I recently ordered the new starter set (which should arrive on Thursday). My main reason for this was that due to circumstances most of my game books are packed away and in some cases, in storage. Also, sometimes I just want to buy new gaming stuff, and recent years output has failed to pique my interest (one of more recent acquisitions I made was the Star Wars D6 anniversary set, which was fun to run, and is probably fun to play with. The others were something of a disappointment - - one didn't pay off with material, and the other felt like there was too much to do to have something that I'd want to work with)
I've dabbled in CoC in the past, having run the Haunting with a used copy of the 5e book, and played in an on-line game over Google 6-8 years ago.
The system generally does what it says on the tin, although some concessions might have to be made in order to keep an investigation going (the old trap of the game stalling because a player failed to find the crucial clue). However, while I want to do something with the system, I'm just not in the mood to deal with the Mythos right now. (I've been a long time Lovecraft fan since hearing about him on an episode of Real Ghostbusters).
So my idea was two fold. Keep most of the mechanics as is, but instead of horror, the game becomes one of investigating 1920s pulp science fiction (which is quite possibly a completely different beastie from what a lot of people might be expecting). (The other idea was to go for a slightly pulpier version of 20s Detective fiction like Poirot or Jeeves and Wooster, but with added cliffhangers).
SF in the 20s involved prototypal mad scientists, rampaging robots, journeys to microscopic realms, and vaguely described technology. (Lovecraft dabbled in this with "From Beyond").
The basic premise starts out the same, with people drawn somewhere for various reasons - - the scholar/scientist is looking for their colleague who hasn't responded in quite a while, the gangster who coming to collect on money or is scouting the location for a possible location to build a distillery, etc. But now have to find out what what happened, and deal with whatever has gone wrong, which may not be at that location.
A possible new rule could be for cliffhangers. At certain times during the session, the keeper, wanting a short break, sets up a situation, and asks the players to write down how they would react to the situation, and after the break, the cliffhanger would be resolved.
Aside from that, I could see some random scenario tables to establish the basis of the adventure, and diagram on how to set up the mystery in the scenario that makes sense logically, and let it develop naturally on the player's side of things.
Thoughts? Opinions?
I think that I have an interesting idea, but am not completely sure how to proceed with it.