This past Saturday evening, my friend Michael ran a playtest of Trail of Cthulhu, from Pelgrane Press, written by Ken Hite. I talked a little bit about reading the game way back here, but this is the first time I’ve played it.
One of the big things standing in the way of running a playtest of the game is the character creation system. It’s complex enough, with enough choices the players need to make at every step, that it requires a pretty solid understanding of the rules before building characters. And, in a playtest, you can’t count on the players to read any of the rules. So, that means pregenerated characters, which takes more time for the GM. Also, the points you get for investigative abilities are based on the number of characters in the game, so if you’re doing pregens, you need to know how many people will be playing – in my experience, not always possible with a playtest or one-shot.
In short, I’ve always thought that Pelgrane Press could do themselves a big favour by posting some pregens for their GUMSHOE games – ideally, complete parties of two, three, four, and five characters. It certainly would have got me playing the games a lot sooner.
This need has been met for ToC by an introductory scenario available for download on their site: The Murderer of Thomas Fell. While the characters are specifically for the scenario, they can certainly be used in other adventures.
Now, I’m not going to give you a bunch of spoilers – we played the game, we sort-of-solved the mystery, and we kinda-won – which is par for the course in a Purist Cthulhu game. We all had fun and liked both the system and the story. After the game, we had a bit of a discussion about it, and came up with these thoughts:
- The game really demands a fair bit of input from players to keep it from devolving into a story being read to you by the Keeper. Specifically, the players need to develop familiarity with their abilities – especially the investigative abilities – and how to use them in the scenes. Otherwise, it can become a case of the Keeper asking, “Okay, who’s got Accounting? There’s an Accounting clue here.” Now, this will come with practice, both the input from the players in the correct circumstances (“I use Accounting to look through the papers in his business desk to see if there’s anything hinky.”) and the way the Keeper deals with it.
- Combat is fast and can be surprisingly deadly. Especially for humans. The bad things are always tougher than you. And this is as it should be. There was a wonderful feeling of panic in the one real combat we had in the game.
- The lightness of the rules really lets roleplaying shine through. Even with the pregens, pretty much everything that happened was the result of character personality interacting with the situation. The ending of the adventure was pretty much entirely dictated by the emotions of the characters, with very little in the way of dice rolling or use of rules. And I found that ending to be immensely satisfying, dramatically speaking.
- Specialization among the characters is key. While the spend mechanic means that the person with the highest rating in a skill can only outdo the others a limited amount of time, it’s good to have at least one relevant investigative ability at a higher level than the others in the group have. My character had only a couple of irrelevant ones at high levels, and he didn’t get to find as many clues, etc. Which is okay in a single session, but would get tiring over time in a campaign.
- The scene mechanic – letting the players know when the characters have got all the available clues from a scene and telling them to move on – was something that I thought would be awkward and artificial in play, but really worked very nicely. The first time Michael used it, it was a little disorienting and surprising, but then it just worked very smoothly.
All in all, a fun game and a big success. Thanks to Michael for beating me to running the game, and to Sandy, Jen, Fera, and Tom for playing with us.
Now I just need to convince Michael to run a campaign…
I have to say I rather enjoyed running a game without all the dice, the laptop, and a table between myself and the players as has become standard in my Iron Kingdoms campaign. It was more immediate and strangely less adversarial. It felt much more like a communal talespinning and it was a nice change. I found it also helped when I had to portray NPCs. It seemed easier for me to take on the roles.
All in all, I found it to be a rewarding and enjoyable experience. I particularly enjoyed expressions of the players at the end they succeeded in solving the mystery, yet still came to horrible, if undescribed, deaths; which by the way is not how the module normally ends but it seemed very appropriate.
I’d like to thank all the players who took the time, supplied the snacks and played the game!
BTW: I’ve already talked to Imagine about getting the Keeper’s Screen and Resource Book…
“kind-of won”. Huh. I can’t imagine what “kind-of losing” would have been like.
I recall getting a dose of Melted Brain Syndrome and your character ending up with too much calcium…
I think that’s why pregen Cthulhu characters work so well – you don’t get attached to them. :>
That’s why it’s only “kind-of won.” We DID achieve the primary scenario objective: we found the missing man.
This is Cthulhu. You gotta take your victories where you can find (or manufacture) them.
I think it really was the best ending you could have hoped for… 🙂
Fred Hicks pointed me at this actual play report. Thanks very much for playing the game, and some useful feedback. If you think The Murderer of Thomas Fell is bad, then try Dying of St Margarets – that’s irredeemably Purist.
We will get some example characters up, and also a summary of character creation, which is supposed to be very straightforward.
You also said:
“The game really demands a fair bit of input from players to keep it from devolving into a story being read to you by the Keeper. Specifically, the players need to develop familiarity with their abilities – especially the investigative abilities – and how to use them in the scenes. Otherwise, it can become a case of the Keeper asking, “Okay, who’s got Accounting? There’s an Accounting clue here.—
One way to deal with this (if it’s a problem) is to treat the investigative abilities exactly as you would in a game where you roll dice. It’s only the physical act of picking up the dice and rolling them which is different.
“We will get some example characters up, and also a summary of character creation, which is supposed to be very straightforward.”
Thanks! That would be great! As for the character creation, it’s not the mechanics of the creation which are difficult – it’s a nice, simple point-buy system, with a couple of minor twists that really enhance it. It’s not even “How high should my score be to be good?” which is dealt with quite nicely in a sidebar in the book. It’s just that, to create a good party, you really need the players to have a moderately solid concept, and to understand what each of the different abilities does.
As far as your suggestion for using the investigative abilities goes, that’s pretty much what we had determined by the end of the game. The disconnect, which happened early on, was a product of unfamiliarity with the system. It will obviously resolve itself through repeated play; it was just the learning curve that’s present in any new system.
Thanks for stopping by, and thanks for publishing such great games!
My pleasure.
Thanks for posting and thanks to Simon for responding – I sincerely believe if you can help ease us diehard d20 players into this new way of thinking you’ll see more of us!