Planning My First Call of Cthulhu Campaign
Reflections on My First Game
It was only last month I was able to run my first game of Call of Cthulhu, I roped 5 of my family members into playing and we ran the “Lightless Beacon” scenario. It didn’t go perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I wasn’t as organised as I think I should have been, but lessons are there to be learnt.
I think the biggest issue I faced was relying on having a bulk of the information on my laptop, this inevitably left me scrolling up and down, flitting back and forth between tabs. A right nightmare!
The other thing that got to me was the handouts. The “Lightless Beacon” scenario comes with a couple of stylised handouts and then some plain text ones. The stylised ones looked great, but only 1 of them was really legible. So I only ended up giving my players the plain text ones, which isn’t nearly as fun!
The New Campaign
So after a successful first session with everyone having fun and wanting to play again, I figured I would make a small on going story. Everyone in my family knew of Dungeons & Dragons, and the idea of an ongoing campaign with character improvements and all that good stuff. For anyone that knows Call of Cthulhu, while there are long running campaigns, the game can be brutal and your character could be killed off at any moment or go utterly insane.
But I want my players to feel like there is a greater risk. So by stringing a handful of scenarios together, it will allow them to get attached to their characters a little more and want them to survive.
The other thing I was struggling with was a reason for the investigators to come together. When planning the “Lightless Beacon”, I took a lot of inspiration from YouTubers and their suggestions and experiences running the game. The main one was from The Rocketboost and their video Call of Cthulhu: The Lightless Beacon (5 GM Tips for the Free Scenario) | Rocketboost Roleplay.
With the first scenario I plan on running for the campaign being “The Haunting”, there isn’t really any direction on a reason for the investigators to be together and meeting with the landlord. I could have gone down the road of all of these people are part of a club or society that investigates the weird, but that would imply that they have had adventures before. I could have gone with them all working together and something weird has happened which meant they all need to look into this mystery, but that would mean restricting the players to having the same job or related jobs.
If this was a smaller group, 2 or 3 people, then that can be worked with. But I have 6 players… 5 of which have only played 1 game, the 6th has never played any TTRPG. So I want to give them some freedom in who they are. The last game, I had 5 characters and they chose who they wanted to be, which caused a couple of problems. I gave one of them a secret identity which lead them to thinking other players also had one and were in cahoots with the enemy. My mistake, lesson learned :D!
So in order to have that freedom, an idea popped into my head from god knows where and I thought of Charlies Angels. There is a mysterious person that seems to have contacts and relationships unknown, then there is a contact that handles the team. So I came up with the “Patron” and a lawyer as a contact to handle the in person meetings.
The Patron
This guy is a mysterious benefactor who has a lot of contacts and fingers in many pies. The idea is that he is contracting the investigators because he knows each of them has had an paranormal experience, while the details need to still be thought of, the idea being “I know you have been having weird dreams that no one would believe, I can help you understand them”. This will come in the way of a telegram, each player will get one with a different experience and their own reason to be intrigued by the invite.
They will be asked to meet the Patrons lawyer who will be in place of the landlord. They will still get the same information and it will come from the landlord, just passed down as a request to the Patron from the landlord.
The overall idea being that there is rumours of a cult performing rituals which is potentially effecting the investigators. While this is true, the secret is, is that the Patron is orchestrating the whole thing. His objective is to get the investigators to collect or free up artifacts which might be held by non cult members, or cultists from other orders. If the investigators take these items, it will be the lawyers job to try and convince them to hand them over for “safe keeping”. If not there will be other ways to get them to the Patron.
The Lawyer
While this guy is a lawyer by day, he is really the mouthpiece and boots on the ground man for the Patron. He is the one responsible for convincing the investigators to take part in these scenarios, he will also deliver any notes and take items off of the investigators hands, for “safe keeping”.
Fixing Issues!
As mentioned, I ran into a couple of problems in my first game. These are issues I want to address and fix ready for the next one.
Information Organisation
To address the issue of not needing to bounce up and down left and right on my laptop trying to scroll to the relevant information, I am going analogue for the most part. I intend on writing some kind of cue cards or something to that effect. Doing this will let me have multiple references to hand at the same time without having to keep switching pages on the laptop, I found that in the “Lightless Beacon” scenario, when the players eventually split up, I was having to scroll back to the right place and then refocus on the right part of the information. I struggle to read at the best of times, being under pressure and trying to focus on something specific does not help at all!
With the cue cards, I can write specific reference information which is quick to focus on and tell me exactly what I need to know. I will continue to use my laptop for other stuff, and as it is one of those fold over ChromeBooks which turns into a tablet, I can keep it out the way and use the pen to write notes down on there instead of scribbling it down on a bit of paper which I might not need for very long. Probably a weird and wasteful setup, but I think the point of playing TTRPGs in person is to disconnect from technology a little.
The Handouts!
Next are the handouts, I love the idea of giving my players something tangible and that they can read and keep hold of for later reference. But as I said, with the last scenario, some of the handouts were just illegible and were pointless. So ready for “The Haunting” scenario, I have invested in a couple of things. The first being designed handouts by the Cultist Armoury for the scenario. While they are lovely designed handouts, some of them are again pretty illegible, so rather pointless in my opinion, the second issue is that they are all beautifully designed… Which does mean to print them, you are going to use A LOT of ink. I am sure we all know how expensive printer ink is, I do plan on getting a laser printer in the near future though if I continue to print a ton of handouts.
So what was my complete fix for this? Textured paper! I found some nice ancient looking paper on Amazon, some came with envelopes which is nice and you can print on to them with zero issue and make the handouts look awesome. So I spent an evening whilst watching a film with some friends, transferring and redesigning the handouts to be printed onto these pages. To do that, I purchased a sweet Canva pack off of Etsy by the creator DigitalOtters. I went for this one over another because I was able to delete the textured backgrounds and keep everything else to make them look so much better. Just take a look at these;
We have what it looks like in Canva;
And what it looks like printed;
Doing a little extra
Now to top it off, I have gone and printed a dagger. The macguffin in this scenario is a dagger and that is the item that the Patron wants. So giving the players something to hold will just be the cherry on the cake. I need to paint it, so maybe I will make a post on here about how I did it. Keep eyes out.
Well I think that is enough waffle for now. I have a different group game I need to prep for… I will post about that one too!
Much Love <3