SteveMND

We just finished up Episode Five (and for us, the campaign) last night as well, and the players all agreed that the eminent arrival (and attempted thwarting of) an Outer God was a hell of a high point to end on.

In a similar vein to BRF as a prequel, we're going to be trying something different with HotOE when I run it next month. The gaming group and I all like the BBC Blackadder series, and while watching an episode the other day, I was thinking it might be interesting to run the various 'optional' encounters in chronological order, starting with the Roman one, up through Middle Ages, then Gaslight, and finally the actual OE adventurer itself, with the players portraying various members of their same long family line from one to the next. If they can recall stuff from the earlier adventures, and can apply that to later adventures, I'm fine with that -- a kind of a 'genetic memory' as it were, from their family line lurking deep within their blood. I think it'll be interesting, but I just need to make sure none of the revelations in the optional scenarios will give away anything major in the main one (or if it will, to obfuscate it enough so that it doesn't reveal too many secrets). (Also, just as a suggestion to the authors for later use -- from an organizational/operational standpoint, I feel like it would have better to have all the optional scenarios like those separated out into their own standalone book, as opposed to interspersed all around, across and within the main campaign itself.)

I had been trying to find 'official' 7th edition Call of Cthulhu stuff being on the GenCon by Chaosium during registration, but I was never able to find them, sadly -- barring stuff like the seminars and presumably stuff that will likely be demo'd at their vendor booth. Is this stuff like that, or are you all talking about something else?

See the existing thread here: http://basicroleplaying.org/topic/4458-time-issues-for-a-time-to-harvest/

My only concern with the Dreamgate 'subplot' is that, while it exists for the Keeper who knows how it fits in to the larger story, there is -- as best I could tell -- no real reason to think the players could ever make any sort of connection here, and that was always something I disliked about similar scenarios elements in earlier OP campaigns -- without any means for the players to link everything back to a complete whole, these sorts of things can often appear just as a "we need X number of combats/encounters per Z pages of text, so we'll throw this one in to fill up some space." Does the DreamGate, etc., have any significant impact on the overall metaplot later on? Because if not (and it's more of a 'flavor' kind of thing for the Keeper to know), I think I'd like to also revamp it somewhat to be a little less out from left field, as it were. Maybe something with some local animals harrying her, after maybe she was lured out there by some of the local Kids.

Reign was correct; I was mainly curious as to how it qualified as an "Organized Play" campaign, when it seemed to have virtually nothing in common with any Organized Play campaign I'd encountered yet since back in the day. As stated previously, I don't mind that it's not, as I love it just the same... I was just a little dissapointed and surprised that it's not actually an Organized Play campaign as anticipated. If it's just being used as a marketing buzzword, that's acceptable as well, I suppose, albeit not quite what I was hoping for. Perhaps after season one, we may see a more 'traditional' Organized Play CoC campaign emerge from the development of this inaugural launch (after all, such a thing has been done before by third-party groups, so I'd love to see an official CoC Organized Play campaign like those). Thanks for the comments, all.

First of all, before I begin, I want to come right out and say my following questions/concerns have absolutely zero to do with the material itself -- from what I've read so far, A Time to Harvest is as absolutely beautiful and evocative and creepy and disturbing and fulfilling as I've come to expect from CoC scenarios over the years. I was giggling like a schoolgirl while reading the material, and am 100% satisfied on that end. That said, however, I am genuinely confused by its use of the term "Organized Play." Or at least, it is not any sort of Organized Play that I've been familiar with over the last 15-20 years or so. From Living City to Living Dragonstar to Living Greyhawk to Pathfinder Society to Adventurer's League and others, Organized Play -- as I always saw and experienced it -- had a few core tenets that they always followed, and ATtH doesn't seem to have any of them. For example, there doesn't appear to be any shared campaign ruleset. By that, I mean, there doesn't seem to be any enforcement of any core consistency from one group to the next (beyond the mundane application of the Core ruleset from the 7e books, etc.). Characters can be made by for the campaign by Point Buy, or made for the campaign by one of the variants for random rolling, etc. There are no hard restrictions on what types of characters can be played (altho several Strong Suggestions). There are no equivalent of adventure records or logs, or the like. Heck, there have been some suggestions on how to incorporate this into a potential already-existing campaign, and some people were even talking about how they could adjust for other time periods. In addition, there doesn't seem to be any real portability. One of the big things with OP campaigns I had encountered in the past was that it was designed so that a player could, in theory, pick up his character and, with the propert documentation, sit down at any other store running the campaign -- say, someone on a business trip over the weekend -- and play his character there, and know more or less what to expect, and where he was. This portability was a big draw to Organized Play, in that it was no longer a bunch of unknown characters with unverifiable abilities and unexplained gear and perhaps suspect levels of progression coming in from an equally infinite number of disparate home campaigns. This feat was accomplished both by a common set of campaign-specific guidelines and rules (as opposed to just the rulebook elements), some sort of verification element (logsheets, adventure records, etc.), and most especially the division of the story arcs into smaller, concise, easy-to-organize-around scenarios. Tradition tended to keep these in some variation of four-hour blocks for maximum flexibility, since Organized Play really got its start in the convention circuits, but these Episodes seem to be much more freeform and far less... well, organized, in that sense. Each Episode looks to not be designed with any sort of 'standard duration' in mind. All of which is perfectly fine, but I really am not seeing how this is an "Organized Play" campaign, as opposed to, say, just a regular campaign setting that is broken up into monthly installments. And in fact, that's what it feels like to me, especially what with the comments about taking all our eventual results and suggestions and recommendations into account for when the campaign is over and the whole is collected into a single bound adventure. Again, I'm not complaining, as I and the rest of my group are still very much looking forward to playing ATtH with great anticipation. It's just... not what we were expecting at all when we heard it was an "Organized Play" campaign. Unfortunately, due to all the other gaming we're already doing, I'm going to have to push back my Horror on the Orient Express home campaign. We had been assuming that we'd be able to run ATtH much like all the other Organized Play campaigns we've done, but this is looking like it wil take reasonably more than a single 4-hour block per Episode, and more likely something akin to a continual 'once a week' kind of needed schedule. I don't want to try and artificially compress the contents to make them fit into one of these pre-conceived time blocks, and neither do my players, so we're needing to shuffle some stuff around and put other stuff off temporarily to make time for ATtH. I'm just genuinely curious as to how this is supposed to fit into the "Organized Play" aspect of gaming. Aside from being broken up into monthly installments, I'm not seeing this as anything other than a (admittedly well-written and still-engaging) adventure book for a home campaign, much like people running HotOEm or Curse of Strahd or any other similar hardback scenario. I was admittedly curious as to how they'd be able to adapt something like CoC to operate in an Organized Play sort of framework, but I'm not sure that they actually have. Am I missing something here, or is it really not Organized Play except in name? Or is there a whole other aspect of Organized Play that I'm unfamiliar with, disassociated from my experiences in the RPGA and its spiritual successors? Thanks in advance! EDIT: This thread was born from the recent thread discussing time constraints and such, but i didn't want to derail that one with specific questions herein.

Nice! Thanks; I'm looking forward to this as well as all the other CoC goodness coming up here shortly.

Are there any plans to offer this later on in some fashion for those who might not have a local store participating? Our FLGS participates in the Tabletop Day version of this sort of event each year, but he looked over Free RPG Day and figured it'd be nowhere close to a decent return based on the prices they were charging to participate.

Does anyone know if these were ever translated into a PDF format over the years? I've looked around the Chaosium site and rpgsheets.com, but didn't see any offhand. Ironically, I discovered that despite the wonderful new BRP book and all the accumulated material contained therein, my favorite combination of options and mechanics still turns out to be essentially what was presented as RQIII.

Very nice, Ayelin. I've been working on a Mage-esque freeform system linked in with the mythology of my personal campaign world (based on mastery of the various fundamental runes of my world), but frankly, much of this looks far more manageable. If you don't mind, I may borrow some ideas for my own...

Oh, I'm sure I could as well. In fact, I grew up on RQ like others grew up on D&D, so i don't think there'd be any major problem with the mechanics end of it, and I've written my fair share of RPGA modules, so I know the procedure there. Rather, my issue isn't whether I can come up with something in two weeks, but whether I can come up with something presentable in two weeks. There's what's in my head and jotted down in half-scribbled notes across dozens of notebooks, and then there's what I would feel comfortable submitting as a finished product. For those of us who are overly anal-retentive when it comes to such things, the two aren't likely to converge in just two weeks, especially with all my other Real Life stuff going on. Steve M

That may well be true. Unfortunately, although the contest looks like it was originally mentioned over a month-and-a-half ago or so, many people are still just now getting their copies of BRP. I had an idea for the submission, but i have only gotten my copy of BRP last week. The two weeks left for before the deadline is so limited a time frame to come up with something I would be proud of submitting, that it's not even worth it for me to try. If they do get a low number of submissions, I do hope they realize that many people will have only had the book for about 2 weeks before the contest deadline, and that they don't incorrectly chalk it up to a lack of interest in the revised system. Steve M

If I could make a suggestion, could errata and clarifications be noted as such when added to the Wiki (i.e., this is official errata; this is a clarification), and also a reference and/or link provided back to the original official source of said errata or clarification (presumably here on the forums or the Chaosium site or such)?

Well, since the Forum keeps pestering me politely with the recommendation to post in the Introductions thread, I figured i'd best do so, if for no other reason than to quiet it down... Unlike many people I've met who got their role-playing start on some archaic version of D&D, I got mine on some archaic version of RuneQuest. I don't recall exactly when, but I think it was just a wee bit before 2nd edition came out. I've been a big fan of the BRP system since then, and while I too turned to D&D occasionally during RQ's quiescent periods, the BRP-based mechanics were always my favorite (and who could not love Stafford's intensely detailed world of Glorantha?). RuneQuest, ElfQuest, Ringworld, Superworld, Cthulhu. Heck, the writing in a lot of the Cthulhu stuff was so good, I'd buy them just to read them, even with no intention of every using them in an actual game. :-) After Stafford and Chaosium parted ways, I never could get into the new 'narrative' RP system Stafford introduced for his world of Glorantha. Time went on, and I was initially overjoyed at the prospect of RQ being done by Mongoose. I had the book pre-ordered and everything, but as time went on, and more and more official snippets of info came out about their upcoming rendition, I realized that it just didn't 'feel' right to me, and so reluctantly abandoned it, cancelled my pre-order, and bided my time once again. And now, here we are, with the BRP system revised and dolled up all nice and new! And while I haven't finished looking through my copy which arrived yesterday, it so far appears to be exactly what I want in my "new version" -- a clean system, updated and smoothed out, with new options but still retaining both the heart and the spirit of the original. Having been a member of one of the playtest groups for D&D 4.0 and seen how that deviated from the 'feel' of D&D, I am very pleased that Chaosium didn't try something like that, and instead stuck to the whole "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy when updating and revising their system. My two lunars, Steve M