As is my habit, I'm prepping one campaign while running another, as I like to switch games up every year or so. In this case, I'm getting ready for a return to our Call of Cthulhu game that's been waiting, dead but dreaming, while I ran some other games.
I've been wanting to run the classic mega-adventure/mini-campaign Beyond the Mountains of Madness for a long time, based on its reputation and the (I think fantastic) tie-in to Lovecraft's original novella. I mean, your expedition is actually mentioned in the story and the "author" is an NPC foil. Good stuff!
So I've been compiling props and cool handouts like I live to do for Cthulhu games and have been super-psyched.
Until I started closely re-reading it after all these years.
WOW - what a railroad! There are so many parts of this adventure that are set pieces for the PCs to look at, but their participation is purely cosmetic.
Don't step in to rescue the kidnapped NPC? That's okay, he won't be harmed and the PCs will still learn all he knows.
Don't get involved when the saboteurs set fire to the ship? That's okay, the damage isn't severe and everything will proceed according to script.
Call of Cthulhu is always fairly railroady, just by way of usually being a discrete plot and investigation cycle, but DAAAAANG. This actually surpasses DragonLance in "No matter what you do, this story is going forward!"
I want to run this, because there's a lot of cool stuff in there, but it's hard to shake the feeling that I'll be reading a story to my players and pretending they have choices, just to make it work.
On the bright side, this group likes to be lead around by the nose, so they'll probably love it.
Video of actual play:
(https://media.giphy.com/media/otXUdOJgy623e/giphy.gif)
Wasn't it originally a con game? Or series of them, later expanded and published?
By nature, they almost have to be railroads
I don't think it was a con game, but it was prepared as a module with certain expectations of how a Chaosium module was supposed to be. I played in the author's real campaign for a while, which was quite colorful and quite different from the standard CoC assumptions.
Also, I don't agree that con games have to be railroads. They have some restrictions, but they can be very open-ended.
(Organized play con games are different - if they have to be identically run regardless of who the GM is.)
Define railroad.
And actually the Dragonlance modules, least the first few were very open to the point the PCs could through action or inaction crash the setting. and were fairly free to roam about.
Quote from: jhkim;1036000I played in the author's real campaign for a while, which was quite colorful and quite different from the standard CoC assumptions.
Do tell!
Quote from: Omega;1036001And actually
DON'T MANSPLAIN ME IN MY OWN THREAD!
j/k I just wanted to feel all Leftist for a moment.
Quote from: Omega;1036001the Dragonlance modules, least the first few were very open to the point the PCs could through action or inaction crash the setting. and were fairly free to roam about.
DL1 was pretty great, they quickly start telling the DM "Oh no, these PCs and NPCs can't die. Make sure they just look dead, or fall off a cliff onto soft sand, etc." because those PCs have specific plot holes that need filling.
And parts of a song to be sung.
Which always cracked me up, because I knew my players (we were in jr/high school at the time) would have punched me if I tried to force them to sing those duets. Oh lordy...
Horror On the Orient Express was also a huge railroad.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1037005Horror On the Orient Express was also a huge railroad.
Ba Dum Tish!
Thank you everybody, he'll be here all week, remember to try the veal. :D
I run CoC and I've become adept at hiding the railroad tracks at con games. When I encounter them in Chaosium adventures, I will try to weave them into events happening around the PCs. If the adventure calls for the cultists to kill a NPC and for whatever reason, they need to die to keep the adventure going, I will have the PCs return for whatever they were doing to find the NPC already slain. It happened when they were doing whatever and now its tragic and must be avenged.
The morning paper or the town crier are good ways to introduce clues and hide railroad tracks. Whatever you do, never deux ex machina stuff away from PCs. I can get away with that at the start of a scenario for episodic stuff "you awaken to find yourselves tied up in a cold cell", but only at the start of a session. Mid session cutaways seem too jarring and break momentum and immersion.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1037005Horror On the Orient Express was also a huge railroad.
I'm playing now. I am so tired of this game. Can seem to get of the tracks.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1037005Horror On the Orient Express was also a huge railroad.
(https://media.giphy.com/media/SUeUCn53naadO/giphy.gif)
Quote from: Spinachcat;1037253The morning paper or the town crier are good ways to introduce clues and hide railroad tracks. Whatever you do, never deux ex machina stuff away from PCs. I can get away with that at the start of a scenario for episodic stuff "you awaken to find yourselves tied up in a cold cell", but only at the start of a session. Mid session cutaways seem too jarring and break momentum and immersion.
Yeah, that would be way too much. BMM seems to rely on more "this thing unfolds like this, so whatever the PCs do is window dressing" moments than I like, especially since it seems to be aiming for a dramatic moment that pretty much tells the GM "this bad thing needs to happen even if the PCs try to avoid it", which kinda sucks. There's a lot of great stuff in the campaign, but it definitely looks like some shenanigans are required to make it work.
Aren't most CoC adventure/campaigns railroads?
Quote from: Haffrung;1037315Aren't most CoC adventure/campaigns railroads?
I think one reason that
Masks of Nyarlathotep has enjoyed such a high reputation for so many years is that, unlike a lot of the other "epic" CoC campaigns, it avoids the trap of becoming a railroad.
Quote from: Haffrung;1037315Aren't most CoC adventure/campaigns railroads?
More the campaigns than the adventures. The adventures often have a timetable when NPCs will do X unless stopped, or X happens in response to PC action Y. The adventures which have "X must happen" are usually easy enough to engineer without the PCs feeling minimized. And I'm not even sure that counts as a railroad.
But CoC campaigns are worlds less railroady than organized play campaigns like Adventurer's League or Pathfinder Society.
Yeah, the problem (if it's a problem) with Beyond the Mountains of Madness is that it's a mega-adventure/mini-campaign. Really, it's probably more my issue than my players'. Most of them will eat it up, while inside it eats me up.
Quote from: darthfozzywig;1037337Most of them will eat it up, while inside it eats me up.
That's a recipe for disaster.
Go medieval on that campaign until it does what you want and makes you happy.
Here's the thing: the significant majority of the most famous CoC adventures were railroads to one degree or another. It's just that they were so well designed that they still worked, usually spectacularly well.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1037632Here's the thing: the significant majority of the most famous CoC adventures were railroads to one degree or another. It's just that they were so well designed that they still worked, usually spectacularly well.
Agreed. And this group is good at following the railroad tracks.
Quote from: Spinachcat;1037343That's a recipe for disaster.
Go medieval on that campaign until it does what you want and makes you happy.
Also agreed. I'll probably run it largely as-written, but I'm prepared to let it all burn if they passively sit around or catastrophically screw up.
When I ran this group through the deceptively-named
Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, I was more than prepared to let the world be destroyed in the event of failure, and that made it interesting.
Published scenarios are usually written as railroads, to a greater or lesser extent, or are written as resources that can be used/slotted into a campaign.
If you have a set of linked scenarios in a supplement, then there is an assumption that thescenarios have probably followed a very rough path, so they can be used together. If you have an NPC in the first scenario who is also in the fourth scenario, PCs killing the NPC in the first scenario would affect the fourth scenario in actual play, so the GM should adapt the fourth scenario accordingly. Sometimes, the linked scenarios will have a box of text mentioning what would happen if the NPC has been killed, but for complex linked scenarios this would be very distracting.
Quote from: soltakss;1037781Published scenarios are usually written as railroads, to a greater or lesser extent, or are written as resources that can be used/slotted into a campaign.
Well, yes, but that 'greater or lesser' extent is a very wide spectrum. What I mean is that old-school D&D adventures, the old TSR ones for example, rarely had more railroading than "here's the dungeon, you're going there".
The CoC adventures had a lot more than that because of the need for investigation, etc. And the amazing thing is how many of them did it very well; because almost every other RPG line that had that level of railroading produced adventures that were at best highly unmemorable.