Hi there,

I'm planning to give the following sheet to my players prior to chargen for my next Cthulhu game. Anyone notice anything which seems odd or obviously isn't covered?

BEGIN HANDOUT

Call of Cthulhu – Character Backgrounds

The date is 1 January, 1925. New Year’s Day.

Characters are 22-23 years old, having graduated from Oxford University two years ago in 1923. The characters were friends at Oxford and have remained in contact following graduation. Accordingly, characters are of upper middle-class or minor aristocratic background. Characters of lower or higher classes would not have been part of the same “set”.

Suitable occupations are any which provide considerable free time and choice in how to spend it. Unless the player chooses to the contrary an independent income will be assumed and the character is unlikely to be dependent on their occupation for their livelihood. Examples of appropriate occupations include: Anthropologist, Antiquarian, Archaeologist, Architect, Author, Barrister, Dilettante, Historian and so on. A character may also be researching their Doctorate of course.
Due to their age and background, none of the characters fought in the Great War. They are Bright Young Things who have never known real suffering or hardship.

Characters should ideally be English, failing which British. If anything more exotic is desired it should not be from outside Western Europe as otherwise the character would not have fitted in at Oxford. You are the establishment, not the outsiders.

Characters will have 100 points to split between their attributes and 300 points to spend on skills. These are fewer than usual as your characters haven’t really done that much as yet. I will be reasonably generous in allowing down time for improving skills or making skill rolls.

Characters will have no prior experience of magic or the supernatural before the start of play. Each character will get a free foreign language skill at 30, player’s choice of language. Further and higher language skills are strongly recommended.

Useful skills will include Credit Rating (which should be at least 40 and ideally 60 or above), Library Use (of course), persuasion skills, academic skills and languages. Characters are unlikely to possess any combat skills other than possibly a little boxing and perhaps some shotgun if they have spent a lot of time at a country estate.

Characters should be pro-active, that is to say the sort of people who if they discover an ancient evil threatening innocent people will do something about it. Passive characters who would not see it as necessary to act once they became aware of such a threat or who would rely on someone else to take care of the problem will be allowed to leave the scenario and new characters will then have to be created. In other words, make them characters who will want to adventure, not ones who want to go home.

Also, I would like a few words on your characters life generally. Other friends, family, loved ones. Things your character enjoys doing. How your character spends his or her time. This is to provide depth and background, I’m not planning to immediately kidnap or kill the people you mention or have you discover that they were cultists all along.


END HANDOUT

The game will be set principally in London, England. I will be using the straight CoC rules set. The game is intended to be simulationist in approach.

Thanks for any comments.

Perhaps the players should make a few notes about the nature of their friendships, collaboratively. Did they room together, have similar interests, come from the same community, etc? This leaves room for more realistic background patter. Or allow them lattitude during play to create these events if they are comfortable with that sort of power. But either way, establish this before play.

Otherwise you always get that same "thrown together" sort of feeling. It helps with the "adventuring mentality" problem that you mention in your handout. If the characters are realistically concerned with each other, that will go a long way to explaining why they are following each other into whatever danger they encounter.

Mike

I'd propose that each character define two social events at which they have met one or more of the other characters; things like the Proms (pref last night), Ascot, the Boat Race, Wimbledon etc.

Then when characters meet they can say stuff like "Ah, Algernon, yes I remember, we shared a box at Wimbledon. Shockingly bad champagne that day, I thought." Alternatively they could have on-campus links, but I'd suspect the flavour could be enhanced by extending them to broader society.

Dump CoC and use this:
http://www.granta.demon.co.uk/drones/

That would be killah.

I'd love to, but my players just aren't ready for it yet. Getting them to play CoC will be a struggle, the group has got very combat happy of late.

Of course, the fact that I don't intend to continue running stuff I don't enjoy any more means that combat will become less of a feature going forward...

Oddly enough, that's one of the few games I ever wrote a review on. I even got an email from the author afterwards thanking me.

It is brilliant, I agree.

Hi there,

I suggest that if anyone shows any sign of interest, recommend these specific Lovecraft stories, and no others.

The Thing on the Doorstep
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Pickman's Model
The Picture in the House

I've found all of these to be effective in (a) inspiring players at that most basic gut level and (b) modelling for them what the situations are "about," namely horrified realization, as opposed to thing-to-kill.

I strongly recommend avoiding the notion that there is a Lovecraftian "universe" to explore, which is actually more Derlethian than Lovecraft and promotes the idea of ongoing adventurers (ie dungeon-crawlers, just above-ground and wearing top hats). Instead, armed with these stories and a very strong focus on Situation rather than Setting, play tends to be very high-yield even in a short one-session run, and astounding in a series of sessions all centered on one awful realization.

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about assigned readings - just the appropriate recommendations in case anyone does express an interest. (Especially the inevitable person who boasts about how they're going to read up on all the creatures in the rulebook, to "be prepared")

Best,
Ron

P.S. I think the story from which the game takes its title is one of the worst Lovecraft stories available; I don't recommend it under any circumstances.
P.P.S. The Dunwich Horror is not a bad story at all, but it's become so imitated and so stereotyped in Lovecraftian fiction (and SO emblematic of "Oh God, a copy of the Necronomicon, choke!") that I can't recommend it enthusiatically.

Ha ha! V. good. It really does hit the nail on the head.

I agree strongly on the Dunwich Horror as a model for gaming. I find the whole "gasp, the Necronomicon" thing highly tedious.

In fact, in my Elisabethan Cthulhu game the NPC sorceror whom the party know has an occult library which contains (amongst other things) Dee's Necronomicon. The party were told they could read it whenever they pleased if it would assist them. I wanted to get away from this idea of the books being impossible to acquire which lends them a DnD magic itemesque quality. Rather I made them easy to acquire and then stressed why most people chose not to.

Not a single character read any tome. Usually in CoC I find that characters strive to do so. Making it available undermined genre expectations and suddenly made people think about what their characters were proposing to do, having thought about it they didn't do it.

CoC has unfortunately acquired default modes of play which are highly cliched. Any shift from these can produce a surprisingly refreshing game, it's all in there it's just been covered by years of gaming practice.

For interest, I will be principally concentrating not on the "Cthulhu" mythos which Ron rightly states to be a Derlethian creation but on the Chambers mythos centering around the King in Yellow. That stuff is truly disturbing, corruption and pointlessness with nothing at all to shoot at...

Contracycle, I missed your first post. Good idea, I'll use that.

Who was your second post in response to BTW?

Hey,

...the NPC sorceror whom the party know has...Dee's Necronomicon. The party were told they could read it whenever they pleased if it would assist them. I wanted to get away from this idea of the books being impossible to acquire....I made them easy to acquire and then stressed why most people chose not to.

Not a single character read any tome....Making it available...suddenly made people think about what their characters were proposing to do...

Very nice.

Paul

I enjoyed the write-up for Drones, which I thought captured its subject very well and amusingly. Something in that style might work for a Tom Sharp theme.