Tag: Call of Cthulhu

Give the gift of Taking Notes

Shane1 Comment

The Tuesday Group, where I’m a player, are on the cusp of finishing Horror on the Orient Express. A very good adventure, which has spanned much more than a year of sessions. 39 sessions and counting. In that time we’ve travelled through a lot of Europe, both west and east and done a lot of investigating.

The investigations often have a lot of exciting twists and turns as we realise that that person is actually the same person as that other person!. When those beats hit, they hit really good and the table gets very excited about it. However, after two years of playing we can’t possibly remember every character’s name, so we turn to our notes.

Playing Cthulhu more than any game has shown me the importance of taking good notes. The investigative mechanics mean you’re given a lot of information that you can’t possibly remember. Dates of when someone died, dates of when they were last seen (often many years after they’d died), and first mentions of cults, the kinds of injuries cult members are likely to have.

Not everyone’s notes are complete. Often it won’t be clear that the tidbit you’ve just heard is important, so it doesn’t get written down. But between you all, hopefully, someone has written it down. There’s excitement in that moment too. “Oh, I remember this. I have half a note about it from session six. Does anyone else have anything?” The flicking through pages is full of anticipation.

Hitting a wall in the investigation happens too. Fairly often actually. But if the DM steps in too quickly at that point, the game begins to be lead by the DM and not the players (an important principle in investigation games). The leads don’t actually have to match up with what’s in the DM’s adventure: the DM is looking for any excuse to give you more information, the players just have to lead the DM to those excuses. With that in mind, keeping a list of potential ideas noted down is crucial. Did you check the newspaper? Ask the hotel clerk for anything interesting going on? (Although, we probably went back to the cement factory more often than was useful.)

I’m certain I’m not the only one that struggles to pay attention the whole time whilst playing ttrpgs whilst at my computer. I’ve found that taking notes keeps me actively playing even when I’m not part of the scene playing out. There’s always something to be writing down which may help in the future – you never know what you’ll miss in a game like CoC.

All the above is fine the player, but it’s wonderful for the DM. It’s disheartening when a world has been finely crafted, only for your players to forget about it later on. The twists aren’t noticed and clues have to be crude. I think it’s really fun for the DM when the players can have a conversation amongst themselves about the world being weaved. It shows player buy-in which is all a DM is ever striving for.

It’s always endlessly useful when a player can answer a lore question before the DM has time to look back a hundred pages to find it. “Does anyone remember [the throw away] name of the train driver from six sessions ago?” “Yep – I wrote five full pages of notes about him.” What a delight for a DM that didn’t realise that Trevor the Train Conductor was going to be a major character.

Write notes – you’ll enjoy it!

There are two other ways you can be a good player over on slyflourish.

The missing things from D&D: Contacts

Shane2 Comments

Character creation in a lot of RPGs get you to think about a background for your character, and almost all of those, including D&D, get you to think about your ties to the world. The Background in D&D comes with a few questions which prompt this: what was the event which made you a folk hero? what made your turn your back on civilisation?

However, very few of those 5e backgrounds prompt you to think about specific people, with names.

Sources of information

In Call of Cthulhu, when you pick your occupation it specifically calls out the contacts you might have made during the course of your work. As a game based around investigation, and rarely brute force, having Barry from the Legal Team as a friend (or even just colleague) gives the player an avenue to turn to when they’re desperately struggling to find the next stepping stone. Finding new contacts is an actively part of the game too – the gunsmith isn’t just a person to sell you guns, but a name you should write down because you’ll need their expertise when it comes to tracking down the owner of a recently sold gun.

When creating a Shadowrun character, you can allot some of your starting attribute points to making new contacts. This isn’t quite a one-to-one relationship, but you can either pick a new spell or add a new contact. Similar to Cthulhu, Shadowrun is all about planning a heist and tracking down information, so it’s not surprising there are such systems around making a network of sources.

Finding a new contact can be as powerful as finding a magic item in Faerun. In Shadow of the Demonlord’s core rule book, this is specifically called out. Being introduced to the High Cultist might be the reward for an entire quest chain. Demonlord doesn’t put as much effort into this as some other systems, but it does include some prompts to be thought about when adding a new NPC.

Having this potential source of information doesn’t necessarily give the players a superpower; the DM still controls if what these sources know. This type of thinking – around if you’ve accidentally made your players too powerful – is counter-productive to fun. Instead, consider it another way for you to feed plot to the players when their wheels start spinning.

Family

There are far too many orphaned and unattached adventurers in the world. Too often there are no ties to their home. Even total losers have at least a cousin they have some affinity for.

At the beginning on my Maze of the Blue Medusa campaign, I asked the players why do you owe this kenku a favour? Despite coming with ideas about their character, there was no prep time for this, and they had to improvise something on the spot. I’m certain that’s the first time some of them had thought about the fact that their father needed some falsified documents, or that they were still living in their parents basement.

My main aim with getting the answer to this was to find ways that the characters were tied to the world, so I could wrap the plot around it when needed. It just so happened that along the way we learned about some of their family, and some of them become NPCs that the characters cared for. “Well, we can’t do the ritual in my home… what if someone bad happens and it affects my mum?” This isn’t just about role play (which a certain type of player is uneasy around) – it’s sometimes key to plot.