Reflections on the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set

(Halloween 2021, Spring 2022, then July 2023 - Aug 2023)

I’ve gotten a lot of Mileage out of this thing!  When I first bought it I played the solo scenario, Alone Against the Flames, and had a blast.  My wife played it, and my then-current group played it too.  Just telling each other what happened to our characters was extremely fun and told us what the game was about.  After playing this scenario, I ran Edge of Darkness for everyone (on Halloween) and it was a perfect intro to the game not just for my friends, but also for me.

A few months later, another friend group got together to try out the game.  We played through The Haunting, (from the Quickstart), and then started a Terror Australis campaign based on everyone’s interest.  At this point, I had purchased the Keeper rulebook, but usually just used the much lighter and more portable books in the starter set.

I didn’t try out any of the remaining scenarios in the starter set, though.  But then I moved to another state and slowly built up a new RPG group.  After wrapping up our D&D campaign of ~ 6 months, I pitched a “tour de Chaosium”.  We agreed to play through the starter sets of Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, and Runequest.

Last month we finished our Call of Cthulhu run through. Now that I’ve run all the scenarios, I think I can join the chorus of folks praising the Starter Set.  It's a masterpiece in introducing people to RPGs and to horror and investigation games.

We started with the solo scenario, and we all enjoyed sharing our various outcomes with each other.  Then we played through Edge of Darkness, Dead Man’s Stomp, and ended with Paper Chase.  I tried to link Edge of Darkness and Dead Man’s Stomp (using the suggestions in the scenario book) and it worked relatively nicely (though did not bring us to a “conclusion” to all the loose threads).  Paper Chase we ran as a small group with new characters, as an unrelated epilogue.

One of the players then bought their own starter set and ran Paper Chase for their family!  The starter set is infectious…  and Paper Chase is the sleeper hit for the whole starter set.  It is so unique and not at all what folks expect.  As cinematic as the endings to Edge of Darkness and Dead Man’s Stomp are, the quiet ending of Paper Chase is uniquely charming.

The scenarios give a wide range of Call of Cthulhu activities (research, rituals, chasing people through countryside and crowded cities, paranoid conversations, and being beaten down slowly by horrors in a fight).  The players enjoyed the variety, though without spoiling much, they lean heavily on similar monsters in two of the scenarios.  This similarity was probably the most disappointing for me - I hoped to have a wider array of strange horrors to reveal.

In addition to the Starter Set, I spent my free time reading Lovecraft stories, watching some Horror movies, and generally focusing on the “vibe” of the game.  It was fun to really dive into the Mythos, and I plan on doing similar things with the other Chaosium games.

The upcoming Pendragon and Runequest starter sets more cohesively present linked scenarios, but I appreciate the light touch here - the starter set gives you some scenarios that you can link or that you can play with different folks.  The “solo, duet, scenario, complex scenario” model is incredible, and really makes it seem like anyone can run the game.  And character creation rules are included, so you could just keep picking up scenarios and probably run them without ever needing the keeper rulebook (which is remarkable!).

The only real downside is the sheer number of loose threads!  The players were largely successful in Edge of Darkness, but the scenario left them extremely interested in all the loose threads.  Where did the sarcophagus come from?  Are there more?  What happened in New Orleans?  And so on.  I had an inkling that as a Keeper I could have spun much of this out into a short campaign in a kind of player driven investigation sandbox.  (In fact, I think lots of Call of Cthulhu scenarios would work well for this).

We agreed that Call of Cthulhu is a fantastic game, and will revisit it for one-shots in between other games.  We are planning to run another session around Halloween.  Maybe we will bite off a longer campaign with it as well, if the stars are right!

And as a final note, I’ve run Paper Chase a second time for my wife (which was very fun!), and I am running Dead Man’s Stomp again soon for RPG school Club.  So I’ll have run each scenario twice, which is pretty neat (and maybe only possible due to my unique circumstances of having moved and playing with multiple game groups).