johndesmarais
Explorer
I’d love to play (not run) Masks of Nyarlathotep and Horror on the Orient Express with a group that really leans into the CoC tropes.
Your wish list of modules you'd want to play in/run
- Thread starter Libertad
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W'rkncacnter
Hero
i read through gears of revolution and it made me want to run it so bad that i started DMing solely to gather enough experience to do it justice. so, i mean, i'd argue that's number 1 for me.
i'd also eventually like to run or play war of the burning sky, masks of nyarlethotep, oracle of war, and the AX (for ACKS) line. they all seem neat.
i'd also eventually like to run or play war of the burning sky, masks of nyarlethotep, oracle of war, and the AX (for ACKS) line. they all seem neat.
R_J_K75
Legend
I always wanted to run or play in a Ptolus game. In 2007 we made PCs and my friend was going to run it, come the next week when we were going to play DM didn't show up, fell off the face of the earth and didn't hear from him again until 2015. I have the 5E version and think about running a campaign in it now and then, but the book is so big and daunting I don't think I even have the strength to lift it anymore.
Joshua Randall
Legend
Based on the sample size of, like, 3 here, I’m going to pick on Red Hand of Doom as an example of an adventure that gets read and raved about far more than it gets played. (And hey, I’m one of the people raving about it!) You read these amazing adventures with cool hooks, memorable villains, set pieces that make you sit back and fantasize about how they’ll play out at the table — and all that makes you list it on your Top Things I Want To Play/Run Someday.
Years ago, someone (James Jacobs? Erik Mona?) wrote here on ENW that publishers like WOTC or Paizo are well aware that a lot of adventures never get run, but can still be popular as reading material for GMs. So they look for adventures in that vein to publish.
To that end it might be helpful to kinda crowdsource some educated opinions on the “reads well” nominees to see what actual play was like. Here goes….
Keep on the Borderlands: granted it has been decades, and my group (including me) at the time didn’t buy into the OSR thought-process.
It’s an adventure that requires a serious amount of self motivation from the players: in a game-y way (“We’re on this adventure because this is the game.”) or in a thespian way (“My cleric has a holy mission to destroy evil monsters!” / “My magic-user is obsessed with uncovering knowledge in creepy caves, past the point of reason.”) — but something to “keep” them engaged.
And/Or, the DM has to do a ton of work to set up compelling hooks and to make the Keep/Caves respond in compelling ways
That said, this is one of the ur-texts of D&D (and thus, of all RPGs) and probably worth experiencing for that reason alone.
—
Empire of the Ghouls: as a backer of this project, before we had true crowdfunding, I really really wanted this to be a success at the table. Unfortunately it went over like a lead balloon for, I think, two reasons:
(1) 3e rules. My group and I were at the point that we felt the heaviness of the rules interfered with our ability to enjoy the game, but we didn’t have any good alternatives at the time, so we forced ourselves to press on. This meant that both on the player side and the DM side, combat in particular became a slog and something we dreaded. Which took away any enjoyment from the lovingly crafted ghoulish encounters.
(2) Lack of context. Only I, the DM, was aware of the history being invoked by the adventure. So only I could appreciate it.
i think (1) is solvable (use a better / more fun rule set) but requires significant work. I think (2) is a major problem with the entire RPG hobby and I won’t presume to know how to solve it here.
—
Masks of Nyarlathotep: as a player, I can say this fell apart for two reasons, one of which will not surprise anyone (I don’t think) and that is…
(1) Rules. Oh boy. The BRP rules are… well they’re some rules. To plagiarize myself from a long ago discussion, it’s like using a TI-88 calculator in 2025. Yes, the buttons still work and the arithmetic still works, but why would you do that to yourself when there are so many better tools available now?
For our group, the rules actively detracted from our enjoyment of the game. Characters felt bumblingly incompetent, especially in combat (which, granted, isn’t a big thing but isn’t entirely NOT a thing, in COC). Anything beyond “search the room for clues” required us to engage with sub-systems that felt painful to implement (chases in particular).
So again, maybe a better or at least smoother ruleset can save this.
(2) The second reason: way too slow of a build up. For an adventure with Masks and Nyaralthotep right in the title, we experienced neither before we gave up. I will partly blame the GM for his dogged insistence to run ever. Single. Encounter. In the preamble and the journey and whatever else was going on before any Nyaralthotep-y goodness.
But how much is that the GM’s fault alone? If the adventure needs to cut to the good stuff to be… good, then write the adventure that way, please.
I will also partly blame a major case of something Robin Laws identified back in the day: the players were in a cloud of uncertainty and doubt with no clear direction, which caused us to eventually throw up our hands and say “Who cares? I guess Nyaralthotep wins and the world is screwed. Oh well. What other game can we play now?”
—
Hope these capsule “actual play” anecdotes are helpful to anyone who ends up playing/running these adventures. They were, at least, memorable!
Years ago, someone (James Jacobs? Erik Mona?) wrote here on ENW that publishers like WOTC or Paizo are well aware that a lot of adventures never get run, but can still be popular as reading material for GMs. So they look for adventures in that vein to publish.
To that end it might be helpful to kinda crowdsource some educated opinions on the “reads well” nominees to see what actual play was like. Here goes….
Keep on the Borderlands: granted it has been decades, and my group (including me) at the time didn’t buy into the OSR thought-process.
It’s an adventure that requires a serious amount of self motivation from the players: in a game-y way (“We’re on this adventure because this is the game.”) or in a thespian way (“My cleric has a holy mission to destroy evil monsters!” / “My magic-user is obsessed with uncovering knowledge in creepy caves, past the point of reason.”) — but something to “keep” them engaged.
And/Or, the DM has to do a ton of work to set up compelling hooks and to make the Keep/Caves respond in compelling ways
That said, this is one of the ur-texts of D&D (and thus, of all RPGs) and probably worth experiencing for that reason alone.
—
Empire of the Ghouls: as a backer of this project, before we had true crowdfunding, I really really wanted this to be a success at the table. Unfortunately it went over like a lead balloon for, I think, two reasons:
(1) 3e rules. My group and I were at the point that we felt the heaviness of the rules interfered with our ability to enjoy the game, but we didn’t have any good alternatives at the time, so we forced ourselves to press on. This meant that both on the player side and the DM side, combat in particular became a slog and something we dreaded. Which took away any enjoyment from the lovingly crafted ghoulish encounters.
(2) Lack of context. Only I, the DM, was aware of the history being invoked by the adventure. So only I could appreciate it.
i think (1) is solvable (use a better / more fun rule set) but requires significant work. I think (2) is a major problem with the entire RPG hobby and I won’t presume to know how to solve it here.
—
Masks of Nyarlathotep: as a player, I can say this fell apart for two reasons, one of which will not surprise anyone (I don’t think) and that is…
(1) Rules. Oh boy. The BRP rules are… well they’re some rules. To plagiarize myself from a long ago discussion, it’s like using a TI-88 calculator in 2025. Yes, the buttons still work and the arithmetic still works, but why would you do that to yourself when there are so many better tools available now?
For our group, the rules actively detracted from our enjoyment of the game. Characters felt bumblingly incompetent, especially in combat (which, granted, isn’t a big thing but isn’t entirely NOT a thing, in COC). Anything beyond “search the room for clues” required us to engage with sub-systems that felt painful to implement (chases in particular).
So again, maybe a better or at least smoother ruleset can save this.
(2) The second reason: way too slow of a build up. For an adventure with Masks and Nyaralthotep right in the title, we experienced neither before we gave up. I will partly blame the GM for his dogged insistence to run ever. Single. Encounter. In the preamble and the journey and whatever else was going on before any Nyaralthotep-y goodness.
But how much is that the GM’s fault alone? If the adventure needs to cut to the good stuff to be… good, then write the adventure that way, please.
I will also partly blame a major case of something Robin Laws identified back in the day: the players were in a cloud of uncertainty and doubt with no clear direction, which caused us to eventually throw up our hands and say “Who cares? I guess Nyaralthotep wins and the world is screwed. Oh well. What other game can we play now?”
—
Hope these capsule “actual play” anecdotes are helpful to anyone who ends up playing/running these adventures. They were, at least, memorable!
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
Oh, I’d LOVE for my gaming group to want to play Masks of Nyarlathotep. It is, however, a big commitment and one of my groups has a player who really doesn’t like Call of Cthulhu’s style of play. I might be able to convince him to play a one-shot, but not a whole, major campaign.
I have played it all the way through once and GMed it up to a TPK that ended it, and we had a blast (literally, it was the dynamite that did the group in).
I have played it all the way through once and GMed it up to a TPK that ended it, and we had a blast (literally, it was the dynamite that did the group in).
Joshua Randall
Legend
How long did it take the group(s) to figure out what the heck was going on? Or enough of "what the heck" to want to keep going?
Because me / my group never did within the first 10 sessions and by that point, we just didn't care.
I realize, for all anecdotes, the problem might be in the GM's chair; but having glanced at the published adventure, I do think some of the blame lies there as well.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
We had a group that played in college and we finished in a single term - so about 13-14 4-hour sessions. We did have a bunch of experienced CoC players so whenever we hit a new location we fanned out in small groups to research and interview the hell out of people on our network of clues. We knew that there was some kind of international conspiracy by the end of the second chapter that involved the main cult and we knew about the big ticket conspiracy by our third chapter. But I have to say that our visit to the New York publisher, Prospero House, gave us the information we needed to motivate our drive in a BIG way. And that was WAY early. It was probably our first stop in NYC after the opening scene.
This was also back in 1989, so it was still the first boxed set version - the Australia chapter was still in the Terror Australis supplement and considered optional - and it didn't have the extra supplementary stuff from the latest edition. IMO, some of the new stuff is really cool, but some of it just muddies things even further like the prologue chapter. So I'd be omitting a good chunk of that stuff if I ran it for my groups.
We also had a fairly diverse and large group of PCs because we had a bunch of players. A few had very good combat skills, pretty much everyone had skill in one firearm (even my theology professor went duck hunting periodically and could use a shotgun effectively), we knew several relevant languages, we had some who focused on research (and reading tomes), and we had a couple with very good talking skills. So our skill bases were well covered.
EDIT: I think one additional factor was that we played in the spring term and in the previous fall, a bunch of us in that group had played several shorter CoC scenarios and mini-campaigns with the same Keeper. So as CoC players, we had really gelled as an effective core group. I recall another group also played through the Masks campaign a year or so later but without the same ground work and less player decisiveness in the investigation sandbox. I think they struggled a lot more than we did.
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Golden Bee
The cool guy of online
Jailbreak in a LARP seems perfect. Once they cure this disease, and the next one...
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