[Campaign] Starting Anew and Some Lessons Learned - Part The First

More Backstory? More Backstory

A year ago I was an old-school D&D DM who was coming back to a hobby he loved. I'd been WANTING to game again for years and I knew what I was looking for - I wanted to play my version of The Classic RPG Game From The 70s. I was after the kind of loose and low-crunch version of the game that I remembered from the Basic and early Advanced editions of the game I had played in high school. I realized that a lot of the players I was working with would be people that I would be introducing not only to *my* game, nor to D&D itself, but also to the WHOLE IDEA of role playing games as a tabletop activity. Frankly, they had no idea how tabletop RPGs worked and why should they? Many of them had played World Of Warcraft and had the basic jist of the combat and "Hit Points" and rewards and that all down pat, but some of them had never actually rolled dice physically at a table with someone else before. As a point of illustration, I had one of them asking me at one point if it was more like a kind of "combat chess" where one group of players would be fighting another half of the players at the table with me refereeing the goings-on. This was all going to be new.  During the six months I ran D&D for that group, three out of five of the people playing had either never played a tabletop RPG before, or, if they had, it had been so long ago and they had been players so briefly that it was like they had to be taught again anyhow. Fortunately, I like a challenge. More importantly, I saw this as a great opportunity to build a new group and if I made it easy enough that ANYONE could sit down and play within 15-20 minutes after making a character I knew that we would get even more players.

With that in mind I came up with a quick and dirty rule set for my gaming group. This was something cobbled together from the source material and other material and house rules that I would be incorporating from other OSR games and things that I had found on the plethora of DIY D&D sites that were cropping up like mushrooms overnight at the time. I like to think it was really successful, and I know that some of the people playing welcomed the fact that a majority of the crunch was kept low while still not pushing the burden of the storytelling onto them. What it also did, was allow me to introduce concepts that were specific to my game (like, say, using DCC magic in an otherwise Ascending AC reworking of B/X D&D rule-set like in LotFP - I've just found the gamers reading this if that alphabet soup I just typed made any sense to them). This way, everyone going in could learn the new game , that is to say, MY game, my "MURDERHOBOES" campaign (as I'd had decided on the name before another group had published rules under that title). It allowed the house rules and the new rules to work together organically. It worked for the six months we managed to keep meeting as a group.

Bearing this in mind, I decided to do something similar with my CALL OF CTHULHU game. I've cobbled together parts of the Quick Start rules for 7th Edition CoC, along with the character creation rules and the listings of Investigator Occupations from the 7th edition Investigator's Handbook to give everyone a fair start going in. Having taught some of those early original new D&D players how RPGs work, these same people have recruited a few of their friends who, like them before, have never played CALL OF CTHULHU before, and who'd been away from gaming for a long time themselves. I'm still looking at, roughly, a ratio of about three new players for each two experienced ones at the table. That's a lot of newbies, but so be it.

To Be Continued - Character Creation and A Radical Change Of Genre

[House Rule] How tall is my character...? It says 65 here...65 WHAT I'm not quite sure...

Has this ever happened to you?

"Heights and Weights!
Heights and Weights for my Dark Lord Arioch!!"

Transitioning to a new edition of any role playing game is tricky for longtime gamers. Usually new editions of a game are made to try to make the game appeal to a broader variety of players. Sometimes, to try to resell the same old game to longtime players the publisher will incorporate some widely used house rules and a set of tweaks and call this a new edition. Coming from BASIC ROLE PLAYING as it did, the original edition of the game staved rather closely to the BRP/RUNEQUEST 2nd Edition rules and the five editions of CALL OF CTHULHU that followed it didn't make too many changes from that. This is uncommon for most tabletop RPGs, and it has been incredibly handy for CALL OF CTHULHU players for the past 35 years. The fact that someone can pick up a copy of any supplemental material that has come out for CALL OF CTHULHU since its inception - in fact ANY BRP-related material at all- and plug it into their CoC campaign has helped a lot of us a great deal.

This is one of those plugs, with some of the math done in advance for those who might be able to use it.

I've taken the height and weight charts associated with the SIZ attribute from STORMBRINGER (Chaosium's original BRP game based on Micheal Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone) and adjusted it accordingly for 7th edition CALL OF CTHULHU's percentage based attribute stats. All a player or Keeper need do is find their SIZ stat to the left and, after choosing on a body type for the Investigator or NPC in question see what height or weight they'd be in both imperial measure and metric. Dig in

Download the PDF here.

[Campaign] Getting The Band Back Together

My group of players and I are beginning regular sessions for MIDNIGHT TRAIN TO ARKHAM, my CALL OF CTHULHU campaign. I'm running the game for the remnants of the D&D group I created last year with some additional interested parties that have always wanted to play in RPGs but who have never really had the opportunity to do tabletop roleplay before.

I am always excited by having the newbies at the table. I think this is because so many of them have always wanted to play but because of a weird kind of push-back from people who already play they've never been able to. Because most of them have never actually learned “the way these things are done” you get a much fresher approach to the game and to role playing in general than you have with long-time gamers who've been taught a strange, silent, secret protocol as to how to say what, and to whom to say it to. I find much of this existing protocol stuffy and creatively stultifying, myself. The protocol serves its purpose, to be sure, but I don't think that the purposes it serves would be something that would be necessary in my circle of friends, and quite often it ends up strengthening the kinds of social divisions that the nerdy erect to maintain a kind of false-dignity that are largely unnecessary when you're actually playing with people you know well and aren't afraid of seeming a little foolish in front of.

You allow poop jokes in your HORROR GAMMME!? UNACCEPTABLLLLLLLE!!!

Yes, I'll say it – I do not play RPGs with strangers, nor am I really that interested in doing so. I'm not saying that this is a stance that's not liable to change in future, but, for the time being, this is one that I'm sticking to and I've got my reasons. On the two or three opportunities I've had where I've played RPGs with people that I've never done anything ELSE with, I've found there's been a strange kind of tolerance for interpersonal misbehavior at the table. This misbehavior comes from a particular kind of player who only seems to socialize well in a tabletop environment because their more antisocial aspects of behaviour are tolerated by others who are more interested in playing a game than in whom they play it with.

Now, I don't think that this is something specific to RPGs, at all. I imagine this is something that happens often in tournament play – whether one is playing D&D, chess, or Scrabble or Boggle – but honestly, my tolerance for it is rather low. It assumes that all of the Geek Social Fallacies are things that are not fallacies and frankly, ain't nobody got time for that bullshit. Fortunately, I have friends who share my interests, and this allows me the luxury of not having to do the adult equivalent of having to be nice to the asshole kid with the swimming pool to be able to swim at all. We've all been there, in one way or the other, at various times and various ages and whether or not any ACTUAL swimming was involved at the time. Again - let us all do things the way we want to do them with those whom we want to do them with. Roleplaying  is like throwing a party - why invite someone you'd rather not have there, or, much worse, go somewhere to do something at all if the people involved make you uncomfortable?

Peggy Hill - BOGGLE tournament champion and mother.
She probably disapproves of your role playing, too.

HOW TO START

Finding a venue for play can be tricky – my apartment is too small for any guests, really, but fortunately I live in a city that has a few options available. I managed to book a place that was a converted bank for a 4 hour session on a Saturday. I mention that it was a bank because we were playing in what was the vault there, once upon a time. Extremely private and appropriate for CoC because you can whisper at the table and everyone will still hear it.

I've decided to run a modified version of Keith Herber's "EDGE OF DARKNESS" scenario – one that the people who produced the newest edition of the game decided to retire from print, but one that I've always quite liked. I ran it once 20 years ago with another gaming group I played with and the folks involved let me know they all had a really good time when I did. I'm adapting it for use with the new 7th edition CALL OF CTHULHU rules, and I've considered adding a scene here or there both for local Arkham flavour and to make it a proper introductory scenario for my group.

Introductory scenarios for a campaign have a few things that they have to accomplish:

There are things you have to carry off with an introductory scenario that you don't have to do again once they've been established:

• you have to get the players together story-wise, as a group
• you have to give them opportunities to use the different game systems that are used in the game
• there has to be a clearly set immediate outcome – especially if the people you're playing with have never RPGd before
• you have to plant enough little seeds to get the players to investigate the world as well as the scenario you've dropped them into

I think "EDGE" manages to do this all very well without a lot of unnecessary padding. I'm tweaking the story a little bit so as to allow for the possibility of side trips to Dunwich as well as the possibility of a visit to a mental health facility (I want them to see what can happen When Things Go Very Wrong), and to add a few more layers to the mystery by doing so.

This, in any game, can be sometimes something of a challenge. Add to this the additional challenges of ANY role playing game:

• you have to be entertaining
• you have to give the players the freedom to make their own real decisions
• you have to encourage the players to look at more than what's listed on their character sheets as their options for what can actually be done.
• you have to whet their appetite for more.

My players are very well up to anything – I'm happy to hear that they've been looking forward to things for a while now (more on why next time) so all in all this looks very promising.

"Parts.... I've never TRIED... PARTS..."

Stuart Gordon's film HERBERT WEST: RE-ANIMATOR was probably the earliest post CALL OF CTHULHU RPG Lovecraft movies that actually acknowledged HPL as the source material and tried to convey a sense of humour along with its macabre goings-on. This is interesting in and of itself because it's very much the way a LOT of us actually PLAY Lovecraft.

This would be the first of MANY official Lovecraft adaptations 
that recognized it's sources and probably one of the very best.

I'll be adding a fair number of movie reviews on this site over time and adding some notes as to how one can take elements from the pictures being reviewed for use in our games. I'll even be re-examining RE-ANIMATOR, but, for now, here's a sample of some of the mayhem the movie brought to it's audience.

The original Red-Band trailer for the 1985 release

Jeffery Combs is wonderful as West - this second clip is a good example of him in top form.

"Don't expect it to tango - its got a broken back..."

Who Is This, Where Does This Come From, and What Is A "Midnight Train To Arkham"?

Hello there. Despite the pseudonymous G+ moniker, my name is Joe Kilmartin. After about 10 years of false-starts and frustrations - despite many good intentions - I finally got a new group of people together to play tabletop role-playing games. For our first few months of sessions, we played an OSR D&D homebrew that I called MURDERHOBOES - a mashup of  Lamentations Of The Flame Princess, the original B/X D&D, some original material and some great stuff that I found on the OSR blogs online. That mini-campaign informed this blog, and will be mentioned from time to time, as will the players who played in it and are now playing in our new game.

Here are some of the players from the the OSR B/X D&D Mashup.
Most of these people, and a few new ones, will be coming back for Call of Cthulhu.

"Midnight Train To Arkham" is the name of my new ongoing Call of Cthulhu campaign -- a game I've wanted to get back to since the 1990s when I was last playing it with another regular group of players. "Midnight Train To Arkham: The Blog" is where I'll share new game materials I come up with for that campaign. I expect to post session reports, new house rules, adaptations of characters from popular media, and other things related to our weekly game and Call of Cthulhu in general..  I also will be posting movie and book reviews that relate to Lovecraftian themes and the period between the two World Wars.  Let's see what I can come up with.