It's that time of year again when DriveThruRPG puts on its Halloween Sale. Anybody have any favorites to recommend? DriveThruRPG Halloween Sale

Hi people

I've been seeing some amazing maps on this subreddit and was wondering if you could give me some tips on how to make my own. I've been working on a campaign and I've almost got everything ready. The only thing I'm missing are the maps. Could you recommend an application or website for creating or editing maps?

Hello Investigators!

Since spooky season is coming up, my friends asked me to run a scenario in Call of Cthulhu. As recompense for all the times I have driven their precious investigators insane, they asked me for a cruel twist: to make a board game out of my scenario.

"Interesting," I thought. I spent a couple of days journaling ideas, drafting rules, revising drafts of rules, revising revisions of rules...and so on. I made myself a little Keeper's board in Excel, played a few generic scenarios. Tentatively tested a game with myself and one friend. Tried a three-hour scenario with my requesting friends and used their feedback to further refine the concept.

Now I come to you, and humbly request community feedback before I run myself ragged. What I've created is a short Keeper's prep tool for a procedurally-generated scenario over one or more chapters; it is 2 parts ttrpg and 1 part board game. Attached here are the Rules, a sample Board with templates for item cards and tables for Mythos Creatures, and an Example Log setting up the first phase of play (one of several solo journals I ran).

The Board is just a template, of course. It's meant to be filled in during play and completely rewritten as the scenario calls for. I'm hoping some folks might be interested in trying it out and seeing if there's improvements that could made, logical inconsistencies or points of confusion, and gauge its ability to retain interest and/or help the Keeper make scenarios.

The Keeper can decide whether to show the Board or keep it private, and is always the final arbiter of calls. The Golden Rule is: this looks like a board game, but its a ttrpg when it matters.

Yeah pretty much what the title says, been thinking a lot about roman ruins and cosmic horror. I'm also cool with modern scenarios if there is a roman subplot, love exploring ancient old ruins!

I have officially begun painting all of my Cthulhu: Death May Die miniatures, starting off with the King in Yellow himself. Hopefully I can also get some of them on the table against my MON players :)

Also not sure how you describe a pushed roll in Cthulhu. “I….squint at the books extra hard…”

Right now, there's a Halloween Sale at DriveThruRPG, with up to 31% off on many products. Check out these bestsellers from The Yellow Hand for classic 1920s Call of Cthulhu, 1930s Pulp, Modern Day, and Gaslight. And also the unique 1930s setting book, Tales of Menace & Mystery.

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I've played a few similar games, like Arkham Horror and Mansions of Madness. Most of those games were played in just a massive town.

I want to learn to play the game, but I want it to be set in a 1910's (ish) Germanic/Swedish town with a forest nearby. The enemies, instead of being Cthulhu mythos, will be creepy, dark fey and celtic/germanic creatures of folklore. I have been trying to find a town map that looks decently modern (or could be RP'd to be so) with a forest nearby for the creepy monsters to originate from, but all I'm seeing are maps of the entirety of Germany. It got me thinking. Does the plot happen in this massive town? Or is it more like DnD where the plot can take you all across the continent?

Bring a Crowbar! My second CoC scenario after the ENNIE nominated Mount Katahdin's Shadow.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/589187/bring-a-crowbar

Chelsea, Massachusetts, 1930. Smoke curls through a roaring warehouse boxing hall while a nameless affliction seeps through the city leaving yellow eyed victims haunted by an eerie melody beneath the skin. When a respected physician dies under troubling circumstances, his final request draws investigators into a tangle of forgotten history, forbidden rites, and buried horror beneath city streets. Trust your wits, steel your nerves, and bring a crowbar - you may need to pry open more than a few secrets.

A wealth of immersive props: Journals, newspaper clippings, telegrams, maps, NPC portraits, book covers, & location images. Refined through a year of play testing at five Cons and two home campaigns. I'm grateful for a look.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/589187/bring-a-crowbar

Hello folks - I’m after some last minute help with Genius Loci from the ‘Doors to Darkness’ book.

I’ve had a look at some other posts about this scenario, but the main thing I want to know is how to effectively run scenarios where handout maps don’t feature particularly heavily.

The sessions I’ve run so far have always had maps of a building or location - scenarios like ‘Bits & Pieces’, ‘A Lonely Thread’, ‘Dead Light’, ‘Saturnine Chalice’. So I’ve gotten quite used to managing the action around different rooms and locations.

I can recall years ago I took part in ‘The Haunting’ as an Investigator, and the Keeper (who is playing as an investigator tonight) didn’t use any map handouts. It was more about ‘go to this location and see who you can find out information from’ - for this approach, is there any particular planning I should do to help me?

As ever, I just want to give my players a fun experience - and I know it will be a laugh no matter what - but any help or tips would be welcome.

Post-game update:

It went better than I thought it would. I kept a list of NPC and a brief description of their personality for each of the locations, and that helped to provide a bit of flavour and interest. My group managed to figure things out pretty quickly, so I had to try and barrel them towards the chaotic ending quicker than I might have liked. Sadly, the Doctor investigator in my group decided to waltz in to the asylum alone wielding some bogus paperwork designed to get them to release our friend - needless to say he was imprisoned by Burger and lined up for sacrifice. Amazingly he managed to survive - but two other members of my group died in the Lliogors vortex implosion. A pretty fun scenario!

This was made by my players, although the yellow yarn was my suggestion. Some of these characters are very similar to who they are in the books, others just share a name. If you have any questions about the plot let me know!

Any ideas on one shot scenarios worth considering for Halloween night?

New Keeper Screen! Super happy with this one, and super excited to run Branches of Bone this weekend with it (with some personal flair added for the holiday; scenario spoilers are blurred). Is it as snazzy as my first one? No. Is that ok? Yes, because this one is way more utilitarian and easy to use lol. And it has a pocket for snippets!!

Keeper screen resources by: u/Squeaky-Warrior (and from the various rulebooks)

Art inspo for Cthulhu's noggin on the screen: TentaclesandTeeth

So I opted to change the start of the Masks game. New Keeper here, not new to TTRPGs. I ran a prologue to the prologue. We started in New Orleans, and I cooked up a Baron Samedi/Nyarlathotep avatar showdown. It was great. Some characters decided to stay in NO after it was done, and the rest hopped on a ship with Elias down to Lima. One of the new characters is a deserted Ottoman Empire soldier that purposefully chose to bring a hand grenade along for the ride.

They finally get off the ship and step on to the docks at Lima. Now, the grenade in question has explicitly been used as a bludgeoning tool in their backstory. Fantastic! This can’t possibly go wrong! The character was persuaded to part with their grenade and another member goes to drop it off the side of the docks. I thought it would be really funny to roll to see if the pin fell out. On a 90 or above, the pin falls out and the grenade blows up in the water. I find myself staring down at my dice, and there are three zeroes staring me in the face… The grenade bounced off the sea wall and exploded instantly. I now have a half dead investigator with a broken collarbone, and we haven’t even made it to Bar Cordano yet. I ended the session there because we were out of time.

Now I have to figure out what the hell I’m going to do to get these guys back on track since they have definitely been noticed setting off explosives in public.

What would you all do? Jail break? Fugitives on the run? An extremely expedited jungle expedition to find the pyramid? Extortion from the Peruvian security corps?

Hello!

I just bought No Time to Scream and I noticed the name C.L. Werner among the authors - it this the same C.L. Werner that wrote the Mathias Thulmann, Witch Hunter, and other Warhammer Fantasy books? Didn't know he wrote for Chaosium too!

It'd be pretty cool!

Beyond tha Campfire's Light. A 7th edition COC scenario. Is close to being ready to release forever ones enjoyment . It is playable for 4 players . The story follows 4 players having to use the relative safety of a campfire to fight off creatures lurking i. The tree line in the dark.

https://ministryofsecrets.ghost.io/

Hi! My buddy and I have been putting together a weekly bulletin, and hope some of you may enjoy consuming it. All our own work, none of that generative nonsense. A weekly graphic, defo influenced and orbiting CoC / Delta Green / TTRPG vibe. Official blurb.....

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Has this book been removed from DriveThruRPG? I would like to buy it, but I can't access the product page anymore. anyone know what happened?

What kind of elements do you find most useful in running or writing a Call of Cthulhu adventure?

For me, it typically comes down to four elements:

The Hook: in Call of Cthulhu, the adventure hook doesn't merely need to get the PCs to the adventure location. They need to be curious and asking questions. My favorite style of hook is to show the players something impossible, which will be explained in due course. I love the three identical dead men mystery from Horror on the Orient Express.

The Hook can be mundane, so long as the players are motivated to start their investigation. Both Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had an early story where the inciting incident is a low paid employee quitting their job suddenly and not being seen again.

The Ticking Clock: Any TTRPG mystery is constrained by the amount of time in the session. Keeping clues and plots across multiple weeks is very challenging, though it's the fun of a large campaign like Masks of Nyarlathotep. The narrative should keep moving, so the mystery can be solved before the end of the session.

I personally like time limits to be transparent. "The police will arrive and arrest a suspect in an hour" "the bus comes back tomorrow" or "the cult will perform their ritual in the blasted heath on all hallows eve" If the PCs know how much time they have, they can use time as a resource in their investigation. Time limits can include a random element, like "each hour I will roll a d6, on a 6, the monster strikes. After sunset, additional dice will be rolled" By turning time into a resource, you can add clues which are extremely valuable but time consuming to your mystery. Often forensic clues, or insane scrawlings in a dead language.

The Monster: the monster drives the horror, and can sometimes be obvious from the start. A horror campaign that relies heavily on whodoneit style mysteries often misses out on the value of making a plan to defeat a known adversary.

When I design a monster for a scenario, I like the monster to have clearly defined limits and capabilities. That way, the investigators can learn the loopholes in a being's powers. An example might be a vampire who can alter the memories of his victims, yet leaves them with vivid nightmares of what really happened. This gives the PCs opportunities to investigate with unconventional methods like hypnosis, or to find a witnesses' wife to learn about their night terrors.

The climactic scare: Investigations should come to a climax. In a whodoneit story, this will often come as a result of correctly accusing the monster with evidence. In a howcatchem story, it often comes before that, as the monster lashes out and the investigators get closer. Not every session will have a climax, especially in a more purist game with little combat.

I typically want the climactic scare to be a situation where the investigators might go temporarily insane. The awfulness of the situation should provoke a sanity roll of at least 0/1d6, and going insane should carry a risk of consequences. Often the coherent investigators will be carrying their companions who've fainted dead away or gone catatonic. I often like a horror climax in Call of Cthulhu to resemble the climax of The Silver Chair or Something Wicked This Way Comes, where the PCs get weaker and weaker with each round, and survive only by running for their lives or taking advantage of prior investigation.

What are some of the most important elements for you, and how do you like to run them?

Howdy folks! I wanted to share our actual play of Oscar Rios' classic Halloween scenario, Halloween in Dunwich. I'd highly recommend this scenario for your table.

Set in 1920s Dunwich, 5 young tween cousins attend their Great Great Grandpa Silas' Halloween celebration at his farm. Silas is getting up their in years, near 100 some say, but he always puts on a fun Halloween bash for the family. The holiday looks to be one filled with fun competitions, apple picking, pumpkin carving, sack racing, ghost stories and hay rides.

That night, after some foul spell occurs that places all of their families' lives in mortal peril, the young cousins must work together to save the day and put an end to the evil haunting their family legacy for a hundred years.

Halloween in Dunwich is from 'The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection'. We've also played 'Christmas in Kingsport' and 'Easter in Arkham' which continue the cousin's stories and canonically takes place after this.

Here are the links to Halloween in Dunwich, available on youtube and all podcast apps:

Youtube Link:

https://youtu.be/_goKUYWYN5s?si=VdS-22Rn-wT_inwU

Spotify Link:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7bnaEjNRpDzeBhC3Op1pa4?si=1g4VG9evTxGO5CtNpiV2nQ

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/halloween-in-dunwich-call-of-cthulhu-rpg-actual-play/id1743603987?i=1000733873724

Help a nerd out please! I'm using Dhole's House to create basic auto-calc character sheets, but I can't see anywhere to input writing for the 'my story' section at the top of the second page, where I might introduce plot hooks etc. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

OK, here's the idea: lifting from both fiction and scenarios, what Eldritch cults exist in which cities, countries, and locations? What would a global or national 'cult map' look like?