As any #CallOfCthulhu veteran knows, old books you've inherited bring nothing but trouble. You should keep them under lock and key - or perhaps even burn them, just to be safe.
Wrote a review of the #callofcthulhu scenario The Hoodlums, written by Alex Guillotte and Ian Christiansen, the seventh and final scenario in the Grindhouse Ultimate Collection.
A short and spooky dungeon crawl-esque scenario with a fun cast of characters, both the pregenerated investigators and the NPCs, human or otherwise.
@SJohnRoss Thanks!
Small-press RPGS, much less community program stuff like this, barely get any reviews or feedback. Trying to at least leave some words about what I play out there for others so they know what they're getting into (or not getting into, in your case!) before hand.
I’ve been reading way too many recently published #CallOfCthulhu scenarios that feature a perfunctory investigation before the Investigators board a train to creepy town that is a one way exercise in hit point and SAN attrition. Sure, some of the imagery is very creepy, but something is definitely missing, that being real problem solving and meaningful choices.
@notasnark@Tim_Eagon@luxet That is literally one of the reasons that Delta Green became one of the most interesting evolutions of Call of Cthulhu. And one of the most appreciated.
It is generally more fun to have a character whom you recognize immediately as capable and effective - even if they are capable and effective in tasks which are not going to be critical to the thing that you know you're going to be experiencing. It's why watching Event Horizon is great fun because the protagonists are competent people in their field. And you know they are capable of dealing with extremely difficult situations. They are simply in a situation they aren't prepared for and isn't within the context they have trained for.
The sensible thing for most of the characters created for Call of Cthulhu to do is to find out that there is a weird problem and then run as fast as possible away from it. The problem is that the game itself does not create a reason mechanically on the sheet expressed for those characters to remain engaged, to want to deal with that problem, to put their sanity or lives on the line. That's an artifact of the fact that BRP is effectively an ancient system that predates the development of good tools for creating situational setups that Call of Cthulhu demands.
My last memory lane posts seem to have resonated well so here’s another. #CallOfCthulhu is up there as one of the games that I’m not very keen on. This comes from a couple of games (both at conventions with well respected Keepers) where the aim has been to scare the player rather than the characters. This put me off for quite a while but after a good game with someone who was running Cthulhu as their first ever GMing attempt I’m tempted to go back to it. #GamesWorkshop#RPG#TTRPG
Question à la commu #jdr : y a t il parmi vous des joueurs de #callofcthulhu ?
Mes compagnons de jeu me tannent pour que je masterise cet univers, je commence à me laisser convaincre, je cherche des one shots bien marquants pour commencer à explorer...
@xalofar@Chuck_Carcosa Ha bin ça remonte à loin mes dernières parties de CoC...
Honnêtement on prenait les one-shots qu'on trouvait dans le mag Casus Belli... et je n'en ai plus un seul.
Ou si non, on inventait... c'était d'ailleurs souvent le ca... sur la base d'une bonne idée.
Une fois à un concert des Black Crowes j'ai eu la chance de voir monter Jimmy Page sur scène, il avait une médaillon étrange... ça a servit de base pour un truc genre secte qui recrutent dans le milieu artistique.
Watch Well Games Newsletter: Issue #11 includes an interview with my friend, CoC scenario writer Aaron Hawke, who published "The Secret Song of Lake Billings."
Did you miss the A-Train to #HarlemUnbound? Want to dive into the original multi-award-winning first edition? I've got you covered, hep cat! #CallofCthulhu#gumshoe
It was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the steamboat under way, the mouse captain whistling a cheery tune all the time.
Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters.
Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency.
Upon which the steamboat captain, showing great presence of kind, began to play a jaunty tune upon the titan's mighty teeth, thus humiliating it into a retreat to its watery place of imprisonment...
1/ Yesterday, we've finished "Corsairs of Cthulhu", a pirate-themed #CallOfCthulhu#ttrpg campaign.
It was a lot of fun. I played a West African man who was educated at Timbuktu, got captured during a slave raid and sold in the Caribbean, regained his freedom, and then hired on as a ship's surgeon. There was some interesting role-playing, as he had views about European colonizers which contrasted with the European-descended player characters in the party.
However, in some ways the campaign was not was I expected (spoilers in the follow-up post).
2/ With a campaign called "Corsairs of Cthulhu" set during the "Golden Age of Piracy", you'd expect a lot of pirate-y action around the Caribbean.
This is actually not the case. The ship the PCs hired on only stays in the Carribean for what is basically the prologue (2 out of 17 chapters) of the campaign, attacking a single Spanish ship. Then the ship heads through the Magellan's Passage, and spends the rest of the story in the Pacific.
Which is weird pacing. I mean, sure, it's appropriate for such a campaign to culminate in the Pacific at you-know-where, but the PCs don't really establish themselves as pirates - they just visit all sorts of pacific islands, and while they have quite a few opportunities for plunder, they don't have any ports of call to spend it on.
Oh well. It's unlikely to happen, but I have some vague ideas for a follow-up campaign which I call "Nazis of the Caribbean"...
I'm learning the #CallofCthulhu rules now in preparation for a campaign I'm going to Keep/serve as Keeper for (?). I'm not going to lie, as a forever GM, this game looks like a lot. It also looks like a lot of fun!
What are your favorite but obscure adventures or scenarios for your favorite big name role-playing games? For example, I think one of the best #CallOfCthulhu scenarios is "What Goes Around, Comes Around" by Jeff Moeller in The Unspeakable Oath 8/9 (Winter 93). What are the hidden gems that you'd recommend?
As any #CallOfCthulhu veteran knows, old books you've inherited bring nothing but trouble.
You should keep them under lock and key - or perhaps even burn them, just to be safe.
@juergen_hubert can confirm. Also, the new books. Actually, lock up all the books. They’re too dangerous and hold grudges. “The study of this Book is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this copy after the first reading.”
Call of Cthulhu Hook:
Many residents of a quaint little town overnight as what seems to be some strange weather event. Despite it being August, dozens of people who were out that night seem to have died of acute frostbite, and many plants and animals also seem to have severe frost damage, but by morning, it’s already a hot day. What could have caused this? #callofcthulhu#ttrpg
Kinda want to do a Call of Cthulhu in space. Start off with a sci-fi setting, then the party discovers that the new drive system was made from copying an ancient ship found in our system. Then they discover why most explorers haven't come back...
