An Indiana Jones themed adventures in 1936. The players will be given tasks to obtain artifacts before the "enemy" does; similarly to Indiana Jones Ark of the Covenant. With each artifact obtained, the players will decide to either return the item to its rightful place or take it back home; with each discovery and interaction will alter each following mission as the players collect more artifacts. The players will normally be up against a verity of threats, from fascists to communists, and from mobsters to cultists. The players will be choosing from premade characters (I know some people don't like premade characters), however I have made a large verity to choose from, from within their respected occupations and backgrounds that suits the scenario (I'm quite flexible with any requested changes that one may have for their desired character).

So, the Call of Cthulhu game assumes that most of Lovecraft's stories are canon, as well as some stories added in by Derleth, Ashton Smith, Campbell, etc. This creates a rather large canon for us to play around with and the fact that multiple author's content is included invites you as a Keeper to add fun twists of your own.

As I've been running the game I've been incorporating whatever other fictional stories suit my fancy. I've more or less confirmed to my players that Sherlock Holmes is real, along with the events of Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy (1999 version, obviously).

Have you included other stories as 'canon' in your universe? Maybe Poirot is currently travelling across Europe and solving mysteries or in a game set in the 50s perhaps there are news reports of a skyscraper sized lizard attacking Tokyo?

We never really tried CoC with our group. I've read about CoC a lot and the internet is full of great CoC stories. People rave about CoC all the time. Yet I've never really gotten into CoC until last weekend when we all sat down to enjoy some CoC together with friends.

Let me tell you, nothing goes quite as deep as CoC. A good, girthy CoC session really brings out the best in me and my friends.

Afterwards, we all questioned why we didn't let CoC into our lives before because CoC almost brought us to tears. Not just in terms of roleplay, actual tears because CoC was just so intense for us. It might be because it was our first time but after a couple of long CoC sessions I'm sure we'll enjoy it even more.

If you haven't tried CoC, I can highly recommend it.

I'm talking about things like Dyson spheres and their variants (swarms, rings, bowls, layers), cylinder habitats, and even "small" planet-bound concepts like space elevators and Dyson motors. My recent dive into space-based scenarios has got me thinking about their potential for scenario/story concepts.

The craft from Rendezvous with Rama is almost completely benign, and it's still got a wonderfully sobering, uncanny, forbidding vibe when people are exploring it. Imagine what could be done with that kind of environment when you add non-Euclidean dimensions and forces/materials entirely beyond conventional physics- not to mention methods like Gates that could make getting onto such a construct more convenient. Imagine Gating, say, a group of Gaslight or Cthulhu Invictus characters onto one, people who literally have no framework to understand what they've found. Just watching the horizon bend upward would probably be worth a Sanity check on its own!

The existing corpus of Mythos materials touches on this kind of scale with Ghroth and Azathoth and in a few other places, and Cthulhu Rising had some interesting concepts for Elder Thing spacecraft, but just in general I feel like this is a greatly underexplored area. These beings are supposed to be so staggering and godlike- so it'd be cool if sometimes we got a glimpse of their plans on truly staggering, godlike scales.

Hello fellow Investigators! My friends and I have a little actual-play podcast using the Call of Cthulhu system called "Tales of the Other Side." It's available on all major streaming platforms. We're a small/unprofessional group so we don't have a budget to do any advertising so I was hoping to reach some of you guys to take a listen!

Here's a quick premise: "When three strangers in the late 1920s board a train, they find themselves bound by cosmic fate and face waking nightmares unlike anything they could have imagined."

We currently have 5 episodes recorded and posted with a 6th on the way (coming out Jan 1st.) Thanks for giving this a read, we're really proud of what we've been doing and just want more people to be able to experience it.

Spotify - Apple Podcasts - Amazon Music - iHeartRadio - Pocket Casts

Hey Everyone!

I’m currently the DM for a 5e DnD party consisting of my mother and father in law, sister in law, and wife. We have run our course of DnD over the last 6 or so years, and finally our fantasy world is coming to an end. Because of this, we’ve decided to reach out and try new TTRPGs, obviously landing on Call of Cthulu.

I have never played nor ‘DM’ed for CoC, and wanted to ask what scenario is worth running first to get us introduced to the game?

For Keepers who may have experience DMing, how is preparing for CoC different than DnD, and what tips would you have for a newcomer?

Thanks in advance for your help!

We've just added a major update with universal VTT support that gives you predefined walls, windows and lighting for use in the battlemaps, compatible with all major Virtual Tabletop systems, as well as 29 tokens for use in the scenario.

https://preview.redd.it/h9he5nls4m7e1.jpg?width=1400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=21bc2cb1303b3b989e5a554ee72f0ed86d6a15ba

In the spirit of the season, we're also running a discount until Christmas.
Use this URL to get the scenario for $2.95

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?discount=9d2b63fadd

I'm planning on starting my first campaign soon (long time dnd 5e dm who loves all things dark and maddening) and was wondering how people have incorporated aspects of actual religions into games as physical places, monsters, etc. Do you treat content from faiths in a different way to the Cthulhu mythos or do you treat the color out of space and a biblical angel showing up as equally mind shattering?

Hey everyone! I've watched videos and read the sections in the keepers manual about 3 times. I just don't understand it. And after attempting to run a chase scene it felt very much like we were going through the motions, not that my players were being pursued.

Can anyone offer some clarification and advice?.

hello, i'm a first time GM and i'm struggling with the actual campaign portion..

i have some ideas. i'm sure i want it to have something to due with hospitals, or may6e some sort of illness. i'd also love to add a sailing portion, as the players have an interest in sailing and the water.

if anyone has an idea on how to merge these 2 themes together i'd very much appreciate it. :o)

I wrote this CoC adventure set in the near future and ran it recently for my group, who enjoyed it.

Putting it up here in case anyone is looking for an adventure to run. Everything in the PDF is obviously a guide - my own players found an ending I hadn't predicted!

The setting:

The year is 2057, and humanity has ventured into the solar system thanks to the invention of reliably survivable stasis technology.

The ability to put astronauts into cryosleep has allowed Earth’s various space agencies to send manned missions much further than before.

As mankind’s reach extends, Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, becomes the focus of scientific curiosity. Its subsurface ocean offers the best yet encountered chance for extraterrestrial life.

A joint US-EU mission involving the US Space Force’s USS Kushner and ESA spaceship Magellan set out from Elon Station, mankind’s jointly operated permanent lunar base, tasked with exploring the potential for alien life on Europa. 

The USS Kushner was to arrive and begin the procedure, with the Magellan arriving a few months after.

However, contact with the USS Kushner was lost days after arrival in Europa’s orbit. 

Now, the Magellan arrives in orbit, and the crew has received orders to investigate the USS Kushner’s radio silence.

Adventure module here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GPvwpTRvJfjrMm-CVPcmVbbvzN97uZLT/view?usp=sharing

Greating ladies, gentlemen, and other tenticaled horrors, as the title implies, I'm wanting to run a game for complete newbie to the cthulu methos. I've got some dnd 5e experience, a little shadowrun 5th(?), but i know CofC is a completely different animal.

My partner is also wanting a game set in modern era, and the investigator is going to be an amature film maker dropping out of college to be a ghost hunter

So my main question is, what are some starter friendly scenarios you've run into the past? How keep things dramatic without being deadly? How do you keep things subtle but not boring? I'll certainly be asking more in the comments lol.

Thansk for taking the time to read ✌️

Hi, I started to get through the Christmas in Kingsport book in preparation for a possible Christmas one-shot, but the language it is written in is really hard for me to get through, so I would like to ask you which scenarios would you recommend or have any experience with? (because honestly I don't want to read all of them if not necessary)

Hello everyone, as the title says i’m mastering Pathfinder and not Call of Cthulhu, but the system isn’t important, i just need some ideas for the narrative and investigative part of a lovecraftian Christmas oneshot i’m preparing. And here i can probably find them more easily than in PF subreddits. The group is already experienced in horrors of lovecraftian inspiration, it’s a recurring theme in my campaign (with a good amount of Bloodborne references too). Also, the adventure will be a horror one, but it can have a certain dose of humor.
(I apologise in advance for the wall of text and if something i wrote sounds bad, english is not my native language)

The setting is an old and quite isolated university in Scotland, during late 19th century. It’s an alternate version of our world, in which magic exists and is studied by some institutions, even though it’s very rare, but the characters will be all human versions of themselves.

Our university (which has not a name yet) has always been one of those places where esoterism and occult arts are thoroughly studied. After a period of decline that followed the illuminist era, the college gained new prestige under the administration of former chancellor Lady Antigone De’Ath, noblewoman, scholar and famed occultist. She integrated modern science with the traditional esoteric studies of the school, opened new academic departments  and inaugurated a new way to investigate the unknown.
Lady De’Ath, however, was also a practitioner of the darkest magic, the kind which draws power from the knowledge of the Dark Tapestry (in Pathfinder that’s the outer void where cosmic horrors dwell). Thanks to this forbidden knowledge, she called a powerful entity from the realm of nightmares (a sort of giant alien worm) in the deep caves under the college buildings, and through it she linked her own spirit to the nightmare. Doing this she managed to escape death by old age and kept existing inside the dream plane, from which she can still progress her plans and influence the material plane.
To keep the ritual active and Lady De’Ath’s ghost intact inside the nightmare, some blood has to be sacrificed every year, during the last new moon before winter solstice.
And indeed, every year at least one student, teacher or other worker of the college dies, in most cases by suicide. Many think this is the price of the often unnerving subjects which are investigated in the school, mixed with the extremely grim winters of northern Europe. It’s not uncommon for students and teachers alike to take sedative medicines after long studying sessions, a practice that Lady De’Ath supported.

But this is a special year. This year the old witch’s plan can be completed. Influencing the current chancellor and professors through dreams, De’Ath managed to have an ancient and mysterious tibetan artifact delivered to the college, a disconcerting archeological find which shows incomprehensible pictograms and subtle but undeniable links with certain whispered necromantic cults. More people than the usual are dying around the college area this time, to feed the worm and its nightmare, and prepare it for something… Because during the college’s traditional Christmas Eve dinner, the participants will unconsciously consume water from the caves where the worm dwells and they will fall into a collective nightmare. The powerful dream will blend into the material world and through it, Lady De’Ath will be free to return to the university. Then, she will use the terrible artifact to perform an unspeakable ritual, fuse herself with the worm’s power and resurrect as a new form, free from the limits of human flesh and spirit.

The adventurers for this oneshot will all be people living and working at the university. We have an archeology professor and a necromancy professor (and because of a meme they will constantly argue about who should investigate ancient tombs findings). Then there’s some other workers, like the caretaker of the buildings and the gamekeeper who watches over the school’s surrounding terrains. This i decided based on their PF classes.

The story begins a few days before Christmas, with the arrival at the college of the mysterious crate containing the tibetan artifact (which i still haven’t decided what actually is). It will be kept under lock and key and only the most expert teachers will be allowed to enter. The two professors among the players will immediately start to analyze it. But soon the suicides and disappearences will start.

Another important element is the presence at the college of a recently hired young mathematics professor. She has welsh origins, but she studied in the USA, at the Miskatonic University. She’s a very weird person, a gloomy loner with odd sleep patterns and even odder interests, even for an occult university. Many students make fun of her, but there’s a small group of mathematics enthusiasts who passionately follow her lectures and feel a great respect for her. Unfortunately, some of the people who die are the members of her circle of affectionate students. Moreover, she’s missing when someone dies because she tries to take advantage of the turmoil to break into the artifact room. And later, a copy of the De Vermis Mysteriis will be found in her private room.
This character serves as a bait for the players, they must be suspicious of her (she’s an ambiguous dark wizard in the main PF campaign, so they will be prone to) and lose time on this red herring. The truth is she knows enough about the Mythos from her studies at the Miskatonic University and immediately begins to think something related is happening, so she’s trying to investigate on her own because she doesn’t trust anyone. Her students dying could be because the ones most interested in her lectures are also among the most brilliant but fragile minds, easily influenced by eldritch dreams…

I need some ideas for the actual development of the events in the days before Christmas Eve, other related events in the surroundings of the college, characters they could speak to…i have a plot outline for the beginning and the end of the story, but the middle part is still very blurry..
Thanks to anyone who will answer!

Hello there,

So I have been a long time lurker/ solo player and I've been given the golden opportunity to run an actual campaign for willing newbies. I have the general idea fleshed out in my head, but I wanted to get some advice from experienced keepers/players on what to include/leave out. I wanted to create a broad scenario which wouldn't play the same for 2 separate sessions but would also include a bunch of fun ideas to introduce new players yet allow entertainment to old hands.

The overall premise is based on a solo campaign I ran, in that the investigators wake up on a train at an unfamiliar station. They are all from various other trains and places (allowing for some variety in players and a psudeo "you meet in a tavern" approach). It's foggy and cool outside, there's nobody else on the train. One NPC is claiming their child is missing.

The station outside declares it is "Fog Bottom". The stations design is older than the current date (was setting it in 1920, so late 1800s maybe. Need to do more research on trains/stations). The station is abandoned, save for one man tidying up. He's got the Innsmouther look, but is relatively friendly. He explains that they are in Fog Bottom and gives random details about the surrounding areas (he's foreshadowing and setting the scene).

It turns out that Fog Bottom station is in an alternate dimension. It's the Man from Taured universe, where history is slightly different, but still recognizable.

There are basically 4 paths to take from here:

The investigators can head down to Fog Harbor and investigate the oddities there (a rival between the new cults of Dagon and Yag-Khosha, a mysterious light house nobody can get into, a murder in a locked room, a few others).

They can also follow a path through the White Forest (working name) where they can come upon a village plagued by nightmare rats, kept at bay by the nightly, esoteric music of Elias Zahn; find a cabin in which to hide from wolves /werewolves (the more action oriented bit) and eventually come to the Spaulding mansion, where the decrepit members of a once proud line live in fear of an ancient member they've hidden away.

There's a mountain path which leads to a bunch of pre prohibition (its 1924) bootleggers driving crazy modified cars on the run from a Hunting Horror. Maybe at the top of the mountain is a weird structure transplanted from the 1980s, a nuclear power plant occupied by a Colour out of Space and being studied by Yigithans. There's also an amusement park, built at the end of a gondola (need to check history on gondolas) which is scary (still fleshing this out).

Finally, the investigators can head back down the train tracks to a tunnel from whence they came, experiencing a lightness realm of ghouls and some kind of hulking horror trudging through the dark. This is meant to be a dead end, where even if they escape, the bridge on the other side is out and it's a sheer drop. I'll drop hints that this isn't the way, but I want to let the players have some agency.

I want to stress I don't intend the players to see all of it in a single game. Each terminal has some end point of escape or death to it, and I more or less want them to pick one unwittingly and explore. If they see more than 2, I'd be impressed. Each scenario is written to have some mystery to be investigated (sometimes more than one) and for most of them I wanted the "monster" to be bespoke/mundane to keep it from being a CoC flavored Castlevania set up. My philosophy is that CoC is as much Lovecraftian as it is The Twilight Zone.

So I'm looking for recommendations. The areas described above won't entirely be linear and will allow for some exploration. There will also be a day/night cycle, in which the horrors become more apparent after dark. Also any recommendations of Mythos creatures/aspects would be appreciated.

I also posted in r/LFG, but figured more interest might happen in the dedicated game subreddit. We're checking out Call of Cthulu, but not everyone in the group is interested, so we're looking to see if other new players would like to try it out with us!

Duration: 3 Hours

Max Players: 5 (3 at the time of posting)

System: Call of Cthulu (1920's)

VTT: Foundry/Forge Link

Content Warning: Call of Cthulu is intended for mature audiences. The Keeper and players should be aware that this scenario contains situations, scenes, and imagery that some might find intense, particularly if they have experienced real life Trauma. (Body Horror, Gore, Character Death, Murder)

"New Year's Eve 1925. You've been invited to a party at an illustrious estate just outside of Arkham. As the clock inches toward midnight, it becomes increasingly clear that something is not right. Can you uncover the secrets before the new year rings in?"

Players will be using pre-generated characters for this one shot scenario with their own secret agendas.

We play over discord Voice Chat. We have rules on our discord to make sure everyone 18+ is comfortable playing together, and that means respecting our LGBTQA+ friends, women, POC etc. Just don't be a jerk. Please let me know if you are interested and I can shoot you the discord invite and instructions!

I was investigating the optional rules in the keeper's book and stumbled with the "Transferable Skill Benefit" on page 78 and on the language section it mentions about language families and encourages you to investigate on your own. Does someone have a list of related languages for this rule? (like French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are romance familie so this rule applies). In romance languages this is pretty clear-cut, but with other cases I had problems in where to draw the line.

Thanks for your help!

(My first language is not English so sorry for any misspelling or error)

Hey, around two months ago I launched Hideous Hiss Foundry module with loads of dark atmospheric music and audio backgrounds with library constantly growing. Some of the music used in Graveyards of Arkham is there as well. So of you might've heard it already. It kicked off quite well with things slowing down now to a halt so I'm looking to make a slight push now to make it known better.

So if you are in need of anything audio for darker games this might be it. Module is available to Patrons at https://patreon.com/hideoushiss at Supporter 3€ pledge so if you think this is fair, give it a try.

As part of promoting my sounds I'm also looking for streamers who would like to use my stuff.

Here's my most recent music track, Secrets of Kongo on Youtube: https://youtu.be/W7fic-PHKCg?si=ibILeNVJo7gGoYiv

i just wanted to say we finished our second session of call of cthulhu and i'm having so much fun!!

i've been the keeper and i just think this game is so great i love the vibe and i think the rules are really simple in a fun way and the prewritten scenarios are great really easy to run and spooky!! i used to dm some other games and i would always feel kinda drained or sleepy afterwards but both sessions we've done of this game i feel so excited and ready to play more!!! i love call of cthulhu!!!

I'm a pretty mediocre keeper, I typically run one shots to 4 session scenarios. But anytime I try and do something other than survival horror I tend to flop, how do you do it especially in one shots? Because the tropes for survival are easy, stuck then shady things happen then reveal then flee or fight. But what about other forms to feel less tropey?

So Im keeper for a regular group of three to four for about a year now, and we meet once or twice a month to do one shots that I’ve been loosely stringing together.

One of my investigators is delightfully prone to going insane, and about six months ago she started insisting she saw a black dog running around her neighborhood. Since then I’ve been having fun having black dogs pop up here and there, maybe three times since she first saw it. Sometimes it’s a hallucination, sometimes real.

I’d love to have this pay off eventually, and if there’s a preexisting scenario that would be excellent. We’re playing classic era based from Arkham, but I’m comfortable adapting things if need be, and it wouldn’t be odd for this group to travel. I just don’t really have the time to write something from scratch right now.

In other keeper's opinions, should the never-healing wounds inflicted by Y'golonac's bite be classed as permanent Major Wounds?

I can't see how they wouldn't, (nor how getting one wouldn't ding the old SAN, but that's "old school CofC thinking").

This has been triggered by a player character receiving not one but two love bites from Mr Fatty no-head, and the player saying "I think I'll play him still".

So the game is about to reach the climax, at least for the current cast of characters, and I may be going a bit over the top and need some advice for running this upcoming scenario,

To explain: the players are in the midst of being used by various cthulu cults, and where sent out to find a door in a military camp, with the session ending with the turning of the doorknob, at the start of the next session one of the players (who is currently devoted to the cult of dagon) deceased father will come out of the door, taking on the appearance he had in his early thirties (when another player character first met them) and ask them to retrieve a lost tome from his "other version" in the wreckage of the family home, and when they bring the tome to him he'll "kindly" let them back to their original (or perhaps even a new) reality. Upon closing the door the players will find themselves in an alternate reality where WW1 escalated into the cults/hidden empires and "aliens" fully using earth as an open battleground, and I was wondering what I could include and/or describe to make this version of reality feel like a different reality, stuff like strange technology, corrupted animals, demolished landscapes ect (especially if it fits into world war one aesthetic, typing this all out I think I got some inspiration from Trench Crusade), and if anyone had any different mechanical hints to throw in to help sell this as an alternate reality, like I know there's already rules for interreacting with "alien" tech in the Keepers guide that I plan on using, but rathe then just bombarding the investigators with sanity checks is there some better ways to mechanically represent just how weird the situation they find themselves in is?

tl/dr: help with the mechanics and fluff of having my players transported to a world war one styled alien/cult war alternate reality.

I am honored to have my scenario "The White Circle" receiving positive appraisal from Matthew Pook at Reviews from R'lyeh. The conclusion is: "Richly detail scenario of moral cleansing horror with excellent production values". Thank you for the kind words! I hope more people will buy it for Christmas.
https://rlyehreviews.blogspot.com/2024/11/miskatonic-monday-323-white-circle.html

Hi everyone, this Christmas I decided to run this scenario. I've read it and prepared some notes, and now I was wondering about the handouts. If there is something already prepared that would be really cool and would save me some time. So as anyone made some handouts? I tried searching on google and in some group online but I've found nothing. Thanks for your attention 🙏🏻

Hello I’m trying to find good quality miniatures for abomination. But I cannot find any of deep ones. Do you have any recommendations for me ?

Just wondering if anyone had any gift ideas for a beginner or intermediate keepers this Christmas (chaosium products or otherwise) for call of Cthulhu