Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem – The Sixteenth and Final part

Call of Cthulhu is a dark and dangerous game and not the sort of thing you’d associate with humour. However, there is room for levity of a sort within the game. I found two sources; the first was direct, in which I would frequently title e-mails with groan-inducing puns and the second was indirect, in which humorous situations arose out of play. The chief amongst these, and one that is remembered even now was Alessandro Mancini’s attempt to seduce the pretty young librarian in Brattleboro and thereby gain access to the secrets that a locked bookcase might supply. However, his internet dice rolls were so bad that the seduction (complete with impromptu poetry reading) backfired catastrophically, an incident that was memorably chronicled by Dungeonmum on her blog.

Whilst these two types of humour are perfectly acceptable since they do not undermine the general atmosphere of gloom, horror and dread, I don’t think that it’s a good idea for the Keeper to deliberately crowbar in situations or characters that are intended to be either ridiculous or comic relief. Whilst I don’t go as far as James Maliszewski in my dislike of things that vitiate the sense of cosmic horror and eldritch darkness that should permeate a game of CoC (I have a cuddly Cthulhu on my bookshelf) I have referred in previous posts to the efforts a Keeper should make to ensure that the atmosphere of a game is as close to that evoked by Lovecraft as possible. Laurel and Hardy or an attack by Mr Stay Puft just don’t fit into that.

And finally; some weeks ago, it was discussed in the comments section that it would be a good idea for some guidance on the best ways for players to participate in a pbem. I asked my players and Dungeonmum came up with the following sage words of advice.

Dungeonmum's Top Tips:
Talk to as many NPCs as you can, even the boring looking ones. If the information they provide doesn't help your investigation it will enrich your gaming experience, and maybe provide you with allies (plus it will give the keeper some work, as if they don't have enough already!)

Remember that you can do anything - don't worry too much about 'permission' - allow your PC to behave according to their personality, situation and the social constraints of the era and culture in which they are set, but don't be constricted by what you think is the 'correct' (in terms of gaming, rather than morality) thing to do.

Yes you can split the party. In tabletop this is harder to maintain but simply done in pbem. If something a co-player wants to do doesn't grab you or time is of the essence and you need to gather more information on more fronts, follow your nose (but be polite about it).

Remember that you are part of a group, so when you return from your forays and the keeper says to intercommunicate - keep your colleagues abreast of everything that you have learned, and try to do it in character, rather than info-dump (see next point). I made the mistake of forgetting to share something that I had learned (or assuming the others already knew, there are a lot of emails that go chugging back and forth - see other point below), but it turns out they didn't. Information that could have been critical.

Talking in-character is fun, I to like write my emails like fiction to distinguish between me the player and my PC. In pbem I do a lot more role-playing than table top (which frankly I always find rather nerve-wracking). My PC is a troubled alcoholic who is frequently witness to disturbing events so I can easily portray her trembling hands, nervous stares, chain-smoking and even signs of her addiction. Apart from checks and other die rolls most of the pbem exchanges are done in-character.
Pbem involves a lot of emailing of course. Set up a folder for it especially in your inbox, maybe even get the relevant addresses to send directly there. The chances are you will need to search for some vital clue that turned up months ago (another beauty of pbem, you are your own stenographer), and you don't want to go trawling through a choked inbox or even (horror!) delete stuff that could be useful later.

Well, that’s it for my guide to running a Call of Cthulhu pbem. I hope that this series of posts has either inspired you to get involved in an e-mail campaign or at the very least kindled (or rekindled) your interest in what must be one of the very best role playing games of all time.

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem Part Fifteen

A brief word on handwaving, the definition of which I am taking as “Not burdening your players with the tiresome bits of reality…”

A pbem takes a long time to play. I think my first adventure took about eight months to cover from Saturday lunchtime to Monday evening. Although subsequent adventures have moved perhaps that little bit faster, it’s still a long process, even if only the essential stuff is included. It stands to reason therefore that anything that slows the process down should be looked at closely and its necessity questioned. We’ve already covered the amount of detail a Keeper should include, but what I’m talking about today consists mainly of the moments at which you decide to say “Yeah, okay, I’ll wave that one through and we’ll move on…”

If it breaks a logjam or moves the game forward and is fair to the player concerned and the Keeper can explain the justification so that it appears fair to the player(s) concerned, it will (or at least it should be) generally accepted.

Handwaves should be considered a limited commodity – if the Keeper starts to use them too liberally, it can give the impression that the action is being circumvented or that, again, player involvement is being restricted.

The perspicacious Keeper should be able to spot when a handwave is required. If you’ve got your finger on the pulse of the adventure, the sputtering sound as the flow starts to stall is a good sign. Similarly, a good degree of player enthusiasm for the process should indicate that now is not the time to skip to the next scene.

I’m just going to mention, as we are getting very near the end of this series now, something that also comes at the end – of the adventure itself.

There is a temptation, possibly born of those five-minute segments at the end of shows, to go through what happened and clear up any loose ends. However, this is probably not a good idea in Call of Cthulhu.

Therefore, my advice is not to do an end of adventure reveal if the adventure is being played as part of an ongoing campaign. The party may never visit the mysterious Majestic Hotel again but unless you’re not going to use those characters again, ever, then keep the lid on what really went on. As we journey through life, we can be fairly sure that we don’t know everything about things that happened to us. Some events in our life are mysteries or just downright baffling. It should be thus in Call of Cthulhu. The party may have overlooked something that the keeper can go on and use in a later adventure set in that same world – but if he spills the beans about what the party missed, that’s an opportunity wasted and it makes the party privy to information that they would not otherwise have learned.

Next time – a bit of humour in an otherwise bleak, horrifying and eldritch world and some valuable insights from my players on sandbox Call of Cthulhu

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem - Part Thirteen

It’s been said on better blogs than mine - unless there is a very good reason to say No, say Yes but ensure that players face the consequences of their own actions.

As we’ve seen in weeks gone by, something that the players do may take the scenario off in a totally unexpected direction and - as we have also seen - this is a good thing. It’s also nothing to be scared of, since, if you’ve been following my earlier guidelines, you’ll only be two steps ahead of the players and won’t have invested hours of your valuable time in devising something that the players just don’t seem to want to try. Will you?

If you have, by some oversight, detailed the next six months of the campaign and feel that this work should be appreciated by your players, then it’s always possible to have the new divergence feed back into the original plotline at a certain point. But for goodness sake, be subtle! In fact, subtlety is, I think, one of the key attributes of a Keeper – if the players don’t notice that something has happened plot-wise, you’ve done your job. Nobody likes being told what to do (if they do, they play Adventure Path D&D, not CoC Sandbox) and those who don’t like it and realise it’s going on are going to get a little bit upset about it. They may even start to deliberately choose against expectations, which can make the adventure a little…hectic.

In the end, it’s all about player choice. I am aware that you, the Keeper, know all things and realise that behind the doors of that abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn is a Shoggoth that is going to turn the party into something resembling a Jackson Pollock but going through those doors is the player’s choice and their right as well. Provided that you have given them clues as to what awaits them, their decision should have been an informed one and if they’ve decided to go ahead anyway, that’s their lookout.

That having been said, nobody likes a TPK but if this was D&D and the characters were nudging 6th with a good chance of levelling up and had been playing the same characters for nigh on a year, the degree of personal distress at their demise would be a good deal higher than it might be if their investigators came to a sticky end after the same length of time playing (and adventures in pbem CoC can run for months). Players of CoC know (or they should know) what the game is like, what is likely to happen and more or less how it is going to happen. If they don’t know, they should be advised pretty quickly, preferably at the recruitment stage to give them the chance of playing something a little bit less…dangerous.

It’s a common complaint about New School adventure paths and such like that in order to keep them on track, the GM has to overrule the results of player choice at certain times. The problem with overruling player choice is that it effectively invalidates any input that the player has and disenfranchises them. A choice of one option is no choice at all. And one of the most common phrases in RPGs is “What do you do next?”


After a while, even the most enthusiastic player is going to get a little hacked off with having their avenues of choice closed down. Soon, the light of fun will go out of their eyes and one of two things will happen – either they’ll become a sullen participant, going through the motions and looking for a way of sabotaging the Keeper’s plans or worse still, they’ll walk.

Yes, players do crazy things but that’s what makes memorable and realistic games. And memorable is what you want. In thirty years’ time, nobody’s going to be talking about the game where everything went to plan and nothing out of the ordinary happened, are they?

Next time – Do Split the Party!

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem – Part Twelve

Celebrities! You really can’t escape them. Of course, you might have thought you could by playing a role-playing game set in the 1920s but such thoughts are foolish whimsy because they had celebrities back then as well. The big difference between celebrities of the 1920s and today’s rather shallow assortment is that the 1920s type were famous for a reason and, if we can allow ourselves a further leap of reasoning, the fact that we can remember them means they were really famous, not just the wishy washy sort of fame we know today.

Where am I going with this? Simply this; there is a great temptation with historical RPGs (and let’s be honest, that’s what CoC is if you set it in the classic HPL era) to introduce historical figures into the adventure, to have the investigators rubbing shoulders with the great and the good of the roaring twenties. However, this is never a good idea. Remember the Young Indiana Jones series? He was always bumping into famous people and it started to stretch credibility after a while. It also gives any adventure the air of a history lesson, which is not what we’re aiming for (unless you find history lessons a source of cosmic horror)

The Keeper should therefore avoid ‘famous people syndrome’. The likelihood of a party meeting someone famous by chance on the street or even at a hotel or such like is remote and unless you have something very specific in mind for that famous person, keep them out of it. A case in point is the use of people like Houdini in scenarios. It’s understandable – he’s a fascinating guy and continues to entertain us, eighty-five years after his death. But is his inclusion in an adventure really necessary? Could the narrative requirement be filled by someone else? Do you know Houdini well enough to make it convincing? What if one of the other players knows more about Houdini or is a bit more Google-savvy than you? What if Houdini gets killed during the scenario?

And on a more practical note, not having celebrities in your adventure means that it’s one more job lifted from your shoulders. In a game where you’ll be doing a lot of work, both research and administration, not to mention writing, that’s to be welcomed.

A related cliché is the “Before they were famous” syndrome. Picture the scene – it’s 1920 and the party is in Germany on the trail of cultists. They meet a strange artist with a little moustache struggling to make ends meet with his paintings. Lo and behold, they find out his name is Adolf. If the players are feeling malicious, they might contrive to ensure that something nasty happens to poor old Adolf and voila, historical paradox!

"Hey! This guy says if we buy his painting, he'll tell us where the Temple of Azathoth is"

Of course, famous people by their very nature were part of life back in the 1920s and so mentions of famous people can be made; this adds flavour. It’s like writing a book set in the 1960s and not once mentioning a certain four-man band from Liverpool.

Having said all this, I’m now going to contradict myself – well, slightly Fleeting encounters with famous people can be slotted in; they should, however, remain peripheral (either across the far side of a crowd or appearing for only a few moments and playing no further part in the story) and it helps maintain credibility if the famous person in question is only a minor celebrity and there’s a good reason for that person to make an appearance. Take the Grace la Rue encounter in the Majestic adventure – before I started to run the scenario, I’d never heard of her and she only spends about ten minutes in the game, if that. However, it adds a sense of realism and doesn’t break the above rules.

Next time, I’ll be looking at when to say no – and when to say yes.

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem – Part Eleven

Call of Cthulhu, the monsters notwithstanding, is not a splatterpunk bloodfest of tentacles and slime. It is not hack and slash, nor is it shoot and slash. It’s all in the atmosphere and it’s up to the Keeper to build and maintain that atmosphere. You might think that it’s difficult to do that through the medium of e-mail – after all, unlike their character, the player is in a well-lit room, well-fed and rested, safe and sound. Why on earth should they feel scared when they read an e-mail? And how can the Keeper ensure that they do?

This is where background reading comes in handy. I’m assuming that the potential Keeper has an interest in horror literature, otherwise he’d be playing D&D or Traveller or any non-horror RPG.

By reading, I don’t necessarily mean HPL (although he is, with suitable caveats, an excellent starting point). What the Keeper needs to do is to immerse him or herself in horror literature, and specifically the more psychological variety. I’m including in this film and TV sources as well. A good place to start is the HPL essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and seek out the texts listed therein. I’m grateful to this essay because it steered me to such works as Machen’s “The Three Impostors”, which is a splendid read and the works of Algernon Blackwood. M.R James I had already discovered and HPL’s description of his work as “gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life”. This description should be ingrained on the DNA of every Keeper because that, in a nutshell, is what they must do.

One of the key words in that description is “steps”. An adventure where the party meets the monster within the first few turns is going to be a very predictable story indeed because the plot has reached its conclusion and once the monster makes its appearance, there are very few places for the story to go – die or run are the two options that come to mind.

The good Keeper can eke out the fear by ensuring that the horror increases in small but significant increments. Matsch’s Law and the German proverb "Lieber ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende" (better a horrible ending than horrors without end) are the antithesis of this philosophy. The players should never be in the position that they are certain that they have reached the end. The greater the tension, the bigger the shock when things finally snap.

In the Majestic adventure, the tension builds because the party don’t meet anything specific for a good while but they encounter aspects of the uncanny almost from the word go. There are also stretches of prose that evoke bleakness, isolation and an unspecified menace that cannot be defended against because its location and therefore its threat are unknown.

Another source of inspiration for generating an atmosphere of mounting horror and menace is to look within. The keeper needs to ask “What really scares me?”

Because, at the level of the amygdala, we all share deep-seated fears; evolutionary pressures have hard-wired into our psycho-biological make-up reactions and instincts that we don’t even think about and yet we are fully aware of the effects of those reactions.

A good grounding in those reactions and the ways in which emotional responses are generated can give insight into the way that fear works. Once the Keeper knows how fear happens, he can devise methods to play on those mechanics and increase tension.

Returning to the HPL quote on MR James, the use of aspects of ‘prosaic daily life’ can reap dividends when it comes to making the players edgy or nervous. We all have a psychological comfort zone within which we feel safe and secure. That zone is often filled with the everyday, the normal; things we trust and know are harmless.

But are they? A good trick to pull when invading the players’ comfort zone is the “are they what they seem?” one, where seemingly normal people, places and things are twisted that little bit to suggest there’s something more to them. The players’ minds will do the rest – and this tendency of the mind to fill in the gaps can do the Keeper’s work for him in numerous other instances as well. Research the way that the mind works – hypnagogic hallucinations, paraeidolia, apophenia, sensed presence; it’s a fascinating subject in itself.

We referred, in an earlier instalment, to the need for the Keeper to stay two steps ahead of the party. Now we can see another benefit of this tactic – the party’s reactions can be picked up and used by the Keeper to rack up the tension. Something works particularly well? Use it. Something didn’t quite have the required effect? Ditch it. By a process of evolution, the ability of the Keeper to get under the skin of his players will be honed and a better, scarier, more vivid and immediate experience will be had.

It’s all in the description when it comes to pbem. You may not be HPL, but by reading around, you’ll be absorbing the techniques, prose and ideas that made great horror writers memorable. Look at the stories that really unnerve you (and CoC is about unease and unsettling rather than outright terror) and try to work out what it was that caused this effect. Analyse the techniques the writers used to evoke that experience. Do the same for adventures that you have played in the past and see how the tension was racked up.

Until next time, pleasant dreams!

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem - Part Ten

Do you like rules lawyers? Of course you don’t. Well, Call of Cthulhu is the game for you. It’s rules-light and atmosphere-heavy and that’s a good thing.

Firstly because, as you can imagine, the fewer rules there are, the less anyone has to nit-pick about. If I flick through my CoC rulebook, what do I see? Character creation runs from page 11 to 16 – that’s it. Five pages. And one of those is an example character sheet. Page 17 to Page 28 is the Game System and Skills. Twelve pages. Up to page 23 is the Weapons and Damage rules, 24 to 28 is the description of the skills and even they are subject to interpretation.

The very basic nature of the rules system for CoC means that players and Keeper can get on with what matters – the adventure. Establishing a protocol for the game before you start can ensure that the players are left in no doubt as to who has the final call on the interpretation of the rules, such as they are. If a dispute situation does arise, the general feeling (at least amongst our group) is that the current Keeper has the last call. It should also be remembered that rules that apply to PCs also apply to the baddies – or at least they should be - so the PCs are not being disadvantaged. If this fact is pointed out the players at the appropriate point, they should be satisfied or at the very least, mollified.

There is a slight downside to the brevity and simplicity of the rules and that is that it places a burden on the Keeper because maintenance of the atmosphere is down to them. If inspiration fails, there are few mechanics that the Keeper can fall back on for support.

However, overall, the CoC game structure and system means that it is easily learnable and indeed can be played without having an encyclopaedic knowledge of the intricacies of the game system. Would that all RPGs were like that. Indeed, a player can start to play immediately after rolling up a character and probably have just as good a time as someone who’s been playing for years, because the fun of the game, the experience of being an Investigator comes from the way that the players and Keeper interact in developing the feel and atmosphere of the game. And it’s the way in which atmosphere can be created that I’ll be dealing with next time.

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem - Part Nine

Classic Call of Cthulhu is set in the real world but in a time that, with one or two nonagenarian exceptions, none of us remembers. The pace of change has rendered this period as real to us as Middle Earth. What inhabitants of the 1920s accepted as commonplace is now consigned to the history books, to be learned about as just a collection of facts and sepia photographs.

So the Keeper has a challenge similar in vein to that of a Dungeon Master who has to create a living, breathing world that is at the same time our world but fantastical and alien. The Keeper does, however have one advantage over the struggling DM – the world of CoC does exist, or at least it used to and there are copious records to attest to that fact.

Those records are like a treasure trove, packed with facts, recollections and images that have the potential to bring life to what for us is tantamount to an alien world. In my post on sources of information for Call of Cthulhu, I’ve listed a great many sites where these records can be found. Properly used, they are a Keeper’s best friend.

However, the Keeper does have a challenge that the DM does not have to face. If a party of adventurers decide to head off across the river into the wilderness, past the Granite Obelisks and through the Bull Gate into the Forest of Hawks, the DM can be pretty confident that no-one is going to say
“Hang on a minute, it’s not like that there, the Bull Gate is twenty miles further north and the Obelisks haven’t been raised yet”
Yet if the Keeper turns around and tells the players in 1920 that President Roosevelt is travelling into New York on Route 66, he’s laid himself open to challenges in at least three areas (four if he uses an anachronistic car).

If, like most Keepers and players, you know little about the 1920s, there are two options you can adopt. One is to ignore the facts and wing it. Just play the adventure, no-one’s going to notice the errors and if they do, you can shrug and tell them to go and write their own history book. That’s an approach that, with a group of players who share the same outlook, can work. It would be a shame if that were the case, because well-placed details bring a game to life.
The second option is to ladle on the details with a big spoon. Whilst this is all well and good to begin with, the Keeper needs to remember one salient caveat.

Research is like salt. It adds flavour but too much makes you sick.

If I were to ask you to give me an account of your day, you’d probably not tell me the make of your breakfast cereal, the toothpaste you used or the brand of coffee you drank. You’d probably use generic terminology for those things. The degree to which you’d use that vagueness of description would probably depend on how well you thought I knew your life and how much detail you felt I needed in order to make sense of your account.

We probably both live in a western industrialised society and there are things that we take for granted that each of us know. I don’t have to listen to a description of how your car works, or – for that matter – what make it is or its performance details. You might tell me that it takes three hours for you to drive 200 miles but it took longer last winter because of the snow. You might enthusiastically tell me about your favourite TV programme but you wouldn’t give me an in-depth explanation of television itself.

Both the world we live in today and the world of Call of Cthulhu share certain details and it’s those that circumscribe the amount of information we need when running our games. A fact should be considered, weighed and then slipped into the narrative subtly so that virtually no-one notices. And it should only be done once. The players are there to play, not to study 20th century history.

When I put my author’s hat on and work on my fantasy novel, I have an acronym that I use - WANTON – Would Add Nothing TO Narrative. This keeps my work focused and free of unnecessary clutter – or so I hope. The same holds true of the description I write for the pbem. Remember that stretching a point to slot something interesting in is fine, but remember that over-stretching causes breakage.

By way of example, I’m including here a long section of my recent pbem, The Majestic Mystery, which gives an idea of the sort of thing I was sending out to players. Everything included is as historically accurate as I could make it, yet I hope the detail didn’t overwhelm the story.



You make your way to the dinner table where Dwight Albert has already taken his seat and has his wallet out. He passes the waiter a $50 bill and sends the man off with an imperious gesture.
He rises as Julia arrives and draws her chair out for her. He shakes the hands of Alessandro and Solomon, less reserved now that he knows who they are with. You note that Alice is seated with the Frosts. Chester Allen and O'Mahony are on a nearby table. A fresh bottle of whiskey has somehow followed them there.

Eyebrows are raised, nevertheless when Alessandro’s choice of guest for the last place arrives at the table.

Daniel Quigley might be good-looking in a saturnine way if he ate regularly and got some sleep. He is twenty-six but no-one would know it. He shakes Solomon’s hand with a less than enthusiastic grip and takes Julia’s hand and kisses it briefly. His handshake for Dwight is rather perfunctory.

Thanks to Dwight’s foresight in buying the waiter, you have more or less the best of everything. He has scrutinised the wine list and suggests a bottle or two of 1904 or 1911 Bordeaux, on finding that the hotel has no 1900, which he describes as an excellent year. For Alessandro, he acquires a White Burgundy 1906 which he believes you would find outstanding.

As regards champagne, he declares that since there were very poor harvests between 1902 and 1909, the champagne riots of 1910 and 1911 and the intervention of the war, he would not recommend drinking it at present.
Quigley is not particularly impressed by this show of largesse. Drawing a long pull on an unfiltered Gitane, he languidly states “I am a friend of the Green Fairy; she is a tender lover and leaves me intoxicated by her verdant beauty”.

He summons the waiter and whispers something into his ear. A few minutes later, a green bottle of Dornier-Tuller Absinthe, a bowl of sugar and a carafe of ice water arrives at the table. He offers the bottle around; Dwight seems less than pleased but is probably too polite to say anything.

[let me know if you are indulging - it's strong stuff. Anywhere from 45-74% ABV; I think this brand weighs in at 68%. Phew! Technically its import had been banned by the US in 1912 so this must be a bottle that the hotel had obtained before that]

Quigley’s love of French culture, he explains, came from a stay in Paris the previous year, during which time he met Gertrude Stein who he describes as “tiresomely ordinary in an extraordinary way” and made contact with the French surrealists, including Paul Eluard, Tristan Tzara and Andre Breton.
“I fear that when it came to true surreality, I found them wanting. They, for their part, found me too disturbing – however, Miss Somersby, I think that you would find their choice of words intriguing, not dérangé but affolé”
Julia is aware from her time in France that whilst the former means 'disturbing', the latter means 'terrifying'.
“They would have nothing more to do with me. I came home via London and sojourned there for a week or two; whilst I was there, I had the pleasure of meeting two very interesting gentlemen, Charles Bennett and George Jones, who describe themselves as mystics. And of course, I had the splendid good fortune to meet Arthur Rackham himself. I greatly admire his style – are you familiar with it?
If anyone is familiar with Rackham’s style and work, Quigley will spend several minutes comparing favourites.
“Of course” he says “his work is not to all tastes and some find him frightening. He took me into his confidence and told me that he has several pieces for which he was unable to find an exhibitor. No-one dared show them. I resolved to make every effort to see them one day”

Alessandro mentions the fact that Quigley has been working on pictures whilst staying here. The artist affects a moue of embarrassment.
“Signor Mancini is correct, although my doctor would throw up his hands in despair were he to hear of it. I was sent here for complete rest due to a nervous collapse before Christmas but I found that I was wholly unable to remain inactive. This place is utterly conducive to my work – it affect me, drawing out the visions within. I have such dreams as art is made of. Signor Mancini has displayed an interest in seeing my work – I wonder if anyone else at the table might consider a private viewing later, once dinner is over?”

[let me know if you're interested in Quigley's offer]

Regardless of what anyone else says, Dwight is stalwart in his refusal.
“I am not in the slightest bit interested in decadent, nay, degenerate artwork of this nature. I can see you for what you are, sir – a louche dilettante, sucking the life out of the American art world with your morally fraudulent obscenities”
“Obscenities? You are a representative of the society that sent millions to their deaths in barbed wire and mud for a failed vision and you have the gall to talk to me of obscenities?”
Dwight will not sit still for this but nevertheless he remains controlled in his anger. He regales the table with his war service and the battles in which he was a participant in France.
Quigley turns to Julia.
“Miss Somersby, if I have offended and insulted you by my actions at the table, I apologise. In you, I recognise a kindred spirit, a rebel and a fighter against the shackles of society. In honour of your integrity and that alone, I shall provoke no further; might we continue this discussion after dinner?”

[let me know if you reply in the affirmative to this suggestion]

Dinner continues with Quigley and Dwight giving each other frosty glances across the table but remaining restrainedly polite. As dinner ends and the table staff clear away the plates and glasses, there is an announcement.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” calls a young man who Julia recognises as Tommy Milner “I’m pleased to announce that the Green Mountain ballroom is now open for dancing; we have Miss Grace La Rue and Fred Mulrooney backed by Sly and Lefty Fitzgerald. Rudi at the bar tells me he has giggle water aplenty for those who haven’t had enough at their tables.”

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem - Part Eight

Other People – they’re everywhere. When you pass somebody in the street and barely look at them, they’re Adventure Dressing but when you stop and interact with them, they become NPCs. And of course, without wishing to sound like a certain Justice Secretary, there are different types of NPC, depending on the function that they are intended to perform within an adventure. Some get perhaps one line of description, others have the privilege of an entire stat block plus back story.

That, of course, is the state of affairs in a conventional published Call of Cthulhu adventure. With the less sandbox-oriented game, NPCs need information because they do indeed perform a specific function – either antagonists for the party in which case their conflict potential needs to be quantified so that they can give our hapless heroes a run for their money or as sources of information, in which case both the information that they will be called upon to impart and the conditions under which they will do so have to be detailed so that the party have hoops through which to jump.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, otherwise known as Occam’s Razor is a principle which should hold true in gaming as well as life. I’m taking it to indicate that NPCs should only be detailed as far as is necessary to give flavour to the game and no further.

There are two reasons for this.

Firstly, to do otherwise is making work for a Keeper when it’s not necessary. There’s enough record keeping and information to manage without making any extra. We’ve already discussed only staying two steps ahead of the players and this should hold true for NPCs as well. There really is no need (unless you’re a glutton for punishment) to start working out precise skill distribution for the antique shop owner in Amsterdam if the chances of the party actually meeting him, let alone him using any of the skills you’re writing down are going to be next to nil for the following six months. The point at which an NPC’s skill levels are worked out should be the point at which the party actually meet him or her and they actually use that skill. It may be that some skill slots are never filled, because they’re never called for. That’s fine – the curator of the museum’s Drive Auto skill is irrelevant if he goes everywhere by subway.

Secondly, there is always the danger, unless the Keeper is particularly dispassionate, that if an NPC begins to acquire detail, they may also begin to gain a personality and start to be thought of by the Keeper as more important than they actually are. We’ve all been there – a set of numbers on a page takes on a life and before you know it, you actually care about the NPC. After all, investing in a sheet of paper and some numbers is what the game is all about, so why should it be so odd if the Keeper starts to do it as well? He’s probably been a player too. It happens. Unfortunately, when it does happen, it’s only natural, either consciously or subconsciously, to take steps to preserve the NPC and that runs the very real danger of violating the development of the game.

However, it may be that in the course of the developing adventure, an NPC attaches themselves to the party and starts to play a particular role. If this is the case, the only skills that need setting up are those which relate to the role that they are playing. Again, keep it simple and worry about that which is absolutely necessary. A rough rule of thumb would probably be that skills in their area of expertise would weigh in at 50 – 60% and other skills anywhere from 20 – 30%. That having been said, to avoid the party being outgunned if they take on someone like that, I tend to set weapons skills generally at about 40-50% or so.

I’m now going to discuss an aspect of the pbem which only really applies if, like my group, you use rotating Keepers. When the mantle of Keeper passes to the next person in the group, what happens to the PC that they were playing (assuming that said PC survived reasonably intact)? I’ve worked it that the PC becomes an NPC run by the Keeper but still very much in the style that they operated previously. Of course, this NPC does, in theory, possess access to the knowledge of the Keeper as regards the forthcoming events and secrets that the party don’t have. This is why the now GMPC should be used as a nudger and hinter but always very sparingly. I used my GMPC in the Majestic adventure sometimes to advance an erroneous opinion or point of view to serve as a stimulus for the party to work their way to the correct solution. It takes a certain mental discipline not to turn the GMPC into a Mary Sue, solving problems and overcoming challenges without fail, but such a character played as a fallible, normal, realistic person can add to the feeling of an adventure. If the Keeper doesn’t feel as if they can carry this off, it’s better to have their character go on a sabbatical for the duration of the adventure. They can always return with some tantalising hints about the next adventure – provided the party hasn’t been wiped out in the meantime. And even if they have, there is now one survivor, determined to find out what happened and, if necessary, avenge them. Voila! The perfect hook for the next game!

Next time, I’ll be discussing research – how much is too much and when to stop before an adventure becomes a history lesson.

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem - Part Seven

One of the main components of a pbem is of course the e-mail system itself. One thing a Keeper is going to have to be prepared for is the fact that the e-mail folder is going to get very big, very quickly. My adventure, which ran from July 2010 to February 2011 had, at the last count, over two thousand e-mails. Even assuming that some of those were duplicates – and I’m pretty assiduous at deleting earlier versions of threads – the total is still pretty big.

Simple e-mails from the Keeper rapidly become threads which can run and run. Strategic deletion of earlier versions of threads is a necessity but beware getting too over-enthusiastic with the delete button – with multiple players may come replies to earlier e-mails that contain important information not held elsewhere and these replies may be mistaken for part of the thread. If your e-mail system allows you to file e-mails into individual folders, it may be a very good idea to allocate each player a folder into which their communications can be put. Of course, even Windows Mail can sort by sender, meaning that finding a particular e-mail is never a wholly impossible task (unless you’ve double-deleted it).

As we’ve previously covered, the e-mail means that individual players can have bulletins updated to their own character’s adventure requirements – if three people are in a room and each is talking to a different person, this is easily handled.

Of course, e-mail is not just words – pictures can be added to the e-mail and this heightens the flavour and atmosphere considerably. Vintage maps, drawings of sinister runes, charms, sigils and the like can be inserted, rather than being described, with the possibility of misinterpretation. Even different typefaces can be used if required to give an authentic feeling to e-mail communication. Handwriting fonts are available for letters, gothic or Olde English lettering for antique manuscripts, something functional and stark for newspaper stories…

And speaking of pictures, I’ve discussed before, in The Links Effect about tracking down photo archives from the period. A Keeper should start to build up a collection of pictures before they start the adventure, preferably whilst doing the research for their adventure ideas. There are a lot of 1920s resource sites out there, some of which I’ve listed on the post referred to, but you may well find others in your trawl of all things eldritch on the net. Save the ones that strike you as useful to a folder somewhere – it’s a bit of work to start with but you’ll soon start thinking “Oh, I could use that for so-and-so who runs the antique shop in Boston…” which is a lot more handy than thinking, several weeks into the adventure “Oh, I wish I could remember where I saw that picture…”

Good categories into which to sort the pictures, and – from personal experience – I found to be necessary are portraits, building interiors, building exteriors, landscapes, transport interiors and transport exteriors, social images (arts, leisure, fashion, entertainment) and miscellaneous ones like foodstuffs, clothing, drinks, etc. You may find that as the weeks go on, you find an image sparks an idea for a future adventure development.

A bit of a short one this week. Next time, I’ll be discussing how to handle NPCs so that they don’t become too much trouble to handle and what to do with the GMPC to avoid them becoming a Mary Sue.

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem - Part Six

This week, I’m going to be talking about red herrings.

First, however, a very important fact – in a CoC pbem, there are no red herrings.

But how can this be, I hear you cry. Surely red herrings are one of the crucial factors of any investigation-based game? Otherwise, every clue would point to the solution and the adventure would be over before it had begun.

Except of course that in our sandbox model of adventure construction, there is no pre-determined solution and therefore the party cannot be diverted from something that does not yet exist.

All right – let’s redefine the topic of conversation. Let’s call them the alternate possibilities of the adventure. Things that don’t seem to relate to the direction that the adventure is taking and yet, if spotted and followed can lead to what might seem to be a blind alley of investigation.

At every nexus of decision and possibility, there are usually two and often more choices that can be made. A railroad adventure has already made its mind up about which direction it’s taking and therefore which choice is to be made (and rewarded) and which are not to be made (and penalised if taken). Although it might seem that offering the party numerous choices is multiplying the workload of the Keeper, we’ve already seen that by staying a couple of moves ahead of the party and having the reaction time in days rather than minutes, this is not the case. Therefore, the Keeper’s attitude should be not be “I’ll give you a blatantly obviously relevant clue and two or three that clearly have no relevance to the adventure and can therefore be discarded or ignored” but rather “Let a hundred flowers bloom”

Of course, the last thing that a Keeper wants is for the party to be overwhelmed by choice – therefore, a sense of proportion is essential. Perhaps four or five leads that might result in something significant if the party chose to follow them up is fine. This also means that the entire adventure is not stalled if the party encounter a lead that they cannot, either through luck or misapplication, solve or deduce on their own.

It is a thrilling experience, albeit somewhat nerve-wracking to watch an alternate possibility take on a life of its own if the party decides to follow it up instead. A flexible Keeper will be able to flesh those out and be happy with the adventure going in a completely different direction. It may turn out that the adventure in its final form has virtually nothing in common with the direction that the Keeper originally intended. So much the better – it will be an adventure in which the players feel they have an investment of time, effort and imagination (and of course, the Keeper can gleefully point out that if they all perish horribly or end up insane, they have no-one to blame but themselves)

As well as active and immediate alternative possibilities, the Keeper should also toss in references which may have nothing to do with the current adventure but which broaden the game world that little bit more. These might be called displaced adventure opportunities, since they can either be followed at once (if the party feel like it) or noted and kept for later. Such is the nature of sandbox CoC that these references can often take on a life of their own even if they are not taken up immediately. The living nature of a sandbox world means that displaced opportunities will develop and change with time and the adventure a party takes up eventually may be different in many respects from the one that they might have encountered had they acted on the reference immediately. And if the campaign is a multi-Keeper one, a new Keeper may want to pick up an aside in the previous Keeper’s adventure and flesh it out into a full-blown adventure of their own.

Of course, it may be that there are alternative possibilities and displaced opportunities that are never taken up. Such is the way – there’s always more that the Keeper can invent than can be investigated even by the most active (and fortunate) party. That’s fine – they can become a part of the tapestry that makes up the world’s backdrop. Other parties, NPCs and the like may choose to investigate them, becoming either successful investigators or – more likely – horribly mutilated corpses to be encountered by a future band of player characters. All the more affecting if the NPCs were known to the players and with it, the realisation that it could so easily have been them.

"Do the smart thing - let somebody else try first"

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem – Part Five

Ever wondered why so many Lovecraft stories involve the protagonist hurriedly writing a scribbled account of his experiences while the eldritch horrors are closing in?

The answer is simple – said protagonist is the last surviving player in the game and the Keeper doesn’t want his adventure to stall. Some unsuspecting soul, probably the doomed one’s nephew or colleague or best friend is going to find that scribbled manuscript waiting for him and think

“Ah nuts, another TPK!”

It’s a truism in Call of Cthulhu that if you don’t run away, you’ll end up dead. Actually, you’ll end up dead if you DO run away if that monster is faster than you. Probably should have started running earlier.

Generally, however, if the Keeper is doing his job right, a TPK should only really happen in Call of Cthulhu if the party is dumb enough not to run away if the signs are bad. If they do all the right things, make preparations, take a truckload of ammo AND run away as soon as the tentacles appear and still die, then something’s wrong with the adventure.

The aim of a Call of Cthulhu adventure is to scare the party witless, give them a hell of a good time while this happens and maybe, just maybe somebody will die if they’re dumb. Setting an adventure up so that even a well-prepared party has no chance is verging towards Killer Keeper territory. If the party doesn’t spot that they had no chance and were doomed from the beginning, they’re going to hang around in KK territory for a long time.

Chances are that a Killer Keeper wants the party to see just how awesome his final set piece showdown is. He’ll have gone to a lot of trouble to set it up (not having read Part Three of this series) and is looking forward to showing everyone his horror chops as he devours, mutilates and generally trashes the hapless band of investigators.

Of course, it might not be that bad. A Keeper might not realise that he should spare the axe if the party has done everything it should have done. In my Majestic adventure, the party (and this is probably the first time I’ve admitted it) never got to see the Big Bad. Encounters with crazy hillbillies (oh, and green slimy tendrils, which was a bit of a hint as to what they might meet later) were enough to persuade them that the hotel should be given a One-Star rating and probably set on fire. In fact, one of them tried to do just that. But when I realised that they were not going to take that final journey into madness and nightmare, I stayed my hand. They were having a great time and I went with the flow. Many parties will look back on the narrow escape that they had and thank their lucky stars that they didn’t turn that corner, open that crypt, read that book. Of course, not having defeated the Big Bad, they won’t regain any SAN points but hey, that’s the price of life!

Another important thing to consider when talking about mortality in CoC is that when designing an adventure, or even sketching it out in a very rough form (which of course you all do now, don’t you, after Part Three?) a Keeper should remember one thing that is certain about life in Call of Cthulhu – anyone can die. And often very easily and very unexpectedly. Yes, the character may have been stupid and yes, it’s a great shame and a tragedy to boot but death is likely. Very likely. So likely in fact that it’s a very bad idea to structure an entire adventure on the assumption that a particular person will survive it or live long enough to carry out a particular task. Or that a particular scenario or instalment of the adventure can only be solved by a particular character’s particular skill. If only one character has the ability to telepathically see through solid objects and you’ve taken this into account when setting up the fiendish death trap in the cellars of Count Morbidius, then that character had better still be alive if the party is not going to be in deep doo-doo in said cellar.

Hanging the entire adventure, or salient features of it, on that particular character being in possession of all their body parts means one of two things – either the adventure is going to nose-dive rapidly after the Grim Reaper has come to call or the Keeper is going to have to move heaven and earth to keep that character alive, and that means taking delivery of a wagon load of fudge. It’s much better to avoid this before it happens.

Okay, I hear you cry, I’ve got a really dumb party and things look as if they’re heading towards a TPK – they’ve not run away or, perish the thought, their Internet dice rolls have gone really badly. What do I do?

Well, if the party hasn’t quite reached that situation yet, I’d recommend that you advise them all to do the ‘doomed investigator’ routine and scribble down their notes on the adventure so far, leaving them somewhere that somebody can find them or mailing them to their back-up character (of which more in a moment)

If they are all in the cellars of Count Morbidius and something has gone very badly wrong, then I would personally handwave the scribbled note phenomenon for just this one instance and advise them that you’ll be adopting it as a house rule next adventure. They won’t have to say they’re doing it, you’ll just take it as read that they are.

Back-up characters – as smart a move as taking a clean set of underwear to an abandoned crypt under Boston. It’s generally a good idea to have said characters tied in to the current characters in some way – colleague, nephew, friend, parish priest, investigative reporter, that sort of thing. Linked but not too closely. This gives the new character, who may (I wonder why?) be coming into the adventure at very short notice an almost instant hook. By the time the adventure has finished, said character will have perfectly legitimate reasons for hunting down the horrors from the Outer Darkness.

Is it a good idea to have a player bring a new character into an adventure that is half-over if his original character has been killed? I’d say it depends on the player – if you know the player and feel sure that he will run that character without using foreknowledge or information known only to his original character (this is assuming that the OC didn’t leave a log of his doings) then fine, there is no real reason why not. Leave a believable amount of time for the new character to appear – not minutes after the OC has hit the ground, torn to pieces by a Byakhee.

The other plus about having a back-up character is that, even if they are never actually needed to step into the breach (or, let’s be realistic here, there is a slightly extended period of waiting for them to do so) they can in effect have a little life of their own. The Keeper can, with all due respect to the player whose character it will be, contribute events and happenings (interesting but not fatal) that the back-up character can experience. They may even write to the current character to tell them about it. That’s what I call pre-emptive hooks. Nothing too strenuous but enough to give them a link to the current party and perhaps a bit of backstory and knowledge that they can dip into if they need it. With the pbem’s miniverse evolving as you play, this is another facet of the bringing to life of the setting – making it all that much more believable and realistic.

Next time, I'll be smelling something fishy - red herrings and how to make the best use of them.

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem - Part Four

This week, I’m dealing with a very handy tool to make the administration of a pbem much easier. I’m talking of course about Obsidian Portal.

Those of you who have used OP already for other adventures can vouch for the fact that it has few equals as a repository of information for adventures, useful for both players and GMs.

The way in which OP can be used for a pbem differs depending on the type of pbem that you’re running. If, like our group, you are using rotating Keepers, i.e. a different Keeper for each adventure, then the use of OP’s Secret Information Facilities is going to be very difficult, if not impossible. However, if you just have the one Keeper, then the ability to store information and keep it hidden from the players, who only get to see one aspect of the wiki page is very handy.

With Call of Cthulhu run sandbox-style, there needs to be a record of a great many details which, in a tabletop version of the game would just slip by if the players didn’t immediately take them up. Bit-part characters can be created and there is a fluff and crunch format that allows biography in one section, stats in another. Since with an evolving plot, it is very difficult to tell in advance who’s going to be the lynch-pin of an adventure, access to details on various characters, even the supposedly minor ones is crucial.

If you as the Keeper are setting up the wiki, it is important to let the players know where it is and how to get into it. They should be encouraged to check it out and familiarise themselves with it. The Keeper should not touch the character detail sheets unless consultation with the player has been conducted. Likewise, the players can alter details on things like the events log and the wiki pages but should not unless there is a very good reason, e.g. the Keeper has misremembered something, and even then agreement should be gained for the alterations, otherwise it becomes a free-for-all and the value of the wiki is diminished thereby.




These are two sample pages from our OP wiki.




And this is from a wiki that I respect and admire greatly - Cthulhu Supremus Est. This guy knows how to use OP very well indeed and the results can be seen here.

Used well, OP can be a very stimulating and useful tool. It brings a campaign to life in a way that little else can – it also means that new players can mug up on the past history of the campaign without having to get a twenty page update from the Keeper or be forever wondering what the in-jokes are all about.


A Question about Combat
A couple of weeks ago, Martin Thomas asked me the following

"I've never done a PbM/PbEM/PbP game before, so one thing I'm curious about it combat. I know there isn't a lot of combat in Cthulhu games, but (at least in the CoC games I've played), there is some. How do you handle that in a PbEM game?"

Well, Martin - the rule book does give some very clear rules on how to handle combat on the table-top and pbem is very similar in that respect – order of fire, damage, hit points, time to reload, dexterity and its effect on who goes first (I won’t quote page numbers because it’ll be different for each edition). It’s best if players and Keeper establish a baseline at the start of the adventure for which rules they’ll be using. This saves arguments in the heat of the moment.
As for dice rolls, we used a mixture of Secure Dice rollers and manual methods to work this. The Secure Dice roller seems to have a mind of its own when it comes to generating scores – I’m sure I’ve failed more rolls in this current adventure than I ever did rolling by hand.
Regarding the scene of the action, I find that a quick sketch map of a room or cave or whatever with the positions of characters and NPCs can be scanned in and e-mailed to the players – this makes sure everyone knows who is where and who can hit whom.
I found that with ammunition and shots fired, it’s best if both Keeper and player keep a record of this so that arguments can be swiftly settled if they arise.
As with all the game’s systems, what applies to the good guys applies to the bad guys, who have the same vulnerabilities and the same limitations on ammunition and combat skills. Remember that combat is very dangerous in CoC – one good shot can take out a much-loved character and that’s before we get into the horrific damage that even the low-level monsters can do. Of course you could always do what one of our players did and construct your own blast bomb out of oil cans and shotgun cartridges. That seemed to work okay.

Next time I’ll be looking at a very frequent occurrence in Call of Cthulhu – character deaths and how to handle them.

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem - Part Three

This week, we’re going to be looking at a way to reduce the amount of work that a Keeper needs to put into the game.

For many, Call of Cthulhu is a very linear game. The investigators probe Mystery A, get clue B which leads them to Mystery C, and so on until Denouement Z, where death, insanity or (possibly) survival await them.

This is the format which many, but not all, of the published scenarios embrace. Even those which do not follow a strictly linear path nevertheless intend that the party arrive at a certain point or the world will end/R’lyeh will rise/Very Bad Things will happen.

What I propose is, to be frank, a sandbox Call of Cthulhu. Although there may well be a sketchy idea in the Keeper’s mind of where he wants the adventure to lead, it needs to remain just that – sketchy. In this version of the game, nothing is firmed up further than perhaps two steps ahead of the party’s current location in the unfolding narrative. You will remember what I said in an earlier post about the game being almost like watching a horror novel write itself? Well, the narrative structure in sandbox CoC is exactly that – only becoming fixed once the party has actually done what they are doing. Before that, there are a number of different outcomes for any particular course of action. It’s a bit like a role-playing game designed under the Copenhagen Interpretation.

So, the Keeper needs to stay two steps ahead of the party and no further. To do otherwise would lead to an explosion of possibilities which few Keepers have either the time or the energy to handle.

It’s usually fairly easy to work out the possible outcomes of a single course of action and make plans for them. Indeed, the advantage of the pbem format, with its turnaround time of days rather than minutes is that the Keeper has the time to react to what the players do and the time to prepare new material and new avenues of investigation.

Of course, what the Keeper needs to remember is that the party should be under no obligation to pick a particular option, even from a limited number of offered alternatives.

One of the disadvantages (if indeed it can be called that) of working this way is that some of the material developed is never used – I’m afraid that this is just the way the adventure goes. There is always the option of recycling stuff that doesn’t get its day in the sun.

This is a perfect example of why it is not a good idea to plan too far in advance. No doubt you’re a creative person who puts a lot of effort into your game. Without some form of self-restraint, you may become overly enamoured of your creations and go out of your way to ensure that your work is not wasted – we’ve all done it in the past. If you have not done the work in the first place, the temptation to railroad the players into it is avoided.

Part of the fun of CoC pbem is the thrill of watching something new and unexpected develop. Flying by the seat of one’s pants sometimes generates the sort of game developments that might never result from endless planning sessions and careful deliberations; it’s like automatic writing – you’re tapping into something in your subconscious, raw creative energies that come coiling out of you, living and breathing. You’re laying story-larvae – don’t smother them, watch them grow!

In order to make sandbox CoC work, the miniverse in which the Keeper’s game is set needs to be introduced into the developing narrative landscape of that game. If hints, mentions, suggestions, fragments of mysteries and events connected to - but not necessarily immediately germane to - the adventure in play are slipped into conversations by NPCs or even the format of newspaper clippings, a network of hooks, ripe with potential can be developed, from which the players can make choices – and meaningful ones at that.

It takes a certain amount of mental flexibility to adopt the sandbox approach to CoC. Some people like to know where they are going before they set out. Others get nervous at the amount of work they think is needed for this approach – although we have seen that this is not the case. Others like to get very creative with all elements of the adventure they’re writing and then become locked into that because they have an urge, understandably so to let the players experience their creation in all its glory.

So, Keepers need to pry their fingers off the handlebars, so to speak, and maintain the lightest of touches on the future of the adventure. This is not always an easy thing to do, especially for those who have come to CoC from the adventure path end of the gaming spectrum. Nevertheless, the rewards are immense – players really do feel as if they are masters of their own destinies. The converse of this, of course, is that they have no-one else to blame if they fail.

Of course, much of what has been written in this post will make using pre-written scenarios very difficult, unless you are the sort of person who views the booklet in your hand as a starting point, nothing more, and feel yourself under no obligation to use all of it. If you are, that’s fine. Take it, dismember it, gut it, fillet it. Throw away (or store for later) the bits the party just don’t seem to want to know about. Scribble your own notes in the margins, change the names, change the towns. Download your own pictures. You’ll be amazed at how quickly someone else’s material becomes your own.

Next time, I’ll be talking about a very valuable tool for keeping tabs on all these adventure elements.

Running a Call of Cthulhu pbem - Part Two

So, you’ve got the players, you’ve agreed the rules and the characters are rolled up. Now – what do you do next?

There are two choices here – either pick up a pre-written adventure or start off with one of your own. If your players are new to Call of Cthulhu, it might be an idea to ease them in slowly with something that you can customise and adapt to their playing styles as they emerge. I found with my Majestic Hotel scenario (home-brew) that this worked best. Your mileage may vary. And as we shall see next time, this is not as much work as you might think it is.

If the characters don’t know each other, the Keeper needs to work with each player, checking out the character rationale and history in order to get an idea of what might hook the character into embarking on this investigation. A player can play a character best when they believe in what they’re playing.

“Wait, wait!” I hear you cry – “I thought Old School was all about exploration rather than developing character, and anyway, why should my players develop characters that are probably going to die within a few days?”

Rest easy, my friend – Call of Cthulhu, as we’ve already discussed earlier, is atmosphere-heavy. In a game environment where the feel of the setting is paramount, the degree to which the players believe in their characters and identify with them makes the job of the Keeper easier when it comes to creating an atmosphere of fear and unease.

So yes, for this game, a degree of character history is not only a good idea but also contributes to the way the game develops.

So, the hook. To begin with, the characters will not know each other and, if the players are new to the game, neither will they. This is a perfect opportunity to ease the player into the scenario - they may even meet another player without realising they’ve done so. For some time, they may believe that they are entirely on their own, suspecting everyone they meet and everything that happens to them. Good – this is just the attitude a player needs to develop if they’re to survive any length of time in CoC.

A case in point – my Majestic adventure was set at a luxurious ski hotel high in the Vermont mountains. I wanted to get the characters there but didn’t want them in the CoC equivalent of “you are sitting in a tavern when a mysterious stranger approaches you…”. I checked each character’s personality and history and from that, extrapolated reasons why they should want to go to the hotel, without knowing what was lying in wait for them. One character was a gangster, who was informed that a fugitive from mob justice was staying at the hotel and was told to go there, dispose of him and recover stolen money. Another character, a socialite with money worries got a letter from a friend saying a mutual acquaintance worked there and was looking for entertaining after-dinner speakers. A third character who worked at a coffee shop had let it be known in his character bio that he was looking for another job and so he got a call from the restaurant manager who was thinking of starting a coffee outlet to respond to impending Prohibition.

All three characters now had a reason to attend the hotel without knowing that the others were also on their way.

With a group of characters that already know each other from earlier investigations (yes, some characters do last longer than one adventure) the job is made that little bit easier. They have common history, may have discovered horrible secrets during their last adventure (which might need following up), possibly acquired artifacts whose history may develop to generate new hooks. The individual characters are now a group with, it is to be hoped, a group loyalty and commonality of purpose. It may be that effectively, the next adventure will more or less write itself.

What does this mean for the Keeper? Well, it means that he needs to hook only one of the characters and the rest will follow. If he wants, the other characters in the party can have hooks that either complement or clash with the main party mission – that will make things interesting, especially if everyone is following their own agenda.

As we’ll see later in this series, establishing a miniverse of your own into which the various adventures can be set, and within which they can be adjusted and amended, gives a fertile bed from which new ideas and hooks can arise.

One final point – I’ve been discussing home-brew in this post, which is easy to amend and adjust to the different histories and motivations of the characters. Pre-written adventures are that little bit harder to use in this situation because they often supply their own hooks and suggestions, which may not necessarily fit the characters and anyway, are very general in order to maximise the adventure’s playability. They may also be structured in a particular way and amending one thing makes the rest of the structure that little bit more wobbly. The Keeper needs to look long and hard at the introduction to these scenarios and, if necessary, throw away the suggested introduction and write a new one that will draw the characters into it in a way that make them feel as if it couldn’t have happened any other way. This is completely okay and develops the Keeper’s creativity, imagination and attachment to someone else’s scenario.

One final, final point – even with all this hard work and character motivation, it may be that the players don’t take the bait. You have two choices at this point – coercion and conciliation. (There is a third choice, which I’ll come to shortly). No player likes to feel that they’re being pushed into something; being the contrary types they are, they may even decide to rebel and derail anything the Keeper brings to the table. Players of Call of Cthulhu may, if the Keeper is doing a good job, become rather paranoid and any hint of compulsion will make them believe that Shoggoths or sinister cannibal cultists are waiting in that seemingly innocent apartment…

Conciliation can work if the players are handled correctly although the Keeper admitting that he would really like the party to do X undermines the atmosphere and verisimilitude of the adventure and the campaign setting – the best horror stories are those when the characters blunder into something that quickly unfolds into a nightmare scenario. Not knowing what you’re getting into is part of the game, and – some would say – the best part.

The final option, if the players seem obdurately determined not to take the bait is to walk away, figuratively speaking and do something else. As we shall see next time, this is not always a bad thing – in fact, in some cases, it may be the making of the adventure.

The Links Effect

Well, I've recently finished a seven-month stint as a Keeper on a pbem Call of Cthulhu adventure. From next week, I'll be starting a new blog post series on my ideas and suggestions for how to run a successful pbem, primarily for CoC but some of the ideas and guidelines are transferable to other games.

Over the seven months, I've built up a long list of links that came in very handy for establishing atmosphere and detail. Now that I have become a player rather than Keeper, it's time to clear house; my wife is complaining that our Favourites list reaches halfway to the Sun and I'd like to have all the relevant links in one handy place.

I'm also aware that there are a lot of gamers out there who'd like to play CoC but can't find the players. Pbem solves that problem and I hope that the forthcoming series will give potential Keepers some guidelines and pointers in running a memorable and successful adventure.

So, herewith, the links. I hope that they prove useful for you if you are tempted to probe the eldritch and dark corners of the 1920s...

(my apologies that they are not hyperlinked; when I've got a bit more time, I'll try to fit those in)


Our Decade of Darkness pbem wiki
http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/decade-of-darkness

An A-Z of Lovecraft's writings, including those hard-to-obtain ones:
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/

Chaosium's Quick Start CoC rules
http://www.chaosium.com/article.php?story_id=87

This site has suggestions and ideas for horror adventures:
http://www.talesofterror.net/index.html

And this site is useful as well:
http://www.vialarp.org/20s/20s_occult.html

General information on the 1920s, by subject
http://www.1920sera.com/

Looking for some info on WW1 aeroplanes? This site has plenty:
http://www.firstworldwar.com/airwar/bestaircraft.htm

As does this one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Military_aircraft_of_World_War_I

Setting my adventure in the area of Brattleboro meant doing some serious leg-work to find out 1920s information on the town. Some links follow:

http://www.ibrattleboro.com/braintrust/index.php?title=Brattleboro_A_Prosperous_New_England_Town

http://www.ibrattleboro.com/braintrust/index.php?title=1900's

http://www.ibrattleboro.com/braintrust/index.php?title=Annals_of_Brattleboro

What Call of Cthulhu adventure would be complete without its mental asylum?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brattleboro_Retreat

Interested in knowing what time the sun sets in your adventure? You wouldn't want to be caught out after dark, would you?
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunrise.html

These links came in very handy when Dungeonmum wanted to have her character speak authentically
http://home.earthlink.net/~dlarkins/slang-pg.htm
http://local.aaca.org/bntc/slang/slang.htm

Information about cars of 1919 can be found here
http://local.aaca.org/bntc/mileposts/1919.htm
http://www.american-automobiles.com/Metz-25.html

And here is the car I want to buy when I am very rich - the Hispano-Suiza H6. What a car!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispano-Suiza_H6

The HP Lovecraft Historical Society is well worth a visit
http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html

Need details of menus and foodstuffs of the 1920s?
http://www.foodtimeline.org/fooddecades.html#1920s
http://www.gjenvick.com/VintageMenus/BreakfastMenus/1914-09-08-Menu-Breakfast-Laconia.html

One thing that really makes a pbem adventure is the standard of the props used. I found this site which has a good collection of black and white photos which are handy for using when introducing NPCs.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/nederland_voor_1920_holland_before_1920_/pool/

This one is very useful too
http://rs6.loc.gov/detroit/dethome.html

Some interesting information on tobacco products during the CoC era, with some authentic brand names
http://www.tobacco.org/resources/history/Tobacco_History20-1.html

If this chap is not in your CoC adventure, he certainly ought to be:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Walker_Atkinson

Want a street map of Lower Manhattan in 1920?
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/manhattan_lower_1920.jpg

And the list of streetcar lines to go with it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streetcar_lines_in_Manhattan

A collection of historical maps; this link takes you to the New York selection but you can navigate to other map categories on the site.
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/new_york.html

Fancy a night out in the 1920s? Check out this list and its sister list as well
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vaudeville_performers:_A-K

You'd be mad to miss a site called Historic Asylums of America. No matter where your investigators go insane, there's a place for them to go.
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~asylums/

If you're setting off for Africa in the 1920s, you'll want to make sure you're taking enough equipment. Read about someone who was never under-equipped
http://uair.arizona.edu/item/272972

Some information on stars of the silent movie era
http://silentladies.com/SGAnnex16.html

Historic Boston - not far from Historic Arkham and Historic Kingsport...
http://www.boston-online.com/Photos/Historic/

Are you Providence? You are? Then this is the site for you; Rhode Island architecture
http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/ri/index.html

A list of the Governors of Vermont - I had great trouble finding this so it's here if you need it. I would imagine that other states have similar listings.
http://vermontgenealogy.wordpress.com/2006/12/23/list-of-governors-of-vermont/

A very handy site, not for the Federal Reserve of Minneapolis but for the converter in the top right hand corner which will enable you to compare 2011 prices with those of any other year. Now your investigators won't end up tipping the bellboy the equivalent of a year's wages...
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/index.cfm


This site provided me with a wealth of historical photographs of Brattleboro in the 1920s but I should imagine that they will pass for any small town and plenty of other locations should have their own archives.
http://www.brattleborohistoricalsociety.org/historic_photos/index.php

Here's an organisation that can be either helper or antagonist for the investigators, depending on which side of the fence they come down
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Protective_League

A little light reading for all horror enthusiasts - The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8492


Find out about disasters and tragedies of the 20th century on this site. I'm not saying Mythos creatures were involved - but I'm not saying they weren't.
http://www3.gendisasters.com/

1907 was a great year for travel - read all about what it entailed here. Things won't have changed all that much by the 1920s
http://www.phouka.com/ant/book04/ttle.htm

A fascinating guide to Forgotten New York - there's even a link to old cemeteries, and we all know what happens to anyone who goes there in a CoC adventure...
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/streetnecrology/necrologyhomepage/necro.html

Links to a whole legion of Gothic writers, including Machen, James, Poe...
http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/authors.html

Advertisements can really give flavour to a campaign: this site's got plenty
http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/

This site is the Popular Science archive and has scans of magazines going back to January 1920 - the small ads can be used to add atmosphere to any adventure (other years are available, just key month and year into the archive box)
http://www.popsci.com/results?query=January+1920

Let's go to Egypt (say Hi to Nyarlathotep if you see him...)
http://oi.uchicago.edu/museum/collections/pa/pioneer/egypt_region.shtml

That's all the links I've got right now. If anyone's got any other links that can assist the busy Keeper, let me know and I'll try to include those as well.

Crawling out of the computer - Cthulhu pbem!

For the past two weeks or so, I and three others – Old 4 Eyes, Dungeonmum and Rich Hart from Gaming on the Precipice have been conducting an experiment.

We wanted to know if it was possible to run Call of Cthulhu by e-mail. Given that we live in different countries (and time zones), a live game was out of the question and at least two of us have had great trouble finding players in our locales. Pbem seemed to tick everyone’s boxes – in theory - but would it work in practice?

The experiment has, I am glad to say, been a resounding success. Complete with Chaosium’s Quick Start rules plus (in my case) a Fourth Edition rule book snaffled from ebay for a shockingly low price (woot!) we have been having a whale of a time. For me, it’s almost like having a group of friends sitting round the table with their dice, pencils and paper. To quote Dungeonmum

“This is my first PBEM, got to say what you lose in immediacy you gain in retention of information and the ability to prepare and roleplay properly. I think I'm enjoying the real world setting more than I would a fantasy one, feels like we're really travelling back in time!”

I’m the Keeper for this particular adventure (instigator’s privilege) and possibly more that might follow until the others in the group feel confident about taking up the mantle of Keeper themselves.

Call of Cthulhu is, to my mind, a game that cries out to be run by e-mail. It needs that slow and steady increase in tension and menace. It needs the feel of epistolary communication. It eschews the vulgarities of combat, the administration of which can so often slow a pbem game down.

In order to be able to craft and refine the playing experience, the Keeper needs that little bit more time to prepare, research, polish and finesse his game. In this particular game, I’ve been adding vintage pictures of scenes and characters to give it that period feel.

In terms of game mechanics, I also find that pbem works very well. Players can communicate with each other almost as easily as around a table, and if a player wants to keep discussion between themselves and the Keeper secret, an e-mail is a damn sight more discreet than passing a note or going into another room. Information is written down, readily to hand and speaking of information…

…I’ve also created a wiki on Obsidian Portal, where I am exploring the possibilities. It’s a very good game aid and an excellent resource (thanks to Chgowiz for steering me to it). I’m listing as much as I can in the wiki section so that any other member of the group who wants to run an adventure can refer back to stuff that’s happened previously and is therefore canon.

And I’m also delighted to say that the adventure has an official chronicler – yes, Dungeonmum is blogging up the experiences of her character in her own and most excellent style.

We hope to be able to expand the number of players for the next adventure, so I’ll be looking to recruit a couple more brave investigators who fancy probing the mysteries of the Old Ones and their evil doings.