It's a horror game set in the 1920s, the era in which Lovecraft wrote most of his work. The game has been around since the 1980s and is generally considered to be one of the classic RPGs and a forerunner of the horror genre, with the 7th edition of the core rules being released in 2013.
Lovecraftian horror is noted for being very bleak. The horrors faced by characters are so powerful,alien and utterly unknowable that the characters rarely survive...if they do, they are often driven insane.
"Sanity" is an actual game statistic in this game. As the player characters encounter more and more horrific creatures and situations, they lose "Sanity points". This results in mental disorders which players have to incorporate into their characters, eventually reaching the point where the characters are unplayable.
This isn't a game about crawling through dungeons, finding treasure and killing the monsters. It is possible to "win", but winning here means staying alive and keeping your mind intact. Running away is a totally acceptable tactic.
I have been running monthly sessions of the game at an open door "meetup" group since early 2011 and ran my last session of the year yesterday. This is a departure point for me of sorts, as next year I'll be stepping away from the 1920s "Classic era"setting to base the games in the "Delta Green" setting in the 1990s. More on that later and in months to come!
With all that said, I thought I'd make my first blog post about my own experiences and thoughts on how it's played out over two years. I would also add that this game has been a big deal for me. I hadn't roleplayed or GMed since the early 1990s, so I was running a game with a lot of rust, and for people who I didn't know at all.
One of the biggest challenges is the monthly meetup format in which I work. The game is open to anyone to join, so when I'm preparing a session I really don't know in advance how many returning players I'll have versus new ones. The good thing about that is that I have to frame my games in such a way that they will work as "one-shot" standalone scenarios, playable in a single 5 hour session. It keeps me on my toes from a storytelling perspective and makes me a better GM...I have to make my game session playable,accessible and downright fun for a newbie as well as someone who's been with me from the start.
The downside to that is the viability of campaigns...I've tried one and it really didn't work. Too many threads in the game get lost with inconsistent player attendance, and with sessions being a month apart it's hard to keep momentum.
I've recently struck a happy medium between the two. I aim now for games that be done in two sessions, but break the story up into significantly different sections so that someone who jumps in on the second part can still feel they played a distinct game.
In future blogs, I'll talk more about GM styles and what my approach is, the different Cthulhu settings, published scenarios that I've run, published ones that I've "tweaked", stuff that I came up with myself,and the non-Cthulhu games that I plan to run.
But next time, we'll talk about the past and how I got into RPGs in the first place.
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