How much prep is too much prep for Call of Cthulhu?

[Shipyard Locked]

So one thing led to another and I've been roped into running my first ever Call of Cthulhu campaign. Not what I thought I'd be doing this year, but I'm game, especially because I can use it at a pretext to explore 19th-century French history.

It'll be a mini campaign, only a handful of sessions for two players at a time. I have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to do, but this is still unfamiliar territory. I feel like I'm supposed to have dozens of carefully detailed locations, twice that many fully-described NPCs, 50+ clues and contingency plans for every possible player choice or mistake. I also feel I need to be thoroughly familiar with the mores of Belle Époque France and its institutions.

This seems like a pretty tall order. Does everyone else go through this?

How much prep is too much prep for CoC?
How do you prep scenarios?
What actually matters and what should I let slide?

 

[AsenRG]

So one thing led to another and I've been roped into running my first ever Call of Cthulhu campaign. Not what I thought I'd be doing this year, but I'm game, especially because I can use it at a pretext to explore 19th-century French history.

It'll be a mini campaign, only a handful of sessions for two players at a time. I have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to do, but this is still unfamiliar territory. I feel like I'm supposed to have dozens of carefully detailed locations, twice that many fully-described NPCs, 50+ clues and contingency plans for every possible player choice or mistake. I also feel I need to be thoroughly familiar with the mores of Belle Époque France and its institutions.

This seems like a pretty tall order. Does everyone else go through this?

How much prep is too much prep for CoC?
How do you prep scenarios?
What actually matters and what should I let slide?

...that's too much prep!

 

[bleys21]

I think it will depend on how familiar your players are with 19th century France. The more they are, the more study you'll be doing :-) If not, then you're golden: stay with the Big Picture stuff that they would recognize, and don't sweat the little stuff.

I'd definitely figure out which NPC's they are going to interact with frequently and flesh them out. Then make up a list of period accurate names, titles, occupations so you can make up people on the fly.

Then compile what events are occurring, and when, and a rough idea of how your PC's might hear or encounter these events. Then just wind them up and let them go!

 

[DeadBob]

...that's too much prep!

Far, far, far too much prep!

 

[Bunch]

Well Cthulhu has been sleeping under the seas for untold eons. I don't think he's prepping much but I be he'll be well rested!

Use that as your guide and get a good night's sleep.

 

[Shipyard Locked]

I'd definitely figure out which NPC's they are going to interact with frequently and flesh them out. Then make up a list of period accurate names, titles, occupations so you can make up people on the fly.

Then compile what events are occurring, and when, and a rough idea of how your PC's might hear or encounter these events. Then just wind them up and let them go!

You all make it sound so easy. I'm used to running sandboxes, not webs of interconnected clues corresponding to 40 skills, with combat so deadly you can't really use it to take load off the GM. The last mystery-adjacent thing I ran was Ravenloft, and that was a grueling prep challenge.

 

[AsenRG]

You all make it sound so easy. I'm used to running sandboxes, not webs of interconnected clues corresponding to 40 skills, with combat so deadly you can't really use it to take load off the GM. The last mystery-adjacent thing I ran was Ravenloft, and that was a grueling prep challenge.

What prevents you from puttung a web of interconnected clues in a sandbox?

 

[bleys21]

You all make it sound so easy. I'm used to running sandboxes, not webs of interconnected clues corresponding to 40 skills, with combat so deadly you can't really use it to take load off the GM. The last mystery-adjacent thing I ran was Ravenloft, and that was a grueling prep challenge.

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off that way, I was sorta hoping to be inspiring lol. But what I've learned over 40+ years of doing this RPG stuff is that I tend to overprepare, and never used the material I did prepare. So I got a little more general: focus on events that I can add in when needed, that aren't specifically tied to a location or time frame.

Definitely use *any* tools you can find on the internet for generating names, locations, etc. Steal from any RPG stuff you currently have, and make it fit for your current game.

Also, unless your players are perusing this forum, you might consider posting your thoughts on what you want to do. There are a ton of really creative and helpful folks here that can give you lots of pointers, ideas, etc.

 

[S'mon]

It'll be a mini campaign, only a handful of sessions for two players at a time. I have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to do, but this is still unfamiliar territory. I feel like I'm supposed to have dozens of carefully detailed locations...

This feeling is wrong.

Players will follow the links they're aware of, the ones that are presented to them or uncovered by investigation. For a typical CoC investigation game you'd start with one site that links to 1-3 others. For a sandbox you can have up to 3 rumours to investigate. Those may link to each other and to additional sites/adventures. You certainly want a setup where at least half the adventure material prepped should be used; I aim for more like 3/4. There is a lot of value in leaving *some* material unused, at least potentially, but there's no value in prepping 50 locations and using 5.

OTOH some reading on 19th century France and creating some 'home base' familiar locations & NPCs is time well spent. If it were X-Files, I'd create the PC's line manager, a couple fellow agents, maybe the receptionist, and a local bar and/or coffee shop, the places the PCs see every day.

 

[Shipyard Locked]

What prevents you from puttung a web of interconnected clues in a sandbox?

I'm just saying the type of sandbox I've done in the past looks easier. It's the long-form mystery plotline I'm nervous about because I haven't had that much experience with complex investigations.

D&D-style hexcrawl where fights are easy to cook up and can fill plenty of session time? Easy.

Vampire: The Masquerade-style social networks where the PCs get assigned pretty straightforward tasks? Medium difficulty, but stuff I'm familiar with.

 

[DeadBob]

TBH, I would never run anything CoC as a really big sandbox.

A small area, a few locations, an ability to follow up leads and make plans in any direction and order chosen by the players?

Absolutely.

You seem like you're planning for a "full world".

Just get their agreement to build overly curious investigative types, then hit them with a single mystery in your chosen setting.

Don't overcomplicate it.

 

[TristramEvans]

I don't believe there's such a thing as "too much prep", if you are having fun. I think it only becomes an issue if it interferes with your ability to improvise during the game or locks the game into preset conditions, causing one to have to railroad players to get through the adventure or be stuck pixelbashing until they hit on the required sequence.


I think a more useful question is probably "what is the minimal amount of prep needed?" and then adjusting from there to what one is comfortable with.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I’ve found the use of a mind map to be really helpful in games where there’s investigation going on. Just a simple one page graphic that shows the people/institutions/places that are involved and summaries of how they’re connected. I’d suggest trying to keep it to that amount so you can easily reference it in play as needed.

 

[SJB]

I think that the Cthulhu adjacent games Night’s Black Agents (Hite) and Brindlewood Bay (Cordova) explicitly discuss striking the right balance in prep. If you read French and want the setting to be the Third Republic Crimes would do most of the work for you. There’s Cthulhu Eternal Revolutions for the period 1756 to 1851.

 

[SJB]

… and I frame the issue as Dent vs. Masks.

World-spanning Pulp

In the Northern Hemisphere, as the nights draw in, the aged gamer’s thoughts might turn to adventures in more exotic climes. When not engaged in Proustian reverie, The Project likes to offer soluti…

the180fantasyproject.wordpress.com

 

[Shipyard Locked]

If you read French and want the setting to be the Third Republic Crimes would do most of the work for you.

Ooh, good recommendation!

 

[joetheok]

I've done a fair bit of Call of Cthulhu in my time, and have run linear campaigns and something like a sandbox, and I've also run some off-beat times and places. Here are some things that worked for me.

1. On the mystery side, i tend to start with the one thing I know I can control, and that is the NPC villains. A good handle on the following will help:
a. What do they want to do, ultimately?
b. What discrete steps do they need to do to get that done? (These are the places where the player characters can intervene. Also the scenarios.)
c. What public evidence do they leave of their effort to do those steps? (These are the clues.)
d. How far along are they? (This tells us how long the campaign can be, and also gives us handout clues to look up.)
e. Who favors them? Who opposes them? Who is powerful but indifferent? (These are the NPC non-villains.)

2. On the research side one of the other posters summed it up. If you know the most about French history, you will have the players more accepting of what you say, but on the other hand, you have to do a little more work to set up the world. If your players know something about the subject, they can understand the world more easily, but you need to be ready for "Marshal Bourbaki didn't actually get elected to the Assembly in the Third Republic," at odd and irregular intervals.

3. Maps are excellent. A good railroad map of the period, a good town map of wherever your characters are off to, a good map of Paris in the appropriate year. Time spent on running the computer printer for maps is never wasted. A few generic building floor plans that you can vary on the fly, likewise.

4. Pictures are also good. Both paintings and photographs, in this era, can help stoke the engine of the imagination.

5. If you want a sandbox, not all villains are interconnected. Some can be dragged into the net of the cultists, others will oppose the cultists, and still others will be just doing their thing. So also with cultists--not all the cults are working together. Masks of Nyarlathotep offers a good example of what can be done in this genre, at least in the older edition (7th ed. CoC is simply something that happens to other people so far as I'm concerned.)

a, So, to start the ball rolling, for something that looks like a sandbox, I found the time-honored cliches work well. For a 1920's campaign which I set in Romania, it was a club of upscale, educated folks in Bucharest. The player characters were invited to a lecture. If they didn't want to go to that, there was a different event that they could attend, or they could attend a musical event at the Athenul Roman (3 + 4 above, and the first part of 2). The club is cliche'd as all get out but the beautiful thing of it was that as player characters depreciated in SAN, the club could furnish another member-character and play could go on. For the Roman game, it was a Senatorial family's dinner party. For my one attempt to run MON, the traditional problem of "Who is Jackson Elias, anyway?") was solved with a series of one-shots to build up the credibility of Jackson Elias as someone who was a stand up guy who offered a lot of fun adventure and not much danger.

b. In each case, there was more than one story line, some of which interlinked (Main story line), some of which went along their own path (Let's call these Mythos secondaries) and some of which weren't Mythos at all. (Who was the spy in the Dreyfus Affair? Why?!) (Raffles is in town! Dammit!) and so on.

c. For a sandbox-like Cthulhu to work, I want to focus the players on all the story lines at once. Some of them are available right now. Some of them will be available in a bit (but we "chum the waters,") I solved the problem in the MON campaign by producing a "Newspaper" on 1 or 2 sheets of 11 x 17 copy paper. The front page had a national headline. and a short, usually humorous, article about it. There was a picture or a cartoon. There was an article "below the fold" about something the player characters had been involved with in the previous session. (Usually involving some sort of mysterious fire.) The rest of the paper was given over to handouts for my scenarios, OR, handouts for the established scenarios that were being built up for the future. OR advertisements for my material OR advertisement handouts for published scenarios. It was up to the players to decide what to chase after.

This last was a little spendy, both in time and money, but it wasn't too hard to put together, and whenever a player said, "Oh wait, we have something on that," it was an absolute joy.

 

[carpocratian]

I tend to do a massive amount of research for Call of Cthulhu games, mainly because I just love doing it. Outside of convention one-shots, I prefer to run sandbox-ish campaigns, though with a little more pre-planned detail put into certain parts of them than in some other games. Having a very thorough understanding of the time period and location I'm setting the game in helps me to come up with some unusual stuff and makes it easier to improv things as needed.

I plan out the background groups and forces and intrigues and such in the game, and keep that stuff running in my head in the background. That way I have a good idea of what the characters are likely to encounter when they dig deeper into something. It is up to them to decide how much digging they want to do, and what to investigate. The bits of information they find are all consistent and fall into an ongoing timeline, but it is up to the players to figure out how they go together, if at all. Like the real world, a lot of stuff is happening at any time, some of which may be connected, and some of which won't be. I don't really put "clues" in front of them very often.

 

[Toadmaster]

More than neccessary? Maybe.

I think the only way to have too much prep is if it makes you not want to play.

 

[Klibbix!]

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but Kevin Crawford's Silent Legions has a lot of tools to generate Cthulhu-esque sandboxes.

 

[Ravenswing]

... when you never get your game off the ground because you've done so much prep work that you forget to eat, and so starve to death.

 

[JAMUMU]

If you're not using official scenarios, then I think the advice to mind-map is solid. In fact I'd mind-map situations, not scenarios, and have your players find/make the connections during play.

Have you seen the Conspyramid from Night's Black Agents? Basically a pyramid with the big bad at the top, and each of the lower layers a slightly less important, slightly wider slice of the conspiracy, until the base is what car dealerships and local libraries they control. That might be a good way to work for Cthulhu.

Also, have you tried asking ChatGPT? If you ask it for an overview of where you're setiing the game in the 19th century, and then ask it to spin up some call of cthulhu adventure scenarios set there, you are bound to end up with a few useable things.

 

[AsenRG]

I'm just saying the type of sandbox I've done in the past looks easier. It's the long-form mystery plotline I'm nervous about because I haven't had that much experience with complex investigations.

As was said above, mindmap them. Seriously, that way, when PCs take actions, you know exactly whose attention they're drawing.
And your NPC folder should contain the resources of said NPCs (along with what drags on those resources exist, a lot of people forget that part, so an urban fantasy clan embroiled in a turf war suddenly has wandering enforcers...)

D&D-style hexcrawl where fights are easy to cook up and can fill plenty of session time? Easy.

Vampire: The Masquerade-style social networks where the PCs get assigned pretty straightforward tasks? Medium difficulty, but stuff I'm familiar with.

...why are VtM networks assigning straightforward tasks? Is it some kind of...plot?

 

[Shipyard Locked]

...why are VtM networks assigning straightforward tasks?

Well you know, as complex as the grand strategy might get, you have to admit that on the PC scale it boils down to a lot of "Kill that dude, steal that thing, destroy that file, persuade that faction, escort that VIP, diablerize that smug bitch, and the ever popular raid that gore-stained compound with katanas-a-flashin."

 

[AsenRG]

Well you know, as complex as the grand strategy might get, you have to admit that on the PC scale it boils down to a lot of "Kill that dude, steal that thing, destroy that file, persuade that faction, escort that VIP, diablerize that smug bitch, and the ever popular raid that gore-stained compound with katanas-a-flashin."

"No! I said kill that dude, steal that thing! Not kill that thing, steal that dude! And where's the dude anyway?"
"...We fenced him. Shouldn't we have? We thought it was free money!"
"Cursed be the night when I lay my eyes on your then-mortal face!"

And sure, everything can be broken down to its components. But I suspect that many sires might not bother with such details, and only give you the general direction.
Or if you do get the specifics, you might want to check your sixes. Just in case, you know. Totally not paranoia from having untrustworthy Sires!

 

[SJB]

Ooh, good recommendation!

I notice that a game called Le Cabinet des Murmures has just been published. All I’ve done is look at the DriveThru preview - the game is plainly bad wrong fun since England and Wales are incorporated into the French Empire according to the map.

 

[AsenRG]

I notice that a game called Le Cabinet des Murmures has just been published. All I’ve done is look at the DriveThru preview - the game is plainly bad wrong fun since England and Wales are incorporated into the French Empire according to the map.

Sounds about right to me!

 

[SJB]

There’s a fairly recent OSR game called Belle Époque (in English, despite the title) that covers the same period and location as Crimes. I’ve only had a quick flick through, but it looks rather good. For some reason it has been deleted from DriveThru but the pdf is available from Lulu.

 

[carpocratian]

There’s a fairly recent OSR game called Belle Époque (in English, despite the title) that covers the same period and location as Crimes. I’ve only had a quick flick through, but it looks rather good. For some reason it has been deleted from DriveThru but the pdf is available from Lulu.

I picked up a copy of it the last time I did a Lulu order. Its sitting on my "to read" pile in my bedroom at the moment. I did a quick flip-through, and it looks interesting.