One
of the difficulties a Keeper faces when deciding to begin a “Call of Cthulhu” campaign, is where to
set it. The game offers a range of canon time periods in which to set
adventures and each of these has a number of playing possibilities. Modern-day
technology and ease of investigation? 1920s joie-de-vivre?
The formality and reserve of the late-Victorian era? The possibilities are
endless.
Of
course, a lot depends upon your players and which time period resonates best
with them. Some might want to play in a milieu
as far removed from their day-to-day life as possible; others might not be
comfortable about re-enacting a time period which seems unreachably archaic. As
Keeper, you often have to draw a line in the sand and say ‘this is it; this is
what we’re doing’, which, while ending the argument, might put some of the
players off side. Do you then just forge ahead and hope that the story will
generate enough interest to offset a player’s resistance to the setting? Or is
there a way to let everyone have their cake and eat it too? I’m here to say
yes; yes there is.
Rather
than narrow your focus to one of the canon time periods, take them all. Think
of the offerings in terms of milieu
as a broad canvas with no reason to restrict your activity to any one of them.
There are a heap of advantages in taking this approach, so let’s look at how it
can be done.
First:
decide with your players where you are all going to start – Gaslight, 1920s,
Modern day. Then, rather than telling them to make a single character for that
time zone, ask them to make a family of characters which cover all three periods:
thus, if you’re playing “Cthulhu Now”,
ask the player to sketch out who their grandmother was in the 1920s, and who
their great-grandfather was in the Gaslight era. Don’t let them get too carried
away with fleshing these ancestors out: ongoing play will affect these
characters’ standings and layer meaning onto them which won’t have been obvious
during character generation. You’ll note that this takes care of the pesky
‘long-lost friend’ problem of hooking your characters into a scenario also.
As
play proceeds, events which impact one of the three characters automatically
have resonance with the other two. Does a scandal affect a character in the
‘20s? How does this impinge upon their modern day descendant? Does a Gaslight
character stumble across a rare mystical tome? How – if at all – does their
1920s descendant get their hands on it? Once you get your players thinking
across a three-stage setting, things start to have more meaning and nuance. For
instance, if a Gaslight character dies without having spawned, this could mean
that the modern-day character isn’t really their descendant after all, so,
having blown apart a generally-held family fiction, how are they related? This is a game about mysteries, and families
can be pretty damned mysterious sometimes...
Secondly,
establishing your campaign like this, gives your story greater flexibility and
range, while simultaneously removing the eternal problem of character
longevity. The Keeper is free to have particular nemeses erupt out of the past
and the source of these grudges might have roots in an earlier generation.
‘Damn!’ a 1920s character might expostulate, ‘these Azathoth flunkies again?! What did I do to harsh his
vibe?’ Well, the answer to this question might lie in the Victorian goings-on
of a forebear.
Now
that all players have three characters to juggle, the group can flip-flop
between settings, stretching out the danger and providing rests between the
action that will make your campaign seem bigger, more multi-layered and
wide–ranging, and – most importantly – longer in duration.
But
that’s not all.
In
the writings of the Lovecraft Circle, time switches and alters its flow
according to the whim of the narrative, and there’s no reason why you can’t
play like this either. Perhaps your Gaslight character plays a little
fast-and-loose with their copy of the Pnakotic
Manuscripts: what if they switch places with their descendant from the
future? How will this fish out of water cope? How will their relative, bounced
into the modern world, stack up? Will it drive them mad? With magic in the mix
– even the cosmic apocalyptic type of magic that Lovecraft’s vision conjures –
anything’s possible.
And
let’s take another approach. Say that one of your players has the skill of Dreaming. A common issue with campaigns that
stretch across to the Dreamlands, is that often only one player has the skill
and, if the story calls for them to stumble about in Dreams looking for clues,
the other players get to sit around twiddling their thumbs. Sure there are
spells and magic items that throw the whole party into the Dreamlands, but why
not allow the other characters who aren’t Dreamers, to roll up their own
Dreamlands characters? These personae should all be predicated upon a connexion
of some kind with the Dreaming character – that is, they should all know each
other – in order to facilitate Dreamlands adventures, but the players should –
as usual - have the option of playing whoever they please. An interesting exercise
would be to let them try and generate a Dreamlands analogue of their Waking
World persona, a move that allows the Keeper to switch the characters across
the Veil of Sleep at some point later in the narrative.
But
that’s still not all.
Lovecraft
kept a rigorous diary of his more colourful dreams and these have sometimes made
their way into his or other writers’ fiction. A good example is Frank Belknap
Longs’ “Horror From the Hills”, which
takes its starting point from a dream recorded by Lovecraft where he found
himself as a Roman military commander in Spain. The Plutonian Drug, various
spells or artefacts, even lucid dreaming or a heavy blow to the head (a la Robert E. Howard), can suddenly
mean that you have a Cthulhu Invictus
scenario running side-by-side with your regular setting. Alternatively, you can
flash your players back to Dark Ages
Cthulhu and have them traipsing across the landscape of Averoigne. Keep in
mind, also, that time runs in both directions, so a futuristic Cthulhu setting
could also be an option.
The
trick of course, is to make sure that, wherever your campaign wanders, it has
ramifications on the other settings and the characters within them. If a
character in Ancient Rome hides a magic widget somewhere, make sure that the
discovery of it has relevance to their ancestor down the track. You’ll soon
discover that your players will start taking a “big picture” view of reality
and will begin making choices that will affect their other characters in other milieu. And don’t forget that, as
Keeper, you’re in charge of such beings as Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth who both
transcend the concepts of space and time, and for whom a setback to their plans
in one reality can be a grudge offloaded in another...
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