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Dread just works, even though/because you're not trying to get frightened by an in-setting element. My vote is Fear Itself, assuming the mystery you are solving is a good reveal.

If your life is so bad that you need to cheat at rpgs, have at it.

I ran an X-Files esque adventure where a pair of velociraptors was migrating south and killing the occasional victim. Once they figured out the direction and speed, the agents knew where they could be cornered.

The dame came through my round door like a square peg, three feet of legs outta three-and-a-half feet of trouble. I took a long drag of Old Toby, it was gonna be an even longer night.

Only because a rectum is already straight. Cavalry <> Calvary

There can be other challenges to an encounter beyond keeping your PC alive or slaying all the opposition. I would also cite Tatters of the King as a combat-light CoC campaign. As well as the four purist adventures for Trail of Cthulhu written by Graham Walmsley.

There can be more endstates to an encounter than victory or death.

It should be at least discussed prior to play. Some players put a lot of thought and time into their characters and could be really discouraged into doing it again. Even an X of Cthulhu campaign - as opposed to a one-shot - with quick death ignores the descent into madness which makes the...

When I am forced to make a timeline, I now make them go in reverse order. That way, players who are less interested in the setting can read a bit and know the general gist of what's happening now. They aren't put off by things that happened eons ago and probably don't affect their character's...

I don't know - the clearer the concept of the NPC, the easier it should be for a GM to react to the PCs' actions. I suppose there is always a risk that the NPC's plans are unstoppable, or that they can use secret knowledge of the PCs against them unfairly. But that's not unique to the system.

Could you run a game about revealing a setting's secrets? I suppose a mystery does this on a small scale. Or you could take the Supernatural route, adding a tiny bit of connective tissue at the end of each session.

If it's given that players don't read the setting and GMs don't read the backstory, the chances for incompatibility are high.

At a minimum you can think about what will happen in the setting without the PCs acting. Even the earliest books have moves for fronts and their NPCs. In between sessions you can decide what important NPCs know about the PCs' activities and consider what they might do to address them.

Look for an inciting event that kicks off the moving parts in the setting. Maybe an election in a jurisdiction that the railroad is getting close to. In cases where the party is employed, too, it can be difficult to drive the job's purpose as a character motivation. Especially when, in the...

Are the PCs already created? Do they have a reason to be strikebreakers?

Shadowrun 1st ed Turn to Goo

For the Dracula Dossier, the short story "The Power and the Passion" by Pat Cadigan. For 1968 Berlin, the movies Funeral in Berlin, The Quiller Memorandum, and A Dandy in Aspic, and the novel Declare.

In a perfect world I would use Loresheets, which provide character advancement at the same time as investment into chunks of the setting. Historical gaming can address this issue, depending on how much research the GM is willing to do. Even something like a movie night can provide the baseline...

Why is it important to the fiction? 9 times out of 10 the spellcaster's next questions become matters of mechanics: What things on the target's person did I burn up? When I froze the puddle the target was standing on, does he fall prone?

For better or worse, the history of business is driven by those members of a creative enterprise who did the marketization that their comrades couldn't care less about (see Gates, Bill).