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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaculata" data-source="post: 6765301" data-attributes="member: 6801286">I made one surprisingly effective tweak to my Call of Cthulhu campaign, that had a dramatic effect on the ambiance of the campaign. After the players had created their characters, I pulled out a stack of ominous black envelopes. I then gave each player one black envelope, and told them that each one contained a little note, with a list of secrets. I asked them to choose one of the secrets by putting a circle around it, and not tell any of their fellow players. This secret would play an important role in the campaign, and if anyone ever found out about it, their sanity* would suffer. I then asked them to put the note back into the envelope, and hand it back to me.(* In case you've never played it before; in Call of Cthulhu characters can take sanity damage from learning dark knowledge and seeing traumatic things. Everyone eventually goes insane.)If however they didn't like any of the secrets, they were also free to make up their own, and discuss it with me. All of the secrets were custom written for their character. Not a single one of them had a duplicate secret, and they had to make sure no one found out about it, especially their fellow players.This lead to an amazing amount of paranoia. Every session there would be a moment where only one player would have a clue what is going on, and he couldn't tell the rest of the party. It was great!</blockquote>