The Call of Cthulhu Starter Set suggests learning the game by playing a solo adventure, then playing with just one player, and then playing with a full group. If you want to give Call of Cthulhu (CoC) a try but don’t want to spend a lot of money to start, consider trying the starter set.
I decided to playtest the rules exactly as recommended. Spoilers ahead. If you plan to run the starter set you can play the solo adventure (free Alone Against the Flames PDF) before reading my review of that adventure.
Alone Against the Flames started off strong. I really felt like it was the 1920s and I was in the middle of nowhere. The village was really creepy. I liked the art and the map.
However, all the rituals you uncover as secrets kill you. As do some of the mundane secrets. The way to survive involves making a successful strength roll and finding a random bike, fighting some villagers or a bear, or sneaking away. It wasn’t satisfying to me as a player looking for investigation and using uncovered secrets to survive.
I saw enough promise in Alone Against the Flames to buy the PDF Alone Against the Frost. It looks to be more robust and maybe will give me a better play experience.
I also saw a glimmer of what Call of Cthulhu could be. If the village contained secrets my PC needed to find to survive I’d be spurred on to investigate. The secret the girl at the boarding house provides a bonus die to break my chains later. In the boarding house basement I find evidence not only of previous doomed travelers but also the bicycle which I later use to escape. An approach like that would have hooked me.
After surviving the solo adventure, I found Paper Chase to be cheerful and light hearted. There is no real risk. The adventure made no sense to me. The PC meets a book reading uncle turning into a ghoul so he can have more time to read (the art shows the ghoul in clothes while in the adventure it is naked).
Now if the ghoul uncle had eaten someone? And the PC knew? That would be horrific. Make the PC make a hard choice concerning the ghoul, to kill it or trust it to banish itself, and make the choice cost sanity. But the adventure is benign and a bit silly instead.
I did like all the investigating the PC does. The binary pass/fail nature of each clue was sometimes offset by the chance to push rolls. Some clues were staggered with better results yielding more uncovered secrets.
I did not like Edge of Darkness which is an on the rails dungeon crawl. A dying sage asks the PCs to stop a monster he and some fellow sages summoned years ago but never banished. The PCs must travel to an abandoned ruin of rooms and corridors, find magic that beats the monster, and use the magic while fighting off zombies and the monster to defeat it. There are no secrets for the investigators to investigate.
I was so stymied by this adventure that I simply couldn’t run it. It didn’t have any of the Call of Cthulhu tropes I wanted: secrets, mystery, slowly building threat, and a horrifying monster reveal. I purchased Dead Light to run instead.
I did end up running Edge of Darkness because Dead Light was so short. The PCs already knew the monster was in the attic so the whole description of what happened if they went up there was wasted information. The rules on running the ritual were buried in text so I missed the rule and had to wing it. The monster seemed weak and it appeared that few shotgun blasts would end it without the need for a ritual. I also didn’t know that a revised Dead Lights and Other Dark Tales was available which might have helped.
Overall, I was surprised to find running Call of Cthulhu to be exhausting. Rules were hard to find and parse, adventures ran short, and the overall vibe varied wildly. I think CoC would be a fine game to run if I had a few more hours a week to prep and wasn’t already tired from work and life when I show up to GM. Right now though, it is simply too much work for me. I am holding off on buying the main rulebooks for now. Not the outcome I wanted and I wish the game had worked better for me.
If you don’t need the dice, I don’t think the starter set is worth getting in print. PDFs would work fine. The pregenerated investigator sheets are corrected in PDF form. Nothing in the box besides the dice is something you can’t just print or run from a screen. I recommend the starter set for trying out Call of Cthulhu. See how it actually plays without sinking a large investment into finding out. I’m glad I did even if I didn’t get the result I was hoping for.
Alone Against the Flames started off strong. I really felt like it was the 1920s and I was in the middle of nowhere. The village was really creepy. I liked the art and the map.
However, all the rituals you uncover as secrets kill you. As do some of the mundane secrets. The way to survive involves making a successful strength roll and finding a random bike, fighting some villagers or a bear, or sneaking away. It wasn’t satisfying to me as a player looking for investigation and using uncovered secrets to survive.
I saw enough promise in Alone Against the Flames to buy the PDF Alone Against the Frost. It looks to be more robust and maybe will give me a better play experience.
I also saw a glimmer of what Call of Cthulhu could be. If the village contained secrets my PC needed to find to survive I’d be spurred on to investigate. The secret the girl at the boarding house provides a bonus die to break my chains later. In the boarding house basement I find evidence not only of previous doomed travelers but also the bicycle which I later use to escape. An approach like that would have hooked me.
After surviving the solo adventure, I found Paper Chase to be cheerful and light hearted. There is no real risk. The adventure made no sense to me. The PC meets a book reading uncle turning into a ghoul so he can have more time to read (the art shows the ghoul in clothes while in the adventure it is naked).
Now if the ghoul uncle had eaten someone? And the PC knew? That would be horrific. Make the PC make a hard choice concerning the ghoul, to kill it or trust it to banish itself, and make the choice cost sanity. But the adventure is benign and a bit silly instead.
I did like all the investigating the PC does. The binary pass/fail nature of each clue was sometimes offset by the chance to push rolls. Some clues were staggered with better results yielding more uncovered secrets.
I did not like Edge of Darkness which is an on the rails dungeon crawl. A dying sage asks the PCs to stop a monster he and some fellow sages summoned years ago but never banished. The PCs must travel to an abandoned ruin of rooms and corridors, find magic that beats the monster, and use the magic while fighting off zombies and the monster to defeat it. There are no secrets for the investigators to investigate.
I was so stymied by this adventure that I simply couldn’t run it. It didn’t have any of the Call of Cthulhu tropes I wanted: secrets, mystery, slowly building threat, and a horrifying monster reveal. I purchased Dead Light to run instead.
I did end up running Edge of Darkness because Dead Light was so short. The PCs already knew the monster was in the attic so the whole description of what happened if they went up there was wasted information. The rules on running the ritual were buried in text so I missed the rule and had to wing it. The monster seemed weak and it appeared that few shotgun blasts would end it without the need for a ritual. I also didn’t know that a revised Dead Lights and Other Dark Tales was available which might have helped.
Overall, I was surprised to find running Call of Cthulhu to be exhausting. Rules were hard to find and parse, adventures ran short, and the overall vibe varied wildly. I think CoC would be a fine game to run if I had a few more hours a week to prep and wasn’t already tired from work and life when I show up to GM. Right now though, it is simply too much work for me. I am holding off on buying the main rulebooks for now. Not the outcome I wanted and I wish the game had worked better for me.
If you don’t need the dice, I don’t think the starter set is worth getting in print. PDFs would work fine. The pregenerated investigator sheets are corrected in PDF form. Nothing in the box besides the dice is something you can’t just print or run from a screen. I recommend the starter set for trying out Call of Cthulhu. See how it actually plays without sinking a large investment into finding out. I’m glad I did even if I didn’t get the result I was hoping for.
