TK Nyarlathotep

I actually quite like this - it'll be great for the Escape From Innsmouth campaign where the PCs are private investigators. Some good advice, all. Thanks!

Hello friends. So I'm a long-time Keeper of Arcane Mysteries, but with a major caveat. I have never run a game of Call of Cthulhu long-term before this year. The A Time to Harvest organized play campaign has been my first, and my players enjoyed it so much that I can see many more campaigns on the horizon. I have managed to keep up an air of menace as well as keeping the players on their toes and, well, afraid. Therein lies my problem. How does one keep the momentum going through multiple campaigns? I feel if Call of Cthulhu stopped being scary then a large part of its appeal would just be gone, so how do you maintain player and character fear as you move from campaign to campaign? How do you keep the players invested even if they know that, inevitably, things will go south for them in the form of madness and death? Running Call of Cthulhu from campaign to campaign is hard - so how on earth do you even do it?

Some rainy days for the Fantasy-inclined RPGer. Good. Perhaps in some small way they'll know the deluge that remains a constant in the Miskatonic Valley.

(a) While I'm still working on the specific hows and whys, Graham Walmsley's absolutely seminal Stealing Cthulhu is a critical help for instilling a sense of cosmicism and existential horror into your games by drawing from the well of the original sources. (c) In my humble (and sure to have me shot) opinion, precious few Chaosium supplements are especially cosmic horror-y or overly "true" to the source material. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as they are designed to facilitate a style of play more suiting to an actual tabletop game, rather than a slavish recreation of Lovecraft's tropes and idioms (which, while perhaps fun to read, would likely be miserably boring to play). That said, a few do stick out to me - The Crack'd and Crook'd Manse from Mansions of Madness is a deliriously frightening scenario where the truest sense of victory comes from having fled from the uncontainable /thing/ at the end of the scenario. Of newer fare, the current ongoing organized play campaign, A Time to Harvest, has had a delightful time in instilling within my players a sense of hopelessness and a sense that they'd have been better off not knowing. It has done little in the way of Deep Time, but pull the right strings and you could likely have all three elements available.

It has been Quite Some Time since I updated this thread. There's dust everywhere! Too much to collate into one place. Let's go kind of episode by episode. Ep. 1 End: Aftershocks --They were hesitant to leave Cobb's Corners until Johnny Law got involved. Then they hightailed it. --The paranoia was tangible. Good times were had. Ep. 2: Reach --This one went SUPER FREAKING WELL. --One player had a psychotic break from the sorcerer's hallucinations, ended up having psychosomatic leg trauma. Nobody even made Talladega Nights jokes! --Until after the session. Drat. --Reintroduced Richard Wendell, who was surprisingly popular among the Playerss (and unpopular among all the PCs but the other Weird Photographer in the group). --They befriended Akeley, Armitage, Wilmarth, and That Other Guy Who Shoots Himself During The Graveyard Ambush. Very useful allies. --After an /extremely/ tense hunt through the graveyard, the one PC who went to the rendezvous got an Extremely (hint hint) lucky roll, popping the sorcerer with a Major Wound and leaving him cursing furiously on the ground. He convinced those who visited him in the hospital that he was shot by the PC who shot him over a love triangle with another PC. Very embarrassing. --PCs managed to haul together and flee to the library during the campus-wide case of explosive amnesia. --They saved the library, did not save the Pasquallium or the Professor (nor were they aware those things were in danger until it was too late). Vaporized the leader with a lightning gun and incapacitated the rest with a very convincing case for self-defense (no legal trouble, but weren't hailed as heroes. They are relative unknowns in the incident.) --The lightning guns and any other mi-go wackiness dissolved into powder. Some bland excuse about a memetic kill switch. The surviving members of the mindswapped NPCs are currently Schrodinger's Servitors, either dead in a prison cell from the aforementioned kill switch or in the mines in Ep. 4 ready for another showdown. --Final note: One PC found and read The Unspeakable Cults But In Badly Mangled German in the Miskatonic Library and learned the spell Call Aether Devil. He did it out of curiosity but failed his INT roll, blocking the memory of that meeting. When he was killed by a Mi-Go lightning gun in the library, he was given a second chance at life when he awoke in the Dreamlands version of the Library slowly turning to dust. A copy of the book in candy colors opened itself to the spell and said "Last Chance". He cast the spell in the Dreamlands and met with a buzzing voice that offered him "Life now. Eternal life later." He accepted. He is not only doomed now, but a triple backflip into a picture perfect dive off the high dive and into the pool at the bottom of the Abyss itself. Episode 3: Hunger (Started 08-24-16 after almost a month's hiatus) --Players seem to trust Abelard, FOC, and its employees fairly implicitly - even after seeing how long they've been trailing their group and learning that they intentionally torture the mi-go. --Fairly boring session - it turns out nobody wants to roleplay up to a month of recovery after several sessions of nerve-wracking tension, and especially since they all more or less healed during the month hiatus. Also nobody is concerned about their Sanity except Mr. Doom up above, who has gotten a terrible work shift and thus his character is currently undergoing severe psychiatric care following a psychotic break, paid for by the FOC until he can come back, minus one of two (!!!) permanent insanities and plus some SAN points. --Gonna do the Canada plot next.

Mother of God.

Session notes for 05-10-16 (Had to play on Tuesday this week due to having company Thursday). --They killed the beast. That was pretty rad. --Replaced the Moon Beast and the zoogs with horrifying, unnecessary biological experiments in combining multiple animals. --Replaced the Men of Leng with Mi-Go servitors (combined with various insects) trying to brain-jar the girl. --Players are EXCEEDINGLY paranoid right now, having seen everyone kidnapped at different points and then seeing them fine in the police station. --Almost had to strongarm them out of Cobb's Corners. Now am not sure how I'll convince them to get /back/ to Cobb's Corners. --They're still debating wildly about who has and hasn't been secretly replaced with "mushroom people". --Music didn't get to do as much because the internet crashed halfway through. Forgot to put my playlists on Available Offline. --They're freaked and excited and I'm so glad it's coming this week so I don't have to keep them waiting for the next installment. --Worrying I may have revealed way too much way too soon. They don't know the true purpose of the mushroom peo--Mi-Go (dammit, you've got me doing it now), but they think an assimilation plot has gone down. The next few months ought to be very exciting.

No session last week, so session notes for 04-28-16 here we go! --They no longer trust Blaine, although I've planted the seeds of doubt that they're right. --Not sure if they trust Jason or not. He checked Azathoth and Others out from the Library. This is weird. --Kept the Mi-Go in the shadows, physically, so they're not sure if the creature is a single, very big entity or an army of entities. Good. Used a combo of Hypnosis and a made-up syringe tentacle that knocks people out to capture the survey group, which one PC was in and is the sole escapee. --Looking forward to mind-freaking the PCs next session when the brain-swapped students show up. --Next week they're checking the woods for John Jefferey, a plot that almost got skipped. I hope I didn't railroad it too hard. --Two of the players agreed "I'll be looking over my shoulder the whole way home." Oh good God this pleases me. --Anxious about this Dreamlands thing and the ensuing sub-adventure. Hoping it's not too at odds with the rest of the adventure, or that they find the reveal suitably terrifying. --Excellent use of The Residents this session (The Ughs and Coochie Brake have some buzzing Spanish language dialogue that really freaked 'em out.)

Thank you! I'm a die-hard Rez Head. My group is very excited about this and I'll update after every (or nearly every) session. Question: Should I add updates to the main post or just post them as their own reply?

Started the game on April 14th using PDFs and my personal group. Reception is good. Here are idle musings. --They trust Deputy Hunter. Good. --They trust Blaine too. Good. --Lots of roleplaying. I was happy about that. --Lost some sanity to a spooky mi-go hell dream. --PCs semi-arbitrarily decided to overthrow the mayor, who I improvised completely as an incompetent J.K. Simmons type. He'll probably be slaughtered by the Young. --The music of The Residents, all three Binding of Isaac soundtracks, Aphex Twin (as performed by Alarm Will Sound), and, of course, Chaosium's own Sense Impacts really sealed the deal, tonally. --For mood, decided to go Twin Peaks as directed by the John Carpenter who did The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness.