I attended the first Dead of Winter in 2009, an invite only horror convention. It was held at the Brookdale Lodge in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was an epic event. The hotel was rundown, the weather was bad, the gaming was great. This convention happened before I started blogging about the convention games I played in. I started blogging about the games because at a certain Mini-Con, I played with a very terrible GM and I forgot his name and I wound up signing up for another game of his. So, this was a way for me to remember the good games and the bad games (and bad GMs).
I decided to write up the experience because one day, I'm going to forget...
Welcome Sign, I like how the NO is covered up
Exterior of Brookdale Lodge
Exterior of Gaming Cabin to the right of the Lodge
Brook Room, with real brook
Dirty Chandelier
Bar facing Brook Room, note missing panes in stained glass
Interior from Brook Room to Cabin
Stairs from cabin to Brook Room
Giant Fireplace in Cabin
Exterior of Rooms
The Brookdale is in Santa Cruz and after several hours of driving through winding mountain roads during a storm, Shannon M. and I arrived. We had booked one of the "improved" rooms. The price was some outrageous $107/night. The room wasn't up to code. The mattresses were saggy, wall plugs didn't work, electrical plates were missing, lamps in the room didn't work, the toilet handle didn't flush, and the bathroom window was permanently painted open with no bug screen to keep the bugs out and it let the cold air in.
In the morning, I took a tour of the grounds. Crows feasted on overflowing garbage from a dumpster, an adjoining building had burned down. The Brook Room was still beautiful (with a brook running through the middle of the room), but rundown and deathly cold. Dust covered the stained glass chandeliers and the facing bar area had stained glass with missing panes of glass. Rain entered through the holes and the carpets were wet and soggy. Buckets were on the floor catching any rainwater that dripped from the ceiling.
Dumpster, my presence scared the crows away
Burned Down Rooms
Mermaid Room (picture I found on the internet)
Portions of the building were off limits and sealed off, but at night Ralph W. and I took a flashlight tour. In the off limits area, past two sheets of plastic, hung up as a barrier, was the mermaid room. A glass window looked into an algae infested swimming pool. The glass was dirty and moisture streamed down its face. Clumsily drawn murals of a man in a diving suit and Humphrey Bogart decorated the walls. There's supposed to be an entrance to the Gangster Tunnels, but bricked up and hidden inside a cabinet. Something like a playhouse was to the side of the Mermaid room and we went up the creaky rotten stairs, afraid that the floor would collapse beneath us, we left quickly.
The only thing still open was the full bar where pictures of famous people decorated the walls. President Herbert Hoover, movie stars like Marilyn Monroe, and gangsters like Al Capone used to frequent the Brookdale Lodge. Across the hall from the bar was the public restroom; one of the urinals was missing, there's just some plumbing sticking out of the wall and missing tile, but no urinal. Next to it, was a functioning urinal. I think in one of the stalls, the toilet was missing or disconnected and on it's side.
During our lunch break, sandwiches were provided in the bar area (not the full bar) that overlooked the Brook Room. Buckets captured water dripping down from the ceiling and water blown in through the missing panes of the stained glass window. The carpet was squishy.
Tree Trunk in Hallway to Cabin
To get to the cabin, you have to traverse some stairs and in the hallway, there's a tree trunk growing through part of the building.
The cabin has a "cold" spot and if you sit over it, it's definitely chilly, much more chilly than the unheated cabin. We started a fire in the giant fireplace, something out of Orson Well's Citizen Kane (it's actually a bit smaller, but you get my drift), but someone forgot to open up the flue and smoked out the cabin. That evening, the power went out. When we returned from dinner for our evening session, we wound up playing by candle light.
The Brookdale Lodge has several ghost stories associated with it. I eventually constructed a Dread game using our experiences and the Lodge's history as a setting. Link to game here. I was going to run it at the Brookdale, but it had been shut down by the fire department just that year and DoW was moved to the Oakland Airport Hilton instead.
I think only Badger experienced some ghostly apparition. Ask Badger about the visitor in his room.
I played in great games run by great GMs. It's been so many years since then that I'm not going to bother about creating a spoiler section. Assume minor spoilers below.
Saturday, Dec 12 10am-4pm
Title: Silent Night
GM: Gil Trevizo
This game was based on the movie: Bad Santa. I got to play Billy Bob Thornton and Shannon got to play Bernie Mac. Lots of high jinks ensued. In addition to trying to rip off the mall, there were zombies, penguins, doberman pinschers, Delta Green, disintegrations, sex with animals, and STDs.
Saturday Dec 12, 6pm - 1am
Title: Partners
GM: Badger McIness
I got to be a cop that was a serial killer. I only killed lowlifes and prostitutes. We investigated a construction site and the other PCs decided to kill my character instead of the alien infected PC -- go figure. I actually got out of the construction site first, disabled their vehicle, and fled back to my townhouse to get some stuff (serial killer victim trophies) before leaving town. They actually called a cab, hunted me down, and shot me to death as I clutched the trophies to my chest. And the alien got away.
Sunday, Dec 13 10:30am - 4:30pm
Title: Communicable
GM: Kristin Hayworth
My introduction the Dread. OMG. Kristin thought the game was a disaster (her words, years later), but it was the most amazing game ever. The first mistake she made was to announce before the game started that there are no lines in this game, that this is a horror game and anything goes. In this game was Mike M, Matt G, Matt A, Matt D, Shannon M, and Morgan H. (I think Mike G might have been in the game too, but I'm not sure.) Well for those who don't know, when you get Mike M and Matt G in the same game, the combination is a bit explosive, um, nuclear. So, during character creation, Mike M rolls 1d6 and says his character's had 4 abortions and asked how many I've had. Then I pick up a 1d20 and roll a 12. On our character sheets, we write down various character backgrounds. When I handed mine in, Kristin crossed a line out on my character sheet and shouted, "NO!" So much for no lines cannot be crossed. Then of course everyone wanted to know what was on my character sheet. I wrote down that I have so many abortions because my boyfriend liked to make me pregnant and collect the aborted fetuses in jars.
Matt D accidentally kicked the table early in the game, knocking down the Jenga tower, and Kristin let him live until the alien burst out from his body.
At one point, one PC repeatedly slammed a car door into another to make her spontaneously abort.
Another time a PC put mattresses to block a doorway to keep alien infected humans out and also leaving other PCs stuck outside.
We had to choose between running over a little girl in the middle of the street or crashing our car. We would have run the girl over except Kristin added that the girl would cure cancer in the future.
At one point, if we reveal a dark deep secret, we would get a bennie, a small skull which you can turn in instead of pulling from the Jenga tower. I think we were, as a group, watching aliens crawl out of the ground and the Jenga tower was very unstable, so that was when I decided to tell everyone that my character had AIDS. There was deep silence as all the PCs did the relationship math and realized they all had been exposed to AIDS.
In this game, we were the most horrible people and we all deserved to die. I think Matt A and Matt G made it out alive.
Sunday, Dec 13 6pm - 1am
Title: Northwest Passage
GM: Matt Steele
Up in Alaska, there's coldness and darkness, and strange things that Eskimos are afraid to talk about. Very strange things started happening like dinosaurs rampaging in the snow, so we holed up at a ranger station. I think my character was the town's dog catcher. At the end, some PCs ignited a big tank of propane and I jumped to cover Matt G's character (or maybe Mike M's? I don't remember now. See? My memory is going.) and saved him from the explosion. My character was a big guy and was able to protect him from the blast, but alas, my dog catcher died.
This year's DoW was the 2nd best DoW; the best being the first one I attended in 2009 where I was introduced to Dread by Kristin S. and had the legendary way-over-the-top game with Matt A., Matt D., Matt G., Mike M., Shannon M., and I. As a side thought, the first DoW happened before I was blogging about my RPG adventures and it was such a memorable experience, I should write it up before old age sets in and I forget everything. DoW? What? Who? Eh? What that you say?
This year, I didn't run a game, but decided to try for the Player lottery. DoW GMs automatically get a seat, but the remaining seats are filled in a first-come, first-served basis and are generally filled right after registration opens in the first day, if not the first few hours. All the games I was in this year were excellent, not good, or fair, or bad, but excellent, like three Michelin stars excellent, a gourmet gaming experience bonanza. So, in this article, I'm going to focus on the GM chef tricks of the trade that I noticed which contributed to the experience.
I hide spoiler sections with JavaScript. If you have JavaScript turned off, you can skip the spoiler sections I have marked.
Dec 10, Saturday 11am
Game System: Call of Cthulhu 7th ed.
Scenario Title: And For My Next Trick
GM: Aaron Vanek
Number of Players: 6 (Mike G. / Alexis G. / Bill L. / Josh C. / Shannon M. / Morgan H.)
Characters Provided: Yes
Description: In the 1920's, Scientific American magazine offered a reward of $2500 to anyone who could definitively prove they possessed psychic abilities. Their investigative team included: Dr. William McDougall, a founder of modern psychology; Dr. Daniel Comstock, the inventor of Technicolor film; Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, an Episcopalian minister; and Harry Houdini. The magazine rescinded the offer after internal strife regarding “The Margery Incident” and the team went their separate ways. But the managing editor of SA, J. Malcolm Bird, is putting the group back together for one more investigation. Pre-generated characters are these historical figures, including Houdini.
I really enjoyed this game due to the interaction between the players and the nice buildup of tension and action.
Trick 1: Do research, but use it as a jumping off point, not as the template for the game.
This game was very well researched. But the research material is only the jumping off point for the game. Some GMs make the mistake of using real history as the template for the whole game and try to railroad the players into playing out the historical events. That is a big mistake. Instead, Aaron started with the historical events having already happened and the game starting afterwards. The other thing Aaron did was to tell us, that though the characters are historical, once the players get their hands on them, we can do as we want and ahistorical events could happen. e.g. Houdini can die early.
The famous historical event that already happened before the game started was Houdini and Margery. You can read about it in the links below (I dug this up after the game):
Matt S. uses a technique for hidden die rolls. He has players roll a series of 1d100 for hidden rolls and have them written down on a sheet of paper. For instance, instead of asking a player to roll a Spot Hidden, he just looks it up on the sheet and crosses it out. This prevents the players from meta-gaming a roll when they fail a roll. How many times has a GM asked a player to roll a Spot Hidden and after a failure, the other players ask to make a Spot Hidden also? Well, Aaron has a nice variation on this. He had each of us roll a series of ten 1d100 and have us write it down on a single shared sheet of paper that's handed to the GM. Then instead of going through the pre-rolled numbers top-down, he rolls 1d10 and selects that pre-rolled number, so if a player had memorized their rolls, it's now randomized. Nice.
Trick 3. The third technique he used which I want to talk about is in the Spoiler section.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
The game starts off with "getting the band back together again." After the falling out between Bird and Houdini, another psychic medium is found and Bird invites the old Scientific American investigative team for dinner at a posh restaurant. His task is to convince the team to investigate and if possible certify the medium as genuine.
Of course, there's history between all the characters and that provides some role playing opportunities as they hash out their old differences and colors their interaction.
What I really enjoyed was that we were able to do two seances: One at the medium's place and one inside our control location.
The first seance followed the standard darkening of the room, candles, holding hands, and contacting the spirit, the ringing of a bell by a ghostly spirit, and asking the medium questions from the spirit world. Other than the possible manifestation of a shadowy rat thing, everything we noticed could have been a sham.
The second seance was where Aaron shined. We did a seance in our own controlled room. Supernatural things happened. When the "spirit" took over the medium, he grabbed my hand tightly which reflexively caused all the other players in the circle who were holding hands to do the same thing, creating a wave of clutched hands, then he did a great booming "transformed" voice. This made us all jump. It was a well done piece of theater.
Trick 3: Know how people react physically and use it well in game (squeezing the hands tightly and a shocking loud voice). Another example of this is how people react to the Jenga Tower in Dread.
The players were convinced the event was real and the medium took the prize money to pay off a strange Oriental gentleman to get an urn of ashes. She then proceeded to summon a "demon" which the players were unable to stop which gathered her up in its arms and flew away.
The build up of action was good, except I found the start a bit too slow, we took an hour getting ready for our first scene. We had to read 3 pages of character background and also another 2 pages about the tiff between Bird and Houdini (for those who knew about the details). Then there were numerous GM / Player meetings. So, when Aaron asked if he should take into account a lunch break or we would just power through, we voted for powering through. We wanted more play time. I think that's one of the dangers of too much research, the GM wants to show the players all the wonderful work he's done and some of it isn't necessary for the game.
I did like that the scenario ended the way it did. Too many scenarios ramp up to the ending of the world and the players trying to stop it. It did look like it was headed that way due to an opening vortex above a high rise apartment building. This time, it was just a disturbance that went away, but the investigators got to gaze deeply into the unknown.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Dec 10, Saturday 7pm
Game System: Call of Cthulhu 7th ed.
Scenario Title: The Road
GM: Aaron Teixeira
Power Level: US Army Engineers
Number of Players: 6 (Bill L. / Morgan H. / Matt R. / Mike E. / Chris O. / Skylar W.)
Characters Provided: Yes
Description: February 6th, 1942, the US Army, with authorization from Congress and President Roosevelt, approved plans to build a road from the Dawson Creek, British Columbia through the Yukon to Delta Junction, Alaska. Ten thousand men are cutting their way through the frozen North where the muck and mire reach up to swallow their tractors and eyes watch them from the darkened forest.
Again really good research into the dark history of WW2 - pun intended. The character interactions were great and there was a really good buildup to the spectacular ending. A minor spoiler, but it's a reveal in the first ten seconds of the game, the engineering group we're playing belongs to an all black battalion.
Here are links to the historical event that I found after the game:
Trick 1: If you want to build camaraderie, put them in a situation that they must work together.
Aaron was able to create camaraderie between the characters through shared hardship. It all started with man vs nature, not man vs man, so we had to band together to beat nature and our initial man vs man issues.
Trick 2: Know when to ignore game system rules.
Aaron doesn't play by the rules. One of the main rules of most RPGs is that the GM decides which rules to apply and which to ignore. A lot of GMs forget this number one rule. Aaron lets players push and burn luck at the same time to avoid critical failures (a big no-no in CoC 7th rules), just so they can survive and be a band of brothers to face the finale together.
Trick 3: Understand your game and what serves it best. Not all games must run in real time.
Between set pieces, Aaron was willing to let days if not weeks go by for the characters. More about this in the spoiler section.
Trick 4: When a PC is going to die, give them a choice as to how they want it to end.
Sometimes PC death is unavoidable. But when my character was going to bite the big one, Aaron gave me a choice of Everywhere, Down, or Up. I picked Up. So, instead of just dying in some horrible way and just becoming a blood splattered corpse which I expected to happen, I got to choose, which was very cool.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
The characters are members of the 97th Engineering Battalion responsible for building a road through the frozen north in Alaska. The issues they face are not only the elements, but lack of equipment and discrimination as an all black battalion.
We had various Mad-Lib forms to fill out to create some Man vs Man connections between the characters (there are friend and foe connections). So we start our characters with some Man vs Man issues.
The game started with a lot of save throws against the environment such as the cold and insects. As things went from bad to worse, we wound up having to work together to survive and by the time it was ready face the big bad, we were a cohesive team.
Aaron had various set pieces and the standouts were: Building a bridge and it's failure. Stealing bulldozers. A group that commits a crime together sticks together. :-) And of course, the finale.
Trick 3: Characters went to the hospital between set pieces because that served the game best.
After characters got hurt, they went to the Army hospital and rested until they're ready for active duty - which made sense. But you still needed to survive the set piece in order to get to the hospital. What was important was that the characters bonded and faced the final terror together, so allowing the characters to heal up served the story better than just grinding the characters down and making them suffer which is a different type of game. So, the GM trick was to understand your game and what served it best. In this instance, letting the characters completely heal, served the story verses having some battalion commander order them out into the field while injured to face more danger.
We were bulldozing a stand of Aspens, and of course, as we headed towards the heart of its creation, we found a ritual tree with a protective circle. "Tree got Freddie" and Tree got bulldozer.
One of the best moments was in the finale when the team attacked the big bad, a Dark Young, with bulldozers, gasoline, and dynamite. After the gasoline and dynamite went off (which we were so ready to see the thing die and the game end. "Game Over Man, Game Over!"), nothing happened to the big bad which was immune to those things. Yes, Aaron gave us those things at the beginning of the game and of course, we thought that was what we needed to kill it. There's some gleeful GM cackling happening somewhere.
We did finally manage to kill it with the bulldozers and that big bad fight was incredibly satisfying.
Shaking hands over the final link of the highway.
Trick 4: Everywhere, Down, Up.
I think Everywhere is being in the explosion when the dynamite went off. Down is being thrown with the bulldozer like a rag doll and becoming an impact weapon against the white road building team. And Up, which is what I chose, was to be taken up into the bosom of The Mother, Shub-Niggurath, and turned into some abomination to survive for all time.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Dec 11, Sun 11am
Game System: Nemesis | ORE
Scenario Name: The House that Jaeger Built
GM: Jack Young
Variations: Modern day, no Madness Meter, minor hacks
Power Level: Experienced special agents and consultants
Number of Players: 6 (Jill S. / Matt A. / Aaron V. / John C. / Jason M. / Morgan H.)
Characters Provided: Of course
Description: New York occult author Lucy Kane is missing. The Psychological Crimes Division of the FBI handles cases of an occult, serial, or unusual nature and your team has been called in to aid in the investigation. Will a decrepit Bronx hotel give up its secrets . . . or its dead?
I'm a big fan of Jack's games and I had heard great things about this game, so I was excited about playing in it. The thing about Jack's games is that they never finish on time. They always run long. So, this time, Jack worked on speeding things up and kept the meat of the game. Afterwards, someone who had played in this game before told me this game should really be a 9 hour game. But kudos to Jack, we finished in 6.5 hours.
Trick 1: Don't be afraid to tell players things and emphasize it is not a GM trick.
To cut various investigative leads out and to save time, Jack told us, these things were already done and by trusted people. Just to give us a flavor, the asked us what we would look at and just narrated the fruitless dead ends that we ourselves ran into. So, we shortcut to the House that Jaeger Built where our adventure really begins - and it's no secret since it's in the game title and game description.
Trick 2: Don't be afraid to shorten combat to save time for more important scenes.
At one point, Jack was going to let one of the major bad guys get away and extend the combat, but we were already short on time, so he was brave enough to ret-con himself (which a lot of GMs are afraid to do) and said, "Let me change this. You actually shoot him in the head and he's dead." Which was ok since the PC did do a head shot, but it was a tie between the bad guy and the PC. Initially, Jack was going to rule that the bad guy got away (probably with some reduced damage), but changed his mind. There was still going to be more major action to come, so it was a trade off between lessening the events at this point, but allowing time for the finale. What would be worse would be running out of time and having to narrate the finale.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
In this game, our only existing lead was to a rundown hotel in a bad neighborhood and two names. We find one of the names on the mailboxes in the lobby and proceed upstairs.
No one answers the door and as we discuss the legality of breaking and entering, a person with groceries shows up. After some questioning and no legal cause for entry, we get ready to leave when a cat slips outside the apartment with a "Help. I'm being held note" tied to its collar.
So, we break in and start a gun fight. Which leads to a secret room with Nazi paraphernalia and our kidnap victim, an occult hunter looking for ghosts. But we find out too late that something bad has happened and the whole building has been transferred edge-wise to a different dimension and we find out we need to find and kill an old ghost that is the anchor to this reality. (It's actually more complicated than this, but you get the picture.)
There are also ghosts sprinkled throughout the building and we had researched their histories and hauntings earlier. In the finale, we get help from the ghosts in defeating the big bad and we succeed and also windup freeing the ghosts in the building. As players, we can tell we probably should have spent some time interacting with some of the ghosts earlier on in order to get their help, but as this was a quick version of a Jack game, we never got to do that. We did talk to some kids playing in the building and got some clues as to where some of the ghostly behavior was occurring, but once we broke into the apartment, all the investigation stopped.
This game was very well constructed with clues sprinkled throughout the game and some tough puzzles and issues which we somehow with our top notch team of investigators (and good players) figured out. The ending was very satisfying and we only wished we had the full 10 hours to play this game in its entirety.
I got to play a doctor and wanted to do a different spin on it. He took his Hippocratic oath seriously. Even though he had a gun, he only fired it at supernatural creatures, and spent most of his time playing coroner and healing people. During the gun fight, he called NYPD and notified them that the PCD of the FBI was in the building and that shots were being fired and to send an ambulance. When faced with a person who seemed supernatural, but he wasn't sure, he zip tied him instead of shooting him. I got to dig through garbage bags and check dead bodies. Good times.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Dec 11, Sun 7pm
Game System: The Veil (Evolved)
Scenario Title: Meat
GM: Matthew Grau
Variations: Splatterpunk
Power Level: Transhuman (of a sort)
Number of Players: 6 (Aaron T. / Lis H. / Morgan H. / Frank F.)
Characters Provided: Yes
Description: Fall in the Midwest. What a wonderful time to go camping with your friends! The leaves are just starting to turn, the crisp air is invigorating, and the summer bugs are gone. You’ve got your tent, your flashlight, and a cooler stocked with cheap beer and meat for the fire. The venison burgers are already smelling good. Yup, this is just about as good as it gets. This is a Body Horror Splatterpunk-style game, which means lots of violence and gore. I’ll do terrible things to you, and you’ll do terrible things to others. I’ll be making custom characters based on who is playing, so that the horror can be a little more personal. This game is also diceless, so you’ll be actively participating in crafting the narrative. Just want to be up-front in case any of this isn’t your cup of tea.
OMG, I laughed through all 6 hours of this game. Lis and Aaron were amaze balls in this. I don't think I can describe any part of this game without getting into trouble (I'll put some of the more tame stuff in the spoiler section), so the only thing I can say is that it was definitely xXx-Rated for sexual content. Lis and Aaron carried most of this game and I was happy to watch the most amazing game ever.
Trick 1: When great scenes eat up your time, let them run, don't cut them short, but steal time from follow-on scenes or throw scenes out and only keep the essential ones.
Matt had a lot of scenes and encounters and I think he threw out at least half of what he had for us and only kept the bare bones. We finished in time and had a great time. I think letting the narrative flow go until a natural stopping point worked very well. Instead of cutting a scene short, Matt just threw away scenes he probably spent a lot of time working on to adjust for the time we were taking in each scene.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
Game starts with us at a DoW reunion beach camping. I suggested playing Flaming Dread with giant 2x4 pieces and having Kristin run the game for us.
Well, after finding a weird body on the beach, we all wound up getting killed and we wake up with our bodies modified in an alien lab.
So, the whole game was about escaping the lab and running into alien weirdness and mad science.
As the game progressed, we got to upgrade our bodies.
The game was brilliant. To get out, we kept on putting on more and more extreme body modifications.
Lis and Aaron become a symbiotic creature that seemed like a Dark Young / Shub-Niggurath creature. Frank and my character became a Master Blaster team. I was just a head and Frank was the Frankenstein-like creature. But my skills started to evolve into hyper-scanning and speed. Eventually, the body modifications allowed me to actively scan and send out x-rays and other energetic particles to scan for things and my gaze could start to unravel matter and my speed increased so fast it could reach the speed of light and effect time travel. Yes, I was starting to be a proto-Azathoth whose gaze destroys all and bends time and space.
The person responsible for our changes as this mad scientist who looked human. He said he had great power, but after the game, I'm convinced that he was Nyarlathotep.
Mike M. missed the game and he was supposed to start as a proto-Shoggoth.
Highlights:
Jet propulsion via ram jetting sewage through Aaron's orifices.
Glow fetus on umbilical cords as light source.
Vagina dentata as a weapon.
Aaron's description of how his 5 stomachs processes DNA for re-insemination.
I play tested Cthulhu Confidential and really enjoyed it. It uses GUMSHOE One-2-One; one GM, one Player. This review is based on the play test, not the pre-order published material. The game is in pre-order, so I can now talk about it.
GUMSHOE One-2-One is an interesting new take on the GUMSHOE system. It's a close cousin to GUMSHOE. You have your investigative abilities just like in Gumshoe, but you have a set number of Pushes which you can spend for additional information or effects.
General skill tests, called Challenges, require a die roll, but instead of spending general points and rolling as in GUMSHOE, each general point equals 1d6 and you roll one die at a time and sum your result. If you have any remaining d6s after a successful test, you gain Pushes equal to the unused dice. There are also Edges and Problems which affect your die roll, those are gained and lost through play and are listed on cards. If after rolling all your dice and you fail, you can opt to take a Setback for an extra 1d6. The Setback generally gives you a Problem. The level of success or failure gives various outcomes to the investigator's action. A really good success gains you an Edge and bad failure, a Problem. I really enjoyed this modification to GUMSHOE.
Since the game is a one-on-one game, there's no fun if the investigator dies in the middle of solving the mystery, so the investigator cannot die until the end of the scenario. During the scenario, the investigator can gain various Problems and if at the end of the scenario, the Problem such as "Bleeding Out" is not resolved, the investigator can die after solving the mystery.
Since there's only one investigator, the investigator can't have all the skills necessary to solve the mystery, so the investigator has Sources who are trusted NPC contacts with specialized investigative skills and contacts.
Each scene has various Leads the investigator can find and if there's an action scene, there's a Challenge card with the success and failure levels and their outcomes listed. Each scene also has an Lead-In and Lead-Out which helps with keeping track of the network of scenes.
The game plays like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure games, except there's a GM and character interaction with NPCs.
I ran all the games online and it worked very well. I did have to do a lot of digital cut-and-paste of Edge and Problem cards in order to play online, but once that prep work was done, running the game was easy. The Challenges are also well presented, much like a 3x5 card, listing the success / failure levels and outcomes. Each Lead also points to a specific new scene.
I play tested the three scenarios included in the book: The Fathomless Sleep, Fatal Frequencies, and Capital Colour. The play test also included other scenarios which will probably come out at a later date.
The Fathomless Sleep is set in 1937 Hollywood with the Player running Dex Raymond, a hardboiled detective. This was my favorite scenario. The background for 1937 LA was very well done and well used in the scenario. Hollywood has gangsters, power brokers, and of course, movie stars.
Fatal Frequencies is set in 1930s New York City with the Player running Vivian Sinclair, a tough newspaper reporter. There's options with dealing with sexism in the 1930s. The GM can dial up or down the sexism depending on what type of game is desired. Again the background for locations and the politics of the area are very well done.
Capital Colour is set in 1943 Washington DC with the Player running Langston Wright, a black ex-soldier. Again, there's options dealing with racism in the 1940s. The background info for locations and politics during war footing in Washington DC is also excellent. This scenario was my second favorite of the three.
Cthulhu Confidential is perfect for one-on-one games and it works for online play. All of the people I play tested the game with really enjoyed it. Even if you're not going to play the scenarios, the wealth of background information for Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington DC are useful for other period games.
I'm a big time travel fan, so when TimeWatch was a Kickstarter project in 2014, I immediately backed it. Like most Kickstarters that keep on adding content as stretch goals, the final book was delivered 1.75 years later than scheduled. The good news was that upon pledging, we got a preliminary PDF, then a PDF version for copy editing, then a PDF with full images and corrections, then a final PDF and hard copy version. And several books with campaign support material. Multiple contributors for content (needing editorial changes for consistency of tone between writers) and art (switched from B&W to color as a stretch goal) were reasons for production delays. The final book ballooned in size to 392 pages.
The good news was that I was able to play TimeWatch in 2014 with the preliminary PDF. There weren't any scenarios written yet, but I found an amazing scenario written by Michael Rees: The Buffalo, The Pirate and the Consulting Detective. He has other scenarios on his website and his scenarios were so well loved that he was asked to contribute to the final book. See what happens when you have a time travel Kickstarter? Someone writes stuff for a game that hasn't been published yet and it winds up in the published game.
TimeWatch uses a modified Gumshoe system. I have mixed feelings about Trail of Cthulhu due to Gumshoe, but for TimeWatch, I LOVE the system.
What's different about TimeWatch?
Well, if the PCs can time travel, then most ordinary crimes can be easily solved, so the antagonists that the players face are always other time travelers. There are a variety of bad guys listed in the book, but there are two that are extensively show cased: Sophosaurs and Ezeru.
Sophosaurs vs Ezeru
The Sophosaurs are intelligent dinosaurs from the past who want to prevent the Asteroid from wiping them out, so the reign of dinosaurs continues into the future. The Ezeru are giant cockroaches from the future who rule Earth after humanity wipes itself out with nuclear weapons. They want to start WW3 early.
In between the Sophosaurs in the past and the Ezeru in the future are humans. Both races want to squeeze humanity out.
Most of the games are investigative. Instead of following clues forward, in this game, you follow the clues backwards in time. There's always some instigating event far in the past and its effect ripples out forwards in time until things change in a massive way. An example is a story written by Ray Bradbury: A Sound of Thunder. TimeWatch is tasked to fix these disruptions to the "real" timeline.
How does TimeWatch know when something has gone wrong? Well, they have detection equipment seeded throughout time and when something changes suddenly like high levels of radiation or the equipment suddenly goes dead, they know something has gone wrong and they send a TimeWatch team to check it out and fix it.
E of TimeWatch
At the beginning of time, before the Big Bang is the Citadel, where TimeWatch HQ sits. TimeWatch agents are dispatched from there. In my game, the players' handler is E, he gives the mission briefing to the PCs. I also love James Bond, so I made a reference to it by using letters as titles (M and Q). I know, MiB also does this except they're referencing people's names.
How do they time travel? Each agent has an Autochron that allows them to time travel. You set the time and location and it takes you there in a few rounds. The Autochron will adjust your location so no locals can see you arrive. The more you travel in time, the less accurate the Autochron is, so if you travel thousands of years, you might arrive a decade too late. The Autochron creates a personal time bubble much like what happens in The Terminator.
Terminator Time Bubble
In my games, I like the idea of a watch being a time machine, so my Autochrons look like wrist watches. And I have a fondness for the story: The Girl, The Gold Watch and Everything.
How do you know what in the timeline is broken? Well, the PCs have a device called a Tether that's like a local version of Google/Wikipedia. When you arrive, you can talk to people or check libraries and newspapers for deviations from your local knowledge store. In my games, the players are allowed to look up facts on their smart phones. This generally takes no more than 5 minutes and it enhances the role play experience. Their smart phone is a low tech version of a Tether.
Instead of the Stability/Sanity metric in Trail of Cthulhu, TimeWatch has Chronal Stability. Each time you time travel or create a paradox (when you do something that contradicts a known fact), you might lose Chronal Stability. If you annoy time too much, it might subsume you and merge you into the current timeline, modifying your memories, like skin growing over a splinter. If you do something totally bad, time may erase you from time, then even your TimeWatch team members won't remember you and no one can bring you back.
How do you know you've fixed everything? You can time travel back to beginning of the adventure and see if everything is back to normal. In one scenario, the PCs are given a device that can detect time drift and when the needle is in the green section, they know they've finished the mission. A bit meta and odd, but that works too.
In my games, E doesn't give out too much information and doesn't want to know how the agents solve the problem because if you know, then history is set and you're subject to paradox. It's the unwritten history missing from their Tethers that allows TimeWatch Agents to act freely.
A number of rules and pieces of equipment is to allow for better game play. I always bring this up because some new players would say some things don't make sense. And I would explain the mechanical reason for it and that would end the argument.
To prevent PCs from having to learn every possible language and infinite costume changes, the PCs have universal translators and Impersonator Meshes (in my world, they're holographic disguises). This mainly aids in game play when PCs jump from time to time and geolocation to geolocation.
Since killing someone in the past might erase your future, the agents are given stun weapons and MEM-tags. The MEM-tags sends an unconscious body back to the Citadel for memory wipe/modification. Once processed, the body is returned, so as to not disrupt the time stream.
What is fun about the game is that you get to play with history, learn history, and interact with it.
So far, I feel it is a daunting task to write a scenario from scratch. The good news is that the core book has 3 complete scenarios and 32 Time Seeds (inspirational ideas for your own game). The Kickstarter included a campaign "Behind Enemy Times" which contains 6 connected scenarios. "The Valkyrie Gambit," 3 stand alone scenarios. "Book of Changing Years," a faux history/diary of TimeWatch to be used as inspiration for your own games, in the spirit of "The Armitage Files" and "The Dracula Dossier." And I've a run several of Michael Rees' scenarios that he's posted on his website.
I definitely got more than my money's worth from the Kickstarter and I'm glad Kevin Kulp spent the time and care to get the books right.
The devil is always in the details. For example, it took me a long time before I noticed the following detail on the cover of the TimeWatch core book:
Battling Civil War Armies
As an aside, I originally thought Chronal Stability checks were only done for time travel and paradox checks, but in "Behind Enemy Times" one scenario stated that any teleport with the Autochron also required a Chronal Stability check. So, I contacted Kevin Kulp and he explained that using the Autochron even for teleportation requires a Chronal Stability check. The rationale is again more of a mechanics thing where it would be more interesting if the PCs had to take local transport to get things done, but if they really, really had to teleport, then they can still do it by using the Autochron with the possibility of a Chronal Stability loss.
"Future Ted told me, Present Ted, that later, you dudes should run."
"Be excellent to each other."
"Party on, dudes."
I hide spoiler sections with JavaScript. If you have JavaScript turned off, you can skip the spoiler sections I have marked.
In the spoiler section below is:
Behind Enemy Times or why I got so excited that I had to write this blog post
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
Behind Enemy Times
In "Behind Enemy Times," the scenario "Time Will Tell" brings in the idea that some rogue TimeWatch Agent is modifying history to be nicer and is revising the main database, so that his revised history is "correct." In this history, the PCs are told the correct history is that Abraham Lincoln is supposed to live and the PCs are sent to accomplish this mission. The players in my game felt very uncomfortable with that, but rolled with the punches and completed their mission.
The whole idea is whether TimeWatch should make the world a better place or whether history should be left alone. One of TimeWatch's punishment details is making sure Hitler isn't assassinated.
A later scenario in this campaign is "Rebel Heart." In "Rebel Heart," the PCs are "burned" and told that they were to be stopped by other TimeWatch Agents because they're going to become traitors if they go on their next mission. This of course is supposed to be a trick, unbeknownst to the PCs, to get the PCs recruited by a Rebel TimeWatch group.
As published, after the PCs are recruited, they're told by the Rebel group to save Abraham Lincoln again. So, what has transpired is that TimeWatch finds out that the "correct" history was incorrect and Abraham Lincoln is supposed to die and have corrected it. So, basically, the PCs would have to save Lincoln a second time.
Well, this didn't seem right to me and didn't seem that interesting. So, instead I reversed it.
Instead, TimeWatch has left Lincoln alive as their "correct" history. And the Rebels who are Restorationists (true keepers of history) have asked the PCs to have Booth kill Lincoln at Ford's Theater. The Restorationists also tell the PCs that they have discovered that some people high up in TimeWatch are indeed modifying history and hiding it.
After given this new mission by the Rebels, I sent a message to the PCs from TimeWatch congratulating them for infiltrating the Rebels and asked them to turn the Rebels in.
In "Rebel Heart," one subplot was the Rebels getting a British secret agent swapped for captured Russian agents. But the British agent is really a double agent and he's supposed to infultrate MI5 a la Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
This was earlier revealed to the PCs by the Restorationists. The Restorationists are doing bad things in order to restore order.
In the published scenario, this causes great harm to Britian, but in my revised plot, it doesn't and things happen as they should.
The PCs after getting their message, realize they were now double agents.
So, the question comes in as to whether the PCs will turn in the Restorationists or kill Lincoln and indeed turn traitor. Well, the PCs picked killing Lincoln and turning traitor.
As a GM, this was such a great moment for me. The PCs did turn traitor and the mission they weren't supposed to go on was indeed the mission that made them traitors. Wow!
The Restorationists have a plan to create a stable time pocket and use that as their base of operations; this will be something similar to the Citadel at the beginning of time.
In "Time Will Tell," the PCs are told that any paradox in the Citadel has a chance of destabilizing it and causing the Big Bang. Because of that, in "Rebel Heart," their Autochrons can't return to the Citadel and their MEM-tags are deactivated. In my game, I put up a red warning symbol on their Autochrons that they've never seen before. When they checked their user's manual, the icon was the "Your clearances have been revoked. Please contact TimeWatch." In my game, the PCs captured all of the TimeWatch Agents sent to capture/kill them and striped them of their equipment. And in the rest of the scenario, they used the kill team's equipment instead.
So, my upcoming plan is that after the Restorationists have created their stable time pocket, they're going to ask the PCs to cause a paradox at the Citadel and start the Big Bang, so that the Restorationists' TimeWatch would be the only TimeWatch. And you know that eventually the Citadel will have to go because if it doesn't, there's no universe.
This is a free online convention. Last year, there were issues with time zones and such. This year, adding an event to my google calendar placed the game at the wrong time. Off by one hour. Also two links to game tables were incorrect (Baker Street and Cthulhu Dark Ages). I learned from last year that you go to the Ox and Mule for tech support. After listening in to all the issues they have to face shows that all conventions, especially online ones have various tech issues. Online conventions have to deal with time zones, incorrectly configured sound and video feeds, incorrect links, etc. Lots happen behind the scenes. And those guys do it for free.
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Friday, November 11, 2016
Baker Street: A Day in the Country
System: Baker Street: Roleplaying in the World of Sherlock Holmes
11/11/2016 • 4:00 PM PST
Game Length: 4 hours
Number of Players: 3-6
Characters Provided: Yes
GM: Jessica Geyer
The investigators are invited to a lovely weekend at a country estate. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
Game started half an hour late as the link to the game table was incorrect. I was able to contact Chris S. with the new link, so there were only 2 players for this game where 4 players had signed up.
I enjoyed the game. But since the game required 3 players and we wound up with 2, the GM added a NPC investigator. The system does require 3 players as there are 3 skills that are required and generally each PC only has one of those skills: Observation, Reason, Deduction.
I guess Sherlock Holmes is an uber-investigator with all 3 skills.
Observation gives you clues and 3 leads for each clue. Reasoning eliminates bad clues. Deduction eliminates bad leads. Player's skill rolls determine how many clues are found, how many clues can be eliminated, or how many leads can be eliminated.
For example: A clue could be a key. Leads are related to the clue such as the key was planted, the key opens this and other rooms, or the key belongs to someone else. With deduction, you can ask N times whether a specific lead is true or false. N is determined by how many successes you get.
Skills go from 2d6 to 4d6 (or at least those on our character sheets). A skill test requires you to roll your dice and a special Sherlock Die. On the regular d6s, a 4-6 is a success. 1-3 is a failure. The Sherlock Die is a special d6 with 1, 2, 3, Watson, Sherlock, and Moriarty as its faces. Watson gives you either an additional success or an aid to another player. Moriarty make all failures count against your successes. Sherlock lets you name 1, 2, or 3 and make them all successes. If you are rolling a professional skill, any 6 (explodes) is a success and you get to reroll the die until you fail to roll a 6.
PCs can aid each other and also spend resolve to roll extra d6s.
When PCs go on a false lead or get GM help, the threat level goes up and eliminates various possible bonuses when we roll the Sherlock die. At threat level 1, ones don't count; level 2, ones and twos; level 3, 1-3 don't count. So, it basically makes the Sherlock die less useful.
I think at some point, the GM gave us some needed clues, but raised the threat level without us knowing about it.
I found the system ok, but I disliked that you really needed a minimum of 3 players for the game. The mystery was fun, but I found the number of clues found based on your die rolls a bit constraining. In the murder room, we got some clues (randomly selected), but we didn't get any in relationship to the body and that felt strange. And I wanted to look at the body, but we weren't allowed because that wasn't the clue we found -- I think we could have but that would have raised the threat level. At other times, we were only allowed to look for clues N number of times equal to the level of success we got. So we were only allowed to explore two places and we had more than that number of unexplored locations.
The system seemed artificially constrained. But designed so that the players didn't spend forever in one room looking for all the possible clues. The game can still suffer from bad die rolls and no clues found and having the investigators stuck with no leads. The raising of threat level was created to help with dead ends, but it's also an odd death spiral as an increasing threat level reduces the chances of success.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
At one point, I told Chris that I think our host is going to be murdered and it's by probably his younger brother because the host stayed in his room during the dinner and the brother went downstairs last.
Well, I was right, but the game was more about figuring out exactly how it was done, what the motive was, and who did it.
We got two clues in the bedroom where the body was. One was a key in his hand and the other was a boot left near a chimney/fire place. What was odd to me was information about the body. I wanted a clue about the body, but the game system gave us these two random clues. Since the game was early, and we didn't want a threat level increase so early in the game, we had to follow these two clues instead of checking out the body.
I wanted to checkout the chimney and found someone had already put a ladder on the side of the house. We found a strip of torn cloth on the ladder. We then wanted to check everyone's clothing and see to whom the cloth matched. Of course, after a die roll, we were only allowed to check two closets in the house. This was another artificial limitation placed by the system. These artificial constraints were driving me crazy.
Near the end of the game, we called in the constables and then did the big gathering and unmasking of the killers. The two killers (younger brother, dead guy's wife) then blamed each other and both got arrested.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Herald of the Yellow King
System: Call of Cthulhu Dark Ages
11/12/2016 • 11:00 AM PST
Game Length: 4 hours
Number of Players: 3-6
Characters Provided: Yes
GM: Eric Betts
Investigators are members of the household of Norman Lord Boniface. The year is somewhere around 1040 and takes place in the fiefdom of Shereborne, in Wessex, in southern England. It is a couple of decades after the Norman conquest of England. Your lord has summoned you to take a journey to a distant town in his domain for a personal matter...
The link to this game was also bad. I wanted a better experience for this game, so I contacted the Ox and Mule two hours before this game. They emailed and Facebooked the GM. Well, the link didn't get fixed until right before the game. So, yet again less players showed up. Only 4 showed out of 6 and one guy had audio problems and the GM spent half an hour trying to fix the guy's audio. We then gave up and let the guy fix his audio while we played. Fifteen minutes later he got his audio working and the GM had to give the guy a summary and character sheet.
We didn't finish the scenario and the GM summarized the rest of the game for us. I think this waiting for players and trying to fix their technical issues cuts into the play time unnecessarily. The GM told us that the game was a 5th edition game, but wanted to run it as a 7th edition game. As he ran the game, it was apparent he was very unfamiliar with 7th edition rules. He should have just run the game with 5th edition rules.
Also during the game, I was the only person who muted the microphone. The GM had an air purifier, children, and phone calls interrupting the game. One player had a dog barking. Another a cat and visitors. So, lots of interruptions that affected the game. Also the roll20 audio quality failed and we reloaded the table a few times. Too many down time issues to make the game pleasurable.
I actually liked the Baker Street game much more than this one.
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
The game was very A, B, C, D.
An old man was promised that his liege lord wasn't going to chop down a specific oak tree. But it was done and we were sent with an apology.
We go to village A and it's wiped out. Wolves were feasting on dead bodies and people barricaded themselves inside and died of thirst. A scarecrow with a yellow mask stood in the field during winter. We found a Yellow Sign and a silver torc and what we later learned was bardic clothing in an older home. No sign of the old man, maybe he was eaten by the wolves -- we actually didn't think that was the case. (We had to fight wolves here).
We return to the liege lord. Then he sends us to village B and C to see if we can figure out what happened to village A.
Village B is wiped out and people were eating leaves and grass. We get attacked by crazed villagers. We learn that a young bard came by and told people stories and they went mad. (We had to fight crazed villagers here).
We send word back to the liege lord to not trust any bards and continued to village C.
Village C is happy and cozy. As some PCs were toasted by the village elders, my character and another PC found a cannibal meat facility. The PCs escape with their lives back to the liege lord. (Fight more crazed villagers).
We ran out of time and the GM summarized what had happened to us.
Apparently we would have to fight through the liege lord's keep partially transformed to a much larger and darker presense -- not sure why we would do that. Then find the bard (who was not at the keep) and either kill him or make him change his ways. The old bard was telling the story of the yellow king and each time he drove a village mad, he would get younger - and bring Carcosa closer to reality. The felling of the tree drove the old bard mad as that was his anchor to the physical world.
Yeah, this game was very straight forward and not to my liking. Lots of combat for no reason. Very little investigation.
=== SPOILER SECTION END ===
Sunday, November 13, 2016
Pandora's Box
System: Call of Cthulhu: Pulp Cthulhu
11/13/2016 • 11:00 AM PST
Game Length: 4 hours
Number of Players: 3-5
Characters Provided: Yes
GM: Mike Mason
A fabled artifact comes to a big city nightclub. At first, it seems like just a publicity stunt but bad luck follows the device and all who chance upon it. The heroes must navigate through a range of interested parties, some less desirable than others, in the search for a missing man whose past has caught up with him.
Wow! This was a really fun game. I guess it doesn't hurt to have Mike Mason, who wrote Pulp Cthulhu run a game of Pulp Cthulhu for you.
Mike kept the pace up and everything interesting. Every PC and NPC was interesting. And even when the party split up into three groups of two, Mike made sure everybody got something interesting to do. A very nice technique. I know in some games when a split party goes to some dead end, nothing happens and the other part of the split party gets all the screen time and fun.
Pulp Cthulhu doubles a PCs hit points, gives characters special moves, and extended the use of Luck spends for heroic effects. We lucked out and nobody got killed at the end.
As an aside, only one person had audio problems, we tried for a small bit to debug his system and finally just started the game. He wound up fixing his system and was able to play after a short while. The players also muted their microphones when not in scene. Yay!
=== SPOILER SECTION START ===
I looked up the scenario after the game and liked the changes Mike made for our one-shot. In the published scenario (one of the several scenarios in Pulp Cthulhu), the mob is involved and the PCs are normal investigators - as is expected. In our game, we had a combination of criminals, a journalist, and a psychic sent by the the mob boss to find the missing item and missing man.
Mike used the psychic to give us clues when the pacing lagged. A nice technique for a one-shot.
At one point, our party split up into three groups of two:
1. The psychic and a con man visited a high end clothing shop and got a lead to The Seekers of Eternal Wisdom - yes, a cult dabbling in things they shouldn't.
2. A journalist and my character (a cold-blooded killer) actually rushed to a pawn shop and found the effects of the cursed item and tore a page out of the pawn shop's ledger that contained a lead's name. This is funny because in the published scenario, this event is actually just a newspaper item the players learn about after the fact. I really like that the players are not passive and investigating things that had already happened, but are investing as things are happening. In our alternate reality of the game, it was the PCs who made the news and also wrote about it.
3. A brother and sister criminal team found another crime scene and encounted a Shoggoth upstairs. What was interesting was how Mike described the minimal damage the shotgun blast did to the creature. So, it was clear that the massive blast did almost nothing.
As you can see all three groups ran into significant things that were interesting.
Then the psychic had a vision and we rushed to the finale in the cultist mansion's basement just as the cult was about to open Pandora's Box and release big bad things.
When I fired my tommygun at a big bad thing, I was looking for clues to see if my gun had any effect. I loved how Mike said that the bullets hit and it was wavering and moving and YOU JUST CAN'T TELL. Nice touch.
In the end, we made a replica of the Pandora's Box to return to our boss and then encased the real one in cement and sunk it in the river.
This being Pulp Cthulhu, no one died. Someone lost his fingers. If we didn't have the pulp rules, I think at least two characters would have died.
The pacing of the game was non-stop and a lot of fun. When things were flagging, Mike just threw us clues to get us to the next scene which is required for a time constrained one-shot.
I've run both Call of Cthulhu (CoC) and Trail of Cthulhu (ToC). CoC since 2011 and ToC since 2014. When I started running CoC, I scoured the web looking for the most iconic or famous scenarios to run since CoC has been around since 1981. ToC has been around since 2008. I had played in several ToC games, but only GMed it in 2014 after Eternal Lies came out and had rave reviews.
Game System
ToC uses Gumshoe. It's a 1d6 system. Every die roll is just 1d6. No special dice needed.
CoC uses BRP. It's mainly a 1d100 system, but it does use most of the other polyhedral dice.
Time Period
ToC is set in 1930's.
Various published scenarios are set in different time periods ranging from 1914 to 1954.
I play tested Cthulhu Confidential (ToC for one GM and one player) and I really enjoyed it. It has 3 play sets: a noir detective in Hollywood during the 1930's, a black ex-soldier in Washington DC during the 1940's, and a woman reporter in NYC during the 1930's. Extensive information about the time periods and locale were included. Cthulhu Confidential uses a vastly modified version of the Gumshoe system and they call this new system One-2-One.
CoC is set in 1920's.
There are various supplements published by Chaosium for other time periods:
Pulp Cthulhu is set in 1930's (CoC 7th Ed) .
Cthulhu Dark Ages is set in 950-1050 Dark Age Europe (CoC 7th Ed).
Down Darker Trails is set in late 1800's American Wild West (CoC 7th Ed).
Cthulhu by Gaslight is set in 1890's Victorian England (CoC 6th Ed).
Cthulhu Now is set in 1990's (CoC 3rd Ed, out of print)
Supplements published by licensees: World War Cthulhu (CoC 6th Ed by Cubicle 7, out of print) and Achtung! Cthulhu (CoC 6th Ed by Modiphius, out of print) are set in WW2.
World War Cthulhu: Cold War is set in the 1970's (CoC 7th Ed by Cubicle 7, out of print).
Cthulhu Invictus set in Roman Times (CoC 7th Ed by Golden Goblin Press; CoC 6th Ed by Chaosium, out of print).
Published Scenarios
When I compare published scenarios written for CoC and those written for ToC, there is a marked difference between the two. I'm not sure if it is because there are more CoC scenarios written, so more bad ones are mixed in with the good or whether ToC lends to a better writing style. The two iconic campaigns for CoC are Horror on the Orient Express (HotOE, 1991) and Masks of Nyarlathotep (Masks, 1984). Eternal Lies (EL, 2013) was written long after the CoC campaigns were written so it benefited from their mistakes and successes. My personal ranking from best to worst would be Eternal Lies, Masks, then HotOE. HotOE suffered from having multiple authors write separate chapters for different cities.
In ToC, investigative rolls are auto-successes (in actually there are no rolls), the investigator just declares that they're using an investigation skill and the GM responds if there is a clue. The whole philosophy behind this is that a game shouldn't be sidelined if the investigator fails to find a clue. Sometimes the investigator must do a spend to get a clue or additional information. This makes the GM/scenario writer more focused on where clue trails lead to (e.g. how to get to the next scene) vs the investigation.
In CoC, investigators must roll dice to spot clues, so there's a chance that a clue can be missed. So, the GM/scenario writer focus is on multiple details that investigators might miss (and possible red herrings), so each scene is like a puzzle to figure out. Also, as you go from scene to scene, you get more puzzle pieces. So, CoC scenarios need to be more well-written to get the same effect as a ToC scenario.
CoC 7th's Push and Luck spends does narrow the gap of catastrophic missed clues that ToC is designed to eliminate. In ToC, you can still miss a clue if an investigator at a scene doesn't have a specific investigative skill necessary to unlock a clue. An example would be where none of the investigators at the scene have Chemistry or Forensics which would be necessary to unlock a specific clue.
I feel ToC is like Sherlock Holmes where every clue is immediately found and CoC is like CSI where clues need to be teased out of the crime scene. To me, ToC is more storytelling focused whereas CoC is more investigative focused.
In some cases, failure is more interesting than success. This is embodied by the Push mechanic in CoC. By removing the possibility of failure in ToC, I feel that a potential for tension and danger (and sometimes frustration) has been removed. I think, with a well-written CoC scenario with multiple clue trails, core clues clearly marked, and explanations as to where a clue can take the investigators, CoC scenarios can be just as good if not better than ToC scenarios.
Sanity
In ToC, there are both Stability and Sanity meters. Stability measures whether you panic and freak out now. Sanity measure whether you're crazy (in a Lovecraftian way, being able to understand non-Euclidean space or the insignificance of man) or not. A mad scientist can be very stable, but very insane believing in very odd things. A frantic person being chased in a haunted house can be unstable, but very sane. Your Stability has to go to zero before you lose Sanity. If you use Cthulhu Mythos, you lose Sanity. e.g. you believe in the Mythos and are consciously using it -- which is crazy. What I found was that was very hard to drive an investigator's Stability to zero. Between episodes in a long campaign, an investigator would visit a Source of Stability and refresh their Stability. In my campaign of Eternal Lies, several investigators did gain some Mental Illnesses and lose some Pillars of Sanity and some Sources of Stability. It was the slow eroding of these things that was very interesting in running this year long campaign. Only at the very end did we lose several investigators to full insanity and death. So, ToC works very well for long campaigns, but the Stability and Sanity system doesn't seem to work very well for one-shots.
In CoC, there is only one Sanity meter. But the amount of Sanity loss determines if it is a Temporary Insanity (lose 5 at one time, this is equivalent to Stability loss in ToC) or an Indefinite Insanity (lose 20% at one time) where you also gain an Insanity such as a Phobia or Mania. CoC is easier to run as a one-shot as you can either start the investigators with less Sanity or adjust either the Sanity loss for shocks to the system or increase the number of frights. When running Masks and HotOE, the number of investigator deaths and instances of Insanity were higher than in Eternal Lies even though I thought some of the things uncovered in Eternal Lies were more horrible. CoC 7th added character backgrounds that can be affected by Insanity.
ToC's sanity system is more nuanced than CoC's. CoC character backgrounds can be used in a very similar way as ToC's Sources of Stability and Pillars of Sanity, but it isn't as formalized as ToC's Stability/Sanity system.
Combat
ToC has only 3 skills for combat: Firearms (guns), Scuffling (fists), and Weapons (knives). Combat uses 1d6 to hit and generally a 4 or better is needed to hit (50%). Damage is generally 1d6 also. Points can be spent from the investigator's Firearms, Scuffling, or Weapons pool before they roll their 1d6. Spending 3 points generally guarantees a success. But most investigators have about 5 points to spend. So, by their 3rd or 4th shot, they're out of points. Once out of points, they can still roll, but cannot modify their rolls with point spends. The points refresh only after 24 hours elapses for the investigator.
I find ToC combat very lackluster. Other Gumshoe systems have added Cherries where Investigators have special abilities that kick in if they have 8 or more points in a general ability which allows them to make special moves, so it adds extra flavor to combat and other activities. I've played Night's Black Agents and it really adds a lot to the game.
CoC has basic skills for combat: Fighting (Brawl) 25%, Firearms (Handgun) 20%, Firearms (Rifle/Shotgun) 25%. Investigators can choose to have combat specializations in other weapons, but the most common are these 3. Damage varies depending on the weapon. During character creation, players may decide to add skill points to combat skills. Combat uses 1d100 to hit and the chance to hit is based on their combat skill with that weapon (rolling that skill % or less). CoC allows Fighting Maneuvers such as disarming, choking, restraining by using Fighting (Brawl).
CoC combat is a little more complicated than what I outlined above, allowing the defender to fight back or to dodge, but I just wanted to go over the general differences.
Health
In ToC, Health is your Hit Points. Investigators generally have 10 Health (max 12), but they only die at -12 Health. When they reach negative numbers, various abilities and penalties apply. At -1 and -6 there's a Consciousness Check. Weapons all do a variation of 1d6 with a plus or minus based on the lethality of a weapon. A gun for instance generally does only 1d6. I found ToC to be a very forgiving system and investigators rarely die. If the investigator team survives an encounter (beats the encounter and someone is still conscious), more than likely any unconscious investigator will be saved. On average, it'll take 6 bullets to kill an investigator. About 5 to possibly knock him unconscious.
In CoC, Hit Points are generally at about 10. If you take damage and reach zero, you go unconscious. If you take any attack that causes damage equal to half your maximum Hit Points (about 5), you gain a Major Wound and make an Unconsciousness Check. If you reach zero Hit Points and have a Major Wound, you would be dying. Previous versions of CoC were less forgiving and death was much easier. CoC is very lethal. A gun will do 1d10 damage. An Extreme success, 1d10+10. On average it'll take 2 bullets to kill an investigator. About 1 to possibly knock him unconscious.
So, you can see that ToC is very forgiving and the chances of dying is much lower than CoC.
Summary
I favor the CoC 7th ed system over the ToC system. But if hear of some fantastic ToC campaign or scenario, I would not hesitate to run that scenario. I would not bother to convert the scenario to CoC, but run it as-is in ToC.
