Five Alive!

In a fearsome feedback loop that threatens the very fabric of not much at all, Adam at Barking Alien followed up on my first five role-playing games post with a post about the five rpgs he's thinking about most right now. Or then, when he wrote the post. That seems like an excellent idea. Let's have at it!

• 13th Age. I'm often thinking about 13th Age because I think it's an excellent game and I very much enjoyed running it in the past. I read 13th Age Glorantha the other day -- I backed as a Kickstarter in 1873 or thereabouts and never got around to reading -- and while it's massively incomplete, it has a lot of very good ideas. It's another layer of complexity on top of the base game -- I refer to it as Advanced 13th Age to no one because there's no one else here -- so I don't know if I'd run it, but it did make me excited to play 13A again, in some form.
• Break!! I've got an idea for subverting the bright and cheery feel of Break!! with an apocalyptic horror campaign influenced by The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Kingdom Death, and few other bleak and depressing things. I can't quite decide if this is a terrible idea, or bold and exciting. Perhaps I will play it to find out!
• Call of Cthulhu. I am almost always thinking about Call of Cthulhu. It has been too long since I last played.
• Lamentations of the Flame Princess. This is a bit of a cheat as I'm working on a couple of books, but I am thinking about it and it is an rpg, so...
• Star Wars d6. I've got a rough idea for a pirate campaign, a mix of original content and some published adventures I've got lying around that would fit well with a bit of bodging. This also ties in with another post I really need to get around to publishing one day. This day? No.

Old Yeller

Years ago, I stumbled upon a film version of The King in Yellow, or at least something associated with the entity. I seem to remember that it was either a short film, or a proof-of-concept for a full scale production, but other than that, I have nothing. Except a screenshot:

I can't find any reference online to such a short film, which is a bit weird. Maybe it was nothing to do with the King. Maybe it was just a music video with a similar visual style. Who knows? I don't. Clearly I failed a SAN roll at some point and blocked it all from my mind.

Curtailed Cthulhu

A while ago I had an idea for simplified Call of Cthulhu characters. For some reason I never put the idea into practice, so here I am, er, putting the idea into practice.

All of the following characters are based on how they appear in the fifth edition Call of Cthulhu rulebook.

Dr Henry Armitage
Hit Points: 10 (+5 spawning points)
Sanity: 55 (0 spawning points)
Profession: University Librarian 80
Hobbies: Occultist 35, Polyglot 50

Randolph Carter
Hit Points: 15 (-20 spawning points)
Sanity: 50 (+5 spawning points)
Profession: Former French Foreign Legionnaire 60
Hobbies: Book Lover 50, Dream Explorer 25

Harvey Walters
Hit Points: 15 (-20 spawning points)
Sanity: 45 (+10 spawning points)
Profession: Occult Journalist 80
Hobby: Amateur Pilot 60

---

The main changes from the original post are that "build points" are now "spawning points" because it's Call of Cthulhu not Pathfinder, and I've increased the points available from 120 to 150, because otherwise the characters were a bit weak in comparison to their CoC5 versions.

I think there's some potential here. I need to think about what happens if a character's "skill" doesn't apply in a situation; what sort of default value would I use then? I think it may be easiest to fall back to the basic skill values from CoC5, but that's something to ponder.

The basic concept here is to make quick characters that retain compatibility with existing Call of Cthulhu materials, but I'm going to explore the possibility of turning this into its own game system. I have some ideas...

Dunwichin'

Chaosium was clearing its warehouses at the end of July -- some bargains seem to be available still! -- and I decided to spend some royalty money on H.P. Lovecraft's Dunwich for Call of Cthulhu. I'm not sure why I picked that one out of everything available, but I'm glad I did. Allow me to tell you why.

The Good

• The format is a lovely surprise. I was expecting a sourcebook on Dunwich, with some related adventures, a bit like Chaosium's books on real-life locations like Cairo and London, and that is sort of what you get.
  
  Ish.
  
  It turns out the book is more of a sandbox, akin to an old school D&D adventure. You get a -- long! -- list of locations, the people associated with them, and any events -- eldritch or otherwise -- tied to them, but there is no plot as such. That said, there are some ongoing agendas and schemes, but nothing like the sort of strong plotting one expects from a CoC adventure. Not only is it refreshing, the gazetteer-like approach makes the content easy to read and, probably, prepare. Which is good, because there is a lot of content. Speaking of which...


• So... much... stuff! Every house, building, or other point of interest is listed and numbered. There are almost a thousand locations, although some are empty. I haven't got this to the table -- and I am unlikely to do so since one of my regular players has read the whole lot -- but I imagine you could get weeks if not months of play out of Dunwich and the surrounding area.


• The content is pretty good too. There is a lot of interesting stuff to investigate and poke, some of which is waiting for the players to discover, some of which is carrying on without them. It all seems very playable and it feels like a real, living location. There are plenty of non-Mythos interactions too, which is good, but I'll have more to say about that in a bit.

The Bad

• The d20 Call of Cthulhu rules. Ha. No, I joke. I'm all in favour of 7th-level Librarians.

The Ugly

• There is some... "old-fashioned" terminology used to describe the mental and physical condition of some of the Dunwich residents. This is a 2002 revision of a 1991 book, but even so I was surprised. On the plus side, there are only a handful of occurrences, but beware and be prepared to ignore the Old Ways.


• There are a couple of sections that are a bit dungeony and feel out of place in Call of Cthulhu. These were perhaps less jarring in 1991 but they feel very wrong these days.


• I think there's too much Cthulhu Mythos content. This seems like an odd complaint for a game about the Mythos, but bear with me. Without going into spoilers, there are at least three major Mythos, er, vectors, only one of which has anything to do with the Dunwich Horror. It feels a bit greedy and over the top and moreover, the intellectual, physical, and social decay running through Dunwich is given a Mythos origin, which I feel undermines the Deliverance-like horror of the setting; I prefer to think that the Dunwich Horror happened because the village was already corrupted by human failings, rather than those failings being caused by an alien influence.
  
  (What's worse is that the book is inconsistent on how pervasive this influence is and jumps through unconvincing hoops to explain why some villagers are unaffected.)
  
  I would remove at least one of these Mythos elements, maybe even two, and make the village a bit less of a Cthulhu "zoo". Cthulzoo?


• I am not a huge fan of the cover, as seen above. It's a fine picture and better than anything I can do, but as a cover it tells us nothing about the book, except that there is a wrinkly old man in it. It's not much of a spoiler to reveal that there are quite a few wrinkly old men in the Dunwich area.
  
  
  
  The cover for 1991's Return to Dunwich is more overt -- perhaps obvious -- as a piece of horror art -- and to be fair, seems to illustrate one minor possible encounter out of almost a thousand, so I can see why it was changed for the reprint -- but it's also more striking as a visual. It looks like the cover of a dodgy VHS horror film, exactly the sort of thing I would rent in a heartbeat.

That looks like more bullet points for Ugly than Good, but worry not! That first Good point is such a... good point that it more than makes up for the flaws, and most of the issues with the book can be fixed with ease, or ignored without making the adventures more difficult to play.

(I would go into specifics on said fixes, but, you know, spoilers.)

I remember seeing the original Return to Dunwich book in the collection of my old Call of Cthulhu GM Keeper Dave and that cover jumped out at me even back then. For whatever reason we never went to Dunwich in Dave's campaign, but I hope I'll get a chance to run it one day, as it seems like great, degenerate, backwoods, fun.

Forever Fibbing

I bought Eternal Lies soon after its release in 2013 but Stuart's children were part of our gaming group at the time, and I was aware that the campaign was full of content that wasn't appropriate for them, nor could it be removed without undermining some of the key themes. Almost a decade later, Stuart's kids are far too cool to play with us old fogeys, so I was able to get the campaign to the table at last.

We've been playing since June 2020 -- with a couple of gaps -- but I haven't been posting summaries here because, well, the authors ask that no details of the plot are revealed in reviews or other discussion. I intend to respect that, although it will make this review a bit tricky in places. Bear with me.

I'm going to reverse the usual Good, Bad, and Ugly order here because -- spoilers, dear reader -- this campaign has major problems, and I want to end on a positive note. As much as I can, anyway.

The Ugly

The book is massively overwritten. This is obvious from the first page and was part of the reason why I didn't push to get it to the table earlier, as I feared it would be a lot of work to get it to a playable state. I was not wrong. The book has around 400 pages but there are probably about 100 pages of actual content; the rest is faff, nonsense, guff, and vast swathes of pointless repetition. Also, there's quite a lot of repeated information, and furthermore much of the page count is taken up with repeating what you've just read a few pages earlier.

There's also an issue with the tone of the writing, which I admit may be a matter of taste, in that it comes across as smug, arrogant, and hypocritical at times. For example, there are a couple of places where the very concept of dungeon-delving is ridiculed, but then we get at least three actual, honest-to-Gygax dungeons. Maps are mocked and considered tools of the imagination-challenged, except when they are not. It's a bit sad and almost embarrassing to read.

The Bad

Oh crikey.

Perhaps the biggest issue with the campaign as a whole is that, aside from a couple of places, there's not much in the way of player choice. The overall structure is somewhat similar to the classic Masks of Nyarlathotep -- which I suspect is deliberate -- in that once things get going, the players can tackle the main campaign locations in any order, but that's where the flexibility ends. Each location is a little railroad, literally in one case, which doesn't even have the decency to be a knowing joke.

(A quickish aside: my understanding is that the entire point of the Gumshoe -- I'm not capitalising it until you tell me why -- philosophy is that the players cannot fail to find essential clues, and so the investigation never stalls. To my mind, this means you can design adventures with a rich and -- if you want -- complex structure, knowing the players will not be blocked from accessing that structure because of a failed skill roll. The authors of Eternal Lies, on the other hand, seem to have taken it to mean that they can force players to experience a sequence of set pieces; it's the sort of structure that we all knew was bad in 1990 so it's a bit baffling to see in 2013, even more so in a game line that I thought was supposed to encourage the opposite. Thus endeth the asideth.)

The grand irony is that despite the rigid design, there are holes in the structure big enough to pilot the Alert through that cause some parts of the campaign to be tricky if not impossible to access. The most egregious is the climax of the entire campaign, which happens for reasons the players have no way of knowing, so the authors crowbar in some quasi-flashbacks to get the players there. One of the major non-player-characters is sort of halfway to working it out, so can nudge the players in the right direction, but -- and look at this for a clusterfudge of bad design -- if the players are sensible there is no reason for them to encounter this NPC at all, so the adventure as written has them beaten unconscious, stripped of their equipment, and dumped literally at the NPC's feet.

(I wasn't going to do that to my players, so in my game, the players arrived at the location and did what they came to do, then decided there was no reason to pursue the NPC, and left.)

This isn't something Gumshoe can fix, because the NPC's name and location are clues the players find whatever happens, but you still need a reason for them to meet the NPC, other than "some thugs knock you out", and the GM shouldn't be doing the work that a £40 book should be doing.

What's worse is that the climax only happens as a result of player action. This is supposed to be a final ironic twist, but because there's no way for the players to realise this, it can come across as arbitrary and random. For the GM, who can see the workings behind the curtain, there is a further disappointing revelation: if the players do nothing, nothing bad happens. The bad guys carry on, but they don't "win", indeed the way they are written -- which is one of the good parts of the campaign; see below -- means that they cannot triumph.

Without going into spoilers, for I have made a promise, this is how the campaign works:

In 1924, a cult attempts to do a Very Specific Thing. It is interrupted and although there are survivors, none of them know what the Very Specific Thing was, or even that the cult was trying to make it happen. This crucial bit of data is lost in 1924.

↓

In 1934 -- or maybe 1937, because the campaign isn't sure when it is set (sigh) -- the players go around tracking down splinters of the original cult and dealing with them.

↓

?????

↓

The players do the Very Specific Thing (oops) and must save the world.

Okay then.

That ????? is a huge narrative and structural gap -- again, a surprise in a campaign which has up to that point forced players along a strict linear path -- and the authors seem to just assume that it will not be an issue. In my game the players decided that yes, they would go and do the Very Specific Thing but they didn't really have any good reason to do so, which strikes me as a problem, and the "twist" that they really shouldn't have done so after all is an even bigger problem, but now I am repeating myself.

(How very appropriate.)

The campaign as a whole is a mess of rigid railroading and massive gaps, which is a worst-of-both-worlds chimera I didn't think was possible.

The Good

There are a couple of terrible non-player-characters in the campaign, but they are not essential and are easily cut. The majority of the NPCs are at least interesting, and the main cast are quite well written, in particular the major antagonists. I am reluctant to call them villains, because while they stand in opposition to the players and represent the traditional Cthulhu cultists, they are far from traditional in their characterisation. Each of the major opposition NPCs is written as complex, with their own goals and motivations, and although the characters are technically on the same side, they have more differences than commonalities.

(The obvious approach is to use these differences to turn the antagonists against each other, but the geographical scope of the campaign does make this difficult and, alas, there is zero support for such an approach in the book. That the potential is there is at least half-good.)

The chief antagonists are layered and interesting enough that they could even be useful to the players under the right circumstances. On the other hand, they are cultists, so even if they are being helpful, the players may not trust them, which of course is fun and interesting. The treatment of these characters is nicely done and by far the strongest aspect of the campaign.

I must also admit that some of the set pieces are effective and fun, so while I can't condone the authors strongarming the players into experiencing them, I can at least understand why they are so keen to show them off. It is ironic and more than a little disappointing that perhaps the chapter with the worst writing is also the one with some of the most fun encounters, and my favourite section of the entire campaign is something of a side trek, optional and not strictly relevant to the main adventure.

I also like the general idea of the big climax, even if it is almost impossible to get there as written.

-----

For the most part I enjoyed running Eternal Lies and I think my players had fun, but my gosh the thing is a janky mess almost from page one, and running it is a lot of work. I don't even mean preparation work of the sort any large campaign needs, but rather a lot of fixing of broken parts and filling in gaps, and even ground-up rewrites in some places. I don't think it's too unreasonable to expect a better, more polished, and more complete product for £40.

I would recommend the campaign only to the GM that enjoys going to such effort, or perhaps as a source of ideas, as there are some good sections that could potentially be pulled out and used in other contexts. Otherwise, there are better, and easier, campaigns to run. You may have heard that Eternal Lies is a classic, on the same level as the venerable Masks of Nyarlathotep, but do not listen to such... lies.

Ha ha.

---

I ran Eternal Lies over 25 weekly sessions between the 20th of June 2020 to the 20th of June 2021 (!), with some interruptions here and there. We played it over Roll20 with a modified version of Call of Cthulhu fifth edition, rather than Trail of Cthulhu; I made good use of the official conversion notes here.

(And how cool is it that Chaosium and Pelgrane allowed those conversion notes to exist?)

Also useful was the Alexandrian Remix; Justin Alexander holds the campaign in much higher regard than I do, and I didn't use much of his actual remix material in my version, but reading it was helpful and it confirmed some of my own misgivings about the source and gave me the confidence to make my own changes. Justin's chapter summaries are far more readable than the ones in the book, so I recommend reading them if you're going to try running the campaign.

Freezing Cold in Eighty Nine Two So

A few weeks ago this was going around the interwebs like an STI during freshers' week:



The lyrics in "Prisencolinensinainciusol" are gibberish, but the idea is that they are supposed to sound like English -- specifically English as sung by performers like Bob Dylan -- to non-English speakers. I would argue that they also sound like English to native English speakers too, just an unintelligble form of English.

It occurred to me this morning that they also sound a bit like something else:

Y'AI 'NG'NGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH H'EE-L'GEB F'AI THRODOG UAAAH
OGTHROD AI'F GEB'L-EE'H YOG-SOTHOTH 'NGAH'NG AI'Y ZHRO

That's from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward* by HP Lovecraft.

Imagine that some crazed wizard sets an incantation to a bostin beat and puts it on the internet, where it goes viral. People start sharing it on social media, celebrities pick it up and share it, and now it's being played hundreds of times a day and the original video has millions of views.

Is that enough power to make something happen? What does it do? How do you stop it? Not even Delta Green has the clout to shut down Twitter...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*I should also at this point recommend BBC Radio 4's adaptation of Lovecraft's story. It's very clever and manages to surprise, even if you're familiar with the original stories. I've rattled through 50+ episodes in the past few days and I am disappointed there aren't more.

Thanks Larry

Larry DiTillio wrote many of my favourite things, including Babylon 5 and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, but it's the brilliant Masks of Nyarlathotep that I thank him for most of all. Thanks Larry.

Bruce WIllis Is a Ghost, Probably, but What Do We Do About It?

We are going to play Call of Cthulhu a bit later today; this is excellent news as it is my favourite role-playing game. It's modern day one shot, and our GM, Ben, has sent out a pdf handout to get us prepared.

The thing is, the handout has -- unless I'm way off, which is possible -- literally given the game away. I've been playing Call of Cthulhu for years and I have written a horror adventure or two in that time, so perhaps I just have the mindset for this sort of thing, but that raises an interesting question.

If I am right, then how do I play it? I think I probably know how to "win" the adventure, but my character isn't going to know that. Do I play him or her straight, even though if they were a character in a film I'd be tutting at the screen at their lack of insight? Or do I make out-of-character "hunches" and blow through the adventure's obstacles?

(There is another option: I could be wrong about the handout, but make out-of-character "hunches" anyway, leading to a series of hilarious mistaken assumptions. Call of Clouseau, if you will.)

I suppose this is a subset of the character knowledge versus player knowledge question that has been part of role-playing games since the beginning, but I've always seen that stated in terms of mechanics or monster statistics rather than genre conventions.

I'm playing in a few hours, so we will see what happens.

(Oh, and happy new year, everyone!)

Push Off

I've been thinking about push mechanics in role-playing games, and I'm a bit baffled by the concept. Maybe someone out there can explain what I'm missing.

I have encountered push mechanics in Call of Cthulhu 7 and Mutant Year Zero, and I wasn't convinced either time.

The basic idea is that if you fail a roll, you can try again and if that roll is also a failure then something interesting -- and probably bad -- happens.

My question is: why doesn't something interesting happen with the first failure? What's the benefit to putting the interesting stuff behind a second roll? It seems to me to be inefficient design, rolling for rolling's sake. It reminds me of those versions of D&D in which you score a critical hit, but then have to roll again to see if the critical hit was an actual critical hit, or who knows what.

It seems to me that this sort of mechanic is hiding the fun -- that's not to say dice rolling isn't fun, but it's a different sort of fun -- behind a superfluous dice roll, but perhaps I'm just not getting it.

The other possible issue is that every time I've seen a GM ask "Do you want to try again, bearing in mind that if you fail a second time, something bad will happen?" no player has ever gone for it, but maybe they weren't getting it either.

(Shrug emoji.)

Hashtag and Eggs

Oh okay then, let's have a look.

I'm not going to do one a day; no one wants to see that. Let's bash through the whole lot in one fat hit.

Here we go!

1. What published rpg do you wish you were playing right now?

What, right this moment? I'm okay thanks. I like games but I don't want to be playing every moment of every day, like some sort of...

Oh.

I want to play Mutant Year Zero. It's been sitting in my reading pile for a year or so but I haven't got it to the table yet.

2. What is an rpg you would like to see published?

I may write a longer blog post about this but I think it's fascinating that computer rpg series like Final Fantasy spit out a complete ruleset and setting every couple of years and then move on; would anyone buy or play these games if they were released as tabletop rpgs? I would be interested, at least.

3. How do you find out about new rpgs?

I don't follow any news sites or anything like that, so I tend to pick up on new releases when people get excited about them on Google+.

4. Which rpg have you played the most since August 2016?

I am a sad loser and I have logged everything I've played and because these things are true I can tell you that it was the Frankenstein patchwork d100 game I used to run The Dracula Dossier. Thirteen sessions in all.

5. Which rpg cover best captures the spirit of the game?

That's a great question. I can think of lots of covers I like but do they capture the spirit of the game? Fifth edition Call of Cthulhu has a wonderful cover but I don't think it's indicative of how the game plays, as such.

Of the games I own, I'm going to go with the second edition of Shadowrun; it's not the best image in the world -- the composition is a bit flat and that drain is given so much prominence that you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a main character -- but does a great job of showing what the game is about.

6. You can game every day for a week. Describe what you'd do!

Assuming I've done all the preparation and I'm ready to go, I'd probably try out a bunch of games and play a different one each day. Maybe two a day, one after lunch and one after dinner.

I know. Rock and roll.

7. What was your most impactful rpg session?

"Impactful" is a horrible word. Eurgh. Stop it.

Anyway, probably the most influential -- much better, see? -- session was the first time I played Call of Cthulhu. I'd played other rpgs before that, and it was Shadowrun that probably got me hooked, but that first CoC session was a profound and enlightening experience.

8. What is a good rpg to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?

"2hrs"?

Good gravy.

(Mental note: stop being an arse.)

Anyway, two hours doesn't seem long enough to get going, once you've taken into account making the tea and moaning about what the Tories have done this week, but I'd go for something quick and easy, like Fighting Fantasy. I imagine you could rattle through a lot of content in two hours with that game.

9. What is a good rpg to play for about 10 sessions?

Most campaigns I run last about ten to twelve sessions, so the easy answer is "any of them" but that's not very helpful.

There's a suggestion in 13th Age to run a campaign in which everyone gains a level with each session and characters have ten levels in that, so you get this focussed and neat sort of "zero to hero" thing. I don't know if that means 13th Age is a good rpg to play for about ten sessions, but I'd like to give it a try some time.

10. Where do you go for rpg reviews?

Reviews from R'lyeh is good, as is tenfootpole. Ramanan Sivaranjan knows what he's talking about, and I will always pay attention to what Patrick Stuart or Zak Smithsabbath like, although our tastes can often vary.

11. Which "dead game" would you like to see reborn?

TSR's Saga System -- the one with the cards -- was ahead of its time and had a lot going for it, but died when TSR did. I'd love to see a new version.

12. Which rpg has the most inspiring interior art?

Death is the New Pink or Troika! because Jeremy Duncan is a genius. So are Jez Gordon and Zak Sabbathsmith, but I don't think there's a published rpg out that features their work. Yet.

(I also have some pictures in DitNP but if you're looking at my stuff instead of JD's then You Are Doing It Wrong.)

13. Describe a game experience that changed how you play.

I was going to blog about this. Maybe I did. I'm old and can't remember everything. Hrm. It was when I was running The Enemy Within II: The Enemy Within and the Temple of Doom and I noticed that WFRP2 sort of expects you to build non-player-characters according to the same rules as player-characters and I remember thinking "no, I'm just going to do what I like" and made up the statistics.

It's sort of obvious and everyone else has probably been doing it for years but it had never occurred to me before and now I do it all the time.

14. Which rpg do you prefer for open-ended campaign play?

I'm not sure how to answer this one because every open-ended game I've played has fallen apart at some point. I would imagine that the best sort of rpg for this kind of campaign would be something where characters don't change much in terms of power level; perhaps something like basic D&D, the Chaosium d100 rules, or Traveller.

15. Which rpg do you enjoy adapting the most?

I don't understand the question. Is this asking if I enjoy hacking games? If so, then I don't do it often because if I have to change a ruleset in order to run something then there's a good chance that there's already a different ruleset that's better suited to what I want to do.

That said, I am a big fan of the Chaosium d100 rules and I find them easy to tweak and modify, so maybe that's my answer.

16. Which rpg do you enjoy using as is?

See above. I'll drop rules if they make no sense or slow things down but for the most part I'm not much of a hacker. Fighting Fantasy and WFRP2 are both games that I run without changing much, if anything.

17. Which rpg have you owned the longest but not played?

Probably Lacuna Part 1: The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City. I've had it since 2009 and I've never got around to playing it. I find it interesting and I'm excited to play it but I also find it a bit intimidating and all I can imagine is making a right mess of running it.

18. Which rpg have you played most in your life?

Ooh, crikey. I've played a lot of Pathfinder in recent years, and I played a stupid amount of Shadowrun when I was but a wee sprogling, but I reckon it's probably Call of Cthulhu. I've run three big-ish campaigns and have played double figure one-shots.

It may be Pathfinder because that takes ages to play, but I don't like it nearly as much as I like adore Call of Cthulhu and I would be sad if I have played it more often.

19. Which rpg features the best writing?

Small but Vicious Dog.

20. What is the best source for out of print rpgs?

I get mine from eBay because all the shops that used to sell ancient rpg books have closed down around here.

In the brief time during which I lived in Minnesota, the local Half Price Books was like a treasure trove of old rpg stuff, but I wasn't gaming at the time so I didn't pick anything up. Tsk.

21. Which rpg does the most with the least words?

Probably one of these twenty-four hour games or two-hundred word rpgs but I don't think I've read any of them.

Troika! is quite lean but also good. Let's go with that.

22. Which rpgs are the easiest for you to run?

I have no patience for fiddly games any more so I only run games that are easy to run. This is one reason I like 13th Age; for the players it's like AD&D in terms of complexity and options but for the GM it's more like Basic D&D.

The easiest for me is probably Call of Cthulhu because the d100 system is super simple to use, and almost everything is on the character sheet.

Then they ruined it by Pathfindering the seventh edition but I've already moaned about that.

23. Which rpg has the most jaw-dropping layout?

Rifts.

Oh, did you mean jaw-dropping in a good way?

24. Share a PWYW publisher that should be charging more.

I don't know of any PWYW publishers off the top of my head. Lamentations of the Flame Princess sometimes does it but it seems to work for James, so what do I know?

25. What is the best way to thank your GM?

I think it depends on the GM. I always appreciate it when the players tell me they enjoyed the game and would like to play more.

Alas, they tend to tell me this either (a) after the final session of the campaign, or (b) years after the game dribbled away into nothing because of -- I thought -- a lack of interest.

Fist-shaking bitterness and tearful self-doubt aside, it never hurts to just say "thank you, I had fun".

26. Which rpg provides the most useful resources?

What?

Does this mean the core rules, or anything published for it?

I use the d1000 mutation tables from Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness whenever I can, but that's not an rpg.

27. What are your essential tools for good gaming?

Whahuh? These are getting vague and weird now.

A game and some people to play it. Anything else is optional. I mean, it doesn't even have to be a good game as long as you have good people.

I keep thinking of when I played Mutant Chronicles when I was seventeen and it was terrible so we drank whisky as we played and I was sick in a bush.

28. What film/series is the biggest source of quotes for your group?

We don't do quotes. Stupid comedy accents, on the other hand, we do a lot. Comedy German is a popular one.

(Sorry, Germany.)

29. What has been the best-run rpg Kickstarter that you have backed?

The standard for rpg Kickstarters seems to be set so low that "deliver what was promised and on time" is considered some sort of achievement, rather than basic competence. That said, the Mutant Year Zero people know what they are doing and the Hubris Kickstarter was run well.

30. What is an rpg genre-mashup you would most like to see?

I'm not a singer as I lack both the ability and the confidence, and it would probably be insufferable torture to watch in action, like a thousand Frozen Youtube videos in one, but I reckon there's potential in an rpg in which singing is used as some sort of resolution mechanic.

31. What do you anticipate most for gaming in 2018?

That's a bit odd. Why not "the next twelve months" so it ties in with the next time everyone does this?

(Mental note: remember the first mental note.)

Anyway, the thing I'm most excited about is that there will be not one but two new editions of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay coming out soon. One will be based on the first and second editions and the other will be based on the absurd high fantasy of Age of Sigmar; I'm keen to see both. I have no idea if they will be out in 2018 but let's say they will be just to end this on a positive note.

Quiet Hordes

Back in January, Brian C asked me -- because I’m always banging on about how much I like Call of Cthulhu -- for my thoughts on both the new Delta Green role-playing game and Kevin Crawford’s Lovecraftian Silent Legions. I had a look at Delta Green in March and here’s the belated follow-up.

In terms of game mechanics Silent Legions is more or less B/X Call of Cthulhu, although you won’t see that stated anywhere in the book, for legal reasons probably. You’ve got character classes, levels, hit dice, saving throws, and all that classic D&D stuff, only transposed to a modern day horror setting, and with a sanity system bolted on. There is a skill system in there too, and it looks a bit like the one from Traveller, but I don't have a lot of experience with the venerable space game, so I may be way off.

It all looks quite robust but it does little for me. I didn’t grow up with D&D and I’m not one of these people that tries to use one ruleset to fit every genre -- says the person who used Call of Cthulhu to run a Night’s Black Agents campaign -- so there’s nothing here that grabs me and makes me want to play it. It’s not a bad set of rules but I can’t get my head around the idea of 6th level librarians as anything other than a joke, and you’re never going to win me over in the Space Year 2017 with odd artefacts like descending armour class.

It’s a matter of personal taste, it’s probably irrational, and may even be hypocritical; there’s nothing inherent to Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu that makes them any more suited to Lovecraftian gaming than classic D&D, and I’d probably feel different if I had more of a background in the game. I don't, so it all seems a bit odd to me.

I'll stop going on about it now because the rules of the game only take up about a quarter of the book; the bulk of the tome is all about designing a supernatural horror campaign. To be more precise, it's about building a supernatural horror sandbox campaign, and this is what led to me backing the Silent Legions Kickstarter back at the end of 2014. Crawford has picked up a lot of acclaim for his campaign design systems in other releases like Red Tide and Stars Without Number, so I wanted to see what he could do with an investigative horror rpg.

What we get is a big, multifarious toolkit for designing a Lovecraftian setting, complete with gods, cults, monsters, and even alternate planes. There are procedures for designing the region in which the campaign will be set -- this could be something on the scale of Arkham County, or it could be the entire globe if you want to go full Masks of Nyarlathotep -- and the individual locations within that region. There are tools for such fine grade details as individual non-player-characters and even specific scenes.

All of this is presented as dice tables so it is possible to generate an entire random Xhoandhora Mythos. You can even roll up eldritch names, like I just did there. You can of course just pick the bits you like.

This stuff is all gold and while I'm indifferent to the ruleset in Silent Legions, I want to try the campaign generation tools right now. I want to generate cults, their histories, and their plans, I want to design pantheons of gribbly space gods, and I want to populate a map with blighted towns and sinister woods. Then I want to plonk a group of player-characters in the middle of it all and see what happens.

Perhaps the best bit is that aside from a couple of details, this vast chunk of the book is not tied to any particular system and you could use it in any horror game. It screams to be used and its utility is vast, cyclopean even, and it's well worth getting, even if you have zero interest in playing a 6th level librarian.

Delta Green, No Relation

A while ago, Brian C asked for my thoughts on the new Delta Green role-playing game and the OSR not-Cthulhu game Silent Legions. Let's start with Delta Green.

Until Brian requested it, I wasn't going to review the game because I didn't think it would be fair to do so, for two reasons. The first is that it is not complete; as I type this post the rules are available as the Agent's Handbook, and as the title suggests, this is for players. There are rules for character generation, skills, and combat, but nothing on adversaries, magic, or the setting itself. I have a certain distaste for games that split the core rules across multiple books, but it's not a bad idea as such; even so it's worth mentioning that the full game is not available at this time.

The other reason I haven't reviewed the game is that I haven't played it. My current Dracula Dossier game uses the firearms rules from DGAH -- but is otherwise fifth edition Call of Cthulhu -- and I helped my friend Ben modify the rules for his Beyond the Mountains of Madness game, but I haven't used the rules as intended. I don't know if my review can be fair if I haven't played the game, but I'll do my best.

In order to maintain compatibility with older DG material, the new game uses a d100 based system. I was surprised to discover that it's not based on CoC, or even Chaosium's d100 ruleset, but rather it's a modification of Mongoose's RuneQuest 2/Legend with the sanity rules borrowed from -- of all places -- 2004's Unearthed Arcana for D&D3. This strikes me as a bit of a roundabout way of doing things when there's a CoC licence available, but I assume the designers had a good reason. Anyway, the important thing is that it's compatible with CoC and older DG material, albeit with a bit of shoving.

The general approach seems to be to tidy up and modernise CoC's rules; this was also the stated intent of the seventh edition of the venerable rpg, and I think DG is more successful in that regard than Chaosium's own effort, not least because it -- for the most part, anyway -- keeps things simple.

Where CoC7 is characterised by adding more rules -- improvement by way of elaboration -- DG goes more for standardisation and ironing out the weird spiky bits CoC built up over the years. One good example is the firearms rules; CoC has some wonky combat rules in general, and the mechanics for gunfights are probably the wonkiest of all, with all sorts of exceptions "spot rules" and fully-automatic gunfire looking more like Rifts than even the most pulpy Mythos tale.

DG strips this back to a simple mechanic based on at most two die rolls and optional modifiers. There is an argument that it's a bit bland as most weapons more powerful than a pistol will either kill outright or do 2d10 damage, but I will take that over the old clusterfudge of one-fifth chances, multiple fire rates, modified initiative steps, and so on. There are exceptions built into the DG shooting rules, but they make sense; instant kill attacks don't work on supernatural creatures, for example. Otherworldly entities break the rules of the game, which is quite fitting.

Another example is character generation, which in DG is based on packages with defined skill values, so there's none of the fiddly points spending of CoC; I quite like the fiddly points spending bit of character generation but I understand that not everyone agrees and I acknowledge that dumping it makes the process faster and smoother, although again there's a hint of blandness to it.

In general, most of the changes DG makes are in a similar vein but there are a couple of occasions where the game wanders off in the opposite direction; for example, the mechanics for acquiring equipment go on for nine pages complete with little coloured icons that are used only for this subsystem. I can see why the rules exist -- the designers want to model agents pulling in favours or diverting funds and resources, and so on; good thematic secret agenty type stuff -- but when most of the game seems to be aiming for simplicity, if not elegance, it's jarring to slam into a big steaming block of rules for buying a shotgun.

There are a few other odd decisions in there too; the examples of sanity loss include "being fired from one's job", which, yes, is stressful and can indeed have an effect on someone's mental health, but it's a bit weird to see that in a game of Lovecraftian horror, and with the same mechanical significance as "find a corpse". Then there's DG's replacement for the Cthulhu Mythos skill, which works in the same exact way as the original, but is called "Unnatural", a beige word that looks like a placeholder waiting for a more evocative term that never came.

It's not all amending and fixing what came before; DG adds a formal Pendragon-like home phase, in which agents can step away from the current mission and heal, rest both body and mind, research, train, or interact with the game's other main addition, the agents' bonds. These are people or organisations that are important to the character, and can help mitigate sanity loss, but at a cost; they are similar in function to pillars of sanity, one of the better ideas from Trail of Cthulhu. There is a bit of fiddliness and rules-for-the-sake-of-rules in the way bonds and sanity interact, but on the whole these are welcome additions to the game, and I'm a big fan of formal downtime mechanics in rpgs, so it's good to see them in DG.

All in all, I'm quite impressed by DGAH; I do miss some of the eldritch spikiness of CoC, and DG does lack personality, but perhaps that's fitting in a game about anonymous government agents. It seems to be a good game -- although bear in mind my two qualifications above -- but I can't recommend it for the simple reason that I don't think it's good value for money.

The cover price is $39.99 but for that you don't get a complete game; I have no idea how much the inevitable Handler's Handbook will be, but I suspect it will be a similar cost, if not more. What's worse is that DGAH feels padded; it's overwritten and the text size is huge. The book could be two-thirds of its current size without sacrificing anything important and it sort of looks like the only reason it's not is to justify the cover price. For all its faults, CoC7 is only $4 more expensive and you get a complete game, with rules, setting stuff, game-master guidance, and even a couple of adventures.

There is a quickstart pdf available that runs through the basic rules and has a much more sensible price of Pay What You Want. That, I recommend without reservation and, if you like it or you are swimming in piles of cash, then maybe get DGAH. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother.

Dare to Be Stupid

Here are some game ideas that are probably stupid ideas but I never claimed to be a genius.



D&D types: experience points are hit points

Dump hit points; instead, all damage is taken from experience points, and if you lose enough experience points you can also lose levels. For example, a third level Lamentations of the Flame Princess fighter who drops to 3999 experience points becomes a second level fighter. There is no healing. To recover from your injuries, you have to go out and get more experience points.

To avoid starting with characters that are already dead, consider starting at second level, or maybe rolling hit points as normal to determine starting experience.

Call of Cthulhu: professions instead of skills

In the latter half of 2016 I was running a Dracula Dossier game using a variant of the Call of Cthulhu rules, and over the past couple of weeks I've been playing in a Call of Cthulhu game using a variant of the newish Delta Green rules; in both games we have put together a bespoke skill list rather than using the default skills, and that got me thinking about simplifying the process. Then I thought about how skills in 13th Age and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay work, about the weird random skills CoC non-player-characters sometimes get, and all of that led me to this.

All characters start with 55 SAN and 11 hit points. They then get 120 build points to spend on professions, hobbies, hit points, and Sanity. Professions are loose descriptions of what the character does, but not too loose; "professor of archaeology" is good, but "academic" is rubbish. Instead of having a list of skills, someone with "professor of archaeology" can do things that a professor of archaeology could do; they'll be good at history and geography, they probably know a bit about digging holes, and may know a bit about architecture and languages, but they are probably not going to know how to fly an F-15 Eagle.

That's what hobbies are for. These aren't the character's main profession but side interests, or previous jobs, and work in the same way. "Former soldier" is as valid as "member of snooker club" or "bakes on weekends".

There's going to be a bit of back-and-forth between player and GM about what is reasonable for a character to be able to do, but as long as everyone is sensible it should be fine.

I suggest limiting the main profession to a maximum of 80, and single hobbies to a maximum of 40. Starting SAN can be increased to a maximum of 99 by spending points at a one-to-one rate, and hit points can be increased to a maximum of 18 by exchanging five build points per hit point. If you want, you can sacrifice SAN and hit points, at the same rate, to gain build points; minimums are 3 hit points and 5 SAN.

(I did consider dropping hit points and SAN and having all damage -- physical or psychological -- apply to the character's hobby or profession scores, but perhaps that's a bit too abstract.)

Any: don't roll to hit, go straight to damage

I thought of this in terms of D&D type games but it could work with any game in which there are separate die rolls for hitting and damage. Instead of rolling to hit, just roll damage. Simple. It does mean that every attack hits but it also eliminates the disappointing naffness of rolling a 19 to hit then rolling 2 damage.

It could penalise some characters in some systems; for example, a fighter in LotFP loses one of their key advantages, the increase in attack bonus. If that sort of thing poses a problem, perhaps add the attack bonus to the damage roll, although that may be too much of an overcompensation in some systems.

---

Now I've put those stupid ideas into words they will perhaps exit my brain and leave space for something more useful. I haven't tested any of them-- I probably wouldn't have published them if I had -- so instead I release them to wreak havoc on someone else's game. Sorry.

B2 or Not B2?

I have some friends up in That London. I have known them for years; we all met at university and we stayed quite close even after my life went wonky for about a decade. They are good friends and I always have a space on their floor when I visit.

They live in one of the trendy parts of the glittering capital, but they are also a bit geeky, and as geek culture has become a bit trendy in recent years, it was perhaps inevitable that they would get sucked into gaming somehow. It was board games that got them; of course they have Cards Against Humanity, but they also have Settlers of Catan and Small World, and the mighty King of Tokyo, because everyone should own a copy of King of Tokyo.

I've been to Draughts with them a couple of times and taken the opportunity to push other games on them; it's only a matter of time before one of them gets Lords of Waterdeep. I feel no shame; games are great.

Now and then they've asked about role-playing games, and the subject came up again the other day as we tried to play Dark Souls over Google Hangouts. Don't ask.

One of my friends grew up reading Dragonlance novels but had never played Dungeons and Dragons; another -- her husband -- loves Baldur's Gate and Dark Souls and knows that these games are based on a common source; the third -- his childhood best friend -- has been playing Fiasco with another group of friends, but I don't think they are aware of the larger family tree of which that game is a branch.

They are all three primed and ready, even if they don't know it. Dragonlance Friend even has a copy of Labyrinth Lord that I bought for her a few years ago alongside Dragons of Despair; in hindsight not one of my better gift ideas.

One day soon, then, I will run a role-playing game for them. It will probably be some form of D&D, because it seems appropriate to start at the beginning -- although a big part of me wants to run Call of Cthulhu and "The Haunting" -- and if so, it will probably be Lamentations of the Flame Princess, because it's my favourite simple version of the game.

Ah, but what do I run for them? I do love LotFP, but I think I should start them with something more traditional, rather than Kult in the seventeenth century. You can't get more traditional than Keep on the Borderlands, but I'm after something that can be played to a decent conclusion in one afternoon or evening. I also know that lots of player-character deaths is traditional, but I'm also after something that they have a reasonable chance of completing without getting disgruntled. I want them to come back for more!

This is where my own experience isn't useful. I started with Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu, and played almost everything other than D&D -- and Vampire; to this day I have not played any proper White Wolf games -- so I don't have the background to know what's a good adventure for beginners.

It's over to you, internet. Is there a good starting D&Dish adventure out there, one I can unleash on absolute beginners, albeit beginners with some familiarity with the general idea of role-playing games?

The Stars Are Right(ish)

It's here!

It is three years late but it's here, and it's a pretty book, perhaps the fanciest English-language rulebook Call of Cthulhu has had in its lifetime. The new Chaosium has done a wonderful job of getting the new edition released after the long and painful delays caused -- or at least mismanaged -- by the old Chaosium. It's a great achievement, it will bring much good karma Chaosium's way, and I am certain that this edition will be popular with the fans.

But I won't be playing it.

Call of Cthulhu is my favourite role-playing game -- I may have mentioned that before -- and one of the things I love about it is its simplicity. It's a light ruleset and the Chaosium percentile system is quite intuitive so there's little in the way of calculation involved at the table.

My preferred edition -- fifth, from 1993 -- has 42 pages of rules. There are lots of pages of mind-warping spells, eldritch abominations, and blasphemous tomes, but all the actual game mechanics fit into those 42 pages.

The new edition covers the same ground in 130 pages, 16 of which are for resolving that most Lovecraftian of events: the car chase. There are two flowcharts used for combat resolution.

Call of Cthulhu is an old game and it hasn't changed much over the years, so it was getting a bit creaky and needed cleaning up; I don't think anyone would deny that, but the way it's been done in this new edition has turned it into a game that is not for me.

This isn't a review or even a recommendation; it's more of an explanation why, when I talk about Call of Cthulhu in the future, it won't be the seventh edition. I wish everyone involved all sorts of success, but I will be sticking to my clunky yet reliable 1993 copy.

I suppose that makes me a grognard!

The Infantry Squad of Extraordinary Gentlemen

One thing I like to do with my Sunday mornings is catch up with the latest content on Hardcore Gaming 101. I like the general structure of their historical approach and it's always interesting to see comparisons between the various versions of older games, from a time when it was possible that the same title could be quite different depending on what system was running it.

The site's writing isn't always that good, alas, and the way that most of the contributors are focussed so much on the US and Japanese markets that they are dismissive of the European gaming scene can be both sad -- almost everything is rubbish in comparison to the blessed NES -- and funny; the idea of using a joystick to play a game and pushing up to jump seems to drive some writers into paroxysms of confusion and fury for some reason.

Flaws aside the site is doing something no one else is and it's easy to get lost for hours reading about old games, then following links to other articles, then following even more links to even more articles, and oh look, it's three in the morning and you still have eight tabs open. Oops.

Even though the site has a nostalgic focus, there have been four decades or so of computer gaming and no one person has played everything so it's not difficult to discover something new on the site; for example, having never owned any of the erratically-numbered X-Boxes I would never have found out about the 360-exclusive Operation Darkness had I not been reading the site over breakfast.

It's a turn-based tactical combat game -- they tend to be called "tactical rpgs", probably because of the influence over the genre of Final Fantasy Tactics, but I think they're closer to football management sims -- set during an alternative World War II in which immortal werewolves fight for the Allies against the Axis forces and the vampire cult that aids them.

That would be enough for some developers, and I'm sure you could get a good game out of that, but it wasn't enough for Success Corporation, oh no. The rag-tag group of misfits put under the player's control in this game not only contains werewolves but also features pyrokinetic young women, Frankenstein's monster, Abraham Van Helsing's grand-daughter, a direct descendant of Sir Lancelot, Jack the Ripper Mêlée Specialist, and Herbert West, who is the team's field medic.

I don't even care what the game is like; the bonkers audacity of putting that cast in that setting is enough to win me over. In the past few days I've been planning a follow-up to the World War Cthulhu game I ran earlier in the year and I've also been thinking of running Pelgrane Press' upcoming Dracula Dossier at some point; as of this morning I'm now thinking of mixing the two together to see what happens.

Why I Gave My Soul to Cthulhu

I have posted about why Call of Cthulhu is my favourite role-playing game before but Charles’ project over at Dyvers has given me the opportunity to go into a bit more detail about why it is so ace and why everyone should give it a try.

Call of Cthulhu was an instant hit with my original gaming group. We played a lot of games back then, even if a lot of them were one-offs, but the most played were Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu. The group formed around Shadowrun and our gamemaster Tim was a keen fan of the game, but aside from a couple of somewhat unsuccessful sessions I ran, Tim was also the only member of the group who had the enthusiasm to run it; the rest of us were content to play. By contrast Call of Cthulhu spread through our group like gonorrhoea in university freshers’ week. Every one of us tried running it at least once, often for multiple sessions, and this was a bunch of stinky teenagers who had never heard of HP Lovecraft. Well, I had but that’s because my mother had a vast horror library and I remembered the name from that, although I’d not read the books on which the name appeared.

I think that novelty was a big part of the game’s success in winning us over. Even then the game stood out as different and unknown. We’d been raised on Fighting Fantasy and Games Workshop and Knightmare so we knew about orcs and dragons and death traps and dungeons, everyone had seen Star Wars, and enough of us had seen enough dodgy 90’s anime to work out how cyberpunk was supposed to feel, but Call of Cthulhu was new. It was about normal people facing the supernatural, but not the vampires and werewolves of classic horror, rather the foes were strange unknowable things from beyond the stars that owed more to science fiction than the Gothic tradition.

It is a game with quite a different feel to almost anything else. Player-characters in Call of Cthulhu are not superheroes or barbarian kings or powerful wizards -- although the latter is a possible but probably unwanted character development -- but ordinary people. You do sometimes get the odd soldier or police officer but for the most part Call of Cthulhu characters are historians, doctors, priests, or librarians. Their skills are based on knowledge and observation rather than shooting or stabbing, and indeed shooting or stabbing is often the worst thing to do in the game, unless it’s shooting or stabbing another member of the party because they’ve gone insane and are coming at your character with a rusty claw hammer, their knuckles bloody, their eyes wild, and their lips flecked with foamy spittle.

Er...

With this emphasis on more cerebral skills the tone and pace of the game is different to others. The obstacles in the game are not for the most part physical -- although there are plenty of opportunities for climbing walls, picking locks, and, perhaps most of all, hiding -- but mental and social. It’s a game of investigation, of talking to the right people, of looking in the right places, and of knowing the right facts, and the payoff to all this -- the game’s equivalent of the treasure room or boss fight -- is the revelation of why uncle Oswald disappeared, or why farmer Dougal’s cattle are unwell, and so on, and that revelation is often one that is inimical to the player-characters.

There is something of a contradiction inherent in the game; it’s all about investigation, but it could be argued that the player-characters are often better off being unsuccessful in their investigations. I think this tension -- although it emulates the source material well -- is what gives Call of Cthulhu a reputation as a game in which it’s expected for characters to die or go mad, and I have seen that conception mutate into an assumption that the game is best played in a sort of humorous Paranoia way, with everyone trying to kill the player-characters off in the most gruesome way possible. I’m not some boring purist who thinks that such an approach damages the game’s stature and that it should only be approached in a serious and literary manner; it’s a valid way of playing, I’ve played it this way, and it’s great fun, but it’s not the only way to play.

For me Call of Cthulhu is about ultimate heroism. The characters are ordinary people, often academics, and are about as unsuited as possible to oppose the actions of alien deities and their servants, actions that are often apocalyptic in scope, and yet with all that stacked against them, they still try. If you were a glass half empty sort -- as I suspect Lovecraft himself was -- then this can seem like an exercise in futility and nihilism; why waste time and energy fighting a fight that cannot be won? I don’t see it that way; perhaps it is inevitable that the stars will become right and humanity will be obliterated either by itself or gribbly space gods, but in this place and in this time the player-characters can still save lives and keep the darkness at bay for one more day, even if they give their lives doing so. It’s a game in which every session can be a heroic last stand and there’s something great about that.

That’s not to say that it’s not dark. It’s the only role-playing game in which I’ve felt fear; my friend Paul wrote an adventure about a witch and towards the end as she advanced down a tunnel towards our characters, scraping a knife along the stone wall and hissing, with our rifle and shotgun blasts bouncing off her withered flesh, I must admit that I started to feel real panic. Paul’s description of what the witch did to our characters with that knife stayed with us for weeks after and made us shudder every time we remembered it. Although maybe that was just Paul. He’s an archaeologist now; I like to think his career choice was inspired by Call of Cthulhu.

It’s also the only game in which I’ve caused fear at the table. I still have fond memories of the players of my second and current group looking at me in shock and dread when I announced that they were being assaulted not by a tentacled horror from beyond the stars but a deranged human being with a fire axe. I’m sure it’s possible to scare players in any game but I have only ever seen it happen in Call of Cthulhu. Perhaps it’s because player-characters are so fragile; a Call of Cthulhu investigator doesn’t get stronger like a Dungeons & Dragons character does -- unless it’s the d20 version from 2001 but we don’t talk about that -- so that first level feel, that sense that any wrong step could spell the end for the character, never goes away. Games like RuneQuest or Stormbringer, though they share the same basic ruleset as Call of Cthulhu, allow characters to rise in power and strength; even Traveller, a game with no advancement mechanism as such, gives characters opportunities to gather power through accumulation of money, technology, and influence.

In Call of Cthulhu, money, technology, and influence are of little use against eldritch forces, and increasing one’s Photography skill from 67% to 72% will be of no use when a strange dog-human hybrid thing is chewing off the top of Professor Woodman’s skull. Investigators can arm themselves with mystical weapons and arcane spells, but all have significant drawbacks, and those drawbacks create interesting decision points in the game; casting Bulwark Against the Denizens of the Outer Dark may save your life, but if it fries your brain and leaves you insane, is it worth the cost?

I say yes, because if nothing else, it’s fun. It probably makes me a horrible person but one of the most fun aspects of the game for me is the collection of mental and physical injuries and disorders the player-characters pick up over the course of a campaign; if Father Bowden’s encounter with deep ones in a previous investigation has left him with a phobia of large bodies of water and the next adventure is set on the shores of a Norwegian lake, then that’s a recipe for a great evening of gaming. What Call of Cthulhu characters lack in +1 swords, gold pieces, and strongholds, they make up for with missing limbs and phobias; I know I sort of dismissed the suicidal mode of play above but even in more serious games there’s some pride to be had in a long list of ailments on one’s character sheet.

Call of Cthulhu is based on Chaosium’s d100 system in which most tests are a roll of percentile dice against a simple target number; if your Chemistry skill is 65% then you need to roll 65 or less on a d100 to identify the mysterious compound you just found. There are a few more wrinkles to the system -- although not many, as it’s a simplified version of the original d100 system as seen in RuneQuest and elsewhere -- but that’s more or less it; the complete rules of the game fit into 48 pages in my preferred edition and everything else is background or GM advice, making it one of the most coherent and comprehensive single-volume role-playing games I’ve seen. It is a simple game and with simplicity comes flexibility, so that it is not too difficult to take the game out of the assumed 1920’s setting and plonk it somewhere else.

The 1890’s and 1990’s -- or the modern day -- have been supported as core settings in most editions, but the only real differences in the game’s rules are that each era presents a different set of player-character skills and a different equipment list; this makes adaptation to any location or era a simple matter of doing a few minutes of research. There are few role-playing systems that are so flexible and easy to adapt.

At the time of writing I have just finished running a game in which my players are agents of the Special Operations Executive running about in Vichy France, but I have in the past run a campaign in which they’ve been supernatural investigators in modern Britain, as well as a sprawling pan-European campaign set in the classic 1920’s era. I have played in countless games, but one recent favourite has been Cthulhu Invictus, because who doesn’t want to play a Roman centurion battling the minions of the Mythos? Perhaps one day I’ll finish putting together my notes on a swinging 60’s superspies version of the game; I’m thinking it may be called The Shadow Over Portmeirion.

That campaign idea has been bubbling along since about 2002 but I will come back to it because I keep coming back to Call of Cthulhu, twenty years after I was introduced to it. No other game has held my interest and attention like Call of Cthulhu; in comparison I haven’t played Shadowrun in fifteen years, sorry Tim. The game is part of me now; I can run it almost without looking at the rules, and when I write adventures for other games, they always seem to be Call of Cthulhu investigations in disguise. It’s my favourite role-playing game by far, and I hope I’ve been able to convey at least some of what thrills and excites me about it, even two decades after my first investigator walked through the front door of that haunted house in Boston.

At some point soon this paragraph right here, the one you're reading right now, will disappear and in its place will be a list of links to other blogs that have taken part in the project. Look out for it!

Mission Accomplished. Ish

Since everything had gone wrong, the agents of the Special Operations Executive decided to have one last go at finding the missing Lionel Malo before they attempted to escape Vichy France. They knew that the German occultist had been in the warren of caves beneath the valley and they also knew of an entrance to those caves on the land of the Toulon family; the agents did not have a good relationship with the Toulons and also suspected them of being cultists, so they didn't ask for permission and instead nipped over a wall towards the back of the orchard.

Mike McVeigh took the lead and peered into the dusk, searching for the hidden cave entrance he'd found the day before, with the rest of the agents following close behind, some less sneaky than others; Pierre-Yves Bertrand and Tidelina both blundered through the undergrowth but no one was alerted, or so it seemed.

McVeigh found the door and using some bolt cutters -- did they have bolt cutters in 1941? -- he'd borrowed from the Decharette mansion he broke through the chain holding the door closed. Before the group could enter the caves there was a howl from the trees behind them and a furry, hoofed figure leaped at McVeigh.

It looked half-human and half-goat, like the faun of classical myth, but with an alien, malevolent face, and the sight of it shook the agents' resolve; most held their ground but Fergus O'Brien's mind snapped and he started to howl and wail in response to the creature's own roars, while firing his rifle close to Kirby Tinkerton's ear and deafening the scientist. Oops.

Despite the panic -- caused more by O'Brien than the faun -- the agents focussed gunfire on the beast and after a worrying number of shots it fell to the ground. McVeigh beheaded the thing while the rest of the group attempted to calm the rifle-wielding O'Brien, so they were all occupied when another two of the horned monsters erupted from the bushes.

Tinkerton attempted to escape up a tree but lost his footing and fell into the path of a rampaging faun, but luck was on his side as the thing missed and ran head first into the trunk of the tree, stunning itself. Meanwhile McVeigh's patience had worn thin and he blasted the other faun with his MP 40; he emptied a third of a clip into the creature and converted it into a cloud of bloody chunks.

It was around this time that the agents decided that the Malo rescue mission was beyond their capabilities and they legged it; Tinkerton was the last to scramble across the wall and looking back, he saw dark shapes moving amongst the trees in pursuit. As the agents sprinted away from the orchard they almost ran into a German Kübelwagen coming the other way, no doubt to investigate the gunfire at the Toulon place; a few minutes later they heard bursts of automatic fire coming from the orchard and more than one of the agents expressed the view that the Nazis and the terrible goat things deserved each other.

They scrambled back to where they had concealed the Gestapo Kübelwagen and made ready to leave. While the others planned the escape route, McVeigh wandered off into the deeper woods and, once he'd made sure he was alone, he sang the song he'd been taught by the mysterious dapper chap from his dreams; McVeigh felt his vitality drain away, and he had a clear sense that something was coming to that spot, but there was no other immediate effect. Disappointed, he returned to the group.

They decided that crossing the demarcation line into occupied France and heading for a coastal town was too risky, so instead chose to drive the Kübelwagen south, over the Pyrenees and into neutral Spain; aside from a random German checkpoint and some rough terrain they made the trip intact and arrived in Madrid many days later, battered and exhausted. There the agents made contact with the SOE and arranged passage back to London.

Their superior -- codenamed N, which isn't suspicious at all -- was not pleased with the group's lack of success in either of its missions but acknowledged that it could have been worse, and they did at least have a faun's severed head to show for it. They were soon packed off to a secure location for debriefing and -- in O'Brien's case -- intensive psychoanalysis.

And that was that! Although one could argue that the players didn't do too well everyone seemed to have fun; we're going to take a break for a few weeks as various members of the group disappear for the summer, but World War Cthulhu has been enough of a hit that there will be at least one more mission for the agents of the SOE in the autumn.

I hear Norway is beautiful in September.