Building from my collection of mythos-related games and book, as well as my interest in integrating props into tabletop games, I’ve gradually developed a fondness for displaying my collection. In some areas it’s modest, in other areas less so. I have dubbed this constantly evolving display my Shelf of Madness.
And I’ve recently taken to creating some props and display pieces of my own.
I’ve posted pictures of some of these items here and there, and I’ve gotten a few requests for a more detailed description of some items, where they are from, etc. So I figured I could start posting some of that here as well. That way when I post some new acquisition or creation and someone sees something in the background, I’ll have a place where I can point them to check out what’s in the collection.
You can see all the posts describing the Shelf of Madness here.
This series of posts discusses some of the existing games set in the Cthulhu Mythos that are currently popular and why I’m not just playing one of these games.
In Part 1, I looked at two major board/card games, Mansions of Madness and Arkham Horror: The Card Game. Both of these games place a large emphasis on meta gaming over making story- or character-based decisions. Both also suffer from a lack of player options due to the lack of a GM. There’s a lot to learn from these games, but they just don’t offer the gameplay I’m looking for.
So now let’s look at those mythos games that have a GM and place a higher priority on story- and character-driven decision-making: Roleplaying games. In other words…
Why not just play an existing roleplaying game?
To some extent, what I ultimately want to do is play a roleplaying game like Call of Cthulhu, but some changes are necessary to be able to play with my family in a way we’ll all enjoy. And I think some of these changes can actually provide a novel way of dealing with some of the challenges that frequently come up in investigative roleplaying games.
First, I should provide a little background. While I’ve played a few different RPGs over the past 20+ years, I’ve also studied a great many more to varying degrees while I worked on my last project. Most recently, the two systems I have focused on most over the past few years are Burning Wheel and Fate Core. I’ll talk more about these two systems and how they factor into my plans later, but for now I’m going to focus on three of the most popular Cthulhu Mythos roleplaying games currently on the market.
CoC 7th Ed (Image taken from the Chaosium website)
Let’s start with the granddaddy of mythos gaming: Call of Cthulhu (CoC).
Thousands of players have shared stories of great/horrific times they’ve had playing this game. A big part of my goal is to be able to have similar experiences with my family and make use of the decades of content available for this game. CoC essentially created the standards by which most mythos games are judged. The integration of sanity and madness into RPGs largely started with this game, and it will be a big inspiration for me moving forward. I backed the 7th Edition Kickstarter and would be happy to own just about anything released for this game. That said, there are a few things about the system that I’m just not a fan of.
First of all, at its core CoC really just uses a standard, traditional RPG system (Basic Roleplaying, BRP). The elements of the system that actually reinforce mythos or investigation themes are just bolted on. Sanity has been continuously refined over the years and is fairly well developed at this point, but there is very little to this system that actually relates to investigative gameplay. In fact, about the only element of the system that specifically relates to investigating some sort of mystery is the Idea roll. And to be honest, I hate the Idea roll.
On its face, the Idea roll is a fairly good… idea. It was created to solve a problem that can come up in lots of RPGs and can be especially prevalent in investigative games: For whatever reason, the players can’t figure out what to do next to advance the story. So they roll some dice to get a hint from the GM (or Keeper, if you prefer). It’s really not a bad solution, but it’s just not a solution I like. To me, it feels like a band-aid slapped on a hole – one that shouldn’t exist or at least should be subjected to better treatment.
So this is one reason I don’t want to play CoC as written: The one element of the system that is really tied to an investigative game is a mechanic I don’t personally like. The other big reasons are also ultimately an issue of personal preference: I don’t like the dice or the basic mechanics.
As I have played and studied games over the years, I have learned a few things about what I like and what I don’t. I don’t like systems that use lots of different size of dice (d4, d6, d10, etc.). I don’t like percentile dice. I don’t like roll-under systems. I’m not really sure why, as rationally I see some value in a percentile mechanic being easy to explain, but I’m just not a fan of these types of systems.
I’m also actively trying to minimize the recordkeeping and math the players have to deal with. This is partly because I know many players – and especially my kids – don’t want to deal with this. It’s also because I have a tendency to put together things that others feel are too complex, so I’m continuously trying to guard against that. I’m honestly not too sure how successful I’ll be on that front, but one look at a CoC character sheet with fractional values is a turn off.
Another thing that initially concerned me about CoC was the setting – specifically the time period. While there is a wealth of content out there covering decades, even centuries, the bulk of CoC is centered in the 1920s. As I have written elsewhere, the big reason I stopped working on my last project was that the setting was so foreign that my family – especially my kids – would have a hard time playing in it. When I decided to pivot to a mythos game, I decided to stick with a modern setting so my kids would be able to easily find their footing. However, having already run a test game set in the 20s (the Peru Prologue for Masks of Nyarlathotep), I’m thinking that this won’t be much of an issue. The setting is still familiar, and the other elements I’m introducing to the gameplay help ensure the players don’t ever feel lost.
ToC (Image taken from the Pelgrane website)
Next up is a game that retooled the basic CoC concepts and integrated them into a system specifically designed for investigative roleplaying: Trail of Cthulhu (ToC).
In my view, there are three major advantages of ToC when compared to CoC. First, clues and investigation are built into the system from the ground up. Second, sanity and horror are further refined to better portray the nuances that exist in mythos fiction. Third, the game offers adjustments to players and GMs depending on whether they want to play a more action-driven, pulpy game or a more classic, purist game.
Bottom line: There is a lot to learn from ToC’s approach, and I expect to lean heavily on it. However, there is one major element of it that I just don’t like. The system resolves the problem of “what if the players roll badly and don’t find the clue?” by making discovering clues nearly automatic. As long as the character is in the right place and is using the right skill, the clue will be found. It builds on this by also incorporating a spend mechanic that allows a player to spend points to uncover additional clues or information. This is where the game loses me.
There are two reasons for this. First, it smacks of encouraging a meta approach to the game. It becomes less about what the character would do in that situation and more about how many points you have available. I’ve seen players complain that the game just becomes an exercise in traveling to a location and reciting a list of skills. That’s something a GM should be able to overcome, but the fact that the system can effectively encourage this line of thought is a problem. Second, this approach robs the GM and players of an opportunity created by failed rolls. One longstanding challenge of many, more traditional RPG systems is what happens when the characters need something to advance the story but fail the roll that was to provide them with it. This automatic-success, point-spend system resolves that issue, but there is a way I find far more interesting.
As seen in games like Burning Wheel and Fate, a failed roll could mean that the character does not get what he was after – but it can also mean the character gets what he wanted with some sort of additional complication or twist. Not only does this ensure the story always advances in some way, it also creates great opportunities to take the story in a new direction. For me, there’s just too much potential to ignore. So I know that many players have had success with ToC’s mechanics, but they’re not for me.
Delta Green (Image taken from the Delta Green website)
When I decided to start working on a mythos game set in the modern day, I naturally took a hard look at another major mythos roleplaying game: Delta Green (DG).
Of course, DG also uses a percentile system, so that was an immediate issue for me. One element the system really has going for it is the integration of investigators’ ties to the outside world – their family, friends, and colleagues. This is one of the most commonly cited parts of the system that make it stand out, and an idea I may end up borrowing from.
Ultimately, a major reason I decided to not just play DG was the setting. To me, it feels like a pulp version of the Cthulhu Mythos (or maybe the first Hellboy movie) married to the X-Files. Now don’t get me wrong, that sounds awesome and is something I’d like to play. I could probably get my wife excited about a game like that. I may end up exploring this setting further, but for my immediate goals it just places too much emphasis on the government conspiracy angle. A common element to cosmic horror investigative roleplaying is that the player characters are everyday people. That’s an element I want to keep, at least as a starting point, so a game that starts from the assumption that the characters are government agents isn’t quite what I’m looking for.
Wrapping Up
So that covers some of the reasons why I’m not just going to play one of these RPGs, but there are other reasons too – reasons not tied to the specific system used by a particular game, but that are generally common to roleplaying games across the board. I’ll explore those more in the next post, which will hopefully shed more light on why what I’m envisioning is a little different.
This series of posts is going to discuss some of the existing games set in the Cthulhu Mythos that are currently popular and why I’m not just playing one of these games. To be fair, I actually am playing some of them and have great opinion of the others, but they just don’t fit what I want to play with my family – at least not on their own. I also touched on some of this in my last post (Background and Early Concept), but this will explore the issues in a bit more detail. Beware that this point could conceivably contain some minor spoilers related to some of these games.
Of course, there are numerous mythos-themed games on the market right now. Specifically, I’m looking to play a game that embraces the cosmic horror of Lovecraft’s mythos, as well as the investigative gameplay suggested in numerous mythos fiction and brought to gaming most notably through Call of Cthulhu. With this in mind, quite a few games are ruled out, particularly those where players take the role of cults, Great Old Ones, etc.
Roleplaying, Board, and Card Games
The mythos games I actually play most often are those produced by Fantasy Flight Games, specifically Mansions of Madness (MoM) and Arkham Horror: The Card Game (AHTCG). I’ve played the original Arkham Horror board game (and have the latest edition preordered). I’ve also played both editions of MoM, and while I mainly play the second edition these days, I expect to draw some inspiration from the first edition as well. Needless to say, Fantasy Flight Games has made a fair amount of money off me.
Likely the biggest reason that I play these games more often than others is that they can actually be played solo. This is a huge advantage in making these games accessible for easy play, but it also results in some drawbacks which I’ll come back to in a moment.
As with most of FFG’s games set in the mythos, both of these games derive their difficulty from a combination of time pressure and trying to make the most efficient use of available character actions. While this works to help realize the overwhelming odds the character’s face, it also results in every game feeling similar in many ways. It also strongly encourages a very meta-based approach to playing the game, which tends to discourage any roleplaying or attachment to characters. It also makes the game much less accessible to the people that are less avid gamers.
Mansions of Madness (image taken from the FFG website)
Between these two games, Mansions of Madness is the most detailed. Each scenario includes rooms or buildings the investigators can explore in detail, there are detailed clues that must be pieced together, and it is probably the closest board games currently get to a Call of Cthulhu type of investigation. However, the fact that each scenario is limited to a single location is a major drawback. There is one level of detail, and the level of complexity that can exist within a single location is very limited. There is no campaign of any kind, nor any character development. While it might be theoretically possible to link related scenarios together, each occurring at a separate location, this has not been implemented and would also create some other issues.
Mansions of Madness also tends to be fairly straightforward in the win-or-lose department – even to the point that it sometimes departs from what would make sense in a mythos story. For example, I played a scenario in which the investigators had to locate some information and then escape town by boat. This is generally considered one of the most challenging scenarios in the base game and involves exploring an area around the docks to find what you need while evading wave after wave of enemies. I played using three investigators, and managed to get two of them and the information to the boat. I had used one investigator to lure the enemies away and create an opening to the boat for the others. Due to some poor in-game text it was not obvious that I had to get everyone out, so the remaining investigator was not in a good spot. Nevertheless, I managed to get him to the docks, which were now surrounded. Using a lantern he started a fire that cleared the docks of enemies so the others could escape, but died in the process. Now in terms of mythos fiction, this would probably be considered a “good” ending – one character sacrifices himself to save the others and ensure they escape with information necessary to save the world – but in MoM this was just ruled a loss.
In MoM, there are standard actions that are always available to characters, and occasionally some scenario-specific actions, but the players are always limited to just a handful of predetermined actions. I also decided to try playing a scenario using my work-in-progress system in place of the basic mechanics to see if it would work. While successful, this experiment also made me realize something else about the game: It involves a LOT of rolling. Once each scenario gets to a certain point, you’re making a minimum of 1-2 rolls per investigator every turn. Once I realized this, I felt like this was just rolling because the system said so, not because of anything that happened in the fiction. The game does a fair job of providing flavor text to justify the rolls, but once you notice this issue, it’s hard to ignore.
Finally, the game is actually very atmospheric. Employing a modular board composed of individual rooms, streets, and other locations, lots of different types of environments can be created. The required app provides sound effects and visuals which work well. Most importantly, the fact that the board is revealed a little at a time does a great job of adding to the suspense and mystery of the game.
Arkham Horror TCG (image taken from the FFG website)
Arkham Horror: The Card Game handles some things better than MoM, but that comes with some tradeoffs. Rather than a modular board, AHTCG uses cards to represent locations (as well as most other things). This use of cards allows for a much broader variety of locations in terms of scale. In one scenario, each location could be a single room in a house. In another, each location could be a different building or area in a town, or even an alien environment on the other side of a strange gateway. This gives the game significantly more flexibility compared to MoM and is one of its biggest strengths.
The other nice thing about AHTCG is that it is designed from the beginning to support campaign play. The players’ actions in one scenario can actually have an impact in later scenarios, eventually building to a conclusion at the end of the campaign. There is also a degree of character customization and development. There’s a lot of potential here, and some interesting story lines can be experienced, but there is a downside that prevents the game from delivering the kind of investigative experience I’m looking for: A decided lack of detail.
Similar to MoM, players are limited to a fairly standard set of predetermined actions. More actions can open up through development, but their abstract nature means they are usually chosen for their mechanical affect on the meta side of the game, rather than for any roleplay-based reason. Far more problematic is that both typical character actions and clues are even more abstract. Exploring a location to obtain clues doesn’t get any more detailed than that. There is no mention of what the character is doing at the location, nor is there any mention as to what the clues are – they’re just tokens. The game ends up boiling down to acquiring clue tokens in order to advance a deck to progress the story before something bad happens. Since there is no detail to the clues, there is very little sense of mystery or investigation.
The game also employs a set of tokens in a cup or bag instead of the usual dice. While this does allow probabilities and effects to be altered from one scenario to the next, I personally don’t like token-based systems. They just don’t feel as random/balanced, and I seem to get the same tokens repeatedly. It may just be a psychological thing, but it’s a big turn off for me.
Ultimately, both of these games in their current forms suffer from a shared limitation: Players choice is severely limited. The game and setting cannot adapt to whatever ideas the players may come up with, so players are forced to stick to a narrow set of options. Essentially, it is railroading to its fullest. Without a GM or similar role, there just isn’t much of an alternative. The lack of a GM opens up some doors in terms of solo play, but in my opinion it’s just not a good trade.
There’s a lot of good ideas in these games – as well as a few others – that I plan to steal borrow, but on their own they just don’t provide enough of what I’m looking for.
Why not just play an existing roleplaying game?
This got a bit long, so I decided to split this up into a series of posts. In the next post, I’ll look at some of the main mythos roleplaying games.
Before I start posting details about my mythos gaming project, I’m just going to post a quick list of the various games and products that are serving as inspiration and sources for the game:
