The Lightless Beacon

As part of my plan to run other people’s RPG adventures, I thought I’d give Call of Cthulhu’s The Lightless Beacon a spin. It’s free on Roll20, which also means I get to practice my Roll20 GMing skills. And because I don’t have a copy of the Call of Cthulhu rules, I used Cthulhu Dark.

Spoilers ahoy!

The Lightless Beacon

The Lightless Beacon is an introductory adventure written by Leigh Carr with Lynne Hardy: the ship the investigators are travelling on is wrecked and the investigators must make their way to the nearest island (and lighthouse), which has its own difficulties (mainly deep ones).

The game is likely to end up with a furious battle at the top of the lighthouse, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in most games, but less than ideal for Cthulhu Dark.

Timings for The Lightless Beacon suggest that it will be over in an hour, with four players. While it’s extremely short, I suspect my players will drag it out longer than that. But we’ll see.

Cthulhu Dark

Cthulhu Dark is Graham Walmsley’s excellent rules-light Cthulhu system. The rules cover two sides of A4, and I have the gorgeous hardback that Graham produced. I’ve written about it previously, and I find it simpler to use than traditional Call of Cthulhu. There are some complications in using Cthulhu Dark, though, that means I can’t quite run The Lightless Beacon exactly as written.

Doomed: In Cthulhu Dark, the investigators are doomed. They’re not expected to triumph. So this will not end well for my investigators—so I can ignore any temptation to have the investigators win.

No combat: Cthulhu Dark has no combat rules. If the investigators fight a supernatural menace, they lose. They can flee, or hide. But they can’t fight. So that rules out a climactic battle at the top of the lighthouse.

Final horror: In the scenario construction section, Cthulhu Dark talks about the final horror, that moment at the end of the adventure when the investigators finally understand the full ghastliness of what’s going on.

However, The Lightless Beacon doesn’t have a final horror—it’s just some monsters trying to recover their gold. So I changed the scenario slightly, and corrupted the deep one gold, making the gold itself evil. The deep ones turn their gold into jewellery and sell it to hapless victims who, upon buying it, become corrupted themselves (and maybe even prompting ‘the change’). I’m writing this before we play, and with luck the adventure will end with the investigators barricaded at the top of the lighthouse, monsters pounding at the door, and with one of them looking at her wedding ring, not knowing if it is tainted or not. Fade to black.

You can download the basic Cthulhu Dark rules for free here.

My thoughts on reading The Lightless Beacon

Roll20 doesn’t make it easy to use pre-written adventures. The text is contained in Roll20’s handouts, which I copied into Word for easy reading. I didn’t copy everything, and I still ended up with 6000 words of text…

So my first sense of The Lightless Beacon, a one-hour adventure is that it’s overwritten. By a long way. I appreciate that it’s aimed at newcomers to Call of Cthulhu, but I’m sure even newcomers would appreciate clear, concise writing.

Hard to use in play: This makes The Lightless Beacon hard to run in play—unless you’ve internalised everything (and why would you for a one-hour game?). Worse, the text doesn’t include the map cross-referencing, making it harder to use.

(I am sure you could present The Lightless Beacon as little more than annotated maps. It’s just a one-page dungeon, it doesn’t need all that extraneous material.)

Everything is hidden behind a dice roll: I was surprised at how much was hidden by a dice roll, including the handouts. Luckily, with Cthulhu Dark, investigators always find the clues so I don’t have to worry about that. But it does seem very old-fashioned and I had thought that 7th edition Call of Cthulhu, given GUMSHOE’s presence, had moved beyond that. (And maybe it does, maybe there’s something in the rules about that.)

Younglings: The monsters in The Lightless Beacon are embarrassing. They’re called ‘younglings’ a word that I’ve only ever heard in association with Revenge of the Sith. I’m not sure why they don’t have a more sinister name—sea horrors, or larvae. Anything but younglings.

Sea horrors (I’m not calling them younglings) have poisonous dorsal spines they can fire at prey. That means they have to turn their backs to attack anything! I’m trying not to laugh at how ridiculous that sounds, so I will give them breakable poisonous teeth instead.

Firearms: Games are scarier when the characters are powerless, and removing guns helps to remove that power. As far as I can see, The Lightless Beacon has three guns: two on the island, and one that starts with the characters. I removed (or broke) two, leaving the one gun for the investigators to find in the innards of a dead NPC. (Guns aren’t any help in Cthulhu Dark anyway.)

Dynamic lighting - bah

Roll20 integration: The Lightless Beacon is the first Roll20-sourced adventure I’ve run, and while it integrates with Roll20, I’m not sure it makes the best of Roll20. Some thoughts:

• Dynamic lighting: The plan of the lighthouse has dynamic lighting enabled, which is nice but I found it irritating in play. Once the players had visited a room I wanted that room to remain visible, but with dynamic lighting once we moved the token away the room went dark. (So I prefer the old-fashioned “fog of war” approach.) My lack of familiarity with Roll20 probably didn’t help here—I’m sure there’s a simple way to sort this.
• GM layer: The maps all have a GM layer with a few notes, but not enough. There’s a bloody stain on the GM layer in the kitchen—I’m not sure why that isn’t on the background as the investigators see it. And I would have liked more notes on the GM layer to make it easy to run.
• Scenario text: As a I said before, the scenario text is all in handouts. A quick reference guide would have been very helpful (or just better annotated maps).
• Roll 20’s Jukebox: I thought I’d try out Roll20’s jukebox feature. I used the Dark and Stormy track for outside scenes, and Existential Dread for inside scenes. (Both are by Tabletop Audio and I found them by exploring the jukebox.)

Actual play

Rotate the map?

So I ran the adventure with my regular players, Jon and Terry. They took the antiques dealer and marine biologist. Once they were on the island, they immediately sought shelter from the rain and went into the lighthouse cottage, ignoring my suggestion to explore outside. (In hindsight, I wonder if rotating the map so the investigators encounter the outbuildings first would have been better.)

They made a perfunctory scout of the cottage (ignoring everything interesting), before climbing the lighthouse itself to see if they could fix the light and prevent more ships from foundering on the rocks. 

So of course they encountered the grisly scene long before I had hoped they would.

They replaced the lighthouse lamp, but then I had the power go out. So they went out into the dark where they found the dead body there, and a generator that had shorted out. By this point they were aware of strange fish-horrors and shapes in the night, and didn’t want to hang around trying to fix the generator. So they holed themselves up in the windowless pantry, barring the door against Things Outside banging and scratching to get in.

By daylight the things had gone, and we ended the game with post-credit scenes for each character. The antiques dealer took the gold coins and was later murdered for them, while the marine biologist took the fish-thing specimen back but was discredited and became a laughing stock. So happy endings all around!

Both Jon and Terry enjoyed the simplicity and bleakness of Cthulhu Dark. They ended up with 3 and 4 Insight respectively, and I think the rule that a fight always ends in the Investigator’s death worked in the games favour. They were hiding from the creatures not trying to fight them.

We took about an hour and 45 minutes to play—so a good time (and as I suspected, longer than the hour advertised).

So what have I learned?

Roll20’s Jukebox: There’s not that much about Roll20 that I can’t get elsewhere, but I did like the jukebox. I’m not sure if the players enjoyed it as much as I did, but it worked for me.

Roll20’s GM layer: The Lightless Beacon introduced me to the GM layer, it’s not something I used before (I’m a Roll20 newbie). I can see me using that in future. (And as I said, I think The Lightless Beacon could be run from a good annotated map.)

Cthulhu Dark: Cthulhu Dark was just right. While I didn’t get the final horror I had hoped for, we had no stumbling over clues or missing anything because of a failed roll. And when they rolled 6, I enjoyed the challenge of finding a supernatural insight for them.

Other people’s adventures: I’m enjoying running other people’s adventures more than I thought I would. I still have yet to find one that really works—a compelling adventure properly laid out and concisely written so I don’t have to do so much homework to run it.

So all in all, a success.

Levelling up?

I was listening to an old episode of the excellent Grognard Files recently (episode #3, all about Traveller) and Blythy, I think, criticised Traveller for its lack of an experience system. I think he said (I was driving at the time so my memory might be wrong) that for many players character advancement and levelling up was really important.

Really?

As I've said before, I cut my roleplaying teeth on Traveller. I was a science fiction fan, so I bought a science fiction RPG. I wasn't inspired by fantasy and so D&D passed me by. (I do remember buying the Monster Manual and enjoyed reading that - but I don't think I used it.)

From Traveller I went pretty much straight into Call of Cthulhu, and from there to GURPS.

None of those games have "levels". Yes, there's a little bit of skills improvement in Call of Cthulhu and I imagine there is some in GURPS (but I can't remember it now). But there's none in Traveller (well, there's a tiny bit, but the basic premise is that you don't improve).

The reason for this is that your characters in Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, and GURPS start out competent. They don't start out at "level 1" - they already know what they're doing.

So I never got into the whole "levelling up" thing.

One-shots not campaigns

There's another reason I never really got into levelling-up: I mostly played one-shots.

I can't ever remember playing in a long campaign, where levelling up was critical. I think the longest I've ever run a single game was for about 8-10 weeks when I ran Call of Cthulhu that ended up being several scenarios mashed together.

Even when we were starting out and I was at school, we still didn't play campaigns. I can't remember much about my games back then, but I'm pretty sure that we liked to mix things up. We all took turns GM-ing and we never settled down into a long campaign. Character advancement wasn't on our radar, and it wasn't something we missed.

So my experience of roleplaying has been playing and running one-shots. (And even a scenario that may take a few sessions to play though is still a one-shot. But in my head, Masks of Nyarlathotep is a very lengthy one-shot, so I might not be the best to judge.)

Really?

So for me, the play was (and is) the important thing.

And when I hear people like Blythy say that players like to level up and that character advancement is important to them, I have to wonder if that's really true.

Or is that just me?

Things I'm enjoying

A few things that I’ve enjoyed reading/playing/listening to/watching.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Following on from The Conception of Terror which I talked about last time, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a 10 part BBC podcast dramatization HP Lovecraft’s story of the same name. This time the story is told from the perspective of two investigators from the ‘Mystery Machine’ podcast looking into Charles Ward’s disappearance. You don't need to know the story as it's quite different from the the original. Anyway, it’s great fun and sounds exactly like a Call of Cthulhu investigation. All 10 episodes are currently available to download from the BBC - along with the start of the next one: The Whisperer in the Darkness...

Villagers 

Villagers is a really nice card game for 1-5 players (although there is a solo option, it’s much better played against others). Following the black death, you must re-populate your village with blacksmiths, carpenters, swineherds, miners and so on. It takes less than an hour to play, and is often a very tight game, with just a few points between first and second place. We’ve played it loads - one of my new favourites.

The Laundry Files

I’m re-reading Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series, starting with The Atrocity Archives and working my way through to the latest, The Labyrinth Index. I’ve finished fifth book (The Rhesus Chart) and am about to start The Annihilation Score, the one with the superpowers. It’s a delight and I’m really enjoying the series. I feel that I'm getting more from them now - I don't know if that's because I know what the future stories bring, or whether I'd simply forgotten so much. Anyway, highly recommended if you like your Lovecraftian horror mixed with workplace humour.

Running Cthulhu Dark

So finally, after writing about it back in 2017, I have finally run Cthulhu Dark. I ran In Whom We Trust on a wet Sunday afternoon in March at GoPlayLeeds (GPL), which wasn’t as atmospheric as I might hope.

In Whom We Trust was originally written for the Call of Cthulhu tournament at Convulsion ’96. Since then it has been played a number of times and suffered a variety of edits.
In Whom We Trust was also used as the RPGA tournament scenario at GenconUK 2001.

I last ran it at Continuum in Leicester in 2016 and wrote about that here.

For Cthulhu Dark, I made a few changes:

• I deliberately made the characters more powerless. So rather than white European explorer types, I made them unemployed locals.
• I changed the expedition from being a Miskatonic expedition to one from the University of São Paulo.
• I added detail in the form of themes, creeping horrors, and what rolling 5s and 6s would reveal.

But apart from that, the scenario is pretty much as it was before.

How did it play?

I had four players, Nathan, Kip, Gary and Daniel. Two experienced players, and two very new to roleplaying. (One had apparently seen roleplaying on Critical Role, found GPL on meetup and turned up to find out what was going on. My how times have changed.) Happily, I don’t think I put them off.

The game went well, if perhaps shorter than I expected. We finished in under two hours. (Although perhaps I should have remembered that, as looking back on that run in Continuum I think that finished in a couple of hours as well.)

Still, two hours is plenty (not every session has to be a five hour marathon) and it gave us lots of time to relax and chat afterwards.

As for Cthulhu Dark itself:

• Playing the game was pretty painless. It’s about the level of rules that I like - very simple, not very difficult. As this was the first time I’d played it there were a couple of moments where I had to look something up, most only now and again.
• Insight worked well - one player reached 6 insight just at the end, the others were on 4s and 5s.
• There was one survivor, which isn’t unusual for In Whom We Trust. It was nice and depressing. Nobody was upset about that - I pitched it as “Doomed investigators in the Amazon jungle,” so they knew what was coming.
• I totally forgot about the creeping horrors, which didn’t surprise me as I had a feeling that would happen. My plan to overcome that was that I repeated them on the worksheet at the end of the scenario. Only I never looked at it. I don’t use a GM’s screen, and maybe if I did I would have written them out so that I couldn’t miss them. (Still, given that we were playing in Geek Retreat, I’m not sure it would have made much difference.) 
• I found a few glitches in the scenario, which I’ve since sorted out.

Overall I’m enjoyed running Cthulhu Dark - it worked well with In Whom We Trust. I’ll probably use it again, if I’m running a horror game (which to be honest doesn’t happen much these days).

Try it for yourself

Here are the game files for In Whom We Trust for Cthulhu Dark.

Achtung! Cthulhu: The Fate Guides to the Secret War

I didn’t know much about the Achtung! Cthulhu line, but the artwork made me think that it was a pulp game of fighting the Cthulhu Mythos during WW2 in the spirit of Hellboy. So when the Fate book was recently on sale, I picked it up as Fate (or at least Fate Accelerated) is currently my system of choice.

So these are my thoughts on Achtung! Cthulhu: The Fate Guides to the Secret War (or A!C:FGSW from now on).

TL;DR: Too much background, not enough game.

It turns out that A!C: FGSW isn’t very pulpy at all. Instead it’s a hugely detailed look at what the world (or at least the Western Front) was like during WW2. There are, for example, four pages describing the German military organisation, and another four pages detailing the different German units. And similar detail covering Allied units. There are pages and pages of detail about the different weapons and vehicles used in WW2.

A!C: FGSW also contains a wealth of information about life on the home front. For example, there’s half a page on music and songs of the era, and a section listing American/British/French/German movies.

(And there are four different timelines. Four! A general chronology of events from 1918 to 1945, plus a Britain specific chronology, plus a USA specific chronology, PLUS one for the Secret War.)

And I have to be honest, none of this was very useful for me. I already have a pretty good familiarity with most of this stuff - and if there was stuff I didn’t know I’d rather look it up in a “proper” reference book rather than a gamebook.

More importantly, I’ve never found this information particularly relevant to running a game. It’s just not necessary. And if that means that occasionally when I’m GM-ing and I don't know something, I would rather make something up and keep the game going rather than interrupt play to look something up.

Not enough game

By “game”, here I mean material to inspire me to run a game. I don’t mean character generation stuff and new rules and statistics for monsters. Those don't actually explain to me how the designer of the game is expecting Achtung! Cthulhu to be played.

All we have are some evocative captions to some of the pictures, and seven pages of (very brief) scenario seeds. Now I know I created Tales of Terror, but they were always meant to supplement the existing game materials, and not be the only inspiration.

So for me, there isn’t enough game material. The scenario seeds are fine, but I would also have liked to see two or three fully fleshed out scenarios as well.

(I think the answer to my question of “How does the designer expect me to play Achtung! Cthulhu?” is that the designer doesn’t have any intention of telling me how to play. A!C: FGSW contains advice for different modes (pulp action, military narrative, Lovecraftian bleakness, etc) and different USA and British organisations to employ the PCs. So it’s clearly there to support whatever style of game I want. But I’d still like to see some scenarios and adventures.)

Physically, what do you get?

Physically, A!C: FGSW is a 376 page softback book. The cover is colour, but the interiors are all black and white (although the pdf is full colour throughout). The art is lovely, although it’s a bit dark in the paperback (it’s much better in the pdf, where it is in full colour). The font, however, is tiny; for my eyes, I need to read it in good light.

This is a colour photo - honest!

The internal design is okay. Most modern RPGs are over-designed to my eyes, but this is relatively subdued with good contrast between font and background (if only the font were bigger!). The tables, illustrations and illustrations are held in place with tape or paperclips, giving it the feel of a briefing dossier, which I Iike.

The book is heavy - it’s heavier than the hardback Cthulhu Dark.

A!C: FGSW is split into two books. The first is the investigators’ guide, and the second is for the Keeper. So there’s a bit of duplication (and that’s why it contains more than one timetable).

Overall, with it’s teeny font, significant heft, and huge page count, A!C: FGSW feels intimidating to me.

The mythos and the war

Achtung! Cthulhu, in an essay by Ken Hite, cautions against using the Cthulhu Mythos to excuse the Nazi atrocities. Instead, several mythos-aware organisations are presented: Section M, the American Majestic (American), Cult of the Black Sun (Nazi) and Nachtwolfe (Nazi - a spinoff from the Black Sun). These are presented in the same detail as the rest of the history, including their founding and the different personalities (with statistics) involved.

Unfortunately there’s one sidebar detailing Codename: Starfish which involves using a colour out of space for British night-time aerial defence. Unfortunately this turns a creature of the Cthulhu Mythos into being horrific into just being a tool. It’s very pulpy, and is quite different to the tone in the rest of the book.

A!C: FGSW also includes 22 pages of mythos creatures, all with Fate statistics, stunts and other abilities. To be honest, that’s more crunch than I can manage - one of the reasons I prefer simpler, more free-form systems is that I can’t remember the crunch.

And what about the Fate stuff?

A!C: FGSW contains good rules for kicking off an adventure, including advice on modes (as mentioned above) and character creation. Fate Core’s phase trio is amended to include a reason why the PC has come to the attention of either Section M or Majestic, life before the war, and crossing paths with the other PCs.

There are plenty of NPCs presented - either key figures from history (Barnes Wallis’ aspects are brilliant all-around engineer, willing to get my hands dirty, highly sought after for my mind), example characters, or villains. I don’t always find it easy to come up with new aspects, so I liked having lots of examples to choose from.

The chapter on sanity tries to fit Call of Cthulhu’s sanity rules into Fate. I’m not sure how successful this is - my personal feeling is that if you want to model Call of Cthulhu’s sanity rules, you’d be better off playing Call of Cthulhu. If I were running a pulp game I’d just use mental stress and consequences as per Fate.

(As an aside, I have never been a fan of the sanity system - to me it always felt like another set of hit points to keep track of. And personally I’d rather my investigators make it through the scenario rather than go insane part way through. But that’s a topic for another time.)

There are some new crunchy rules to reflect the nature of warfare in WW2. The most interesting of these is Scale - which one side gets when it has an overwhelming advantage (say a tank against an infantryman). Scale gives the side that has it a +4 shift bonus. There are also rules for armour, artillery and other crunchy stuff that I will probably forget (for the reasons mentioned above).

I’ve mentioned creatures above, but it’s worth mentioning that as well as having +6 “Rend and destroy all around”, shoggoths also have Scale… Best run away then.

There is also the obligatory list of tomes and spells (17 pages of spells!), all set up for use in Fate. A!C: FGSW introduces a magic point system for spells, a bit like Call of Cthulhu’s POW. Despite running and writing several Call of Cthulhu adventures, I’ve never actually let my players use magic and cast spells.

So who is Achtung! Cthulhu for?

As far as I can tell, the best use for Achtung! Cthulhu would be a great reference if you wanted to run a Call of Cthulhu game during WW2. There’s loads of detail, and a couple of mythos organisations to use either as employers or opponents.

But you don’t actually need Achtung! Cthulhu to do that. You could just use Call of Cthulhu and a couple of history books of your choice.

So who is A!C: FGSW for?

I have no idea. I've not tried using Fate for horror, but I'm not convinced it would work. Instead, I would use Call of Cthulhu or Cthulhu Dark. (I do wonder if part of the problem is that A!C: FGSW started life as a stretch goal for the Achtung! Cthulhu Kickstarter. It was therefore always an add on.)

I can imagine running a Hellboy-esque game of pulp horror set in WW2, but there’s very little in A!C: FGSW that I would need for that.

Which is a bit of a shame, as clearly so much effort has gone into it.

Cthulhu Dark: some thoughts

Scaring players is hard. I've been roleplaying for over 35 years now (admittedly with some long gaps) but I can only remember two occasions of real fearfulness.

In the first, I was a player. I can't remember the details of the game, but we were playing Call of Cthulhu and we were exhuming the body of what we thought was a sorcerer. And I remember being on the edge of my seat as I imagined what we would find.

In the second, I was running Call of Cthulhu and the players were exploring the derelict half of an old mansion. There was nothing there for them to find, but I just made it as creepy and unsettling as I could. The players soon fled. I might be wrong, but it seemed to me that the players fear of what they might find overcame their boldness and they retreated to safety.

So my experience of playing and running Call of Cthulhu (and writing adventures for it) is that most scenarios involve solving a complicated puzzle - one with monsters. But they're not actually scary.

Cthulhu Dark is different.

Kickstarter

Cthulhu Dark is Graham Walmsley's cut-down rules set for playing Lovecraftian horror. He first published them as a free pdf in 2010, and in 2017 he Kickstarted a full hardback, which I backed.

Physically, the book is lovely. It has a gloriously understated cover by George Cotronis, black and white full page illustrations by Matteo Bocci, and maps by Stentor Danielson. The text is simply black on white, with the occasional boxed text.

If I had to pick one word for it, that word would be elegant.

The rules are wonderfully simple, and distils the Gumshoe "you never fail to find a clue" system to its essence. I won't describe them - you can read them here (it will be quicker for you to read them than it is for me to explain them).

As the basic rules take up two pages in the hardback, the rest of the 190 page hardback book is taken up with a more detailed review of the rules, excellent advice on constructing a horror scenario, a look at Lovecraft's creations and how to use them in Cthulhu Dark, and four settings, each with a detailed scenario.

The Cthulhu Dark Philosophy

What the full Cthulhu Dark book brings is its philosophy (which the free pdf doesn't explain). This philosophy can be summarised by three statements:

• The investigators are doomed.
• Investigators should be powerless.
• This game is meant to be scary.

There's nothing stopping you from playing Cthulhu Dark using the basic free rules and treating it just like Call of Cthulhu. But I think you're missing a trick if you do.

Doomed investigators

Most of the Call of Cthulhu scenarios that I've written can be "won" in one way or another. There's a solution, an evil to be defeated. And that's fine - I'm happy with them all.

But my favourite Call of Cthulhu scenario (of the ones I've written) doesn't have a happy ending, and that's In Whom We Trust. That scenario typically ends with most of the investigators dead or having succumbed to a foul great old one. (If you want to see what I mean, you can find it here.)

And that's the Cthulhu Dark philosophy - investigators are doomed. The mythos threats are not there to be beaten, they're immense forces of darkness. The scenarios are about the investigators uncovering a truth that dooms them. (So much closer to Lovecraft's stories.)

Next time I run In Whom We Trust, I will probably use Cthulhu Dark. (But more on that below.)

Powerless Investigators

Cthulhu Dark recommends that you play powerless characters. In his design notes, Graham Walmsley notes that this came about following his response to the usual dilettante Call of Cthulhu characters. So instead, Cthulhu Dark is full of the poor and working class.

Aside from any social commentary, I do think that taking power away from investigators increases the fear and horror. I approve of that.

As example, Alien features powerless working-class space-truckers, and is exquisitely scary. Aliens, on the other hand, is filled with powerful space marines. Aliens is a thrilling ride, but Alien is the scarier of the two.

And if you don’t like the idea of powerless characters, there’s nothing in the rules preventing you from playing the usual dilettantes if you want.

This is a scary game

Cthulhu Dark contains 38 pages of Director’s advice about creating a scary game. That’s something that was missing in Call of Cthulhu (although as I haven’t seen the latest edition, maybe that’s changed). Still, I’ve not seen such advice elsewhere. Such advice includes:

Lovecraftian Threats: There are no statistics in Cthulhu Dark’s list of monsters. Instead it is much more interesting and instead includes discusses how the threats might be used in a story. Cthulhu Dark limits itself purely to original Lovecraft (no Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath here), but also pushes that limit by including less obvious threats like the rats in the walls and reanimation solution.

Creeping horrors: Creeping horrors are “unexplained, unsettling moments of weirdness, which repeat throughout the mystery.” Their purpose is to unsettle the players. Cthulhu Dark suggests creeping horrors for each of the threats, such as the stink of the sea (deep ones) or sudden darkness (shining trapezohedron).

Themes: Themes are the topics that a scenario explores, what it’s really about. Again, themes are suggested for each threat. Suggested themes for the elder things are doomed civilisation and imitation (in relation to shoggoths).

Scenario/story design: Cthulhu Dark’s story/scenario advice is superb - I think it’s the best I’ve seen. This section covers themes, creeping horrors, locations, final horrors - and more. And it’s then followed by a way to look at your potential story from different perspectives. For example, The Descent suggests imagining your mystery as a descent into darkness. I am now tempted to go back to some of my old Call of Cthulhu adventures and “darken” them. (And I don’t think for a minute that’s as easy as just removing the stats.)

London 1851, Arkham 1692, Jaiwo 2017, Mumbai 2037

I have previously stated that I don’t like reading backgrounds, so for me, the four Cthulhu Dark backgrounds are mercifully short.

The backgrounds are London 1851, Arkham 1692 (written by Kathryn Jenkins), Jaiwo 2017 (a fictional African country written by Helen Gould), and Mumbai 2037. So that’s two “standard” horror settings, and two unusual horror settings. I was pleased to see that Cthulhu Dark omitted the usual 1920s and 1930s settings; I think enough has been written about them already.

Each background is 10-20 pages long, including a full page map. Over half of the background information is given to typical investigator occupations, and ideas for making sure their occupation is relevant in your mystery.

The occupations themselves are unusual - so the London 1851 setting includes cleaners, costermongers, mudlarks, housewives and toshers. Not your usual RPG characters then.

The rest of the setting provides enough to be able to run a game, and there’s a bibliography for each if you want to dive deeper. From my perspective, that’s just about enough background for me - if I need more I can look it up (or make it up).

The mysteries

Cthulhu Dark contains four mysteries: Screams of the Children (London 1851), The Doors Beyond Time (Arkham 1692), The Curse of the Zimba (Jaiwo 2017), and Consume (Mumbai 2037).

The scenarios are all equally doom laden as the investigators work their way to the final horror. There are no happy endings for anyone. I think they’re great, with Screams of the Children and The Doors Beyond Time standing out as the creepiest.

I also like the fact that the mysteries are usually longer than the setting material. That’s the right mix of setting and background in my opinion!

However, I have two criticisms of the mysteries.

The first is that, for a book with “Cthulhu” in the title, none of them use any of the threats described in the rules. I actually think that the mysteries are all the more effective for that (and I can’t really complain about not using mythos creatures - I’ve done that myself). But it does seem odd that none of the mysteries in Cthulhu Dark uses the threats (with the exception of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to “man-faced rats” in The Doors Beyond Time).

My second criticism is layout, which doesn’t look as if it will help actual play. Cthulhu Dark is laid out in elegant blocks of text that are somewhat stark and minimalist. I really like it for most of the book - but not the mysteries, which need to be easier laid out so that information can be quickly found during an adventure. Here’s an example page:

Okay, I admit that I chose a particularly bad page here, but that’s not how I like my scenarios to be formatted.

I’ve not tried playing any of these - but if I do I’m going to have to make lots of highlights and notes to make it easier to run.

From Call of Cthulhu to Cthulhu Dark

I really like Cthulhu Dark - it’s a simple elegant system and next time I run a Call of Cthulhu adventure I’d like to use the Cthulhu Dark rules.

Which of course I can - I can use them for exactly that. (And I probably will, as I’m not as familiar with Call of Cthulhu as I once was.)

But I think I’d be missing out on Cthulhu Dark’s philosophy of personal, doomed horror.

So I’ve been thinking about running In Whom We Trust again. And while I could run it exactly as written using the Cthulhu Dark rules (it is almost systemless as it is), I feel that if I did so I’d need to add creeping horrors, themes and think about what rolling a 6 means. I then started thinking about more structural changes to suit Cthulhu Dark’s philosophy, but then I may as well write a new mystery from scratch.

The fifth mystery - and a nagging problem

As part of the Kickstarter, Cthulhu Dark includes Mo Holkar’s As Good as a Feast pdf, a mystery set in dust bowl America that, again, doesn’t use any of the Lovecraftian threats. It’s laid out just like the mysteries in Cthulhu Dark itself. I don’t know if it will be available separately.

However, it was as I was reading As Good as a Feast, something else started to nag at me: all the mysteries are basically the same. All five are basically railroads where the investigators start to discover something untoward and are slowly drawn in before facing an evil entity. I don’t mind that as a storyline in itself, but I would have liked to have seen some variety. Maybe that’s what happens when your mysteries feature doomed, powerless, characters. But I hope not.

Overall

I really like Cthulhu Dark. It has done something few other games have done: it’s changed how I think about roleplaying. Before, I didn’t really find horror roleplaying scary. As I’ve said before, most gaming really isn’t scary at all - horror or otherwise.

But Cthulhu Dark has given me the tools to create unsettling, creepy games. And while I may use Cthulhu Dark’s elegantly simple ruleset, I suspect I will find those techniques creeping into my other games as well.

My biggest complaint is that about the sample scenarios/mysteries. I would like to see some variety, so maybe I won’t change In Whom We Trust too much. I like its current structure, but I think I can darken it and make it more unsettling.

As for the layout not being easy for me to run, maybe that’s just me. After all, I have read reports of people running the scenarios successfully. So perhaps I should get over myself and just run one.

When I do, I’ll report back here...

#RPG12: Q1 New Players

In the spirit of RPGaDay in August, Paul Mitchener has started an alternative set of daily RPG questions - the Christmas dozen, one every two days. His argument is that 31 questions is too many (and for me, August is holiday month so it's doubly bad).

Even so, I've found 12 questions fairly challenging. I think I'd prefer one a month...

You’re running an RPG to introduce new players to the RPG hobby this month. Which game and genre do you choose, and why?

Although I don't do it often, I love introducing new players to the hobby. But, I find that I do put myself under a lot of pressure to make sure that they have a good experience. The last thing I want the game to be is a disappointment. (It’s a bit like running a convention game in that sense.)

And I’d always run a one-shot to show off roleplaying, rather than drop a new player into a campaign. (Not that I run campaigns these days…)

So while the system is easy (Fate Accelerated - it’s my current go-to system, it’s simple, and character sheets are easy to parse) the genre depends on who they are.

If I felt that the players were up for fantasy, I’d run something like The Craster Demon. If I thought they would be more likely to enjoy urban fantasy, then I’d run an Other London adventure for them. Both of these are my own settings, and both are things I’m comfortable running.

I have a feeling that Ben Robbins’ Follow would be a good introduction to roleplaying, but I’ve yet to play it.

Looking back

And having said that, I thought I’d look back at what I’ve done when I’ve run games for new players in the past.

In the dim distant past, I have used Call of Cthulhu as in introductory game. Call of Cthulhu has lots of bonuses - it’s set in the “real world”, so that removes a lot of the learning and geekiness (which was more of an issue back in the day). And everyone understands horror. These days I’d be more likely to run Cthulhu Dark than Call of Cthulhu, simply because Cthulhu Dark is simpler (although I need to get a few games of Cthulhu Dark under my belt first).

Megan's first character sheet

The first game I ran for Megan, my daughter, was Faery’s Tale. But she was only five - and I was targeting the game to my audience. (I ran a rescue scenario. Megan played a fairy who had to rescue Jack from the giant in the clouds, and she invented a "mechanical Jack" that would replace Jack so that they could escape. I was so proud.)

On the other hand, I ran the D&D starter set for my two nephews Ben and James and their father, Simon. This must have been about the time of D&D v3, and  we were in Travelling Man in Leeds and, out of the blue, Simon decided to buy the boys the D&D starter set for Christmas. I quickly read up on it overnight, and the following day we played through the introductory adventure.

As an introduction to D&D it was really good, although it wasn’t really what I think of as roleplaying (too much combat).

Shameless self promotion

Way out West

Looking slightly beyond the table, I set up Freeform Games with Mo Holkar to bring freeform style roleplaying games to normal people. We don’t tell people that they’re playing a roleplaying game, because we don’t want to scare them off.

But I estimate that most of our customers are new to roleplaying, so I think that counts.

If you'd like to find out more, you can get a free murder mystery game (Way out West) by signing up to our newsletter.

Looking back at Tales of Terror

I first published Tales of Terror in 1990.

Tales of Terror was put together using an Amstrad PCW 8512. I had bought one in 1986 or 1987 to write my dissertation. While I did use it for that, I also discovered a joy in writing that I didn’t know I had. That eventually led to Tales of Terror (and many things beyond).

The idea from Tales of Terror came from my delight in Call of Cthulhu’s elaborate handouts. For me, Call of Cthulhu was the first rpg that made good use of handouts, but one thing that I found slightly irritating was that it was always clear when you found a handout - you could tell from the fact that it had been copied from the book.

As a Keeper I liked the idea that you could drop other handouts into a scenario that might lead to other places. I envisaged a product that was almost entirely handouts (newspaper cuttings, extracts from books, letters, and so on), with some simple ideas for where the handouts might take you. (When I look back on that now, I wonder if that was really a sensible idea. As a player I might have found it very frustrating.)

From there, that lead me to the Tales of Terror format. (The idea of three different variations I took from Traveller’s 76 Patrons.)

That’s why the first edition features so many newspaper cuttings and book extracts. Over time, I realised that they weren’t necessary, and they’re rarer now.

Garrie Hall was my co-conspirator with Tales of Terror, and he helped with the printing. Garrie had produced a small-press fiction fanzine called Tales After Dark. As luck would have it, Garrie lived in Loughborough, where I was studying at university. I liked the feel of Tales After Dark; its glossy card covers gave it a veneer of quality that was lacking in many rpg fanzines of the time. We used the same printer for Tales of Terror and printed 250 copies.

I did the art in the first edition, inspired by Lynn Willis’ silhouettes in Call of Cthulhu. I didn’t like later editions of Call of Cthulhu that had detailed picture of the entities. Silhouettes left plenty to the imagination, and let me fill out the details. So I took the same approach with Tales of Terror.

Pulling it all together and getting it into print was one thing. Selling it was another. I’m not very good at selling. I sold a few by post, I sold a few at Convulsion, and I sent a whole bunch to John Tynes to sell via Pagan Publishing.

I sent a couple to Chaosium, just out of courtesy. I got a nice letter from Lynn Willis, followed by a scary letter from Greg Stafford telling me I’d infringed their trademark. That caused me a sleepless night or two before it was resolved, but it seemed that Chaosium thought that Tales of Terror was a professional publication, rather than the not-for-profit small press zine it most definitely was. (Mark Morrison suggested I should consider it a compliment.)

Pagan Publishing persuaded me to edit two more volumes, one in 1996 and one in 2000. All I had to do this time was put the words together. They took care of the layout and the sales. That was easier, but looking back I’m not sure if that was a good thing or not.

In 1994 I got my first web-space, and one of the first things I did was create a Tales of Terror website. That’s now defunct, as is the website that followed it. I am now slowly populating a new Tales of Terror website using Blogger, here. If you want to keep up you can follow it via RSS, or my Tales of Terror Google+ collection.

I still write the occasional Tale, but only two or three a year, just to keep my hand in. My most recent was The Old Quarry.

As for the future, I will continue to populate the new website with all the old Tales, and I will continue to write new Tales now and again, as the mood strikes me. But a new collection? I’m not so sure.

A return to convention GM-ing

This summer, at Continuum 2016, I ran my first tabletop roleplaying game for complete strangers for absolutely ages. I can't remember the last time I did that - in the late 90s, I think.

So I don’t run tabletop games often enough to be completely relaxed about it.

I have slightly higher standards when I run a con game compared to running one at home. At home I’m with friends and family, and it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect. And while a con game doesn’t need to be perfect, I do expect to bring my A game when I’m running at a con. Players have paid to be there, I’m putting on a show. Things had better be slicker than at home.

I know, all of that is in my head. I’ve played in as many average con games as I have great, and I’ve conveniently ignored that fact that usually GMs don’t get much of a reward. (Perhaps the deeper question is why, as a player, don’t I always bring my A game to the table? That’s a thought for another day.)

So all that adds up to a whole heap of unnecessary and self-inflicted pressure, which is why I don't run many games at conventions. If I did more, I think I’d be more relaxed about it, which is why I want to do more. (So a bit like presentations then…)

(And yes, I have the same nerves with a freeform. Despite two and a half decades of experience, knowing that it will all turn out okay, and players can be trusted, I still experience pre-flight nerves.)


So I eased myself back in gently and I ran one of my favourite Call of Cthulhu scenarios: In Whom We Trust. I first wrote this as a tournament scenario in 1996 (twenty years ago!) and it concerns an expedition in the Amazon. It’s a mashup of Arachnophobia, Outbreak and The Thing - and once it gets going it pretty much runs itself. It’s also been played a whole bunch of times at other cons, so I know that it’s pretty solid.

I ran it on Sunday morning, which isn’t the best time to be running Call of Cthulhu, but was the only time I could do to fit in around everything else I wanted to do.

I had six players, which was the most I can reasonably handle. For tabletop, I prefer no more than five (and three to four ideally - but that’s a bit too high a GM:Player ratio for most cons). I don’t think six players was a big problem and I tried to ensure that everyone had enough of the spotlight.

I learned a long time ago (before Gumshoe came along) that investigators can’t solve the mystery if they don’t have the clues, so I don’t make players roll to find the handouts. Except, for some reason I’d left something in the scenario that you could only find on a successful roll. Succeeding wouldn’t have changed anything, apart from adding a bit of colour (and possibly mystery), and after they’d failed the roll I kicked myself. So I’ve now edited that out: the next group will find everything...

Apart from that minor glitch, the game appeared to go well. I don’t think anyone was actually scared, but things went from bad to worse and there was a frantic shootout in a mysterious temple. I had three survivors, which is a pretty high for In Whom We Trust.

In terms of how I ran the game, I noticed that I had to stamp on my instinct to ask the players to roll dice for trivial actions where failing the roll wouldn’t have been interesting. For example, if a door was locked I didn’t make them roll to see if they could unlock it or break it open, I just let them succeed with whatever action they were trying to do.

Do as I say or do as I do?

In a previous post I talked about what I thought made for a good convention game experience as a player. So measured against that, how do I think I did?

Invested in my character: I could probably have done better on this. I used the original characters, which were just basic Call of Cthulhu characters. Each did have a goal that ensured they kept with the scenario (rather than turning and fleeing like any sane person). The only activity I asked of the players was, after they had introduced themselves, for them to state out loud who at that point they trusted. I’m not sure if that had any impact on play, but the players gamely complied.

Characters that fit the scenario: Yes, absolutely. I wrote the characters specifically for the scenario - they all have goals driving them forward into the mystery.

During play ask reflective questions: While I like this as a player, it’s not a GM habit for me yet. Must try harder. I could have asked, part way through, who they now trusted.

Keep to time: Yes, no problem here. I had a three hour slot and we were done in just over two hours. I heard later that the players were amazed that we’d fitted so much into only two hours, and I think they were pleased to have a longer break between this and the next game.

Limited mechanics: With only one real mechanic-y section (the shootout at the end), perhaps that’s why we finished so soon.

So overall I’m pretty happy. I need to ask more reflective questions, and maybe think about other ways to get the players invested in their characters. That’s not something that “classic” Call of Cthulhu was that good at - and I’ve not seen 7th Edition.

In Whom We Trust for Call of Cthulhu

In Whom We Trust was the last Call of Cthulhu scenario that I wrote - although to be honest it’s almost system-less and there’s barely any reference to the Cthulhu Mythos.

I originally wrote it for the Call of Cthulhu tournament at Convulsion ’96. Since then it has been played a number of times and suffered a variety of edits.

In Whom We Trust was also used as the RPGA tournament scenario at GenconUK 2001.

Anyway, here are the game files for In Whom We Trust.