Quote from: Rafael on July 13, 2023, 12:10:49 PM
My question would be, how much time do you spend writing/preparing?  Like, I'm reasonably solid with knowledge management and with historical sciences, but I'd classify my my learning curve from I-Know-Nothing to I-Can-Portray-This-Era-Faithfully as a 100-hours-exercise. That's a lot of time when compared to the "Fuck it, we'll set this in Ravenloft" strategy that takes only about an evening to prepare. 

Usually, a couple of weeks for an adventure 2-3 sessions long. I just love to delve in the period and place - esp. if it is not one of the "usual suspects".

For example, I re-wrote "Under a Winter Snow", a module about the fear of the resurgence of the Spanish Flu in a small town in North Dakota (the idea was good but the development sucked). So, North Dakota in 1919... How was it? I found an incredible amount of photos. Then the culture. The German-American population was still reeling from the treatment they received after the US entered WWI (i.e. concentration camps - something not really remembered). Then we were near Christmas, so I looked for the local traditions. And so on.

The characters were pre-made. Basically, around Christmas 1919, the Mayor of Minot received troubling reports about a mysterious fever killing people in the small town of Eisner, up North. Fearing a resurgence of the flu, he contacts Bismarck (my players were a bit surprised to discover that the capital of ND is called Bismarck). From there they send an anatomopathologist from the Grand Fork University, dr. Lawrence Chambers. Yep, I looked for the best choice in the area and it was Grand Forks. I even found the pictures of the university.

With him the Mayor sends the sheriff, Theodore "Tex" Colbert (I found many pictures of ND sheriffs in 1919-20) and his personal assistant, Elisabeth "Lisa" Hermann to keep a formal record of the events (including taking pictures with a 1919 camera...) Lisa's parents had been held in a concentration camp, and her father had died, shortly after being freed, of "consumption". The player didn't know if this was important or not. It wasn't, but it was a way for her to have an idea of the time and the place.

Basically, I love to surround d the story with elements that give to the players the idea of being "there" in that year. Sometimes you only need a small detail. When they found a letter from the Army about the death of a certain NPC I looked for these letters on the internet and I reconstructed one - including the symbol of the US-AEF at the beginning. It is in Italian but the overall style is simply translated from the original. Researching things like these take only a bit of time but, IMHO, increase the "realism" of the player's surroundings - which in turn will make the dire things even more scary...

Quote from: Reckall on July 13, 2023, 02:58:46 PMResearching things like these take only a bit of time but, IMHO, increase the "realism" of the player's surroundings - which in turn will make the dire things even more scary...

Exactly.

The more "real" and "normal" everything is, the more the "unreal" and the "abby normal" stand out and shock.

Quote from: Spinachcat on July 13, 2023, 04:49:50 PM

Quote from: Reckall on July 13, 2023, 02:58:46 PMResearching things like these take only a bit of time but, IMHO, increase the "realism" of the player's surroundings - which in turn will make the dire things even more scary...

Exactly.

The more "real" and "normal" everything is, the more the "unreal" and the "abby normal" stand out and shock.

I agree. However, this does make me question setting Cthulhu games in the 1920s. Most of my games were in the 1920s - plus some in the 1890s and a few in 1930s through 1940s. Still, there are good reasons to have games set in the present day. Lovecraft generally set his stories in the present day for him, and mostly in his own familiar ("normal") environment of New England.

I've done one-shots of Delta Green and The Laundry, but I feel that making the PCs as government agents is a big shift, and makes things a bit less "real" and "normal". In the future, I'd like to try more Call of Cthulhu set in the present with ordinary civilians as PCs.

Quote from: jhkim on July 13, 2023, 05:17:03 PM

Quote from: Spinachcat on July 13, 2023, 04:49:50 PM

Quote from: Reckall on July 13, 2023, 02:58:46 PMResearching things like these take only a bit of time but, IMHO, increase the "realism" of the player's surroundings - which in turn will make the dire things even more scary...

Exactly.

The more "real" and "normal" everything is, the more the "unreal" and the "abby normal" stand out and shock.

I agree. However, this does make me question setting Cthulhu games in the 1920s. Most of my games were in the 1920s - plus some in the 1890s and a few in 1930s through 1940s. Still, there are good reasons to have games set in the present day. Lovecraft generally set his stories in the present day for him, and mostly in his own familiar ("normal") environment of New England.

I've done one-shots of Delta Green and The Laundry, but I feel that making the PCs as government agents is a big shift, and makes things a bit less "real" and "normal". In the future, I'd like to try more Call of Cthulhu set in the present with ordinary civilians as PCs.

I'm also tending more in the direction of modern-day Cthulhu scenarios. However, I prefer to get away from the "crazy cultists doing weird rituals to call on an outer god" type of thing. I take some inspiration from Lu Cixin's Three-Body Problem and thus have the aliens/outer gods supported by a global group of ecoterrorists, which, in a sense, functions like a doomsday cult similar to real-life "climate activists".   These "cultists" would receive extensive funding from big investment companies such as BlackRock and Vanguard, which work on behalf of the aliens/outer gods. Needless to say, the PCs would really have their work cut out for them, especially given the great political clout of Big Capital and the fact that anyone who warns about the alien/outer god threat would be denounced as a "conspiracy theorist".

Quote from: jhkim on July 13, 2023, 05:17:03 PM
I agree. However, this does make me question setting Cthulhu games in the 1920s. Most of my games were in the 1920s - plus some in the 1890s and a few in 1930s through 1940s. Still, there are good reasons to have games set in the present day. Lovecraft generally set his stories in the present day for him, and mostly in his own familiar ("normal") environment of New England.

True. However, HPL's time was perfect for the kind of stories he wrote. Much of the World was still unknown/barely explored. Long-distance communications were difficult. The Earth still had "dark corners" from where "things" could come. Today, I don't think that R'yeh could come up without some US satellites seeing it.

Quote
I've done one-shots of Delta Green and The Laundry, but I feel that making the PCs as government agents is a big shift, and makes things a bit less "real" and "normal". In the future, I'd like to try more Call of Cthulhu set in the present with ordinary civilians as PCs.

I never played a CoC game set in the present with civilians so I can't comment. However, I ran a few Delta Green games in places ranging from Cambodia to Tasmania and, IMHO, the key is again "realism" - from, again, a sense of place to "how do the "alphabet soup" agencies really operate?

One of the best adventures I ever ran (not DG, as the characters are unaware of the Mythos) was "Ladybug Ladybug Fly Away Home". It was so good that I didn't feel the need to change anything. I set it in 2015 and it is about the kidnapping in full daylight of a young girl. The characters are part of the task force which is immediately put together to track the kidnapper(s?), and the story shows the inner workings of this kind of operations. What can such a task force do? How fast? Is a psychologist better than a sniper?

Seth Skorkowski did a wonderful intro to this adventure. A lot of what he says can be useful for other adventures in a similar vein.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0YweLN2IWnw&t=0s

Quote from: Rhymer88 on July 14, 2023, 04:52:14 AM

Quote from: jhkim on July 13, 2023, 05:17:03 PM

Quote from: Spinachcat on July 13, 2023, 04:49:50 PM

Quote from: Reckall on July 13, 2023, 02:58:46 PMResearching things like these take only a bit of time but, IMHO, increase the "realism" of the player's surroundings - which in turn will make the dire things even more scary...

Exactly.

The more "real" and "normal" everything is, the more the "unreal" and the "abby normal" stand out and shock.

I agree. However, this does make me question setting Cthulhu games in the 1920s. Most of my games were in the 1920s - plus some in the 1890s and a few in 1930s through 1940s. Still, there are good reasons to have games set in the present day. Lovecraft generally set his stories in the present day for him, and mostly in his own familiar ("normal") environment of New England.

I've done one-shots of Delta Green and The Laundry, but I feel that making the PCs as government agents is a big shift, and makes things a bit less "real" and "normal". In the future, I'd like to try more Call of Cthulhu set in the present with ordinary civilians as PCs.

I'm also tending more in the direction of modern-day Cthulhu scenarios. However, I prefer to get away from the "crazy cultists doing weird rituals to call on an outer god" type of thing. I take some inspiration from Lu Cixin's Three-Body Problem and thus have the aliens/outer gods supported by a global group of ecoterrorists, which, in a sense, functions like a doomsday cult similar to real-life "climate activists".   These "cultists" would receive extensive funding from big investment companies such as BlackRock and Vanguard, which work on behalf of the aliens/outer gods. Needless to say, the PCs would really have their work cut out for them, especially given the great political clout of Big Capital and the fact that anyone who warns about the alien/outer god threat would be denounced as a "conspiracy theorist".

All these ideas in the last few posts deserve an open source archive if there is none already ofcourse. I might make some material as well, like handouts, mostly gaslight and 1920 for <6e which I'd willingly share. Just an idea, not sure if it's viable or there is interest or if Chaosium would come after me, they seem rather protective of their game and any material published for it.

There are collections of "freeware" adventures and adventure hooks already available on the internet.

101 Call of Cthulhu Adventure Hooks From the Forums of Yog-Sothoth.com
https://www.seiyuu.com/okamoto/gaming/coc_adventure_hooks.pdf

40 Adventures For Call Of Cthulhu Micheal C. LaBossiere
https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1368065916313.pdf

Quote from: Reckall on July 14, 2023, 06:01:13 AM
There are collections of "freeware" adventures and adventure hooks already available on the internet.

101 Call of Cthulhu Adventure Hooks From the Forums of Yog-Sothoth.com
https://www.seiyuu.com/okamoto/gaming/coc_adventure_hooks.pdf

40 Adventures For Call Of Cthulhu Micheal C. LaBossiere
https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1368065916313.pdf

Yeah I found that last one just recently, should be enough for a few years...The hooks are new to me, looks good.

Quote from: Reckall on July 13, 2023, 02:58:46 PM
Usually, a couple of weeks for an adventure 2-3 sessions long. I just love to delve in the period and place - esp. if it is not one of the "usual suspects".

For example, I re-wrote "Under a Winter Snow", a module about the fear of the resurgence of the Spanish Flu in a small town in North Dakota (the idea was good but the development sucked). So, North Dakota in 1919... How was it? I found an incredible amount of photos. Then the culture. The German-American population was still reeling from the treatment they received after the US entered WWI (i.e. concentration camps - something not really remembered). Then we were near Christmas, so I looked for the local traditions. And so on.

The characters were pre-made. Basically, around Christmas 1919, the Mayor of Minot received troubling reports about a mysterious fever killing people in the small town of Eisner, up North. Fearing a resurgence of the flu, he contacts Bismarck (my players were a bit surprised to discover that the capital of ND is called Bismarck). From there they send an anatomopathologist from the Grand Fork University, dr. Lawrence Chambers. Yep, I looked for the best choice in the area and it was Grand Forks. I even found the pictures of the university.

With him the Mayor sends the sheriff, Theodore "Tex" Colbert (I found many pictures of ND sheriffs in 1919-20) and his personal assistant, Elisabeth "Lisa" Hermann to keep a formal record of the events (including taking pictures with a 1919 camera...) Lisa's parents had been held in a concentration camp, and her father had died, shortly after being freed, of "consumption". The player didn't know if this was important or not. It wasn't, but it was a way for her to have an idea of the time and the place.

Basically, I love to surround d the story with elements that give to the players the idea of being "there" in that year. Sometimes you only need a small detail. When they found a letter from the Army about the death of a certain NPC I looked for these letters on the internet and I reconstructed one - including the symbol of the US-AEF at the beginning. It is in Italian but the overall style is simply translated from the original. Researching things like these take only a bit of time but, IMHO, increase the "realism" of the player's surroundings - which in turn will make the dire things even more scary...

Thank you for sharing this! 

I love to do this as well, but usually, it just doesn't play out like this - I usually have a Saturday evening to prepare Sunday's game. Long-term projects always run different, but it's been ages since I've tried to get into a new historical period for gaming. I'm trying now, BTW - with "La piel del toro", the Spanish CoC variant. I will eventually get there, I guess, but at the rate at which I am progressing, it's gonna be my Sunday night game of... 2026?!

I have frequently complained about this on other occasions: "Symbaroum", for example, is a fantasy game that I really like. But the setting-building AP is around 1.000 pages. That's three months of reading before I even have a cursory overview, and a year or two until I'm really proficient with the setting. Like, sure you can run stuff before you read this bible; but those who read the whole thing first are always going to have an advantage. The same goes for modern RQ, or my beloved Stormbringer - not to speak of many older TSR settings that have entire library houses full of content. Like, for me, preparing "Delta Green" for a group of adult gamers, that would be 50 hours of reading Max Hastings' all-encompassing books on the historical backgrounds, 30 hours of watching the different HBO documentaries, ten hours of watching the most famous movies, and ten hours for the ruleset and the actual adventure scenario. That's not a buy-in that I can realistically make, and certainly not on a regular basis.

Like, I recently stumbled over what seemed to be a wonderful Cthulhu adventure, "Pastores", about devil worshippers in medieval France. With Symbaroum, La piel del toro, and maybe some actual D&D stuff ahead, this has all the signs of being the base for an awesome game... For the merry year of 2029.

Quote from: Rafael on July 18, 2023, 07:19:05 AM
Like, for me, preparing "Delta Green" for a group of adult gamers, that would be 50 hours of reading Max Hastings' all-encompassing books on the historical backgrounds, 30 hours of watching the different HBO documentaries, ten hours of watching the most famous movies, and ten hours for the ruleset and the actual adventure scenario. That's not a buy-in that I can realistically make, and certainly not on a regular basis.

Allow me to say that your approach is wrong. I'm saying this both as a published author and a creative writing teacher. Your problem is called "The myth of infinite possibilities" - and it is a recognized problem for the creative mind. Basically, since you can do anything, you make the mistake that you must know everything - with the result that you end up doing nothing.

Start with one thing. In my example, it was North Dakota in 1919 and it was given to me by the module.. Focus on it. You don't need to study all the 50 States to see if some other place is better. Actually, since the places involved are Minot and Eisner, I didn't research Bismarck. I only mentioned it as the capitol and what orders had come from the Governor.

Then, there are simple rules. Basically three.

1) You only need to know in depth the details of the players' surroundings - and maybe of their background.

2) The more "distant" something is, the less detailed it needs to be. If the king of a kingdom is crazy you don't need to detail what he does on an average day. Maybe a character is fined because of his blue cloak - and the king hates blue and has laws against this color. If the characters decide that enough is enough, then the king's habits and the castle's layout become important.

3) Realism is created by small details - including some that are there for flavor. When I rewrote "No Man's Land", set in WWI, I read sone testimony from the American soldiers. Two things became immediately clear: they were normal people, literally like you and me, which were told: "Take this rifle, go to Europe and kill someone." No soldier in the World knows anything beyond his surroundings. Don't study the strategic situation on the Western Front in October 1918. There is an offensive, they survive, night falls and the squad realizes that they are lost in some forest - very possibly full of Germans. That's enough.

I then added, back when they arrive at the frontline, the sight of a long line of soldiers walking slowly with their hand on the shoulder of the one in front of them. "They are people blinded in a gas attack", said a veteran, "Good luck". Believe me, this is enough to bring the players on the Western Front in late 1918 - especially if you are the illiterate son of a farmer from Nebraska with 20% in rifles... For a bit of color, I added another angry veteran who said "President Wilson entered the War because the Boche is winning and the US risk to lose the loans to France and England! Crusade my ass!" He came and went, leaving to the characters what to think...

Quote
Like, I recently stumbled over what seemed to be a wonderful Cthulhu adventure, "Pastores", about devil worshippers in medieval France. With Symbaroum, La piel del toro, and maybe some actual D&D stuff ahead, this has all the signs of being the base for an awesome game... For the merry year of 2029.

I have it but I never read it. Out of curiosity I opened the PDF and put my nose in it. Here are my observations/suggestions:

- It is badly written! What does means:

The Pastores are but the most recent incarnation of a pre-Roman (and indeed pre-Celtic) fertility cult. In prehistoric times, they had commerce with the subterranean civilizations of K'n-Yan (or their European equivalent)?

Uh? It is clear that the Pastores operated in Europe since forever, so that "or their European equivalent" makes no sense. This is already a sign of bad proofreading.

Then we have a Shock and Awe amount of historical info about them that makes little sense (if the Romans almost exterminated the cult, obliterating a vast region in Southern Gallia, why there is no historical record about this? Had the Romans their own Delta Green? This is a cool idea, but you need to be the one who has it, as the module isn't bothered to think beyond its nose).

Then we have a second shock and awe of what seem to be alchemical practices - actually bad cthulhoid stuff. But... was this, to the cult, a form of alchemy? Was "alchemy" a cover story? Why the writers of the module use classic alchemical language but never use the word "alchemy" in it?

[My suggestion here: if you like to research things, look for alchemical symbols on the internet. For example, the image for the Transformatio Passione rite - AKA the first clue for the characters hidden in a hermetic book, can be this one:

https://jahsonic.tumblr.com/image/32879469352 ]

And then we have this gem:

"The entirely fictional Begon county, the Pastores equivalent of Arkham county, lies to the west of the county of Rodez, and north of the county Toulouse."

Begon county isn't fictional. It is near Rodez and Toulouse and I found it in two minutes on Google Earth. Maybe they wanted to say "The setting is a fictional version of the real Begon county." If so, again we have bad editing. If they, instead, wanted a total fictional setting, why to use a real name? They literally devote a box to suggestions about how not to use Begon (just don't use it in the first place, then) or how to explain that the county disappeared from history... except that it is there today! What a mess.

After much, much more shock and awe, we finally get the first scenario. Now, my suggestion is: start with this scenario and stick to it. Don't bother to memorize the rest of the module. From what I read, your hands are already full with even more info. That's all you need. Maybe, between sessions, glance at the immense background of the Pastors. If you find sone thing interesting related to that moment in the game use it.

Something can be used for flavor. Maybe a minor noble has a crest showing two broken Roman gladii. If the characters suspect an involvement from Rome in ancient times only then glance at the part about the Roman invasion of the region. Even here, start small. A buried temple with traces of a battle - maybe a couple of skeletons in Roman armor and traces of... creatures. The rests were not buried because there was a sudden collapse... And this made the Romans miss how the temple hid an entrance to the underworld - but now centuries of erosion are bringing everything up...

See? Have a general knowledge, see things the way your players see, and delve only in what may become important.

BTW, ditch D&D and other systems... or, maybe, get inspiration from the classic "Château d'Amberville" - but only for the atmosphere. This module is already complex enough.

Ooooh! Sorry, @Reckall! Hadn't seen your reply! Will answer once I get a free minute! - Thanks, mate! Te debo una cerveza.

Quote from: blackstone on June 29, 2023, 09:42:25 AM
for scenarios: IMO some of the best ones come out of the series of books detailing "Lovecraft Country": Arkham, Kingsport, Innsmouth, and Dunwich. Not only do they have details of each area and it's surroundings, but each book has several scenarios as well. You could have an entire campaign just within the confines of the Miskatonic Valley.

Which is my current campaign, BTW: those books plus Arkham Unveiled and Miskatonic.

Quote
With that being said the Miskatonic U. book is a must. The '95 book is good, but the one put out in the 2005 is even better.

Word.

The best thing 7E did was "Here is an objectively good evolution of BRP (well, I like it) - but you can adapt 40 years of material on the fly (true: you don't even have to prepare before; you only need to know how to multiply and divide).