CoC has a good number of excellent published scenarios and campaigns, and might be considered a tougher game to create homebrew adventures for than some others. What's your experience with your group's mix of running published vs home-made? Is it a headache for the Keeper to find the time or creativity to craft compelling games?

I haven't run CoC in a few years, but when I did, I almost exclusively wrote my own scenarios. The published stuff is great, but I often find trying to adapt prefab scenarios to my players to be more trouble than it's worth. Plus, I almost exclusively ran my games in the modern era, and there was so little support for that.

Quote from: The_Shadow;1021541Is it a headache for the Keeper to find the time or creativity to craft compelling games?

The players in the groups I've been in have made the effort more than worth the Keeper's time creating the sessions.

We've done a lot of both. Maybe 50-50.

It was a challenge to me, because of course I love to make my own adventures, and the occult is an area where I shine; but CoC also has some of the very best adventures ever, and some of them were too good to resist.

I tend to write my own adventures for The Laundry but use  some professionally written scenarios for Call of Cthulhu especially when I'm running at conventions. Should the scenarios not be widely available I run them RAW but if they happen to be published thus and widely available I always modify them to provide a fresh approach for investigators.

I have done both--I wrote most of the material for a campaign set in ancient Rome, as Invictus had just been published and I had some ideas.  But even there I also plugged in some of the material from the Arrius Lurco campaign.  I also wrote a 1920's scenario set in Romania based on some things I had seen there.  On the other hand, I have also run published scenarios for 1920's in an attempt to solve the central Keeper's problem of Masks, which is that it opens with "You are all good friends of Jackson Elias."  About midway through, the players will really begin to ask two questions--"How the h--l did that catastrophe of letting Jackson Elias into our lives happen." and then, midway up a mountain, "Just how close of a friend was this Elias, anyway?"

I have never found it particularly hard to write scenarios--as I read things, I ask what supernatural or "Mythos twist" could be given to the material to make a scenario.  I also ask, in reading any fiction that looks promising in that regard, (and some history in the case of the Romans) what happened before and after the narrative discussed in the work.  Those two questions usually lead to a plausible if not great scenario for me.

Quote from: wombat1;1022087I have done both--I wrote most of the material for a campaign set in ancient Rome, as Invictus had just been published and I had some ideas.  But even there I also plugged in some of the material from the Arrius Lurco campaign.  I also wrote a 1920's scenario set in Romania based on some things I had seen there.  On the other hand, I have also run published scenarios for 1920's in an attempt to solve the central Keeper's problem of Masks, which is that it opens with "You are all good friends of Jackson Elias."  About midway through, the players will really begin to ask two questions--"How the h--l did that catastrophe of letting Jackson Elias into our lives happen." and then, midway up a mountain, "Just how close of a friend was this Elias, anyway?"

I never had this problem.

I play in an irregular CoC campaign and the Keeper custom creates all his content (Set in early 20th century London).

However, based on discussions, he puts in a LOT of prep work, multiple evenings of prep work for a play session and he spends a fair amount of time AFTER a session integrating what happened in a session.

When asking when the next session is, he usually says he's still working in details for the campaign.

It IS a fun campaign and has lots of historical data, nice printed handouts, detailed NPCs and covers a lot of what we do and intend to do all ready done.

He DOES enjoy running CoC and we all enjoy playing it, as he is also  great at RP and generally running RPGs.
But it also means sessions are irregular, as he does so much prep work and after session work.

Compare this to his DnD 5e gaming sessions where there's not much prep and regular sessions for his group.

So yeah, CoC seems to need a lot of prep for a Keeper, particularly if they use their own content.

I intended to just use published materials for my CoC game, but when I started my group into Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, I realized what a CF of a campaign that is. Some good ideas and NPCs in there, but it's really a big mess just blobbed together. I ended up reworking up a lot more of it than I intended.

Really tempted to run Beyond the Mountains of Madness sometime, though.

I run my own CoC adventure creations 90% of the time, but Chaosium books are great for idea mining.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1022430I never had this problem.

Perhaps not but think of the mountain whereof I speak, and add the detail that my players live and (don't) die by the motto "He who flees first, flees best," and it becomes a very logical question to worry about.

Quote from: wombat1;1022613Perhaps not but think of the mountain whereof I speak, and add the detail that my players live and (don't) die by the motto "He who flees first, flees best," and it becomes a very logical question to worry about.

Well, fleeing is not always a bad idea in CoC (having a 95% in a firearm skill plus some dynamite is a better one); but ultimately any campaign depends on having a certain amount of buying-in on the part of the players.

You could just as easily have a D&D group where the players decide they don't want to go to the Cave of Chaos because it's dangerous.