Tuesday, April 24, 2012

No. 10 Progress Report; Cthulhu!

I love the Storyteller system and the World of Darkness, but i have to face the fact that the zine's readers are old school. I also understand that I do not have time to prep for a chronicle and prepare alternate material for the zine. I need to play what I produce and vice versa.

     With that in mind, I scrapped my recent plans to run a World of Darkness mortals chronicle. Instead, I want to run a Call of Cthulhu serial set in northern California. I think northern California will be terribly exciting. Heck, Bigfoot lives there. I think the investigators will deal more with nature spirits, shambling Things from the sea, bigots, and moonshiners more than they will extra-dimensional entities.

    In a way I am running WoD in the 1930s, but without Kindred, Lost, Uratha, etc. I hope you like the material I am preparing. Today I scribbled four pages of notes by hand and I loved the way it felt.

     In other news, the Hex Crawl will be wrapping up very soon. I'll talk about the reasons why in the intro to no. 10. The gist is that while my group was having a lot of fun, some of the genre's tropes and limited options for characters resulted in a play-style that became a bit over the top silly. It became more murder hobo than intrepid explorer. I still love LL/Moldvay-era D&D and think it's one of the best games ever published. Period.

16 comments:

  1. Have you read any Clark Ashton Smith. I believe he set a number of his stories in California.

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    1. Yes, Smith lived and wrote in Auburn, which is about 30 minutes from where I grew up. And I didn't know that until last year!

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  2. CoC! I dig it. I like your style of adventure design, I look forward to see what you do for Call of Cthulhu. Though I'll probably be porting it to Trail of Cthulhu. (I've been porting your Hex Crawl to Dungeon Crawl Classics without a hitch, and it works great.)

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    1. Nice! How is the Gumshoe system? (That fuels ToC, right?)

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  3. Though I quite like the hexcrawl series, I'll be glad to see something else as well. I mean, if I were to use your hexes, I could just expand them on my own, right? As it stands, they provide an excellent introduction to the genre, and you've given us some really neat ideas.

    Have your readers been saying that they don't want any WoD? That's pretty dumb of them. Ideas come from many directions.

    CoC will be pretty fun. I always love seeing different takes on the Mythos. Mythoi? Whatever. I think it'd be neat to see what you would do with the Dreamlands.

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    1. People have been very cool in regards to the WoD material. The only time I have taken heat is when I stopped running Pathfinder material. The old schoolers are remarkably tolerant for the reason you cited, that inspiration can come from anywhere.

      The decision to go with CoC was a toughie. I worried about turning off readers with lots of WoD material, so CoC felt like a nice compromise. The system will allow me to delve into horror/supernatural/human psychology while at the same time paying homage to the roots of the hobby.

      I hope my brand of CoC is well-received. I played few times and was so turned off by players who approached it with a "D&D murder hobos with guns." It was like each session was a race to see who could go insane first and waste a fellow PC with a shotgun in the process.

      Wish me luck!

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  4. Oh, very cool! I'm wrapping up my own CoC campaign - the first one I've ever run set in proper "Lovecraft Country." I ran a campaign set in the Bay Area last year and had a lot of fun. CAS was down as a possible NPC, but the group never crossed paths with him. Pity. Also, take note that Sausalito (in the North Bay) was the rum-running capital of the West Coast. So you could have a party of gangsters for your PCs. Just sayin'.

    I'll be writing about my impressions on this latest campaign soon, but in brief: in the future I think I'm going to limit myself to running CoC campaigns of no more than 10-12 sessions, especially if the group is your typical bunch of accidental investigators. (Exceptions being made for mega-adventures like Masks, of course.) Beyond that, it gets a little tough to justify why our heroes keep running afoul of the supernatural, and harder to avoid a TPK as the threats keep escalating. A TPK can be a great way to end a Cthulhu campaign, of course. But if one hits ahead of time, it'll totally derail the campaign. Horror gaming's at its best when the players are invested in their characters, so I try to keep them alive (albeit mangled physically and mentally) as long as possible. We left off with one dead PC, one PC who sacrificed a finger to get crucial information, another who ended up with a ghoul for a boyfriend (the player nearly puked IRL when that tidbit was revealed!), and a fourth who was down to a CON of 4 and had taken to wearing goggles and a scarf everywhere he went, making him look like the Invisible Man. I'd call that a successful stopping point. :)

    Funny, I've also been running a sandbox D&D game online for a couple friends and we just decided to call a halt to that one as well. In addition to the murder hobo thing, I also found that, after I did most of the initial work, I was finding running a sandbox to be kind of boring from a GMing perspective. ::shrug:: We're going to try out a sandbox-style Night City Cyberpunk campaign with my friend as GM. Pretty stoked about that.

    My tabletop group is going to try Burning Wheel next. I think you'd love that system, personally.

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    1. Vittoria Nangelo is hot. Well done, sir! I look forward to studying your notes. :)

      I have a similar experience to yours in that writing the sandbox has proven to be more enjoyable than running it. Odd.

      Like you, I enjoy a long-term campaign, but will be interested in seeing how it works out. One thing I will do is to explore equally the PCs' mundane lives and their paranormal experiences. I did something similar with Changeling and it worked really well. It worked best when the PCs weren't sure if they were dealing with a paranormal or normal threat. I guess in CoC it'd be obvious, though. ;)

      I look forward to reading your impressions of your CoC campaign.

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    2. I think that the problem with running a hexcrawl is that, as a Referee, your process of discovery and exploration happens during the writing of it, while for the players it occurs at the table. It's one of the reasons that I am trying very hard to not learn too much about the world of the Black-Blooded Earth in advance, only those things that I need to know. That way, I can learn about the world along with the players, in play.

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    3. "One thing I will do is to explore equally the PCs' mundane lives and their paranormal experiences."

      Absolutely--this sort of contrast is crucial. One nifty trick I picked up from listening to an actual play podcast is, at the start of the first session, go around the table and have each player describe a typical day in the life of their character. "How did you spend your Monday?" Right off the bat, you're creating a baseline of normalcy and grounding the players in their characters' normal lives. Sort of like a CoC version of the WoD Prelude.

      faoladh: Excellent point. I think in the future I'll just content myself with detailing everything in a one-hex radius around the starting hex and leave the rest up to random dice rolls as required. But as you point out, it's hard not to start adding details of the wider. There has to be some kind of context, after all.

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  5. Christian,

    Sorry to hear that the Hex Crawl will be ending soon, but hey, you've given us a great set of ideas as a starting point. Elements from your Hex Crawl can be dropped into lots of potential games (and they are a heck of a fun read). As you say, inspiration can come from anywhere, so I personally really care much more about fun ideas and mash-ups than exact stats and edition wars. I can cobble together the stats myself if I don't care for the ones you provide.

    Looking forward to your CoC stuff. I have always been a huge fan of it, and favor it over the WoD books, though I must admit that "old school" Vampire had a charm all its own (around 1991 or so when I was playing it).

    I am a huge fan of indy horror films and so will recommend two that may be of some interest:

    First, if you are doing a horror campaign set in Northern California, you absolutely must watch Pig Hunt (2008). It's set in the modern day rather than the 1930s, but it shows just how much can go wrong (in crazy, fun, over-the-top sorts of ways) when folks find themselves a couple hours outside the SF/Bay area in the wilderness.

    Second, your knocker tunnels and the weird/surreal experiences of those trapped there strongly reminded me of the implied setting of the film Absentia (2011). That film is really more about what happens to those left behind after loved ones are made to disappear in something like the knocker tunnels, but it's extremely well done.

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    1. Hi Andrew!

      Thanks so much for the film recommendations. I will definitely check those out. :)

      I'm glad you enjoyed the hexes. Sadly, I'm not going to be running the hex crawl any more, so I need to allocate my resources. Someday I hope to revisit the series, as it has been a lot of fun to write.

      Peace,
      Christian

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  6. I just finished reading Loviatar 9. This one was really the best so far. It makes me sad to think that we will not be able to visit the Gravenspire Mountains or the enchanted forest in more depth. Or read about Haldane itself. I understand that sometimes you need to move on to other material to stay creatively fresh, and also that it is important to root these things in actual play. And I like your material for other systems, even the systems that I don't understand.

    :-)

    All that being said, if you ever feel like returning to these areas, you certainly have one very interested reader here.

    Unrelated: do you have any experience with Nobilis? I would be curious what you thought of it.

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    1. Hi Brendan,

      I think that after the sting of how poorly my group and I executed the hexes wears off, I will be able to write more. I just finished Hex 006 and liked how it felt. It's funny that I use the word "feel" in regards to these things.

      Someday I hope to play the hexes again, but with a group of people that are fired up to do so. This time around, I made the critical mistake of approaching the hexes as a get to know you/filler game and as a result, the sessions were played with little to no effort.

      Someday I will do it up right. In the meantime I hope to write my buns off in order to keep readers like yourself engaged.

      Keep on keepin' on,
      Christian

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    2. PS: I need to check out Nobilis someday. I have heard that it is pretty amazing if you can wrap your mind around the concept.

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