Chimerical Realm

  New Year, New Character   Day 17   Call of Cthulhu  Call of Cthulhu (CoC) is one of oldest, most famous, and venerable RPG's out there.  Even if you haven't played it, you know about it. Inspired by the writings of horror author H.P. Lovecraft, CoC takes the players into the world of weird horror. They play investigators of the mysterious, bizarre, and unknown. While horror has always been one of the keystones of RPG's--even Blackmoor had "Sir Fang," the vampire--few tackled with anything resembling the care and precision of CoC. This was no casual horror adventure, where the monster was slain and the heroes moved on.  Rather, battling the "Cthulhu mythos" would cost the PC's their lives, their careers, and even their sanity.  To some, it can come across as overly dark and nihilistic. Why bother finding out what the mysterious statue represents, or what happened to the eccentric artist cousin of yours, if all you were going to find was death an...

Alone Against the Tide I’ve been on a bit of a “solo module” kick lately. They’re a very different take on Solo gaming than what I’m used to, but still a number of them are really fun. For some reason, Call of Cthulhu seems to have a good number of these, and most of them are really solid. Which shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. A lone investigator confronting horrors Man Was Not Meant To Know is far more in the Lovecraftian wheelhouse than, say, “disparate team of mercenaries, spies, Occult Scholars and the idle rich put aside their differences to save the world.” One of the newer ones I haven’t had a chance to play yet is Alone Against the Tide by Nicholas Johnson. It’s gotten some great reviews and sounds like a classic setup. The PC is sent to the small town of Esbury, Massachusetts following the death of Professor William Harris. The rules only require the 7 th Edition Quick Start Rules (available Here ) and the player creates their PC during the module.  T...

Last night, I finally got to play a GMless game. Ever since I started Solo Role-playing, I've been particularly fascinated with this variation of "standard" role-playing.  To put it simply, it's a "group solo" style game, where multiple players come together and use an Oracle rather than a GM to tell a, for lack of a better term, emergent story. It's obviously a bit of an odd duck, but one that is pretty well documented and supported with the base Mythic game. Since I love both traditional roleplaying as well as Solo, this seemed to be an excellent method to combine the two.  Plus, there's something to be said for an utterly zero-prep style of game.  Well, I managed to rope in a long-time friend of mine, D. He's been an off and on gamer for years, both as a player and as a GM. He's read along some of my Solo AP's, so it wasn't a completely alien concept to him. He still wasn't sure that he "got" it, but was will...