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.
Inspired by a conversation with @blabberlicious yesterday, I started reading all the short #CallOfCthulhu scenarios that appeared in White Dwarf, and I'm probably going to go through Imagine after that. A lot of stuff gets packed into a few pages, let me tell you! I'd read more, but my Kindle is in the bedroom and my wife is sleeping in - so it's Premier League time instead.
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
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.
@JazzDude Enduring attritional survival horror is not why I play #CallOfCthulhu. Not saying that it can't be done or you should never do it, but it's so prevalent in today's scenarios.
@AndreasDavour The sheer volume of published adventures is one of the reasons I love #DND and #CallOfCthulhu. That said, the constant churn leads to some really high highs and some really low lows!
I was thinking some more about this, especially in relation to one of my favorite #CallOfCthulhu scenarios "Bad Moon Rising," which ends with an extended sequence of horrifying and weird experiences. I think the key difference is that before then, there's an extensive investigation with lots of RP and then the Investigators can explore HMS Selene and do lots of cool things before the Great Race of Yith get a hold of them. It's that build-up that makes the experiential sequences work IMO.
@Tim_Eagon As I see it, here are some of the problems structurally that lead to bad Call of Cthulhu scenario design.
Both the players and the Keeper know that this is a Lovecraftian horror scenario.
The style of gameplay being initiated is not "play to find out" but instead "play to be told."
Because if the clues aren't found, the horror doesn't happen, but the mechanical architecture doesn't exactly make discovering the clues likely or even possible in some cases.
The mechanics around finding clues are fairly horrifically bad or completely left out because they get in the way of actually executing the plot.
The only on-character markers that can be affected dynamically by the mechanics as presented are HP and SAN, which provide a very narrow scope of "things that can be done to you and that matter in the long run."
Real problem solving requires that there be a real chance of not solving the problem, and if the problem doesn't get solved, the level of threat being manifest is too large to be acceptable either to the players or the Keeper.
My gut says that the underlying idea of "the scenario" is part of the problem.
@Tim_Eagon There's a really simple reason for that. Nobody has done it before.
Obviously, that's a complete simplification, but it's not far off from the truth. "That's not how Call of Cthulhu scenarios are designed" is just the facts. On top of that, it is creating content that you know some significant percentage of the players are never going to see because they will have already got the first clue. So why make the second clue? I mean, sure, they could have completely missed that first clue, and need the second clue, but isn't the "Good Keeper's job" to make sure they don't/can't miss the first one the first time?
The small-scale stories are easier to manage because in the same expected space that someone paid for, you can have a lot more things going on simultaneously and stuff just works.
I would love to see some Lovecraftian fantasy horror using the system of Fantasy World. The game is so low prep and so extremely clear both on how it expects mechanics to be operated and how much it leans on the precepts of PbtA that it almost deliberately excises that get in the way of a good COC game. I think there's something there to be mined out, but my brain is still chewing on it.
@Tim_Eagon I think I actually have a good reason for it:
Because for three quarters of the PbtA/FitD games out there, some element of Lovecraftian horror is already worked into one of the potential world building paths, so going purely Lovecraftian would be firstly something that felt like somebody else had already done it and secondly duplicating effort.
I can pick up Blades in the Dark right now and run an extremely Lovecraftian-flavored game, and it can even be from the perspective of the cultists. I can pick up Starforged and run an extremely Lovecraftian-flavored game – in space. Scum and Villainy, maybe a little bit harder but not impossible.
It's reasonable to assert that Call of Cthulhu, as a specific subgenre representative, is dominated by a single game which represents pretty much a single manifestation of the style… But Lovecraftian horror has spread as a concept through almost everything else to the point where unless you specifically want to do 1920s-era Lovecraftian horror, you can do it with the tools in your pocket.
@Tim_Eagon I'd say that probably counts. I'd probably throw in Trophy Dark/Gold as a closely related game design which puts its fingers into a lot of the same spaces. Also the Dee Sanction.
Let me grab some links for those people who may be coming along later and want to check out what we're talking about:
That last is particularly interesting because they put out a standalone SRD book (Sanction) which essentially lets anybody build a game off of the core that they want, as quite a lot of indie RPGs these days are doing.
In a real sense, we are not spoiled for choice when it comes to Lovecraft on the tabletop. Not even a little bit. In my mind, truthfully, the question is "why does Call of Cthulhu remain so ridiculously dominant when there are better game designs out there for doing the same thing?"
But I ask the same question about D&D on a regular basis.
@Rollenspielblog@Tim_Eagon Perversely – not something in my collection, but the existence thereof doesn't shock me at all.
According to DriveThruRPG, it was added to the catalog and thus probably came out about 10 years ago which puts it in a particular era of #PbtA development, one of the front runners. That would explain why it's not in my pocket.
@luxet@Tim_Eagon That definitely touches on one of the significant issues in mimicking the architecture of the original mythos stories: they aren't intended to nor do they involve characters who continue from one experience to another.
Some unprepared person falls into a horrific, nightmarish situation and either manages to escape from it or is consumed by it – and then we go on to the next guy.
Continuity of character is not something important to generating verisimilitude of the stories, but it's extremely important to Call of Cthulhu as it is formulated mechanically in the TTRPG.
If it took five minutes to put together a character, you drop them into a situation, and they either get killed while discovering things or make their way out and enter the NPC pool that anyone could draw on, that would be a far better representation of how characters in the Cthulhu mythos actually exist within the stories.
You would also probably get better set up situations, better kickers, as a result.
@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.
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...