What ROLE-PLAYING have you been doing?

You're very welcome! They really are stellar games, and I think they represent a sea change in how to approach mysteries in a way that plays into the strengths of RPGs as a medium. (As long as players are on board with the premise that they aren't solving the One True Answer That Is Written In The Scenario, like your typical Call of Cthulhu adventure.)

With literary or television mysteries, the author can make the protagonist exactly as smart as they need to be in the moment, and introduce clues, etc. But I think anyone who's GMed an RPG for any length of time has had the frustrating experience of players who are completely clueless no matter how many hints the GM drops.

They (BB and PA) are also so easy to run. I do maybe ten minutes of prep before introducing a new scenario, then a five-minute refresher each week. Plus the printouts are optimized for GM support at the table. Nothing against GMs who like the "lonely fun" of mapping the fifth level of the dungeon, or creating every NPC for a village, but that doesn't interest me -- I like playing RPGs, not getting ready to play RPGs.

The core system has inspired a bunch of games in development; there's "Beakwood Bay," basically not-DuckTales mysteries; "White Mountain Rescue," about park rangers looking for lost hikers and discovering ever-more creepy stuff deep in the woods; a raygun-and-rockets pulp sci-fi one, and many more.

I did a "Let's Read" of the BB book over on RPGgeek, if you want to check it out:
rpggeek.com/thread/3197857/lets-read-brindlewood-bay

The thread's mostly wrapped up but you're welcome to add questions or comments. Or post them here, of course.

Hope you get it to the table soon!

I am currently running one of the major Call of Cthulhu campaigns from the '80s. The campaign has a global scope, and my players leap-frogged over one of the more predictable geographical approaches, taking them to a section that was likely designed to be the finale of the campaign. Last night, we played the second half of a large, dramatic battle with cultists that was inspired by the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice. In the previous session, one player character was nearly killed, only to be saved by a last-second first aid roll. The other players brought her unconscious character back to a boat on the shore, in order to keep her out of harm's way while they returned for a second assault on the cultists. During the second battle, one player character died after getting impaled in the chest with a trident, while another player character went indefinitely insane. Even so, the last functional player character, with the help of a couple of surviving npc allies, managed to defeat the cultists with a Hollywood-style explosive finish.

I'm getting tired of my players throwing home-made white phosphorus grenades around, so I am tempted to give the indefinitely insane chemist a fire phobia in case he returns to play soon. Or maybe I will just let it slide. The remaining half of the campaign will feature several grave threats to their sanity, and no amount of white phosphorus will burn away the creeping madness. I don't think that game balance is in serious danger, and I don't want to take away an element of the game that the players enjoy.

That's such a classic CoC issue; it's hilarious that it's still being organically discovered by players decades after the game's initial release.

On one hand, it's objectively correct (from a "win the scenario" point of view) to bring horrific weapons of war to a skirmish against cultists. But it's certainly unthematic to have genteel investigators behaving like a de facto commando unit. "That's just not proper gentlemanly behavior" is unlikely to be persuasive to modern players.

One thing I started doing was calling for sanity checks any time the PCs started acting like psychopaths -- as opposed to just experiencing horrific things. Pull a gun on a librarian because he won't let you into the restricted stacks? Sanity check.

Another was to have them make sanity checks for unintended consequences of their reckless behavior. If they start a phosphorus fire in the basement of a cult headquarters, and the fire spreads throughout the entire neighborhood, burning down an orphanage with all souls inside, that'd be worth at least 1d20/1d4 in my book.

But, if it's not causing game balance issues, the unthematicness doesn't bother you, and everyone's having fun, then it ain't broke.

It wasn't a game balance problem before, but the player of the character that died last session is bringing in a new character who is an Olympic shot putter. So the group will finally have someone with a high Throw skill and the strength to throw the grenades far. It's clearly a deliberate exploitation of the situation. But maybe I will still let it slide, because the upcoming sessions will likely include a large and invisible monster that can fly, a literal horde of cultists, and a face-to-face meeting with a hostile deity. Probably in that order.

Got a good laugh out of my Call of Cthulhu group at the last session. After several consecutive sessions of intrigue, danger, and adventure in Shanghai, this session started out in a small port town in northern Australia. The characters had broken into a suspicious warehouse and found a crate marked for delivery to a cult location in London. So they opened the crate and found a small statue of Cthulhu. After making their sanity rolls, one of the players asked me if there was an inscription on the base of the statue. I replied, "Let's see. Hmm." I held an imaginary object up with my hands, rotated my hands to indicate that I was now looking at the base, and solemnly stated, "Made in China." Everybody laughed.

The Call of Cthulhu campaign continues. We are down to three players and four characters, as one of the departing players encouraged the group to keep him around as a friendly npc. For most of the campaign, I have kept the challenges at a human level, with players generally battling cultists who aren't any better at combat than the ordinary human player characters. Last night, the party finally went up against an actual Great Old One.

It wasn't even a fight. The heroes all had high Sanity scores, due to their ongoing successes against the cult, so none of them broke when they saw the Great Old One towering over the landscape and casting a mighty spell. Dressed as cultists, they infiltrated an extremely important ritual and successfully assassinated two crucial cult leaders. One player threw a frag grenade at their feet, and the blast knocked all but one of the people on the dais unconscious. Another player shot dead the one cultist who was still on her feet. Then the Great Old One appeared in the room, growing to titanic size until it blew the top off the mountain lair. The resulting collapse finished off the unconscious cult leader and her bodyguards. With their sanity whittled down by the previous appearance of the Great Old One, now all of the players rolled badly for their sanity checks.

The police detective from Hong Kong (pc turned npc) came to his senses at dawn, with partial amnesia obscuring his traumatic memories of the Great Old One and the frenzied cultist orgy afterwards. He then located the petty criminal (pc), and found that she now suffers from Multiple Personalities Disorder. She became her own sister (the previous pc for the same player), a psychiatrist who died in a pitched battle with cultists near London. As a petty criminal who now believes that she is a psychiatrist, she is now dispensing very crap pop psychology in lieu of actual therapy to party members. Later in the day, they found the other party members. The medical doctor was in shock, but eventually recovered during the several day journey back to their hotel. The minister lost all of his sanity points and is permanently afflicted with severe schizophrenia.

Many months previously, the party learned that this global cult was preparing for a big event on a certain date exactly 364 days after the campaign started. At this point, the party has reached the final destination that they want to investigate, and have just 27 days to do so. That sounds like a lot of time, but one nasty fight might require them to recuperate for a couple of weeks, so they may go into the endgame exhausted and injured. And one of them is insane, though she is functioning because she has created a different persona to cope with the situation. The player who was playing the minister will be starting another new character next session, his fourth of the campaign.

The Call of Cthulhu campaign is finally nearing the end. The campaign was always on a clock, with something terrible scheduled to happen in 364 days if the players don't stop it. They actually didn't know there was a time line until nearly halfway through the year, when they were going through a stash of paper from a cult leader's desk. The campaign is global in scope, and somewhat of a sandbox in that players obtain early clues pointing at most of the other locations and are free to make their own travel plans. And yet there was also a logical travel sequence that conveniently set up multiple possible finales at the later locations in the sequence. Unfortunately, my players chose to skip one of the middle destinations and so have already confronted each of the possible finales. They don't know it, but they have already thwarted the cosmic menace. Now they have about 3 weeks of game time left and are at that location that they skipped over.

Rather than let the campaign sputter to a mediocre and anti-climactic ending, I have decided to make the most of what is left with additional prep to really sell the ending. Last session, they confronted a herald of the Great OId Ones (starts with an N) who mocked them, toyed with them, and tempted them. I flowcharted the way the encounter might go and prepared some good lines for each possible point along the flow chart. Like, if they say this, it responds thusly... This time, they managed to locate a secret entrance to a complex system of tunnels around the local cult headquarter. They didn't think about mapping until they were pretty far in, so I just gave them verbal descriptions, like the tunnel bends off to the left and there is a side passage branching off up ahead. They finally got nervous about getting lost and put away two of their three flashlights in order to conserve remaining battery power. I played up the eerie atmosphere with background music like the OSTs for The Last Temptation of Christ, Sorcerer, and The Thing.

Depending on the pace of the next session or two, we might get to a dramatic finale where the cult attempts to massive ritual to resurrect a powerful member of their order from ancient times. I've got nearly two weeks to prepare, so I might even do a map of the large ritual chamber, as the players will probably try to blow things up or at least shoot some cultists. For the sake of the campaign, I have occasionally pulled punches in the past to prevent Total Party Kill, but all bets are off for the final battle. I have been hinting at the possibility of a sequel adventure, so it will be all the more shocking to them if all the characters die at the end.

With just three weeks of game time left in the campaign, my Call of Cthulhu players have dragged the campaign down to a crawl. Their unofficial leader has been obsessed for two consecutive sessions with the idea that they overlooked something important when they killed the local cult leader and searched his place. They actually found the only two things that mattered, but he can't let go of the idea that they might have missed something. Twice now, they have returned to the scene of the crime, only to slink away after realizing that the place is overrun by cultists now. (What they don't know is that the cult leader was resurrected and now under heavy guard until the next big ritual at the finale of the campaign.)

Despite several other clues pointing to NPCs that they should be meeting, the group feels that their only other course of action now is to focus on the underground complex that they found last time. Hilariously, their wrong-headed leader decided to seek out and hire a couple of insane cultists who worship a different deity of the Cthulhu Mythos. (In actuality, they are members of the same cult that the players have been battling the whole campaign.) Then the group returned to the underground complex.

Last time they were down there, they got ambushed by some savage humanoids who were trying to take captives. This time the party rambled around looking for secret doors by smashing stone walls with pickaxes and crowbars. So they attracted attention and fought three separate battles against small packs of the savage humanoids. The dimly-lit and narrow subterranean quarters have been suboptimal for the gun-toting investigators, especially since they have mediocre combat skills. And yet they are still exploring, despite two wounded investigators.

I have run Call of Cthulhu many times over the years, starting way back in 1981. After some initial misfires, I came up with the concept of The Line. In order to offer a satisfying game to players that includes getting through most of the adventure, I tend to pull my punches all the way up until the start of the finale, which I consider The Line. Before the players cross the line, I might injure them, cause some insanity, kill some NPCs, or even kill a reckless player character or two. But there will be no Total Party Kill unless the players are acting with reckless disdain for the safety of their characters. Once they cross The Line, all bets are off. I never fudge dice in order to kill characters, but I will sometimes fudge the dice rolls to save them before they cross The Line. Since these players have completed roughly 95% of the campaign and are now recklessly getting into fights, I have decided to treat them as having crossed The Line. One way or another, this game should be over within the next one or two sessions.

Finally wrapped up the epic Call of Cthulhu campaign, just weeks short of the second anniversary of the campaign start.

The players were getting frustrated at the lack of leads, though they were not bothering to track down potential contacts that they discovered in the last two sessions. The unofficial spokesman of the players was still obsessed with searching the home of a cult leader that they killed two sessions ago. They went back last session, but were surprised to encounter burly guards at the door. They asked their two cultist ally/followers to recruit some help for a surprise raid on the deceased cult leader's home. Their allies said they need a couple of days to recruit help, and showed up the night of the raid with four more dudes.

The group returned to the cultist's home, and were all prepared to take sniper shots through well-lit house windows to start off their attack. Suddenly, their six "allies" jumped them, grappling and disarming them while shouting for help. More men came running out of the house, and proceeded to subdue and capture the player characters with a 4:1 numerical advantage. One player was knocked out with a sleeper hold while two other cultists held him down. Then the supposedly deceased cult leader stepped out and cast Power Drain a few times to KO the other two player characters.

Eventually they awoke and became unwilling participants in human sacrifices during a huge cult ritual. The end. The players were surprised and saddened, until I informed them that they had already won even though their characters died. The cult had a very specific and complex ritual planned for a certain date, but the players had already ruined 2 of the 3 crucial elements for the ritual. Then I handed over my source books and notes and other prep materials, and answered a variety of questions they had about the whole adventure. I also related a few anecdotes about how the previous party handled the campaign when I first ran it back in the late '80s. Overall, they were pretty happy about the game, and talked about some of their favorites moments from past sessions.

I'm going to take a break from role-playing until next fall, then start up either a new Call of Cthulhu campaign or else an epic Stormbringer/Hawkmoon/Corum campaign that I have been wanting to run for the last 20 years.

Two months ago, I decided to run a one-shot Call of Cthulhu adventure that was originally published in the mid-'90s in the pages of The Unspeakable Oath. Because I announced it two months in advance, most of the people that I invited actually said yes or maybe. So I will have at least 6 players, and possibly 10. The scenario is designed for up to 8 players, so I created two additional characters along with backstories and briefings about the other characters. Like some of my other favorite Call of Cthulhu one-shots, this one was clearly designed to be run in a convention slot, so every character comes with a couple of pages worth of briefing about their character and what they know about the others.

It should be exciting. The characters are all members of a cult, and half of them have a dangerous secret. At least one other character either knows each secret or has a clue. The adventure starts with the discovery that their cult leader has been murdered, and somebody will be playing that murderer.

My gaming table can seat 8 players. If I get 8 players, I will run the game from a separate card table near the main table. If I get 9 or 10 players, I will run it as a larp and use different rooms of my house as proxies for different locations as needed. I can ditch my DM screen and carry my limited materials on a clipboard, which will also come in handy for dice rolls. Either way, I am going to have each player wear a lanyard that displays the headshot, name, and occupation of their character.

Finally ran my one-shot Call of Cthulhu adventure. Last minute cancellations left us with only five players, which I considered the bare minimum quorum for this scenario. I held back the two least crucial characters during selection, in case none of the maybes showed up, so at least most of the crucial characters were covered.

Compared to the two previous times that I ran in this adventure, this time was curiously static. The first two thirds of the time was all spent at the scene of the crime. It started with curiosity and a search for clues, proceeded to discussions about whether or not to cover up the murders, then devolved into accusations as a certain characters revealed the secrets of certain other characters present.

In the finale, the character who was the actual killer had a remarkably easy time of persuading everybody to show up for a cult ritual to seek guidance. A certain Great Old One was successfully summoned, and nearly everybody present was sacrificed in order to promote their leader from human to monster. The end.

I am still prepping for an ambitious Stormbringer campaign that I will launch in November. I have recruited 7 players, mostly veterans of at least one of the two big campaigns that I ran within the last decade. I also have two part-time players lined up. One is a snowbird who will only be available during the warm half of the year, while the other is a busy guy who abruptly vanished from my recent Call of Cthulhu campaign at the one-year mark. Nine players sounds excessive, but I ran GURPS Fantasy for a group of 11 players back in the early '90s, and I knew none of those players a month before I started the campaign. (I had just moved to Minnesota around that time.)

Eleven players was a real handful for GURPS Fantasy, a crunchy combat system that included spell-casting, hit locations, critical hits, fumbles, and a variety of tactical options. After the first couple of sessions, I realized that we would normally only have time for one or two small combats involving some of the players plus one big combat including the entire group. I paced each session to allow time for those combats, expanding or decreasing the non-action elements accordingly. Sessions were challenging to run, and I burned out after a year, but the campaign was popular because players really enjoyed the combat system.

This time, I am using BRP (Basic Role-Playing), the underlying system used by more than a dozen rpgs that have been published by Chaosium, including Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, and Stormbringer. My campaign is going to incorporate elements of all three Moorcock-inspired rpgs: Stormbringer, Hawkmoon, and Corum. Since those settings include advanced technology, mutations, and multiple systems of magic, I have been doing some extra work to reconcile various differences between the rule sets, right down to creating a bespoke character sheet format that will use consist skill names for each setting.

The biggest changes will involve the combat system. I still want players to have enjoyable combat actions, but I also want the combats to run faster and smoother. To encourage faster resolution of combat, I am creating a deck of about 20 action cards for each player. Each character will secretly choose an action card or two and put if facedown in front of them on the table each round of combat. This will cut out the occasional lengthy discussions of what certain players should do in a combat round. Actions will be resolved in order of character dexterity. If a character chooses a red action card, that will be the only thing they do that round. Or they can choose two yellow actions. There are also green actions that are freebies that they can invoke just by laying down that card when relevant.

Examples of red cards: Full Attack, Full Defense, Full Move, Use Skill (certain skills that take the full turn, like Stealth or Mechanical Repair (to clear a weapon jam).

Examples of yellow cards: Attack, Move (up to half of movement rate), Use Skill (skills that don't take as long to resolve).

Examples of green cards: Speak (short sentence at the most), Step (move a space or two), Defend (dodge, block, or parry), Use Skill (quick skill usage like Ride or Spot).

The other change to the combat system was simplifying the attack/defend matrix. Under the normal BRP system, skill checks (including weapon skills) include the following five possibilities: Critical Success (5% of your chance to succeed), Special Success (20% of your chance to succeed), Success, Failure, and Fumble (5% of your chance to fail). That results in a five-by-five matrix of possible combinations of attack roll and defense roll. And there were odd variations to critical successes and special successes, depending on type of weapon and even campaign setting. I decided to completely strip out Special Successes, and convert the various critical/special results into a menu that players could choose from. For example, if the attacker got a Critical Success and the defender got a Failure, the attacker can choose one result from the menu, like Bypass Armor or Disarm Weapon. Conversely, if the attacker rolled poorly and the defender rolled well, the defender could choose a result from the menu. If one character got a Critical Success and the other got a Failure, the successful character would choose two results from the menu.

The opening adventure will take place during a tourney, which will be a great opportunity to teach the combat system to players and detect any potential problems while there is still only non-lethal damage involved.

"Two months ago, I decided to run a one-shot Call of Cthulhu adventure that was originally published in the mid-'90s in the pages of The Unspeakable Oath."

Ah, The Unspeakable Oath. I happened to come across one of their very first issues in a Columbia, Missouri, game store, only to realize that it was a local production. As a Mizzou j-school student at the time, I ended up interviewing John Tynes, who was a fellow Missouri student. Just 19 or so, and he and his crew were already pumping out high-quality roleplaying material. Even before the ultimately went to a (I think) slick magazine format, their digest-sized pubs were far better than typical fan material. I still have a few of them around. I might even have that interview writeup around here somewhere . . . might be an interesting historical footnote for about three people.

Just FYI: Chaosium is doing a Humble Bundle on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund: 26 Call of Cthulhu RPG books for $30 (spend more if you want to support the fund, of course.)

www.humblebundle.com/books/so-you-wanna-...u-chaosium-inc-books