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Most of the CoC material I've bought over the past year has been from Cubicle 7. A few pieces of the Cthulhu Britannica line (like the boxed set, Curse of Nineveh, Shadows over Scotland) and some of the World War Cthulhu line. I'm a fan of their original Cthulhu Britannica book, and used one of its scenarios in my recent Cthulhu by Gaslight campaign. C7 is definitely one of the best CoC 3PP in my mind - high quality material.
Good to know. I was thinking on checking them out. More reasons to.
 
I'm running MoN using Pulp Cthulhu 7E and it works well as a low pulp game.

CoC 7E lends itself to pulping things up, you can do it by using the CoC 7E core rulebook by itself; adjusting the Luck rules to be cheaper in cost for particular situations that fit in with the individual character concept. The rest is just flavour, framing things as a rollicking adventure rather than a horror investigation.

However I do recommend the actual Pulp Cthulhu book itself, as instead of adjusting Luck Pts you get Pulp Stunts like you would expect, and the core char gen is tweaked a bit to play pulp templates. Plus lots of info to add that pulp flavour.

Our campaign is in hiatus in Egypt, but we'll pick it up soon and get back into it. Kind of runs like Death On The Nile-meets-Raiders Of The Lost Ark, lots of fun.

I think Chaosium updating MoN as a reprint with Pulp Cthulhu in mind is great, and they probably need to consider doing that with another of their 'grand campaigns', Beyond The Mountains Of Madness. Horror On The Orient Express also would benefit from Pulp Cthulhu treatment, although it was only updated with CoC 7E stats recently, so it won't be updated again, the Pulp flavour is predominantly more of an 'approach' thing rather than any major change to game mechanics in CoC.

If I hadn't already started MoN, then I would try out Chaosium's 'The Two Headed Serpent' campaign for Pulp Cthulhu 7E. It looks great, I like the way the scenes are framed with Pulp Adventure in mind, starting sessions in media res etc

However the next rpg session I run will be my homebrew ActionFlick setting, which is a contemporary modern setting with heaps of cheesy cinematic action. I'm kind of going for a Charlies Angels/Burn Notice/Mission Impossible/Die Hard/A-Team flavour, and I'll be running it with FATE Core. I think the game mechanics will suit it, it's all about cheesy tropes and one-liners and such, so FATE's approach should work well.

Pity that Evil Hat hasn't got any published campaign I can use for it. They are updating their Spirit Of The Century setting to the 1980s so it will play like an '80s Action, that would have been good but I can't wait a year for them to do it so I'll press on with my homebrew, unless I stumble across a scenario I can use. I may even check out if there are any published scenarios for D20 Modern that I can convert to FATE Core - I'm happy to have a look at any recommendations
 
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Lots of Pulp Cthulhu love going around. Maybe I should look into it.

Incidentally, I recently picked up Cthulhu Rising. I'll look into it some time next week!
 
Most of the CoC material I've bought over the past year has been from Cubicle 7. A few pieces of the Cthulhu Britannica line (like the boxed set, Curse of Nineveh, Shadows over Scotland) and some of the World War Cthulhu line. I'm a fan of their original Cthulhu Britannica book, and used one of its scenarios in my recent Cthulhu by Gaslight campaign. C7 is definitely one of the best CoC 3PP in my mind - high quality material.

Cthulhu Britannica is up on Bundle of Holding right now.
 
I ran H1-H4 the Bloodstone Campaign. I loved the mix of Battlesystem and kingdom building with dungeon crawling and going to the Abyss to face Orcus. We played AD&D 1E up to about level 23 with that campaign being the capstone last series of hardcore adventures.

I ran the Pirates of Drinax for Mongoose Traveller 1E when it was free PDFs. My players went from not knowing Traveller at all to wanting to play another campaign.

I'm currently running Paths of the Damned for Warhammer 2E. The first adventure was great, the second poorly laid out but usable, and I haven't started the third one yet.
 
If I did it, I'd make it a point to move them to The Forgotten Realms, just because I'm sure it would cause someone somewhere almost physical pain.
That slamming sound you hear is me spasming on the floor violently.
 
Have never purchased or run a published campaign, in fact I hardly ever have even used a module as I find both tend to make too many assumptions about how I want to play a game, but I have borrowed bits from various Traveller adventures. The closest I've come to running a published campaign would be using:
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That slamming sound you hear is me spasming on the floor violently.

Boom.

For my next trick, I'm ACTUALLY getting ready to run The Savage Pendragon Campaign. Adapting Pendragon to Savage Worlds to run the Pendragon Campaign, which has already caused someone pain in their heart.
 
Boom.

For my next trick, I'm ACTUALLY getting ready to run The Savage Pendragon Campaign. Adapting Pendragon to Savage Worlds to run the Pendragon Campaign, which has already caused someone pain in their heart.
that sounds fantastic
 
Boom.

For my next trick, I'm ACTUALLY getting ready to run The Savage Pendragon Campaign. Adapting Pendragon to Savage Worlds to run the Pendragon Campaign, which has already caused someone pain in their heart.
It will definitely upset some purists, but I can see that being a good match. Keep us informed on how it goes.
 
I've heard Alien Hunger is good, but have not checked it out.

It is. The problem with 1st ed VtM is that rather than take Chicago By Night as a campaign sourcebook about Chicago specifically, everyone took Chicago By Night as the ur-campaign book, and assumed all cities had large vampire populations, fiendishly complex political factions and maneuvering and relationship graphs etc., etc. when the original intent was that WoD Chicago was like that because real-world Chicago was like that.

Alien Hunger provides a mini-Denver By Night campaign frame where the Prince is a Toreador, mostly wants to be left alone to play music in his club, and there are maybe a dozen vampires in the entire city. It's valuable for showing that there's more than one way to do it. It does commit the typical VtM sin of Clan-as-class, but whaddayagonnado.

The longer Vampire went on, the more the characters were defined entirely in terms of imaginary vampire society.

I don't understand the problem with that. It's very much in genre; for any Vampire out of training fangs, they've been a Vampire for far, far longer than they were ever human and every mortal they've ever known and loved is dead and gone. In much of the source fiction, vampires often don't even reliably remember who they were before being turned.
 
Re: The classic Warhammer campaigns. I find both Doomstones and Enemy Within to be, at best, mediocre. Their reputation as all-time classics doesn't make any sense to me at all.

Eternal Lies for Trail of Cthulhu is excellent. It does basically everything Masks of Nyarlathotep does, but (IMO) does it better.

Monte Cook's Banewarrens is a really great mid-level D&D campaign in which multiple factions are racing to explore a newly discovered dungeon complex. The PCs are faced with a multitude of agendas and have to deal with situations both in and out of the dungeon.
 
It will definitely upset some purists...

That's almost always a good sign.

"The world is full of vulgar Purists, who bring discredit on all selection by the silliness of their choice; and this the more, because the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of things." - John Ruskin
 
Lots of Pulp Cthulhu love going around. Maybe I should look into it.

Incidentally, I recently picked up Cthulhu Rising. I'll look into it some time next week!

Update: Cthulhu Rising is a smidge more space-operatic than I expected but still has plenty of ideas and rules worth using.

I loked at the Pulp Cthulhu reviews and most of them focus rather a lot on the character creation guidelines for more badass investigators, mook mechanics, and other "pulp action = scripted badassery" stuff. Not to mention that the PDF is expensive. Might as well pick up Achtung! Cthulhu (since I found World War Cthulhu wanting) and/or Realms of Cthulhu (even if SW Cthulhu still sounds like heresy to my CoC-loving ears).

It is. The problem with 1st ed VtM is that rather than take Chicago By Night as a campaign sourcebook about Chicago specifically, everyone took Chicago By Night as the ur-campaign book, and assumed all cities had large vampire populations, fiendishly complex political factions and maneuvering and relationship graphs etc., etc. when the original intent was that WoD Chicago was like that because real-world Chicago was like that.

CbN is to VtM as TEW is to WFRP — the campaign that shaped everyone's expectations for the rest of the game's life. (That is a lot of acronyms.)

And now I want to look into Denver By Night.

I don't understand the problem with that. It's very much in genre; for any Vampire out of training fangs, they've been a Vampire for far, far longer than they were ever human and every mortal they've ever known and loved is dead and gone. In much of the source fiction, vampires often don't even reliably remember who they were before being turned.

It's great for NPCs, but for PCs, in a game where letting go of your humanity is one way to lose your character, it sort of plays down the drama. Not saying it has to be all angst all the time, but it'd be nice if it gave players pause before drinking a vagrant dry in preparation for combat.

Incidentally, this is also why the Fog of Ages was a good mechanic, as was the Memory attributes for (WoD1) mummies (which vampire Elders should have too)

Eternal Lies for Trail of Cthulhu is excellent. It does basically everything Masks of Nyarlathotep does, but (IMO) does it better.

My interest is piqued. Care to elaborate?
 
It's great for NPCs, but for PCs, in a game where letting go of your humanity is one way to lose your character, it sort of plays down the drama.

Oh, I see. I thought by "characters" the OP meant NPCs.

On the latter point, most if not all of the reason for the katanas-and-trenchcoats playstyle is that very few people actually want to play a long-running game about slow moral degeneration culminating in inevitable self-destruction. It's the sort of thing I could see doing as a one-shot in a rules-light storygame, at best.
 


Precisely. Knowing that every Humanity loss draws you closer to NPC-dom, much like CoC's SAN meter, gives the game a great "edge", be it katanas-and-trenchcoats (big fan of the play style) or otherwise. Do you suck your next feeding victim dry, or storm the Sabbat pack hideout with a Blood Pool of 6? Do you off the witnesses to your supernatural shenanigans? Murder a werewolf's mortal family to send the pack a message? It's real easy being an amoral murderhobo with fangs without the Humanity mechanic.
 
That's almost always a good sign.

"The world is full of vulgar Purists, who bring discredit on all selection by the silliness of their choice; and this the more, because the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of things." - John Ruskin
Wait are we talking politics or RPGs now?
 
Even though G3 was the first D&D module I ever bought, back at original release in '79, I've never thought the G/D/Q series was that great. The first three are just big monster lairs. There's very little motivation to grind through them all. Things pick up a bit with the drow adventures, and of course Gygax's underdark is very cool. Still, until D3 there's not much scope in the campaign for anything besides endless monster bashing.

For my money, the Night Below campaign does a much better job of presenting a campaign in a box. It starts at level 1 with a really well crafted sandbox of a barony. Players have all sorts of scope for exploration and pursuing their own agendas, but the main motivation will draw them back in. The underdark sections have a lot of variety and scope of diplomacy. The middle book is a bit of a grind, but that's a factor of a campaign that runs from level 1 to 14 or so using 2E level advancement. It's really a well-designed campaign, presenting situations at low levels with the kinds of challenges, such as infiltration and diplomacy, that they will need to repeat at higher levels. For example, you have to infiltrate a small keep with bandits in the first chapter (around level 3), and then infiltrate a fortress of derro in the second chapter (around level 8), and then an entire hostile city in the underdark in the third chapter (around level 13) The campaign structure essentially trains them up as players to face the challenges ahead.
 

I can honestly say I've never seen or heard of a CoC campaign, in RL or online, that could be described as "slow moral degeneration culminating in eventual self-destruction". Generally, once the players realize they can't "win" they load up on guns and dynamite and just go out in a blaze of glory.

It's real easy being an amoral murderhobo with fangs without the Humanity mechanic.

It's real easy being an amoral murderhobo with fangs with the Humanity mechanic. I know of virtually no VtM 1 & 2 campaigns, in RL or online (I'm including LARP in that) where the GM bothered with enforcing the Humanity rolls or the "monsters we are, lest monsters we become" theme (yes, I know, that doesn't actually contradict your point - not enforcing it is the same as not having it). People just weren't interested in playing that kind of game.

What the game says you're supposed to do, and what people actually do at the table, rarely coincides in RPGs. That's rather the genesis of the entire OSR movement.

To get back to the OP: I'm a bit surprised no one's mentioned X1: The Isle of Dread. It's a great little sandbox (maybe that doesn't count as a campaign?) that gets away from the typical D&D tropes in favour of the Pellucidar/Lost World theme.

I don't know if it counts as a "campaign", but the old V&V adventure modules Death Duel with the Destroyers/The Island of Dr. Apocalypse make for a good superhero story arc that can easily run as long as a typical mini-campaign. I usually bulk it up with more action scenes to break up the dungeon crawl-y nature of it, though.

Maybe I just really like islands.
 
It's real easy being an amoral murderhobo with fangs with the Humanity mechanic. I know of virtually no VtM 1 & 2 campaigns, in RL or online (I'm including LARP in that) where the GM bothered with enforcing the Humanity rolls or the "monsters we are, lest monsters we become" theme (yes, I know, that doesn't actually contradict your point - not enforcing it is the same as not having it). People just weren't interested in playing that kind of game.
I was willing to use the Humanity mechanic, but it was simply broken. You needed to do more dramatically vile things each step down the ladder to the point where you could have a character that drank babies dry on a nightly basis, but you still couldn't bottom out your Humanity.
 
My interest is piqued. Care to elaborate?

Eternal Lies uses a flexible, node-based structure like Masks to create a globe-hopping campaign, but:

- Has greater variety between the nodes.
- Creates escalation and build through flexible interstitial scenes, making the campaign generally more responsive to the the actions of the PCs.
- Leverages the Sources of Stability mechanics from Trail of Cthulhu to tie the PCs' personal lives dynamically into the campaign.
- Culminates in an incredibly strong conclusion (whereas Mask campaigns tend to just be "one more of the same thing you did in the other four cities, but now you've cleared all the bosses").

Even though G3 was the first D&D module I ever bought, back at original release in '79, I've never thought the G/D/Q series was that great. The first three are just big monster lairs. There's very little motivation to grind through them all. Things pick up a bit with the drow adventures, and of course Gygax's underdark is very cool. Still, until D3 there's not much scope in the campaign for anything besides endless monster bashing.

The only module in that sequence I like is actually G1, which works pretty well as a raid-style scenario. (The maps for G2 and G3 just seem to fizzle in actual play, the D sandbox doesn't have enough interest unless the GM does all the heavy lifting, and Q1 remains one of the most disappointing modules ever published.)

I steered away from pure dungeon campaigns in my original post, but along with Night Below I would also add Rappan Athuk.
 
I was willing to use the Humanity mechanic, but it was simply broken. You needed to do more dramatically vile things each step down the ladder to the point where you could have a character that drank babies dry on a nightly basis, but you still couldn't bottom out your Humanity.

I'm fairly certain cold-blooded murder always triggered a Humanity roll, though, no?
 
I'm fairly certain cold-blooded murder always triggered a Humanity roll, though, no?
It's entirely possible I am remembering wrong, but I seem to remember a table of the kind of act you needed to do to trigger a Humanity check at each level. I can't remember the specifics, but I believe the bar got really high as your Humanity got lower.
 
It's entirely possible I am remembering wrong, but I seem to remember a table of the kind of act you needed to do to trigger a Humanity check at each level. I can't remember the specifics, but I believe the bar got really high as your Humanity got lower.

Yes, that's all true. I just wasn't sure if you were engaging in hyperbole or if you actually observed table play where PCs were committing infanticide without losing Humanity. That doesn't sound right, but then as I said virtually no one ever used the Humanity rules around here anyway.
 
We used the humanity rules, even in T&K games. Kind of pointless game without them. Camarilla/Sabbat conflict is just political that way.
 
Camarilla/Sabbat conflict is just political that way.

Yes. That's how every VtM game/LARP around here got played. Either political maneuvering or vampire murderhoboing. Although I don't recall the Sabbat showing up much in anyone's campaigns. One group ran a Sabbat campaign briefly, mostly for the lulz, as the Sabbat at the time were depicted in the sourcebooks as Clive Barker levels of gore and body horror.

Admittedly the LARPs were much larger and ran for much longer than the RPG was played; one of the LARPs ran continuously for over ten years. The LARPs were pretty much proxies for silly, junior high-levels of social cutting amongst the players. Remind me to tell you about the attempted coup some time.
 
I think LARPs tended to have less emphasis on humanity and morality than tabletop games did, and I think humanity conflicts with how people expect to play RPGs, for better or worse.

I don't think it's a bad idea, and I've used it when running Vampire. I prefer Requiem 2e's take, though.
 
It's real easy being an amoral murderhobo with fangs with the Humanity mechanic. I know of virtually no VtM 1 & 2 campaigns, in RL or online (I'm including LARP in that) where the GM bothered with enforcing the Humanity rolls

If the Humanity mechanic is not being enforced, it’s hardly a game “with” the Humanity mechanic, now, is it. :blah:
 
I notice you trimmed my quote immediately before the part where I note that exact point.
 
Twilight's Peak, for original Traveller - it's an adventure that plays like a campaign, slowly unfolding through rumors and stories as the adventurers trade along the Spinward Main. When we played through it, the search for Twilight's Peak was almost a sideline of the crew as we worked to keep the Empress Nicholle flying, with all that entailed: dealing with nosy SPA inspectors, negotiating with grasping brokers, avoiding 'Imperial entanglements' over cargoes which didn't always conform to local law levels, &c.
 
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