Day of the Beast

The beginning of the year I kicked off a Call of Cthulhu campaign at my buddy, Rob's, place. It had been about a year since I last ran CoC, so I was pretty excited to get another game going.

I'm running Rob, Dave, and 2 new recruits through the Day of the Beast campaign. It's a fairly introductory campaign that presents a pulpy, world-hopping romp. It's been fairly well reviewed, and I'm fond of many of the scenarios I've read through. It is likely - though - that I'll tweak the later scenarios based on the progress we make.

The characters are from a wide variety of backgrounds. We've got: a blues singer, a yacht instructor, a private investigator, and a missionary. (More details on them in a later post). Suffice to say, they're all occult enthusiasts that seem to have gotten themselves tangled up in a seance (in a haunted house!) in New Hampshire.

When I started doing prepwork on this campaign, I resolved myself to run CoC RAW (rules as written). Let me tell you: I had quite the internal struggle over this. I'm so fond of the BRP rules 'advancements' that have come along with MRQ2 and the BRP Gold Book that I find the standard CoC rules set to be a little crusty. But, rather than write up a list of house rules and changes, and throw it at the group, I decided to keep it simple, and grin and bear it. We've got a couple new gamers in our group, and I didn't want to overwhelm them with detail. Just point them at a current rulebook and say, "we're playing this".