These are the Games of Our Lives - Part Two

Playing: Cthulhu

In addition to the ongoing D&D saga, I’ve been playing a little Cthulhu as well. I playtested Liam’s Cthulhu Invictus scenario “Chaos in Rome” which I understand he entered in a recent Chaosium competition. It was not what I was expecting, and despite my initial reservations about Cthulhu Invictus, it was good fun.

Regrettably for Liam, we played on the setup (an upper class Roman family at each other’s throats after the mysterious death of the patriarch) and this culminated in my spoilt momma’s boy character conspiring to poison his brother (played by Mark as a particularly nasty piece of work), then after that failed, hiring some footpads to ambush him. Both attempts were ably thwarted by Igor’s centurion. The problem was that after all that excitement, and by the time we found the lurking menace, the resulting action was necessarily truncated by time pressure, leaving several character’s suddenly dead.

I’m also playing in Liam’s run of “Bad Moon Rising” a classic Cthulhu adventure from ‘The Great Old One’s’. After a full session of abortive investigation, we have arrived at the heart of the scenario, albeit in a way which makes me question if all our attempts at investigation were really needed (and find that I agree with the GUMSHOE manifesto more and more). To Liam’s credit a lot of the older Cthulhu scenarios require considerable shoe-horning to run as intended.

Finally, I’m looking forward to playing in Andrew M’s playtest of a forthcoming Trail of Cthulhu scenario. I’ve been wanting to run Trail for ages, but find that there is more than enough regular Cthulhu I also want to run, without having to learn, and teach, a new system. Hopefully Andrew can do the heavy lifting on that account for me…