Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Byrons_Ghost" data-source="post: 795435" data-attributes="member: 7396">Unless you're running some of the older, classic Chaosium materials, I really can't think of a "standard" way of doing CoC. It doesn't fit into easy categories like D&D might, say dungeon crawl vs. city-based adventure. The "official" periods that were supported where Victorian, Jazz Age, and modern day. Modern day tended to be more active, Victorian tended to be more investigative, and 1920s scenarios fell somewhere in between.Our original style in playing the game 10-12 years ago was pretty mayhem-intensive: lots of dead, insane characters and weird monsters. A lot of this was the BRP system- modules called for constant sanity checks, even for piddling things (such as strange noises or odd-looking doors), and even the weakest monsters could tear a character like tissue paper. Nowdays the published supplements seem to be getting away from that and focusing more on the mystery and Lovecraftian elements.Your best bet is probably to take some of the things you liked about their the Mythos or the Lovecraft stories and focus on re-creating those elements in whatever genre you're most comfortable with. Odd as it may seem, Lovecraft's original stories may not be the most helpful in creating an RPG campaign, since there's little in them that would appeal to most players- lots of historical research, geneological investigation, that sort of thing. You're better off just borrowing a few elements that you liked and putting them into something you're familiar with than trying to run a Lovecraft story.One of the biggest problems I've seen in CoC is what we called railroading. In a lot of published material, the players were just yanked along from one scene or encounter to the next, following a trail of clues that a five-year old could interpret and having no other options for dealing with the situation. This is another reason why I think Lovecraft's stories- as written- would make poor RPG modules. Most of the time he wrote in 3rd person observer mode, where the narrator/protagonist is pretty much just a witness to the horrible things happening to those around him. Again, it's effective for fiction, but kind of boring for RPGs, where the PCs themselves are supposed to be central.The flip side of this is that, if you make the PCs central, then they're the ones experiencing the horrible things, and tend toward messy ends. Here you just have to sort of experiment and find what a good mix is. I would say keep the monsters weak, hint at the larger entities in the background, and only call deduct sanity from monsters, tomes, spells, and really disturbing experiences, like realizing your wife is turning into a Deep One. Probably the best thing for you to do is keep your game group in mind, if you know who your players are. If you've gamed with them before, then you can determine whether they'd like more investigative style games, whether they're comfortable taking matters into their own hands or need to be put on the run, etc. That will give you the best indication of what to start with, and hopefully let you know the best way to evoke the atmosphere and themes you're looking for. The Mythos elements themselves can then just sort of be the icing.</blockquote>

Verification