I really don’t have diverse interests, something about me that my wife would very much like to change, but within my narrow focus I can be diverted easily. So–even though I am working on Lions of Judah (5,000+ –words this week, up from ~500 the entire previous month!)–I still take time when I cannot be writing, like on my breaks at work, to work on things that require less mental energy and fewer tabs/less screen-space.

This week, I was waiting on feedback from an alpha reader on SaSS:R (which, while not finished, is nearly to the playtesting phase), so I worked on other game projects. The first is a project to make a Mongoose Traveller (the first, not the second) sector, all sixteen sheets and 1280 hexes of it. The other one of them is a Call of Cthulhu/Basic RolePlaying game set in my hometown (there are no identifying features given, so really it could be anywhere of reasonable size and with a river nearby.)

Now, one thing everyone who knows me would recognize about me as a writer and a gamer is that I detest modern horror as a genre–and find the Cthulhu Mythos laughably silly compared to the spiritual realities of the world–but I really like the Basic Roleplaying system, especially as it is presented in the most recent version of Call of Cthulhu [1]. That being said, the CoC adventures I’ve been in or read are all very much on rails for all that they have an appearance of choice, which I don’t appreciate; I thought it would be interesting to try and start on the rails and then derail into a landscape trapped between warring powers, none of which truly qualify as horrifying (which is funny, because I try to make AFMBE action-genre, and get players who have really strong reactions to my zombies, but with this I am trying again to take a horror game and make it into an action adventure… we’ll see how it goes.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, I thought I’d put up my preliminary notes for the CoC game, and check back in when we have played it. The ‘on-the-rails’ part is pretty complete. The ‘off-the-rails’ part is just notes about the background; I leave the clue-giving at that point up to the discretion of the Keeper.

[1] Their idea of Sanity Loss is very similar to the idea of Mental Health Damage I came up with for SaSS (I had never read, played, or listened to CoC when it came to me; it is an outgrowth of Essence from All Flesh Must Be Eaten/Witchcraft), and I love in theory how sanity loss effects your character. In practice I have never had sufficient loss happen to a character of mine, so I can’t really judge.