Which Cthulhu game is the best one?

With the online Fantasy Grounds Convention around the corner on Friday the 13th, I've been waning back and forth on which game I want to run. My first thought was a Savage Starship Troopers game but I don't think it lends itself well to interludes or role playing in general. I've never been a fan of hierarchical organizations in role playing so it's down on my list right now. I mean who wants to be told what to do by another player at the table and you might not even know who that other player is. I sure wouldn't want to.

That brings me to the topic of this post. Cthulhu. Which version of Cthulhu RPG is best? For this topic I'm going to limit it to Call of Cthulhu using the Basic Role Playing system from Chaosium, Trail of Cthulhu using the GUMSHOE system from Pelgrane Press, and Cthulhu Dark using it's own rules-light system from Graham Walmsley.

Lets start with the new kid on the block, Graham Walmsely. Before I get going here's a free copy of the official rules for Cthulhu Dark. As you can see, Cthulhu Dark really is rules-light. Here's a different version of the same free rules that I personally think looks better. The only difference between the two are that the official version of the rules uses Insight instead of Insanity. The simplicity of it makes me think there's something wrong with it. My first impression was that the insanity rules were a bit over the top but then I started thinking about it and I think it fits in with the theme of Lovecraftian horror and the possibility of quickly going insane. Then I saw this section of final points and it made sense to me. 

I need to run this game to make my own conclusion on whether this game will be good or not. In my opinion Graham Walmsley is a good writer and the preview book I have shows that. I have no doubt in my mind that the adventures written for this would easily be compatible with any of the Cthulhu games with a little tweaking to make it work for the respective system. That actually says a lot about how something is written. The adventure provided in the preview book takes place in London 1851 and is more of a true H.P. Lovecraft investigation style story with just a little chance of combat. 

Next we have Big Brother. Call of Cthulhu has been around since 1981 with little changes made until the most recent 7th edition. For the purposes of this discussion I'll stay away from 7th edition because I own 6th edition and don't plan on buying 7th anytime soon. I understand there were some major changes made to 7th edition and not all of them loved by the CoC fans. I have not completely read this book or played in any games which is why these choices are difficult for me. I have seen some CoC games played on The Dice Stormers Youtube channel. They do a good job with their production of the channel and now I want to play it. This version is mostly a percentile based game. The action resolution mechanism for CoC is percentage based which means it is a d100 roll. The player rolls d100 and is looking for a result which is at or lower than his/her indicated skill score. For opposed attribute checks there is a resistance table in the book but it doesn't include rules for opposed skill rolls.

Finally we have Trail of Cthulhu which promises to fix the ever popular misconception that failed rolls will leave an investigator floundering and stop the scenario dead in it's tracks. The GUMSHOE system uses only one d6 for resolving conflicts and the clues are automatically given to the players provided they utilize their skills appropriately. Player characters have investigation abilities and general abilities. The main difference between the two are that investigative abilities can always be used even if their pool is at zero. General abilities are gone once they are down to zero. Players use their ability pools to gather information to solve the mystery before losing all of their health or insanity. It is up to the players to narratively use their abilities to uncover clues and solve the mystery.

I like the feeling of players rolling dice to randomize the outcome of a possible ability/skill. If the Keeper of Call of Cthulhu can improvise then the game wouldn't come to a screeching halt when a player fails a roll. I also like the use of ability pools in Trail of Cthulhu which give the player's more narrative control but I feel like there needs to be more dice rolling. The rules-light approach of Cthulhu Dark would definitely give more narrative control to the players while still rolling dice for random outcomes. My only concern with Cthulhu Dark is that the dice mechanic of Insight is almost entirely in the hands of the player.

I can't decide which one is for me. I need your help. Tell me your thoughts on which one you think is best and why. What do you like about it and what do you dislike about it?

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Husk: Wrath of the Swarm Review

It's review time. Yesterday a friend of mine sent me a message asking if I was going to use Husk to run a game. I said what is this Husk? Then he sent me a link to DriveThruRPG and when I saw the image I said oh yeah I remember seeing Nathan Carmen post this on Google+. I must admit, I was very skeptical about purchasing this product because it seemed a little overpriced from what the product description says. I think the words "This Setting Kit provides an outline of a setting" threw me off more than anything else. At $4.00 for 23 pages the pdf will cost me $0.17 per page which I thought was a little high. So when my friend messaged me, I thought about it more and decided to buy it. I'm glad I did. These 23 pages are really good. Wait, I think I just got tricked into doing a review on this. I won't forget that Eric.

You are resistance fighters and only 30% of the populace is left. It's a dog eat dog world where only the strong survive. The alien bugs have invaded and all but wiped out the world's military organizations. There are 6 factions of resistance groups left and you belong to Unity.  This group seeks to unify the human race against the invaders. You may or may not face off against the other factions. That's up to you and your GM.

Within the pages you get 4 new edges, 2 new hindrances, 2 new setting rules, an adventure generator, and a great bestiary with 7 wildcard human NPC's, 2 human Extras, and 14 alien NPC's (6 of them are wildcards). This product is labeled as a kit for an alien bug invasion setting and it is exactly that. It is a toolbox of great ideas and beasts. I highly recommend buying this pdf if you're interested in any type of science fiction. Best of all, it's for Savage Worlds and it's only $4. Go check out Husk: Wrath of the Swarm.

This product has given me a great idea for FG-Con 11, the online convention for Fantasy Grounds. It happens to be starting on Friday, October 13th and continues to October 15th. Yep, you read that right, its on Friday the 13th this year. Word is that they're trying to do a theme for it. Hopefully I can get into a Trail of Cthulhu game. If not then maybe I'll run it myself. Anyway, I'm going to use this kit to perhaps run a Starship Troopers game. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

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Primeval Thule

About a month ago I was perusing DriveThruRPG for a 7th level D&D adventure. That's when I came across The Watchers Of Meng, an adventure for characters of levels 5-8, written by Robert J. Schwalb. This adventure was written for the Primeval Thule setting from Sasquatch Game Studio. I'd heard of Thule before but I never really looked into it. Before purchasing the pdf of the setting book, I asked over at the Nerds-International G+ page if anyone was familiar with this setting. Within a few minutes of posting my question I got several replies from those fine folks. My main concern was whether or not I could use this setting for the player characters already established in 5th edition of D&D with minimal translation involved. I was assured that I could indeed just drop the player characters into the adventure without any problems.

So, what exactly is Primeval Thule I asked. The majority of replies I got were if you're looking for a true sword & sorcery setting for D&D, this ain't it. This is more like a lower fantasy setting with Lovecraftian influences. Hmmm, Lovecraftian influences you say. Now I'm more intrigued than before. My first thought was how can they make D&D feel like Cthulhu? Of course I should have looked in the Dungeon Masters Guide. There are madness rules on page 258. There are also rules for adding an Insanity Ability Score on page 264. Wow, I never knew that was there! Ok, time to look at this setting more closely.

Looking around some more, I found a free teaser pdf called Primeval Thule Travelers Guide. To my surprise I discovered that this overview supplement is also the entire first chapter of the campaign setting book with minor changes made to artwork and layout. This chapter definitely sets the stage for a more savage land with danger lurking outside the city as well as within. In fact, the city is described as being just as deadly as the wilderness. This land called Thule is also not as magical as it once was. There are only a handful of magic users at any given time inside a major city. Ever since a catastrophic event occurred in the city of Atlantis, magic has been on the decline. Since "the world’s ancient empires were founded on occult learning and lore", it is my understanding that most magic is actually alien in nature and feared by most.

"Because Thule is an ancient setting, many of the tropes common in more conventional fantasy settings are not necessarily present. This is a world of barbarians and gladiators, not knights or lords. Temples are ziggurats, not cathedrals; people dress in loincloths and leather fighting harness."

The map of Thule is a fantastic pdf and when printed it comes out to a big 30 x 25 inch poster. So far there are 3 adventures in the campaign setting book, 3 stand alone adventures, and an anthology book containing 3 more adventures. Unfortunately that's where the adventure supplements end. It also appears that support for this setting is pretty much done. Its also worth mentioning that if you're a Savage Worlds fan, there aren't any published adventures for that rule system. The only Savage Worlds support is the campaign book.

All in all, I think this is a fantastic setting and I really like the feeling of lower than normal magic for D&D. It's not quite at the barbaric level of Conan but it is definitely a step in the right direction.

I'm giving this one 4 out of 5 Jalizaran Moons.

One of my friends JC Locke, The Jolly GM, is going to be posting some videos on his Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/ShotGunJolly about 6mm figures and how to paint them. You can also check out his blog at http://thejollygm.blogspot.com/

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The Curse Of Calimah

A while back, on April 8^th, I had a chance to run my first Fantasy Grounds (FG) game during FG Con 10. I ran an adventure I wrote, titled The Curse Of Calimah. This Savage Worlds adventure was designed to be an introduction to the Pirates of the Dominions sourcebook from the Beasts & Barbarians setting published by Gramel. I would say that overall, it was a success. Unfortunately, I had to omit lots of information in order to try to finish the game on time. Even after that we still went an hour over the scheduled time. The players said they had a good time and it was fun but I’m not sure if they were just being polite.

I learned some valuable lessons. First is to make sure the images and maps are under 1MB in file size. The images I used were large and stopped the game for 5-10 minutes while the players downloaded them. Alternatively, you can set the images to be Force loaded to the players. This means when the players connect to your game all of the images will be downloaded at that time. This can take some time if the file sizes are large but that also means that the game will run faster for everyone during actual play.

Second, if at all possible, try to have a veteran Fantasy Grounds GM as a player. They can help tremendously for a first timer in FG. There were times I felt bad because the game slowed to a standstill. I couldn’t figure out some of the nuances of the combat tracker like adding multiple NPC’s under a single action. I’ll have to go back and revisit that. I know Eric Lamoureux has a video on YouTube about that here. You should go visit his channel because he has a good selection of instructional videos as well as recorded game sessions.

The third and last lesson I learned was that, if you make the players unnecessarily chase after a bad guy, they will either hate the NPC or you, the GM. There is a fine line here and hopefully I didn’t cross it. The first few rounds of combat during the final encounter were slow to say the least. Each player had an allied extra that were relatively close enough to engage an enemy but most of the players were out of range. Then the final bad guy is revealed and the players had to chase after him. They hated the NPC (or me, it’s hard to say for sure) so much that when one of the players killed him, they wouldn’t let him die until I spent all of my GM bennies to try and soak the damage.

I’m starting to come around to the idea that I ran a good game because the players had some laughs and by the end they got emotionally involved in making sure the bad guy felt every last wound. 

With the announcement of the Beasts & Barbarians Steel Edition crowdfunding via Indiegogo, it's fitting that I can announce I've finally gotten approval from Piotr Koryś to release this adventure. For anyone interested, you can download the adventure for free here The Curse Of Calimah.

Memorial Day Weekend Update & Random Thoughts

I've been quiet for some time now on G+ and here at my blog. This past month has had me busy at work and at home. With the weather warming up and the weekly yard work I've had less time to think about RPG's. We are in prime construction weather here in Illinois which means I'm staying busy at work with airport improvement projects and the seasonal HVAC issues at many of my sites. At home I've been busy with getting my Chargriller Smoker put together and varnishing the wooden bits. This Saturday I'll be seasoning up Charlie for her maiden voyage on Sunday. She'll be smoking me up a brisket for this Memorial Day weekend.

Just yesterday I made a trip to Rockford to pickup a used Char-Broil grill. It's missing a door but not bad for $60 used. This 6 burner baby retails for around $300 new. Not bad eh.

Soon I will be fixing up my front porch which will require at least a full weekend to repair then on to painting. This will have to wait after our family vacation in a couple of weeks. We're going to Walt Disney World in Orlando Florida. I'm dreading the drive. Google maps says it will take 18 hours but my father-in-law says it is more like 22 hours. I'm sure it'll be a blast once we get there but 22 hours in a car, ugh!

In my last blog post I said I was going to try to run a game of Tales from the Loop, well that game fell through. I might try to get it going again but lately I've been reading Rippers Resurrected and I'm getting interested in trying to start a campaign for this. I've played in a game of this before but I really didn't know anything about the setting so it didn't really sit well with me. Now that I've had a chance to read the first half of the players guide I really like some of the mechanics. I need to get back to writing because Con on the Cob is just around the corner on Veteran's Day weekend and I want to run a great game. I also need to work on my second Beasts & Barbarians adventure for the Fantasy Grounds Convention coming in October.

For the online FG Con, I plan to run a follow up adventure to The Curse Of Calimah. This first adventure was an introduction to the Beasts & Barbarians Pirates of the Dominions. I tried to design it so that it would ease the players into this new setting materiel without feeling like it was overly swashbuckling. This next adventure will solidify the characters' path into the murky seas of pirates amongst barbarians. They will have been Pirates of the Dominions under the tutalige (perhaps miguided) of the crew aboard Etu's Manhood for more than a month. This will allow the characters to have "forgotten" some skills in favor of learning new, more seaworthy ones to replace them. Captain Kodar has a special mission for the newest members of his carousing crew.

Lots of members from the Nerds International G+ community will be meeting up at Con on the Cob this year and I've been doing some research for a one shot I plan on running. I'm not 100% sure that I can make this work but I want to run a game titled Attack From Mars!. I've had Steve Jackson's GURPS Mars Attacks source book for some time now and have read it several times. I hope to have this adventure ready for the Con, which will include miniatures, maps, characters, bennies, and of course the story. So far the basic premise is that the Martians have landed and the players need to get to the most defensable building in town to fend off the never ending wave of Disintegrator Ray gun toting Martians.

Please take a moment this weekend to remember those that gave their life to keep this country free. I wish everyone a fun and safe Memorial Day weekend. Post your weekend pics on G+ for me to see.