Call of Cthulhu Chat Thread

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Voros

Doomed Investigator
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Thought we should have one general chat thread on one of the greatest ever RPGs...

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Jk. I mean Call of Cthulhu.

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This is the edition I have.

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This was sparked by this good review of the 7e adventure Dead Light. Looks fun. Someone here recommended this review channel and it is a good one.


 
I played in a run-through of Dead Light. I liked it a lot but according to the GM we Players skipped/missed big chunks of it, so I'm not even sure I even know what's going on in it. As usual most of the fun actually came from the other Players... particularly at the end... where my PC died horribly at the hands of the others.
 
I played in a run-through of Dead Light. I liked it a lot but according to the GM we Players skipped/missed big chunks of it, so I'm not even sure I even know what's going on in it...

Does anybody every really know what's going on in Call of Cthulhu? More to the point, should anybody ever really know? :hehe:

Ran a session on Sunday as the investigators are dealing with the aftermath of their first (post-convention) investigation (the entire campaign was born from a trio of convention scenarios I ran in October). At any rate, the villain they subdued at the end of the first adventure :gunslinger: has mysteriously died in the hospital; a quick search of his condo revealed he was evidently part of the Arkham witch-cult. But the heroes have more pressing matters to deal with, namely a teenage boy's suicide related to the software (and its related demons) that was briefly unleashed... This is gonna be sooooo much fun... Muahahahaha!!!! :devil:
 
I own around 5 editions of Call of Cthulhu, but I typically use 5th edition, revised (5.6e) which looks like 6th edition but without the annoying layout:

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About 3 weeks ago, I finished running 4 scenarios set around the Miskatonic River Valley (pulled from a number of supplements/adventure collections). This past Sunday a member of my CoC gaming group ran a one-shot Trail of Cthulhu adventure (The Black Drop) using CoC 7e rules. Next month, another player has threatened to run a modified version of the Day of the Beast campaign. When that completes, I'll be picking up the ball and running a modified version of the Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign.

I've got a lot of CoC gaming going on over the next 6 months...

Regarding adventures, I've got acres of CoC stuff collected over the decades - material from Chaosium, Pagan Publishing, Cubicle 7, and random magazines. Enough to run for a lifetime, probably. But I have very little in the way of CoC 7e stuff. The only thing that comes to mind is the Curse of Nineveh campaign released by Cubicle 7.
 
Call of Cthulhu 2nd ed was the first RPG I bought in English. We had to read a book, and then talk about it in English class. "Hey, RPG's are books, right?" :grin: Somehow, I got away with it. :smile: I ended up with CoC because I thought the cover of the box looked interesting, but I had not a clue what it might be about.

A cousin of mine borrowed it, and it was just the other year I got it back after it had been at his place for over a decade (together with my red, blue, and green D&D boxes). :ooh:

My latest physical RPG I bought was Call of Cthulhu 7th ed.

There have however been very little of CoC gaming for me. Running horror isn't one of my strengths.
 
I have a soft spot for CoC, and have done a handful of campaigns in it. My favourite homebrew was 'The Doom that came to Sogd', set in Tajikistan during the cold war (Sogd was actually a real kingdom in the region sometime in the middle ages). It was set in a town called Panjakent, on the silk road just up from Samarkand, in the antiquities department of a little fictitious university occupying a very pretty old moghul palace. Naturally, this had a really ugly brutalist office block built right in front of it.

Originally I ran it somewhere about 1990 (before Stargate came out - this is important). It featured a portal and a series of interconnected worlds.
The game ended up with the party travelling back in time and destroying a serpent man city by calling Azathoth on what is now the gulf of mexico. This killed the party and several hounds of tindalos they used for the time travel bit.
I think one could expand it into a sort of fantasy-horror setting as the worlds had been settled by Sogdian expats during the reign of the empire. There were several worlds with enclaves of humans, serpent men and various other entities.
The Sogdians got wiped out by the Persians who found out that they had been consorting with unwholesome tentacled beings, leaving all sorts of fascinating legends. The persians had then blocked up the portal.
 
Does anybody every really know what's going on in Call of Cthulhu? More to the point, should anybody ever really know? :hehe:
IIRC we didn't even see the monster, if there was a monster. Paranoia set in quick and had us trying to flee, suspecting each other of being possessed.

I've got most all of the older CoC stuff but I've never run the bigger, world-spanning, campaigns. Early on I ran it a lot more splatterpunk-ish, but then I got into Film Noir and wanted it all moody and full of corrupted humans with less magic, monsters and mass murder.
I did manage to run an extended campaign of it set in 'Summer of Love' San Francisco... lots of crazy non-mythos stuff to draw from like the Manson family, the Process, the Zodiac killer, Alcatraz, cults and drugs and whatnot.
 
I ran Dead Light a few years ago. Following the Haunting, it was the second CoC adventure I ran. We had a lot of fun with it, although we stumbled on the controversial 7e chase rules a bit (I've had more practice and generally like those rules now). It's a fun little survival horror scenario. My players really got into the claustrophobic feeling of it and I liked throwing little horror movie tropes in to separate the party from the NPCs and pick people off one at a time.
 
What a timely topic! I just ordered the 7E update for the Masks of Nyarlathotep.

Call of Cthulhu like Pendragon are great because the games really help players play games that emulate the source materials. Our Cthulhu games usually turn into Indiana Jones romps but we always have a great time.
 
I ordered two physical copies this week. I'm really hoping they can get some broader distribution in places like Barnes and Noble. We need to break the grip of 5E.
 
I like Call of Cthulhu but seldom get to play it. I've run it without bothering to look up any of the write-ups for creatures...always seemed weird to me that they even have stats rather than just descriptions since many are beyond the ken of mortal man. Somebody (not me) should run a play-by-post!
We need to break the grip of 5E.
Agreed! :gunslinger:
(together with my red, blue, and green D&D boxes).
Green? :trigger:
 
I am preparing a Call of Cthulhu campaign for the New Year, linking a number of Deep One scenarios building up to the classic Raid on Innsmouth.

It has been among my favourite games for decades, though sadly 7th Edition spells the end of my interest in new material. A pointless exercise in fixing what wasn't broken.
 
7th Edition is fine and was more needed because of market realities than gaming realities. I'm fine with small revisions like what CoC has done in order to be a profitable business venture.
 
The adventures for 7e seem to be getting lots of praise, I'm reading Reign of Terror right now and it seems great so far. Plus there's the great Cubicle 7, Trail of Cthulhu and Stygian Fox material. Exciting stuff, I would definitely be down for a PbP session.
 
I hate to say this to you all, but I wouldn't be a good community member if I didn't, PbP games invented by European ladies so they would have something to keep busy with while their husbands cooked dinner.

H/T Hank Hill
 
Cubicle 7's excellent Cthulhu Britannica line has ended. Not due to 7th Edition so much as getting the Warhammer Fantasy license.
 
I like Call of Cthulhu but seldom get to play it. I've run it without bothering to look up any of the write-ups for creatures...always seemed weird to me that they even have stats rather than just descriptions since many are beyond the ken of mortal man...

The bestiary was the only letdown for me in 7e. They took all the non-Mythos monsters out. Granted, I kept my old editions and could easily convert creatures over, but it was not at all expected.
 
Ah, I thought maybe you had some strange foreign edition I'd never heard of. Now I assume it's just these:
Yup. Those are the ones. :smile: It looks a lot more greenish when it's in the shadow and next to the blue box.
 
That's for the latest edition, right? I'm so getting it ASAP :smile:!

I like Call of Cthulhu but seldom get to play it. I've run it without bothering to look up any of the write-ups for creatures...always seemed weird to me that they even have stats rather than just descriptions since many are beyond the ken of mortal man. Somebody (not me) should run a play-by-post!

Agreed! :gunslinger:
If I had more time, I would be doing exactly that... that, or Traveller, or Unknown Armies, or something like Two-Fisted Tales. There can never be enough Traveller, Unknown Armies, or pulp games:grin:!
 
The bestiary was the only letdown for me in 7e. They took all the non-Mythos monsters out. Granted, I kept my old editions and could easily convert creatures over, but it was not at all expected.
They still have non-Mythos monsters. The "Traditional Horrors" section includes Ghost, Mummy, Skeleton, Vampire, Werewolf, and Zombie. The "Beasts" section has Bat, Bird, Bear, Crocodile, Dog, Horse, Lion, Rat, Shark, Snake, Giant Squid, Wasp and Bee Swarms, and Wolf.
 
It looks like a great starter set. I like the approach of providing the solo adventure to help teach the new Keeper some of the game, then a one-on-one adventure to corrupt a friend.
Throwing in Edge of Darkness and Dead Man Stomp makes this a great value.
 
Any game that is serious about increasing its player base needs a box set that has everything a group needs to get started.

I entirely agree. Boxed sets seemed out of fashion for the longest time, but they appear to have returned.

As stated, 7th Edition is not for me, but I am pleased to see it get a starter set to attract others. Though the cover art is so terrible it might cause sanity loss.
 
I entirely agree. Boxed sets seemed out of fashion for the longest time, but they appear to have returned.

As stated, 7th Edition is not for me, but I am pleased to see it get a starter set to attract others. Though the cover art is so terrible it might cause sanity loss.
Haven't seen a really clear image but from what I have seen the faces are bad and the woman's pose is particularly awkward.
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But bad art has never dissuaded anyone from playing RPGs going all the way back to 1974. :hehe:

7th edition and the Starter Set are both not anything I would buy as I already have a perfectly serviceable version (3rd ed., GDW hardcover), but I could be persuaded to try them out either as a player or a referee if someone lent (or gave) me a copy.
 
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Yeah, that cover is awful. The editing is pretty bad in the pdfs at least. My initial skim saw a lot of typos, some incorrect page references, and there are no bookmarks in the pdfs. 7th edition has been really raising the bar on art and production values, so I'm not sure what went wrong here. The value is still pretty great, but it feels sloppy.
 
Ouch that's awful. Chaosium should never be allowed to put out any more CoC, until they put out versions with all the art from the French and German versions, which are so good, you think they were painted by Pickman.
 
But bad art has never dissuaded anyone from playing RPGs going all the way back to 1974. :hehe:.

In 1974 there was an excuse for cheap art. In 2018 less so...

Besides, we all know that the 3rd Edition cover was perfection itself, right?
 
Dig me some CoC. Ironically never ran or even played a proper campaign; we always ran it as a one-off or mini-campaign/short arc thing.

I have long dreamed of running Masks of Nyarlathotep, or my white whale -- the "what happened to Percy Fawcett" game.

Or maybe trying my hand at whipping up a horrific sandbox of sorts; a large city sparsely seeded with sanity-blasting horrors under the veneer of normalcy. (I understand that existing setting supplements are not particularly suitable for this sort of game?)

Also Delta Green.

With everyone running D&D5 it's one of the most likely candidates to scratch my current "I want to run something but not what everyone's running right now" itch.
 
Yeah, that cover is awful. The editing is pretty bad in the pdfs at least. My initial skim saw a lot of typos, some incorrect page references, and there are no bookmarks in the pdfs. 7th edition has been really raising the bar on art and production values, so I'm not sure what went wrong here. The value is still pretty great, but it feels sloppy.
That's too bad about the editing. As you say, they've been quite good about that, so I suspect it was rushed, probably to get the boxes in stores in time for the holidays. On the bright side, they've also been really good about fixing typos and other errors, updating the PDFs and cleaning up subsequent printings of the physical books, so I'm guessing they'll get this fixed too. With that in mind, I'll probably hold off a bit on buying the actual box, and just stick with the PDFs for now.
 
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