RPGaDay 2024: Day 12: RPG with Well Supported Campaigns

Day Twelve: RPG with well supported campaigns

I'm assuming here that we're talking about games where the publisher also produces good quality campaign material to support the role playing game.

I'd like to say Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons. After all, every year WotC bring out a hefty hardback campaign. These have provided additional details for the default world of The Forgotten Realms and have often provided additional rules and systems to cover specific environments or styles of play. Examples include Rime of the Frostmaiden (sandbox), Storm King's Thunder (point crawl) and Tomb of Annihilation (jungle set hexcrawl).

Yes, I'd like to say D&D 5E, but sadly, the recent campaigns just don't measure up*.

They all contain great moments, but are often padded out with fairly ordinary stuff. They can also suffer from awful railroading; not a good lesson for the GM looking for guidance on designing their own campaign.

You'd have to go back to the original Dragonlance series to find a reasonable example of a published D&D campaign, and that never quite worked for me (its me, not Dragonlance, but I found it too 'soap-opera-ish for my liking, and it also suffers from railroading).

So instead I'm going for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu (again).  Particularly the classic Masks of Nyarlathotep.  

This campaign has been around since 1984.  I remember owning it when it was a box with seperate booklets for each chapter.  I've still got the 1996 version, but not the recent mega version, nor, sadly, the props package that comes with it.

It's considered the exemplar of a roleplaying campaign (though Eternal Lies, apparently, comes close) because it offers a huge degree of freedom in which order the chapters are handled beyond the first.  There is a reasonable amount of redundancy in the clues (almost the Three Clue Rule at work) and it is truly world-spanning.  

If you want to know more, check out the Wikipedia page.  

If you are a Call of Cthulhu player and you've never played in it, (and you've got many months of game time available), badger your Keeper to run it for you, or better still, take up the revered mantle of Keeper of Arcane Knowledge yourself and run it for a bunch of victims mates.

I will warn you though, that, written in the 80s, some of the attitudes seem outdated now (rather like some of HPLs).  

Good Keepers should be able to overcome that though, and it's well worth the effort.

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*Honourable mention though to the BECMI Wrath of the Immortals campaign.  Written as a swan song for the BECMI version of Mystara before everything went second edition, this was more a series of set pieces that were the framework of a far ranging campaign.  There are some great moments in it, and I tangentially used some of them in my 4E campaign, but there are too many gaps that require many levels of adventuring to fill in to properly class as a full campaign.

RPGaDAY: Day 11: RPG with well supported one-shots

Day Eleven: RPG with well supported one-shots 

For me, this has to be Call of Cthulhu. 

Chaosium have produced many one shots over the years, as have other third parties (check out the Miskatonic University Monographs) and they are all of a high standard. Some, such as Machine Tractor Station Kharkov - 37 or The Derelict are rightly considered classics. 

While such one-shots can be used as the start of a campaign, the personalities of the pre-generated characters is usually such as to preclude this. There's also a built in lethality that isn't necessarily present in other investigations.

Nevertheless, I've heard of two separate campaigns set in Soviet era Russia that began with Machine Tractor Station Kharkov - 37 (quite how, given the extreme deadliness of the main nasty, baffles me, like when I hear players describe their investigators going on to finish Masks of Nyarlathotep after completing Shadows in Yog-Sothoth).

It's partly the nature of horror roleplaying games that character longevity is a shaky concept. One-shots don't have to consider life beyond the scenario, which in turn allows for more interesting, and possibly self destructive, personalities. Well thought out pre-generated characters will spark off each other and provide lots of opportunities for entertaining roleplay*.

One-shots are a great way to introduce new players to RPGs. I've ended up running several campaigns that began with one-shots, though I've deliberately designed them with the possibility of following scenarios. rather than finishing them all with a bang.

Honourable mention goes to Savage Worlds. PEG have produced Quick start packs for every edition in many different worlds. Indeed, a good half of my Savage Worlds gaming has been with these.

If you've dismissed one-shots as too light weight, or lacking long term engagement, give them a go. Quick start rules packages are often a great way to find them, and give you a chance to try a new system as well.

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*A quick caution. Sometimes the personalities can be a bit too much.

My most unpleasant RPG experience was running a one-shot. One player took some of their characters' personality notes as an excuse to verbally abuse other players. Yes, they'd gone well beyond character.

This was definitely not the fault of the one-shot, and the player was ejected from the group in short order. I was running the game for all comers at a FLGS, nevertheless, I was aware of this particular player, and I should have given them a different character at the least.

Prop Progress?

So how did 'prop May' go?
Pretty well. I haven't posted much because most of the props were printouts from the adventure or pictures from the internet. Very useful for player immersion, but not very interesting to show here.

Moving on; New month, New project.

As I mentioned previously I went to the Mantic open day, there I picked up a pathfinder set for the new version of Deadzone. It's not the full retail box load (and I'm still waiting for my kickstarter stuff), but is great for running demos.
I've been planning the terrain and looking through my old DZ stuff putting together a few 100 points forces.

Last night we managed two consecutive games using my stuff alongside T'OtherOne's stuff (mine is teh unpainted grey stuff in the foreground, his is the rather excellent yellow stuff behind; more about it on his blog, link below).

We all had fun and got both games done in around two hours. No surprise then that June looks like Deadzone month.

Props

As I mentioned, I will be running A Time to Harvest so I have been thinking of props to add that little extra to the game.
The campaign starts with the investigators on a university field trip, so I thought note books would be appropriate. Besides, note taking is an important part of Call of Cthulhu.
Propnomicon, an excellent source of ideas and techniques, has designed several Miskatonic University note books, so I adapted his design and simply stuck it onto an A6 note pad. I couldn't find any reasonable pads that weren't spiral bound, unfortunately, but I think it does the job.

Here's another prop I made for a Delta Green game earlier this year.  It's a ritual stone found on an archaeological site in Orkney, actually made from a piece of slate picked up in a local car-park, engraved, and a leather thong tied round it.  The thong is supposed to look new.

May Madness

In an attempt to continue theming the month I was wondering what May will be.  I had hoped to have received my Deadzone Infestation set by now, that would have made it May; the month of Mantic.
However there has been a delay (with my stuff, not the kickstarter generally) so that didn't work, even though it's the Mantic Spring Open day on Saturday.

I might drag out my Kingdoms of Men army and get them more complete now I have the spears and pikes to finish a couple of units.  That would also help me sort out what to sell, as I have far more than I will ever need.  I must also get some more stuff finished for both my Kings of War orcs and goblins.

I have been painting more Bones undead, mostly for roleplaying (and The Walking Dead), nothing too exciting; you've seen the process by now.

But I start running A Time To Harvest, Chaosium's organised play adventure for Call of Cthulhu on Thursday.

I'll be making some extra props to go with it, and reading the new rulebooks as well, so May will have to be the Month of Mythos Madness.

7th Ed - First Thoughts

Obviously I haven't read everything yet, but here are my initial thoughts about the new 7th Edition Call of Cthulhu.

Firstly a bit of background.  I have played Call of Cthulhu since the second edition was released.  I remember my friend Dave sending letters to me at uni describing his enjoyment of the game (first ed) and playing through the classic Shadows of Yog-Sothoth campaign.
The release of 2nd ed coincided with my finals and I rushed down to Games Gallery in Newcastle after my last exam and bought the boxed set.  It was our summer game that year, and the enjoyment lasted many years afterwards.

I have, or had, every edition since, and was hooked immediately I heard about the kickstarter for the seventh edition.  A lot has been written about the reasons behind the delays, but after nearly three years from the campaign closing, is it worth it?

Well, yes.  The production values alone make the books a great piece of work.  Al last we have a rulebook the equal of any recently published RPG.  The artwork is stunning, and the use of photographs throughout adds to the feel of the book.

The rules themselves have some changes.  All scores are now expressed as percentages, and there has been some tightening up of skills (e.g. Brawl replaces the various different hand to hand skills like punch, kick etc.).  There is a lot more emphasis on the character's background; who is important to them and what events or places are special.  To my mind this mirrors the inclusion of the various ideals, flaws and bonds in 5th edition D&D or the bonds in the new Delta Green RPG, and represents a shift in the hobby towards rounder character development supported within the rules themselves.
Perhaps the biggest omission to old hands is the resistance table; a staple of the BRP series.  Don't worry, there is still a mechanism for opposed rolls, it just seems odd to not have the table.
I am really looking forward to trying out the new rules once the current Delta Green/Section op is over and I will be running A Time To Harvest, Chaosium's organised play campaign at my FLGS. More on that, with details of any props I make, later.

TLDR:  its great - buy it.

Ia, the Mystery is Solved

I got the mystery parcel and it turned out to be teh long awaited 7th Edition Call of Cthulhu kickstarter stuff.

A box full of role playing goodness

The main books, just some of the contents.

All in all I got a nice slipcase containing the Keeper's rulebook, the Investigator's handbook and the Keeper's screen (itself containing a 96 page book of two new investigations, plus maps for the main rulebook's adventures and some lovely maps of Arkham and New England) plus Nameless Horrors, a six adventure supplement and Sandy Peterson's Guide to Creatures of the Mythos.

It's going to take me a long time to digest this lot, though I have browsed through my PDFs already, so I have some idea what to expect.

I have a bit of work to do finishing a prop for tonight's D&D, but them I think a bit of reading is in order.

A Question of Scale

Today I finally found some of my old Call of Cthulhu miniatures.  I bought quite a few of these old Grenadier sculpts back in the 80's, though in the end we tended to use the silhouettes provided in the old boxed set.  I even expanded my collection with some of the Citadel Gothic Horror range.

Looking at them they are nice sculpts.  Clean detail, especially with the Grenadier ones, the Citadel are less fine, with a realistic look that, for me, fits the subject matter.  I also have some of the creatures, but they haven't surfaced yet.  

Still, plenty to go at for building Threshold teams if and when I get round to Strange Aeons.

Then I put them next to the exorcist I painted for SA.

Oh Dear.

Well I suppose it has been something like 30 years, but even so.  The exorcist is on the short side next to some of my Reaper Bones too.

I can just about/nearly get away with this, after all, people are different heights.  But I am still a bit disappointed that the scales are not a little closer.

Happy GM's Day

GM's Day?

For reasons that escape me 4th March is International GM's Day.

Lots of manufacturers have sales on sites like RPG Now  an excellent chance to stock up on games related stuff at a discount.  As an example Heroic Maps and Fat Dragon both have a hefty chunk off their titles.
So if your a GM, have fun, players too, and take a bit of time to remember that the co-operative story telling we all enjoy is pretty remarkable.

As a bonus Chaosium have released a free Call of Cthulhu solo scenario.  Enjoy