth itself.
• Author Appeal: The Cthulhu Mythos, Pulp fiction tropes, and meticulous attention to map design are all things Seth loves in his review material.
• Badass Boast: Seth Skorkowsky usually places some sort of horrifying magical curse on whoever spoils themselves as a player for the modules he reviews.
• Bittersweet Ending: "Two-Headed Serpent" ends with the player characters successfully saving the world from being turned into a new Serpent Men homeworld. However, half of the player characters died in the process.
  • Seth names the ending to the time he played "Shadow Over Providence" to be this, since his character died and another player's is probably evil now. But technically they defeated the monster.
• Black Comedy: A frequent result of his games as the player characters Batman Gambit and out of the box thinking often results in bizarre happenings like catfishing the fat-sucking monster in "Intimate Encounters" or adopting the horrific abomination in "Mr. Corbitt."
• Catchphrase: "Hello internet, Seth Skorkowsky here."
  • Jack has a few, one being "Hold on, [name], we're coming to save you!"
• Compassionate Critic: Seth reviews the games out of love, though he's sometimes accused of being too nice and never doing negative reviews. "Crash Drive" for Call of Cthulhu, "Dwellers of the Forbidden City" for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and "A Quick Trip to France" for Achtung! Cthulhu are some of his most critical takes, though even then he admits they have good elements, such as "Crash Dive" offering great diving rules.
  • Seth will always mention when an adventure has elements that he's reused elsewhere to great effect, or when a module introduced something new and interesting to the game (such as Tomb of the Lizard King introducing great plot hook style and nonhuman vampires to Dungeons and Dragons) despite not being a great module overall or having shaky parts.
• Darker and Edgier: Zig-Zagged. Seth often prefers to use Lovecraft Lite handling of the Cthulhu Mythos with player characters more likely than not to survive if they research as well as prepare for dealing with their foes. However, he's frequently prone to amping up the horror factor of adventure modules like when he had the witch of "The Dare" give birth to a human faced rat bearing the face of a dead player character. Note, the player characters for that scenario were twelve years old.
  Jack The NPC: "The players, not our characters, lost SAN for that. What the hell is wrong with you?"
  • Seth will also specifically note when a module is unusually dark, such as the end of Mansion of Madness, Ladybug Ladybug Fly Away Home, or Kult: Oakwood Heights.
• Deadpan Snarker: Jack the NPC frequently takes shots at Plot Holes of the game or ways the game can go off the rails.
  [referring to a friendly NPC who found them via psychic visions] "She knows too much; we may need to take her out."
• Deus ex Machina: The Pulp system for Call of Cthulhu allows this, like when the player characters are caught in the volcanic eruption of an island at the climax of the Two Headed Serpent. A good half of them manage to survive by still having points to spend.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: As often a likely end to his adventures as Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu. Well prepared and methodical player characters are likely to triumph or at least survive. He is also fond of "Pulp Cthulhu" interpretations of the game where the player characters have a lot more likelihood of surviving thanks to the modified rules.
• Lovecraft Lite:
  • Despite (or more likely, because) of his veteran status in the tabletop RPG community, Seth Skorkowsky states this is a perfectly valid playstyle for Call of Cthulhu and even encourages player characters being able to survive multiple adventures or even triumph over the Mythos.
  • Seth Skorkowsky frequently champions Pulp rules for Call of Cthulhu as a way to facilitate this sort of gameplay.
• Master of Disguise: Seth Skorkowsky wears a variety of costumes for his videos including a Hardboiled Detective for Call of Cthulhu, a Horny Vikings raider for Conan the Barbarian or Dungeons and Dragons, and a Punk Punk outfit for Cyberpunk 2020. Typically he's still portraying Jack the NPC when he does this, changing the outfit to match the genre of game he's talking about. Such as wearing a flight jumpsuit and sci-fi-looking helmet for reviewing Traveller. A bit of costume-blending went on in his review of Murder on Arcturus Station where, after he reached the murder-mystery part of the adventure, Jack swapped his helmet for the detective hat usually worn in Call of Cthulhu videos.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: In-universe at least. In Jack's first appearance discussing a fantasy setting, he starts speaking in a voice more expected from a character in a fantasy setting, before quickly deciding it won't work and switching back to his expected pulp private detective voice. He also doesn't bother pitching his voice up when representing Jane during the Two-Headed Serpent videos.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Seth's third player character, who ended up getting the nickname "Dweebles" after Seth saw one comment refer to him as such. Dweebles' lack of a real name frequently drives him to madness.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Discussed in the Star on the Shore review, where the pre-gen player characters' occupations are all over the place and don't seem to have anything to do with the adventure itself. Lampshaded by Jack when the hook for the adventure has a detective asking them to help investigate something. "We've got a doctor, a lounge singer, and a vagrant."
• Red Shirt: Seth outright calls the porters in The Lost Expedition this. In a broader sense, Seth advocates using NPCs in this role to show players what not to do, but also advocates maybe giving one or two of them full character sheets in case they need to serve as sudden backup characters.
  • This is also how Seth advocates dealing with bad rolls in the start of The Atrocity Exhibition. Don't have it kill a player in the opening scene, but have their mistake get another character horrible killed, which will affect their Stability.
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: Is not a fan of the Game Master/Mother/Keeper being able to just kill off a player character, even if it's for story reasons such as trying to set up a Sole Survivor. He specifically calls out this attitude in Chariot of the Gods, saying it should only be the player themselves or the dice that screw them over, not the Game Mother ordaining it should happen with no ability to save or prevent it.
  • The party's own choices and poor dice rolls did cause a player-induced version of this trope during a zombie-style one-shot, resulting in Seth's first Total Party Kill.
• Sanity Meter: Seth often reviews games with this mechanic, and praises modules or scenarios that offer specific types of madness or consequences for losing sanity in that particular scenario.
• Self-Deprecation: Jack the NPC is used frequently to mock Seth's own sick sense of humor or will call out his grosser additions to adventure modules.
  • Seth's taste in movies is also often mocked.
  • Seth's habit of dying whenever he's a player in a horror game also comes up a lot.
• Snake People: The main villains of the Two Headed Serpent campaign. They are Howardian rather than Lovecraftian and survivors of the Hyborian Age. Oh, and there's three factions of them.
• Sole Survivor: Not a fan of this in tabletop unless it happens totally naturally or at the very end of a campaign. Seth advocates for giving players whose characters die "backup characters" to play so that they're not just sitting around the table doing nothing while everyone else has fun.
• Spanner in the Works: One of the elements most frequently brought up in Seth's videos are the player characters choosing to go off the rails to investigate things they were never meant to, coming up with insane plans that often work out for them, or just doing something utterly insane.
  • A particularly off the rails plan comes up in The Asylum, where the players grew obsessed with the bootleggers the doctor was working with and tried a stakeout to follow them back to whatever city they were operating out of (which has nothing to do with the adventure). The entire plan went south and in the end no one could even remember whose idea it had been. Jack declared it the magic of "planning by committee."
  • Also caused the "For Thor!" incident, with a player rolling so badly on attempting to destroy a magical shield that he failed so badly that it became its own adventure just to trash the thing.
• Took a Level in Badass: Talks about how to beef up villains and encounters in regular Call of Cthulhu to Pulp Cthulhu standards, particularly whoever is chosen to be the Big Bad.
• Two-Fisted Tales: A preference for how he runs many of his campaigns with the Pulp Cthulhu rules frequently coming up. Perhaps the biggest example being his extensive playthrough of "Two Headed Serpent."

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