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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheAuldGrump" data-source="post: 566856" data-attributes="member: 6957">Umm, I hate to say it, but you might be better off running D&D, maybe D&D with the Cthulhu Mythos. One of the major points of Call of Cthulhu is use your head, not your thews, changing the massive damage pretty much cripples that. If the PCs are fragile they are more likely to stop and think.I have run the old CoC in the late middle ages, it works fine. Tweaking the HP and massive damage is not going to help the game.As for suggestions.1.) Prepare handouts ahead of time, clues that you can actually hand the players to reward investigation. In the case of written clues keeping the fonts consistent so that a given NPC always uses a single font, this gives the PCs something to go on, even if the clue isn't signed. If any of the players are good with cyphers use one. Invisible ink is another quick and easy way to do clues. (Milk or lemon juice will turn dark if heated over a candle. The smell can give them away, which is a good thing.)2.) Have a timeline for what the villains are up to, nothing fancy - a flowchart works fine too. Make sure that failure on the part of the investigators means something BAD happens. 3.) Don't be afraid to kill PCs, this is a horror game, pulling punches waters it down. If you want to warn the investigators kill an NPC first, prefferably one who is important to the PCs.4.) Isolation, seperate the PCs from help, make them feel that they are on their own.5.) Props and music - atmosphere is very important, props help this. If you can tie the props into what is going on all the better. One of the best CoC games I ever ran had a set of candles on the table, both in game and in real life. As PCs died I extinguished the candles, one by one. One PC tried blowing out one of the candles - he died. As the candles burn down the players will get more and more desperate.6.) Set up what the villains will do if they are interfered with, they won't wait in their dungeon for the heroes to come to them.7.) Set up mysteries, its a game of thinking, let the PCs think. Reward their thinking, penalize stupidity.And of course read the section on running the game in the rulebook itself, there is a fair amount of advice in there.Check the web, there is a lot of the old CoC stuff out there that you can convert. A nifty place to visit on the web is <a href="http://WWW.TCCorp.com," target="_blank">WWW.TCCorp.com,</a> run by one of the two main authors of the d20 version of the game, in particular check out The Annotated Unspeakable Oath. Also good is <a href="http://WWW.Chaosium.com," target="_blank">WWW.Chaosium.com,</a> which has a lot of really nifty links for CoC.I would also recommend running one of the sample adventures for a first game rather than go overboard on 'new and exciting', or at least take a look how they are organized.Oh, and believe it or not watching 'The Blair Witch Project' and 'Secret of the Blair Witch' can help, if ever there was a movie that felt like a game of CoC that was it.The Auld Grump, who started playing CoC around 1981 or so...</blockquote>

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