Hooray, I Have Time for a New Campaign

The past few months and years have been busy and I'm finally starting to see things loosening up. I've completed my last graduate class and endured a mercifully brief bout of unemployment.

I'm at the point of feeling able to actually plan out a bit more ambitious game. Most of my thoughts are in the Chaosium-family of games.

The most likely is probably a continuation of my ongoing Call of Cthulhu game, which began at the end of World War I and has reached mid-1921. I've some of the original players but, as is typical for Call of Cthulhu, none of the original characters are active. One is still around but after sanity and luck-blasting adventures, has retired from active adventuring. I've toyed with a global-spanning campaign like Masks of Nyarlathotep but find myself thinking a lot about focusing the game on Boston - certainly with forays into the wider world as appropriate.

Frustrated with the lack of an official Boston supplement for Call of Cthulhu, I've been doing a ton of research on Boston of the early 20th century and I'd like to start putting that to use.

In the back of my mind is actually something a little bit earlier. The latter half of the 1910s were rather eventful for Boston, with events like a police station blown up, a molasses flood, and a police strike. Cthulhu Dark with its focus on the downtrodden seems a possible tool for such a game.


Leaving the world of Cthulhu I've been thinking about other settings. Pendragon has long been on my bucket-list. I find myself wondering if I could pull off a multigenerational game ranging from Uther's reign to the death of King Arthur. One of my kids has joined us and she is fascinated by paganism, giving me ideas on focusing on the different religions of the era.

There's a few possible twists to that idea. Escaping from the legend of King Arthur but keeping the same rules set is Paladin, set during the reign of Charlemagne. One could keep the Arthurian setting but lighten up the rules with the Prince Valiant game - a game I recently picked up and am fascinated by. As a kid, I remember my grandfather and the funny pages. He loved Dick Tracy and Prince Valiant.

Going for a totally fictional setting lies a final option, adventure in the world of Glorantha. The new RuneQuest borrows a lot from Pendragon, with passions, family lineages, etc. It makes for a more mythic experience than previous versions of the game in my opinion.