Saturday 7 July 2012

Call of Cthulhu - my new mini campaign

It's been more than ten years since I last ran a Call of Cthulhu campaign using fifth edition, and as my gaming group is going through a few games at the moment and trying to settle into a new schedule - what with pesky real life and other commitments interfering with our beloved hobby - I thought it might be fun to run a speedy CoC game to fill in a couple of weeks.
Walker in the Wastes - Pagan Publishing

I've been reading up on my history recently as I've been working on non-RPG projects, and I've been interested in explorers and adventurers of old who really put it all on the line to acheive their goals and dreams. One such adventure was the Franklin Expedition, doomed to failure under mysterious circumstances. Although the clues have been found and the fate of the crews of the HMS Erebus and Terror have been all but answered, I thought it would be a great jumping off point for a 1930s CoC game.

Browsing the Wikipedia entry for any inspiration (I know Wiki is not the most reliable of sources, but considering the fact that I'm fictionalising the entire expedition it's not a problem for me) I noticed the line:

'The expedition has also been the subject of a horror role-playing game supplement...'

Nuts, I thought. I bet that's for Call of Cthulhu.

And it was. It was Walker in the Wastes from Pagan Publishing.

Well, my game is all designed now. It's not fully concentrating so much on the expedition itself, although the doomed voyage will be a pointer to the larger picture, but I just thought it strange how I had considered the historical event perfect material for a Call of Cthulhu campaign, only to find that someone had beaten me to it. Hopefully my players will assume that this is what I'm running and try to get hold of a synopsis of the adventure, or even a copy of it, to try and second guess me in the hope that this will increase their chances of success.

If that happens, then the whole game is going to get very interesting.

2 comments:

  1. I don't know of many GMs who haven't had this happen in the past. Sometimes it gets a bit spooky when they spend months GMing an adventure for the games company to release it six months after completion. One does wonder how the games companies manage to install mind reading chips into so many people without it being more obvious...

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    1. he thing is, the Walker in the Wastes looks great, and I can't find a copy anywhere! The more I read about the Franklin Expedition the more it makes me want to run Pagan's game and not my own, just to see how they approached it.

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