Off the Shelf: Call of Cthulhu

I had this game stored and never thought I would return to it. However, my recent interest in Runequest led me to dig it out, and there is a reason this is the second most-played game behind D&D.

Horror games are fantastic.

5E absolutely cannot do horror.

The Alien RPG by Free League is my other horror game, but nothing beats the Lovecraftian classics. Nothing will come close to this game, except maybe Vaesen by Free League. But these are world-ending horrors, Cthulhu himself and other society-eating, world-crushing, madness-incusing things from beyond the veil of reality.

This does modern-era gaming and the 1920s, just like its superset sister game, Basic Roleplaying. CoC has the madness rules, ancient lore, the artifacts, and all the spooky horrors that turn a seemingly ordinary small town in the middle of nowhere into a frightening experience of sheer terror.

The beauty of this game is that any situation can be played entirely normal, and then when the world turns upside-down, what was once safe and familiar becomes a no-man's land of strange cosmic horror.

I once had a scenario in a small Nebraska town where the investigators investigated a series of mysterious cattle deaths. They had a packed town hall meeting in the local church, which dragged on into the night. A small group got tired of the pointless meeting and said there was no threat. It was wild dogs, and they left to go to their cars.

When the meeting ended, the first out discovered the group that had left, sans heads, lying in the street.  They never made it to their cars. The clouds in the sky were strangely moving like snakes.

And all the guns were in the general store three blocks away.

And the only one with the keys to the gun safe was lying in the street. Oh yeah, you are screwed, and those guns will not likely do you any good.

That was a long night.

Until they realized what was under the church.

No X-card is saving you. You saw the sign-up sheet's "what can happen" reverse safety tool and agreed. I am an old-school "eff-er" DM. I will happily bore you, twist the situation on its head, make you fear for your lives, and then unfairly pull the rug out from under you. I will replace a party member with a doppelganger and never tell the player until their character bursts open into gory tentacles.

If I pull things back or say, "I'm sorry," I am not doing my job. People who play with me come to enjoy a specific type of no-limits experience. This is like popping John Carpenter's The Thing into the Blu-Ray player.

You are in a horror game.

This is what you paid admission to see.

Basic Roleplaying Solves the Runequest Problem

I see many reviews of Runequest from a few years ago that say the game is too tightly tied to the setting, and they wish it wasn't. Most complaints are from those who did not use the setting but liked the rules. Mythras, the BRP fork supported by the creators of Runequest 6, solves the problem by creating a set of rules not tied to a world.

I like Runequest 7 being tightly tied to the setting, making the game different and unique. I am tired of the cookie-cutter, planar-linked, faux-modern, non-colonial, neo-Renaissance, Harry Potter meets pop-culture settings that Wizards puts out, and they are all the same at this point. Baldurs Gate 3 takes the entire D&D genre into sci-fi, and it is hard to call anything D&D fantasy these days. Call them Spelljammers, but they are starships, and most D&D settings are now wannabe sci-fi settings that force characters to start as primitive stick-using townspeople.

There is so much sci-fi in fantasy these days. This Conan meets Buck Rogers stuff gets tiring, and all it serves to do is put every genre in a blender and press the highest number on the machine to create flavorless multi-genre scop paste.

The science-fantasy fad also subconsciously tells every fantasy character, "You are a low-intelligence primitive." It is the designer's way of describing the audience as inferior for wanting to play fantasy archetypes and is also colonialist in theme. Fear not, stupid barbarians and primitive peoples of the world! The space people are here! Sorry, our cleaning robot killed you. Don't kill yourself figuring out our space artifacts!

Sci-fi in fantasy, unless this is the game when it starts, sideswipes the players and their expectations and feels like the DM and module writer talking down to the players.

And how do you return to caring about the everyday fantasy world when you know UFOs are out there? Do I care that the Black Knight ruined the King's celebration? Am I mad that the Dark Elf raided the Border Keep? Do I care about the lost island? We need to rescue the princess, but we really want to be chasing aliens.

I have never had a fantasy campaign recover from a sci-fi incursion.

And frankly, Gamma World is a better mix of the genres. Post-apocalyptic is the place to be for mixed sci-fi and fantasy, and it does the genre the best, with mutations as the power source. You belong here, and the great mystery is figuring out what happened to the world and who the ancients were.

Dungeon Crawl Classics does it right, too. The sci-fi elements are so crazy and strange that they are alien and unrelatable. You are not getting a "Star Trek" ship that is more civilized than you up there, with a crew teleporting down and telling the characters what primitives they are.

Runequest is pure bronze-age high fantasy, with even everyday people using magic. You think "everyone knows magic" as something that blows out the game world, but it works here with a heightened sense of spiritualism and magic being a part of life. The magic is minor and more like charms or incantations, something used to help clean a room, like the old AD&D cantrips. In 5E, cantrips became "laser" attack spells like a video game (and fell into the 'why take anything else' category). In AD&D, they were minor incantations, like magic tricks, with no combat use.

If I were using Runequest for a generic fantasy game, I would use the old Basic Roleplaying game 'Big Yellow Book' before using Runequest since the assumption that 'everyone knows magic' is nonexistent. These days, we have even better...

The only answer here is the same one that was true back then as it is now: the Basic Fantasy Game is the generic d100 system for non-RQ fantasy, and it always was. These days, we have an ORC-licensed system ready to expand upon and use, and it works out of the box for generic fantasy, high to low. It also works in Gamma World-style settings.

But letting Runequest be Runequest is a strength. I love runes and passions as part of the character. I love the tight tying to tribe, cult, and family. No other game does this! Let the game's systems reflect the world, culture, and experience of living there.

BRP is for everything else except Cthulhu. BRP is designed as a toolkit and fits better as a generic fantasy starting point. And the starting point is an excellent way to describe it since fantasy games are always better when the generic part is tossed out, and the group adds their ideas and magic to the system.

Mythras is also a great option if you go off-Chaosium, and they have a classic fantasy supplement if you want less Bronze Age and more high fantasy. Yes, the font size is small, and I use a PDF on a tablet (and I bought reading glasses). Hopefully, when this team goes ORC license, they reprint the book with a larger font.

The BRP-like d100 systems are a great place to play and are also very compatible with each other.

BRP is the best thing to happen to all of Chaosium's games since it takes the 'universal system' pressure off them. This also allows Runequest and Call of Cthulhu to be their own thing, with system-specific game rule extensions. This also sets the model for your worlds and creations, inviting you to build subsystems to add to the game.

I love GURPS, but with Chaosium games, the parts unique to the world are essential to the flavor and play of the game. You need to flip optional rules in GURPS to get the same thing, but there is a freedom in BRP that allows the designers to customize the game for the setting—and it invites you to do the same.

Wargaming Roots: Wargame Complexity

A fun little snip on the design of the Tunnels and Trolls Adventures mobile game's "about" page strikes an interesting point here about the development of pen-and-paper games and the hobby's wargaming roots:

In 1975, as role-playing games were beginning their rise to popularity among the gaming community, Ken St. Andre found himself dissatisfied by the complexity and inaccessibility which rules systems of other games presented newcomers to the genre. Seeking a game with which to introduce his friends to the world of interactive storytelling, Ken set out to create a lighter and more flexible rules system which would provide players with greater latitude for heroic feats. He did away with the often times dauntingly complex stat sheets and tables found in the wargames from which the first RPG was descended, and created a game more inspired by the deeds of comic book superheroes. Ultimately, Ken named his game Tunnels & Trolls.

We have come a long way from the Chainmail "wargame" style rules to a more player-focused and I feel accessible B/X style, and then from there I feel we went deep into the wargaming side of the hobby again with D&D 3rd and 3.5 Edition, Pathfinder, D&D 4, and then D&D 5. Our wargame roots are clearly on display and this has spawned an entire group of games these days that are more accessibility focused than complex wargame focused.

More Complex These Days?

In some ways, I feel we are way beyond the complexity of the 1970's wargame-roots games, especially with Pathfinder, D&D 4, and software like Hero Lab. D&D 5 I feel took a step back from the abyss, but I still feel the older B/X games and their clones do a better job at controlling complexity and focusing the action more on the adventure rather than the character.

Some products make me smile, like the Pathfinder Strategy Guide, a great book that tries to tamp down the complexity of the base game, explain things to beginners, and make a complex system easy to use. But really, when I think about it, I get this feeling if the effort were put into making the system easier and not needing a book like this would be a more laudable goal. Games that are simple and accessible to beginners do not need how-to books.

Part of me likes the complicated game though, and there are fans of this hyper-detailed genre of gaming, again, hearkening back to our wargaming roots and having detailed World War II wargmaes with rules for jammed turret rings, smoke capacity, the ammunition capacity and depression limits of of bow-mounted tank machineguns. I have played wargames like those, and while the one or two times that level of detail comes up in a 6-hour game you may be happy to have these rules, more often than not I find rules like this slow the game down more than they do add value.

I feel the same with detailed character generation systems. Our tendency as designers is to add more, to make options for every possible character type and background, and through universal inclusivity we weigh the system down so much we end up needing multiple pages for one character. Genesys requires three sides of paper for each character, and that has hurt our desire to play what should have been a simple storytelling game. Pathfinder, the king of complexity, requires Hero Lab these days, and it is not uncommon for us to be printing out six to twelve sides of paper for each character.

Less is More

And I look at the single-sided one-page character sheets of Labyrinth Lord and other B/X games and I see a lot of wasted space, and that is a good thing. I could do a B/X character on a quarter sheet of paper and put four to a side and still have plenty of room. Back in old-school Traveller we put one character on two lines of a sheet of notebook paper.

We still had fun with those games because we ran fun adventures and we didn't need detailed character essays for each player to pour over. I get this strange feeling at times that games use complexity to drive interest these days, that somehow a detailed character generation system makes up for a lack of compelling adventures and stories. That is really an unfair statement for many games, but I see so many games that are 90% character creation systems and then assume everything else, story, adventure, and how to have fun comes for free.

I would rather play a game that was 10% character creation and 90% story and background. Call of Cthulhu and Dragon Age are good examples of modern pen-and-paper games that minimize the game rules while maximizing story content and background information. I would put T&T in this category as well, especially with the incredible world-book in the Tunnels and Trolls Deluxe Edition in the latest version of the rules.

B/X and Labyrinth Lord? These are more giant toyboxes with 10% character design and the rest of the 90% are monster, spell, and magic item lists. That toybox content is the story and background. There are times when I like this, since I make my own stories and worlds anyways, and other times when I miss having that world and story to play through (and save me the work).

How far off are the more modern games from the toybox model? It is a bit tougher to judge I feel, since you have a good portion of these games tied up in character design and it grows in size the more books you add to the system. My generic rule is: if a computer program makes character creation easy and error free, the character design system is heavy. If it takes me more than 5 minutes and a sheet of paper to design a character that is too long.

If you need to pass a book around the table for players to design characters you have dependencies in there that should be streamlined onto the character sheet (or eliminated from the game). If I play Pathfinder with a group again I would love to have class-specific character sheets, one for paladins, one for rogues, and so on...

Everything to Everybody?

It brings to mind the question, "How much character design do you need to tell a story?" There is a point where there is too much, where you are making a feat to cover a bonus to every possible action and interaction, such as a feat that allows you to call a truce during combat. These sorts of feats rub me the wrong way in two ways: this is codifying roleplaying and creativity, and you are adding unneeded complexity to the character design system. Without this feat...you can't roleplay this? When I am refereeing the game it becomes another added "thing I have to remember" in order to play when the one character in a thousand's player actually bought this feat and expects it to come into play.

In T&T or B/X? Hell, make a CHR saving roll or roll under Charisma at a minus whatever and we are done. In most every other game it is an ability score roll, the current situation, and referee judgment. Done.

In the 1970's wargames there was this tendency to start simple, and then balloon complexity with each new expansion and revision. Track performance in taiga and mud for armored vehicles. Fuel performance and ambient temperature. Snowshoe size versus snow type. Curvature of the Earth and muzzle velocity of off-board artillery. Most of the rules had some historical event behind them and they probably affected the outcome of some real-world battle somewhere...but there is a point where enough is enough.

If I equip my desert soldiers with snowshoes does that give them a movement bonus? If my winter partisans carry large desert water packs at what point do those freeze? Do I need a table for that?

And the more complicated wargame goes in the closet and the new game that was designed for fast and fun play goes on the table. That is where I am with Pathfinder. Completely bought in with both books and Hero Lab and we never play it really all that much. Great customers and lousy players.

Simple Games are More Fun for Me

So I come back to the old versions of games, the retro-clones, and some of the classics made back in the day where they saw this problem and designed against it. Labyrinth Lord and B/X. Tunnels and Trolls Deluxe Edition. Other classics. There are some new games, such as Savage Worlds and FATE, that attack complexity of character design versus story and those are worth mentioning too.

I see a collection of huge books for a gaming system and my reaction is, "I don't have enough time for these anymore." Instead of feeling bad I switch games that I do have the time for. I am sensing another round of boxing games up coming here soon. It is a sad thing but also a good thing, since it lets me focus on games I want to play (and it frees up space for more games, like Traveller's new edition).

My thing is, play what you love - and some people love the complexity. I have moods when I love all the detail and choices. Be happy if you can find people who love what you do and play with them. As my players dwindle and I find myself more and more alone, my tastes and needs change. I want less record keeping and design. I want solo play. I want smaller rules and tighter designs. I want more story and world, and less rules. I want attribute systems that handle many things, and less flipping through books to find a rule that handles a special case.

My tastes are changing more towards the retro-clones and classic games that I started the hobby with because those are what I love and where I find the most comfort.

Pulp Cthulhu

First off, I wish this was a standalone book with all the rules you need to play a 1930's pulp adventure game. You need the main rulebook Keeper's Guide to play. If that was so, this would be my standalone book go-to game for 1930's action and adventure. You could get alone with the quick-start rules and this book, but the full rulebook is really needed here. That is my only issue with the book.

Otherwise, this is darn-near close to a perfect game covering the era: radio-show dramas, gangster action, and all sorts of cool retro 1930's crime-fighting adventure. This is the only game that I feel comes close to me for replacing the classic and now out-of-print TSR Gangbusters game, just because of the wealth here of flavor, two-fisted action, and period specific information. The strength of supporting material here makes this a lot easier to play than the latter game.

As Time Passes...

I find historical games get harder to play, as interest wanes and the source era becomes less familiar to the world. There will always be fans of the genre and old-time movies, but I get this feeling these games are a harder sell to players these days. The Cthulhu appeal is strong and drives player interest, but I find gangsters and crime fighters are less so, and without Cthulhu you really need a group of fans of the era to maintain interest in a longer-running game.

So part of the strength of the game is the supporting material, especially on what it was like to live in this world. No cell phones, no computers, no jets, no Internet - so how do things work? What do people wear? What cars do they drive? With Gangbusters, it felt like the players of that time were more familiar with the era with late-night movies and that whole 1930's gangster vibe still a part of popular culture. that game didn't need as much supporting information and you could get by with a loose rule set and a lot of help from players who bring information and excitement to the table.

Nearly 40 years later from that game's release (and approaching 100 years from the original era), we are a lot further from that point in time and familiarity with this time. I feel for a game to work in this point in history, you need a lot of help, articles, pictures, drawings, and getting people started on becoming a fan of the era. The game should serve as an entry point for players who want to explore the era through movies, music, and radio shows and this book does an incredible job of doing that. This is more than just player training, this is seeding the interest for future fans in this time and genre.

A Longer Life Expectancy!

Compared to characters in the basic 7th Edition rules, Pulp Cthulhu heroes can take a lot more punishment, have much better skills, and can dish out a lot more damage. Part of me likes the less experienced and less capable heroes, but I can see the 'superhero' appeal of a two-fisted masked crime-fighter than can out punch a Shoggoth. Remember, the first issue of the original Batman comic came out in 1939, so this sort of period-style costume crime fighting came from The Shadow, Green Hornet, and all sorts of other cool radio shows, serial films, and other entertainment from the day. Not to say you need to be a masked crime fighter, you could be a Sam Spade style PI equally bad-ass and pulpy.

This is, in a way, a superhero game at heart with all the special rules in character design, using luck, and other game systems that give a player greater agency over the game world and events that happen during the game. That word agency is important, since a lot of hard-core games have this 'you fail, you die' sort of feeling with no way for players to spend resources to better the odds or change outcomes after the fact. This "mod" of the base game does that very nicely here, and for players frustrated their base game characters "go insane and die" all the time this feels like a breath of fresh air. Players can now twist fate and design characters with special talents and game-changing abilities not present in the base game, and this gives players more control over the game world and their player's fates.

Overall, while making things slightly more complex, it makes the game more accessible for an audience expecting more two-fisted heroism and less soul-crushing horror. A 7th Edition compatible Hero Lab module for this book is sorely needed and I hope they come out with a module or update soon. This is something I would pay for to have support for this expansion.

The Futuristic World of the 1930s!

Where I felt the 1920's was closer to fantasy, the 1930's feels a lot closer to the modern day for me in both attitude and technology. You get police car two way radios, car radios, talkie films, electric shavers, frozen food, stereo records, and a lot more of the early versions of the familiar things that make life easy today. With mad science inventions you could get away with modern inventions, such as Dick Tracy's wristwatch radio as a cell phone, primitive television as an 'electric eye machine', the Internet as the 'analog electric brain network' which transmits data via punchcards, disintegration rays, or any other fun and crazy conversion of a modern device to 1930's tech. A lot of what we have today can be recreated through mad science (and there is much fun to be had with making it not work the way we are used to).

If I ran this campaign, you can be sure Moon Men, Flash Gordon, or any sorts of other 'from beyond the world' space aliens from Mars or beyond would show up to mix it up with gangsters, gun molls, two-fisted archaeologists, mad scientists, and masked crime fighters of the day. I know space aliens are closer to a 1950's game, but I love the old sci-fi serials of the 1930's so much that while the 1950's thin-man 'gray aliens' are out, green-skinned long-mustached Mars Men human-like actors hamming it up as 'Mentok the Powerful' may be in. Ditto for the 1950's 'matinee monsters' like the Blob, Create from the Black Lagoon, giant ants, killer bats, and other Cold War craziness - those are out and strictly the realm of a 1950's game. Anything from the 1930's radio serials or pulp books of the era is fair game.

It sounds fun and crazy to have Chtulhu monsters on Mars, The Shadow, Sam Spade, Al Capone, mad science, and that would be the type of game I would love to run with this expansion.

Adventures and More!

The book ends with a generous collection of adventures with maps, locations, art, and characters. The characters are richly detailed and pulpy and would make a great collection of NPCs for any game set in this era. Overall, I liked this book a lot and it adds a really fresh and cool new era to play in, and most importantly an entirely new feeling and power level to the game. the game is strong, and even strong enough to support non-Cthulhu play, and one I know we will be having fun with for quite a while. the game pays for the extra complexity in rules mods and character design with the 7th Edition's simplifications, and it hits the right balance of crunchiness yet retaining simple core mechanics with us. I will put this one in our 'happy purchases' column and a book that I know will be out on a shelf within easy reach for years to come.

Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition

Meet our new favorite horror game. So our group was playing the older 5th edition of this game just as a one-off and we rediscovered the magic to the Call of Cthulhu "BRP" system and decided to check out the newest, 7th edition of the rules system.

If you are a fan of D&D 5 and how they simplified the game's numerical complexity, I feel you will appreciate this system immensely. Chaosium took a elder weed-whacker to the tangle of interlocked d100 rules and charts of previous editions and presented a version that is really pick-up-and-play and streamlined. While part of me misses some of the older complexities, I can say my group appreciated how straightforward everything is in the 7th edition of the game.

A note, we skipped 6th Edition, so our experience is going from 5th to 7th Edition. I know little about about the 6th Edition, except that they did a lot of great work for it and it has a lot of fans as well. Anything Chaosium puts out is great so you can't really go wrong no matter what version you play.

d100 with No Charts?

And they stuck with d100 in this game, which sticks with that easy to understand "what is my chance to do this" sort of ease of play a d100 roll-under system gives us. 80% is good, 40% is not so, and 20% kinda sucks. Easy. They also introduced a bonus-die and penalty-die system that eliminates huge tables of percentile modifiers in one fell swoop and was really appreciated by my group. It works a lot like the D&D 5 advantage/disadvantage die system but instead of rolling 2d20, you roll two of the "tens" d00 dice on your skill roll and use the lower of the two if "advantage" or the higher of the two if "disadvantage." It is simple and it works and my players love it.

For example, you take an easy shot. Roll two tens dice and one ones die. The results are 20, 50, and 6. The roll is a 26 since you are taking the lower tens dice for a "bonus die" roll.

The system expands to actually using more than one bonus or penalty die as well, so you could get a situation where you are rolling two penalty dice and taking the highest. Bonus and penalty dice also cancel each other our one for one, so there is some play with this system where you can make things harder or negate difficulty with referee rulings or situational modifiers. So in a way, the system advances the advantage and disadvantage mechanic and tosses away the long lists of modifier charts we disliked about d100 games. Well done.

Simplified Character Design

While I love my odd, quirky 3d6 low IQ accountant characters that the older systems created, the score allocation design system for the 7th edition won us over quickly. I am a real fan of character design systems where I can give everyone a character sheet and then do an "all at once" design session by announcing the "next thing to do." We made this a "group participation game" and it went wonderfully. For us, it went like this:

"Look at your ability scores and put an 80% in your character's best score."

"Now, put a 70% in your character's second best...."

And so on down to the worst ability scores. And this was the same way for skills. Pick an "in name only" occupation, and then pick eight skills that define that job. Put an 80% in your character's best skill and so on down the line. Same for the four +20% hobby skills you get. Finally, we all calculated secondary statistics together as a group. I go through each person and ask them, as a member of occupation X, what equipment would you have on hand? Write that down. Now everyone come up with a backstory for your character and then share that with the group.

And eight characters were done in about 15 minutes, as a group, as a part of the game, and we were ready to go on the first night of play. I can't say how beautiful this type of character generation is for us, having wasted one group's entire first 4-hour session on character creation back in D&D 4. In that game we got to start playing the next week, and that is a huge waste of time and energy for a group that large. The game also plays very well from off the character sheet alone, which is a huge plus for us.

When you lose your investigator to the gaping maw of some elder god, a botched skill roll jumping over a pit of spikes, or the padded rooms of the Arkham Asylum, you will appreciate simplified character design greatly. This is a horror game and characters should drop like flies, and the horror shouldn't come from the time spent wading through the character design system.

Get the Quick Start Rules!

Yes, this is another book to buy (for eight bucks), or you could download this (for free) and print it out, but make sure you have a copy of this on hand! You can play the entire game (for the most part) with this book alone, and the game's rules are condensed down into the first 14 pages of this book - including character creation, skill checks, sanity, combat, dicing, and most every rules question a new player would have. I would print these first 14 pages out to hand out as a rules-primer to every new player, and they are that useful.

I reference the quick start rules and the handy reference booklet included with the referee's screen (or the screen itself), and I rarely have to open the main rulebook. Yes, I know, this is another purchase, but one I felt was well worth it in that I could run the game like a professional keeper and not have to be constantly flipping through the rulebook like a noob while my players waited. It saved me a lot of time and made me look smart and well-versed in the rules on my first night refereeing, so I am calling this purchase as a good call for me.

With eight players you get a lot of questions! Each one of those eats up time, either in me or them checking the rule book, me looking up a rule or a chart, or them wanting to know something about the rules. If everyone has a copy of the free quick start rules that answers half of their questions. If I can not open the book and either check my copy of quick start rules or the charts or booklet that came with the referee's screen that covers most of the other questions.

Do you have players in any game that use magic and spells? That is a time and cost investment, but more on the referee's side because the spells are supposed to be more on the "secrets of the game" side rather than a D&D style laundry list of character options. No spells are included in the Investigator's Handbook either, so that is another difference between this and more traditional style fantasy games.

Optional: The Investigator's Handbook

There is an optional player-focused book you can buy that contains all of the player-focused information from the main rulebook. You do not need this to play, and the quick start rules are really all you need here for player reference.

If you have players who wonder where their cell phones are in a 1920's universe, or their eyes are somehow allergic to old black and white films, this may be a good book to get to explain things. There's no Internet and there is no Google, all phones are landlines, maps are large folded pieces of paper, and even things like radios are not in cars until after the period in 1930.

Two-way radios in police cars? Not until 1933. Walkie talkies? About 1937. Telephones, telegraphs, and teletypes (telephone connected typewriters) were about it, and the latter were really only in use with larger businesses, railroads, and telegraph companies. You didn't really have one of these in your corner office. Even direct dial long distance wasn't a thing until the 1950's, so you had to go through a living, breathing operator to make a connection.

No Internet. No Interstate highways. No television. No recorded radio programs (other than playing a record to a microphone and broadcasting that), and most all radio programs were done "live" in a studio. Talking films weren't until the end of the 1920's with the Jazz Singer, and before that it was mostly playing a silent film while a phonograph record (or live music) was played alongside. Vinyl records weren't until the 1930's, so the older (and more fragile) shellac style records were about all that were in use.

Oh, and be prepared to hit the library, newspaper archives, and public (and private) records a lot. A lot a lot. If one of the characters plays a researcher or secretary type all the better, and this person will be seen as the 'star' of the group. Kind of like a healer in an MMO, and someone who makes the group a whole lot more efficient and fun. Just handle a lot of the boring library work as off-board activities and get that player back into the action quickly and you will be great.

Or better yet, break everyone in the group up into smaller task-based groups while the researchers do their thing and get a lot done in a little time. Mr. Fix It, fix the car. Sneaky gal, follow the stranger in town around. Doctor guy, heal up Mr. Muscles. You two go to town hall and check real estate records and me and her will hit the library and check birth and death notices. Now...break!

Part of being a great referee in this game is keeping everybody busy with important tasks...before the terror of the horrible creature ruins everyone's well-laid plans. Then, while they are questioning their sanity? Give them more things to do. Trust me, they will be coming up with their own 'things to do' pretty quickly to figure out the mystery (or just figure out how to survive), and they will be happily coming up with all sots of crazy plans and ideas.

The 1920's is a Fantasy World

The 1920's is more closer to a "fantasy world" than it is the modern day in many regards, which is what makes it so fun. Once you know a couple ground rules like this, and get some of the style of movies during the time, you are all set. Although, the 1920's still had trains, cars, guns, ships, and early planes - so a lot of what makes modern games fun is still here. A lot of what makes modern life convenient is not here, and this adds an element of fun that puts us closer to fantasy games. Although some fantasy games take the easy way out and replicate cell-phones and long-distance travel with common magic spells and we are back to square one.

You will get a special thrill when you figure out how to do something without a computer or cell phone and just crafty and smart use of your character's skills and the limited resources available. This makes skills important, and puts a lot of heroic emphasis on figuring out how to do (and know) the impossible.

That said, the Investigator's Handbook is a great summary of what it was to live in these times and recommended for those who may only be casually knowledgeable of the times. Bet yes, treat this as a fantasy world more than a modern one and you will start to discover the charm of these times.

Face to face interactions matter. Trust matters. Getting physical access to places you shouldn't be is a challenge. Being sneaky matters. Being smart matters. Following the clues is a key to success. Sometimes you have to lie to people or rough a few up. Figuring things out early is the path to victory. Being strong in mind and body helps mitigate threats. Taking risks can lead to big rewards. You can't rely on magic or technology all the time. Great threats to the world exist and are out there.

These are all classic almost Tolkien-esque fantasy ideals, and they apply to the world of the 1920's in a strong sense as well.

You Can Play Modern Too!

Yes, this version out of the book supports playing in the modern era, and all you need are different character sheets. We prefer the 1920's setting though, just because the Elder Gods don't have Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. I kid, but you know...that gives me an idea.

On that note, if we did play in the modern era? Give supernatural creatures the ability to disrupt technology, mess with video feeds, make electronic devices go haywire, stop cars, turn off a building's power (or flicker all the lights at once), cut off Internet access, crash cell phones, put images on digital cameras, play strange chanting and screeching noises on the radio, put evil and disturbing images on television, and generally take away all the wonders of the modern world when the big nasty gets close.

I'd be extra mean and let the big bad ones 'see' though web and cell phone cameras and listen in through microphones. We really don't know how that 'other world' works, now do we? They don't play by our rules, and they can 'get at' us through the things we trust. If maybe only, they can access technology through our minds without us knowing how they do it....

That? That is true fear in today's world. That in which you rely and trust can be messed with, used against you, and easily taken away. Now, you can go insane, but you will have to rely on your raw survival skills to live through the night. Go nuts.

Cons? Division by Two and Five

I think the only downside to this edition is there is a lot of work filling in half and fifth boxes on the character sheet. You need these for success levels, but they are a bit of a fun-tax on character creation needed to get the d100 system working smoothly and avoiding the dreaded math during play. If you do all the "division by two" ones first and then the "divide by five" ones all together, you will speed this up, but still it left some players with a sense of heavy math-ness after the end of character generation.

The half and fifth numbers were used though during play, frequently, so this is a little bit of early pain for a lot of later speed of play gains, so we all felt it was worth the effort at the beginning to do early.

Some of us did cheat a little and fill half and fifth values in skills as we used them. It didn't break anything, and once you fill them out that is the end of calculations. This is a small price to get a d100 system working with varying success levels, but it is worth noting.

Earlier Editions? Still Great.

You don't need the 7th Edition to play, and we could have happily played with the 5th Edition - no problems. Though I feel the newest edition has simplifications that a lot of players coming from D&D will like, and some mechanics that are a bit more familiar. That 'ease of use' and familiarity goes a long way from making a game something interesting to something I am really excited to play. It is like using an older cell-phone, you can still get things done, but the newer models are so simple and familiar they create that instant desire to pick them up and play. Simplification is the ease of access, and it also gets a lot of cruft and chart work out of the way so players can look at their sheets, listen to the referee, and figure out what they want to do next.

As D&D 5 has proved, you can create a lot of interest in simplifying things down to their core and essential elements. That is the Seventh Edition to us, still the core rules and play of the original game, with a lot of the older baggage removed and the great and classic experience preserved.

TLDR

A great edition, just like all the others, but targeted towards simplification and streamlining for today's players and expectations. This still sticks with the classic d100 system, and eliminates cumbersome modifier charts so common to d100 games. A very approachable, modern, and easy to use horror game with a classic and iconic setting.