I’ve been into Call of Cthulhu for a long time; I was a Lovecraft obsessive when I was in high school, much to my detriment, but I think that I wasn’t so much into Lovecraft himself as I was into the game supplements for Call of Cthulhu. But over the years, I’ve noticed that I’ve had some issues with the way that I play the game.
It’s a role-playing game, not a short story
A lot of Call of Cthulhu adventures in the 80’s and 90’s felt less like an adventure whose outcome you could affect and more like a short story that you could walk your players through. I wasn’t really aware of it until I read - I think that it was Dennis Detwiller? - the observation that most of those scenarios were basically scenes that you put the players through, then gave them the next scene based on the result of a particular dice roll. The problem with it is that they were fairly railroady, and if you failed the check required to get to the next scene, then the adventure stalled out.
There’s scenes in the adventures that feel like they step into short fiction rather than just being a scenario. A fight with your evil alter-ego over an empty grave in a dream. A description of a poem that turns out to be the poem itself. A room full of bones that you wind up obsessively counting if you fail a SAN check. A land of lost dreams where the ambitions of great men come to nothing, and Leonardo Da Vinci is eaten alive by his own flying machine. A twisted freak running over his brother with the car that he loved to drive. Being caught in the horrors of a phantom Civil War battle. A dream town full of surreal scenes relating to the works of Thomas Ligotti. (And the color plates included in the 4th edition of Call of Cthulhu were really awesome to see - I loved Ward 13, and I’ve thought about how you could integrate that scene into a scenario.)
But what makes fiction good isn’t what makes a game good; games have to be dynamic, and if they have memorable scenes, sometimes they’re the result of play and not a prearranged event.
It’s a GAME, not a SHORT STORY
Which leads me to one of the problems that I’ve had when I’ve run Call of Cthulhu - I love describing creepy scenes to my players, but a game is by necessity interactive. You have to give your players something to do, even if it’s just combat. I ran a game of Insylum when I was getting my Master’s degree that wound up with the players saying that the game just wasn’t going anywhere, and they were right; I tried a Mythos D-Day scenario that had the same problem, where there was plenty of stuff to see, but nothing actually to do. (It was inspired by a thread on RPGnet where somebody asked for creepy events occurring after the Allies don’t encounter Nazi forces after the invasion; just a string of creepy events, like a meadow filled with crucified frogs.)
I’m hoping that I’m getting better at this; I’m working on a new version of the D-Day Call of Cthulhu adventure that gives the players something to do (sweep up Mythos resources in the aftermath of the moving front) and has weird scenes that the players can still interact with. And if things get slow, a half-track filled with Nazis is always something that the players can engage with.
ALIENS done fucked me up
My brother and I watched the TV-edited version of Aliens when we were around ten and eight, and we thought that it was fantastic - although it gave my younger brother nightmares, ‘cause it’s a pretty intense movie for kids that age. But Alien and Aliens are two different genres; Alien is a straight-up horror movie, and a good one, while Aliens is what I’ve seen described as a “matriarchal war movie.” The idea behind Alien is that you can’t really fight the monster, only hide and run, whereas the monsters in Aliens are gunned down in droves by machine-gun fire.
Guess which one had more of an influence in how I approached horror?
Call of Cthulhu is notorious for a high body count, but the problem is that my players - sometimes my little brother included - were frequently enthused about the idea of attacking the monsters with a variety of high-powered weaponry as opposed to researching the monster and running away if they weren’t absolutely ready to fight it. (I was also trying to GM at far too young an age, but that’s a story for another day.) Call of Cthulhu players know that guns are usually the last thing that you want to bring up against a Mythos monster, but I grew up in the gun-friendly Red state of North Dakota, and the idea that a gun made you safe - made you powerful against monsters - was hard to fight.
Wow, that’s really cool, and I’M SO VERY FRIGHTENED
I have never really had a good relationship with Call of Cthulhu’s Sanity rules system, which is kind of like being against the idea of going up in level in Dungeons and Dragons. I think that one of the problems is that it seems to punish you for looking at the cool, scary stuff that the GM came up with - like having your hand slapped for fighting an orc.
An example: One of the ideas that I had for the D-Day campaign was that the PCs enter into a town that’s been interlaced with a variety of alien dimensions, so you could walk down a street and find yourself suddenly in an desolate alien winter wasteland with two suns in the sky and no particular way out. I would think that the desolate alien winter wasteland is something interesting and evocative to throw at the players, but the rules say that you’re going to take Sanity damage for suddenly being wrenched out of the real world and into an alien dimension; and if you go into three or four more interesting alien dimensions, you would hypothetically be taking more and more Sanity damage until you stop engaging with the cool stuff and try to avoid being sucked into the alien world.
A friend of mine, having gone through some of the adventures that I ran, noted that my games weren’t so much about horror so much as they were supernatural - in other words, the fantastic wasn’t necessarily something that was going to reduce you to a puddle of whimpering Jello just from seeing it. I’m wondering if I was just using the wrong system the entire time.
