Forays into TTRPGs: Call of Cthulhu

As I mentioned previously in my brief write up of the Birmingham anime and games convention, I am keen to get back into tabletop RPGs (TTRPGs). The first RPG book that I ever owned was for the warhammer 40K roleplaying game “Dark Heresy” which focuses on the exploits of inquisitorial agents. This setting allowed for a wide array of scenarios including combat, investigation and social interaction. Whilst I did eventually play Dark heresy as intended, that was not what first drew me to the rulebook. At the time there was a homebrewed RPG for Evangelion being developed that used the rules for Dark heresy as a starting point (Adeptus Evangelion, or Adeva). Having just watched Evangelion as an impressionable teen I was of course excited for the possibility of GM-ing a game set in the Evangelion universe. That game only lasted a single session but it taught me several important lessons about TTRPGs, most importantly that you should probably start out simple with something that everyone knows/ has an interest in rather than having your friends introduction to roleplaying being a bodge job of an already niche rules system to fit anime exploits that it was never built for.

But enough scene setting, that was my initial experience with TTRPGs, but recently I have been a player in a couple of games of Call of Cthulhu, which were both excellent and have re-stoked my interest in roleplaying games as a whole. Both times the game started off with a slow burn, gathering information first of all from the information in our immediate environment, which led to exploration deeper into the inveronment. This in turn led to more information being made available to us, which we then used to push our exploration. Before we knew it however, we were in mortal danger and had to make a logical leap from the information we had already discovered. This 2/3rds investigation, 1/3rd all-out-survival-action really works well in a 4-ish hour one shot. My character was fortunate enough to survive the first game, but my second character did not (RIP Frank, even if it was your own fault).

So far I (along with the other players) have been using prebuilt characters that we then assign a name/ background and personality to, which has made the adventures quite accessable, as it means that only the GM has to have read the manual from cover to cover, whilst everyone else just needs to know the mechanical basics.

Naturally this enjoyment has led to me perusing drive thru RPG, a website dedicated to cataloguing and selling a wide array of RPGs and other tabletop games. My current list of games that I am interested in playing are: