Call of Cthulhu - Recommend Me Some Good Adventures

[Olaf the Stout]

Since there is a 30% off sale at Chaosium at the moment I'm looking at buying the Call of Cthulhu rulebook and some adventures.

Masks of Nyarlathotep, Beyond the Mountains of Madness and At Your Door have been suggested as some good adventures.

Are there any others people would recommend? And does anyone know where to get At Your Doon, either in dead tree or PDF format? I can't see it available on the Chaosium website or on DTRPG.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for good starter adventures?

I've only played CoC once before (a convention one-shot) and I don't think any of my players have played CoC at all so I'm completely unaware of what is out there.

What about the free adventures, on the Chaosium website and elsewhere? Any good ones to recommend?

Olaf the Stout

 

[jdrakeh]

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Horror-Orient-Express-Call-Cthulhu/dp/0933635761"]Horror on the Orient Express[/ame] is an amazing campaign box set — unfortunately it's so highly regarded that not too many people want to part with it, so it tends to be on the expensive side (in the $100 range) whenever a used copy pops up.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Some of the adventures mentioned (Masks of Nyarlathotep, Beyond the Mountains of Madness, Horror on the Orient Express) are massive campaigns, which will take a long, long time to run. As CoC tends to eat PCs, it might be a good idea to start wit smaller one shots instead.

The main CoC rulebook usually includes several shorter adventures which are perfect for trying out the game. My absolute favourite is 5th edition's adventure involving a jazz club and Louis Armstrong.

The campaigns can be characterised as follows:

Masks has the characters traveling around the world (New York, England, Egypt, Kenia, South East Asia). It features a strong theme, so each single adventure plays an important part in the campaign.

Beyond the Mountains of Madness is extremely focused: it describes an expedition to Antarctica. This means a limited selection of possible characters (no grey-haired librarians, please), and the GM may have to stretch the sense of disbelief in order to bring replacement characters in.

Horror on the Orient Express is - pardon the pun - a bit of a railroad. All the action happens on the voyage of said train Constantinople and back. Several parts happen in cities where the train makes a stop, which means that the players have to act under a strict time limit.

All campaigns have a plot so strong that players interested in the story aspect really want to proceed, to discover just one more thing until its too late for their characters.

 

[Wik]

Yeah. I've heard nothing but good things about the Horror on the Orient Express.

It's not really an adventure, but the Delta Green setting is AMAZING. Probably the best RPG read I've ever had - the adventures contained inside it are some of the best ever - and incredibly brutal (as CoC should be).

Beyond that, I'm not too sure. I really only know d20 CoC - which is still one of my favourite all-time games.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Is Horror on the Orient Express available in PDF format anywhere?

Olaf the Stout

 

[jdrakeh]

Is Horror on the Orient Express available in PDF format anywhere?

Olaf the Stout

Sadly, I do not believe so.

 

[talien]

Are there any others people would recommend? And does anyone know where to get At Your Doon, either in dead tree or PDF format? I can't see it available on the Chaosium website or on DTRPG.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for good starter adventures?

I've only played CoC once before (a convention one-shot) and I don't think any of my players have played CoC at all so I'm completely unaware of what is out there.

What about the free adventures, on the Chaosium website and elsewhere? Any good ones to recommend?

Olaf the Stout

Hi Olaf,

At Your Door is a "modern" adventure (more like 1980s, but that was modern at the time). It's been almost universally panned as being awful, but I'm quite fond of tinkering with scenarios and have so far run a very successful Delta Green campaign using the worst elements of the book. Please note that my descriptions below give a lot away if you plan to play in At Your Door!

You can read how the campaign went here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/story-...beginning-end-updated-daily-april-6-a-38.html

Elements I enjoyed:
* Satan's Sadists: An all-purpose biker gang. They also appear in The Evil Stars, another 1980s scenario which I linked to At Your Door.
* Ssruthaa: A serpent person in the guise of an evangelical preacher. I changed this character significantly by linking him to Future/Perfect (answering your other question -- Future/Perfect is free at Nothing Can Stop the Blog, Detwiller has piles of excellent free scenarios for download).
* Dawn Biozyme: Nothing quite like a lab that specializes in genetic mutations from the Great Old Ones.
* Full Wilderness: Although Full Wilderness seems like a ridiculous combination of eco-terrorism and corporate greed, with today's "greenwashing" of corporations this organization fits right in.
* Jenny: A four-armed horny giantess. Seems absurd, right? I'm not sure how, but we made it work. Better than that, she mated with one of the agents and her babies came to term in agency custody. As you can imagine, this will have long-term implications in our game.

Elements I removed:
* Mr. Shiny: A shoggoth in human form. He's just too weird of a freak to use with Delta Green agents who are likely to get suspicious and start shooting.
* A Giant Talking Dog: This needs no explanation. I turned him into a huge feral wolf on steroids that didn't talk. That seemed to work fine.
* Too Many Dark Young: Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath have since changed throughout the ages and become much, much deadlier. I used Night on Owlshead Mountain as a link, which put Dark Young in the appropriate light but ruined the possibility of having more than one show up without the agents just fleeing in terror. I ended up using "baby" versions of them, which were much easier to handle.

You can buy At Your Door at Amazon.com or Noble Knight (search for "At Your Door" and "Cthulhu"). Amazon.com seems to be selling it for under twenty bucks.

Hope that's helpful!

 

[Odhanan]

Masks of Nyarlathotep.

If you play CoC, don't have it, and don't end up getting it through this sale, you are missing one of the, if not -the-, greatest role playing game campaign books of all time.

 

[James Jacobs]

Huh... Interesting to hear that "At Your Door" has been "almost universally panned," because I really quite liked that one. Maybe because of the T.E.D. Klein elements, but probably because when I ran it back in college I had a GREAT time with it.

But yeah... Masks of Nyarlathotep is pretty much the place you need to start when you're beginning to buy Call of Cthulhu adventures.

 

[tylerthehobo]

There's another thread going on about the Chaosium sale that has turned into a discussion of good scenarios for Call of Cthulhu. My post is re/cross-posted here:

More recommendations
For those just getting into Call of Cthulhu, the scenarios in any of the core books/sets are good starting points. Blood Brothers is also pretty hip if you're trying to get players used to the mechanics but they don't have a background in H.P. Lovecraft's mythos - it has one-shots based on classic horror flicks.

Good books, once you're on your feet:
*Shadows of Azathoth - an epic globe/dimension trotting set of adventures
*Trail of Tsathoggua - another epic set of scenarios
*Tales of the Miskatonic Valley - an anthology of one-shots based on locations from the mythos universe
*Shadows of Yogsothoth - a series of linked scenarios built around an erudite secret society
*Mansions of Madness - classic one-shots featuring haunted houses and the like
*Secrets of New York - a campaign setting / sourcebook to New York in the 20s. In my opinion, the best of the lot of geographically oriented CoC sourcebooks I've read, with a couple of good scenarios in the back of the book.
*There are tons of small print run "Monographs" in the Chaosium online store that serve to illustrate more esoteric periods and regions. Their annual halloween run of adventures is generally a good starting point for a theme-night of gaming.

A tip to folks getting going - get a CD or some mp3s of music from the 20s, and print out a few wikipedia pages about the 20s for your players. For those of us who may not have read much about the Roaring 20s since high school history, this will help serve as a refresher and get you in the spirit of the default time line for the game.

I'm really glad to see so many folks taking an interest in this great game.


NOTE: Maybe an admin wants to stitch these two threads together?