Casting Shadows

#RPGaDAY2025 has reached its twenty-fifth day and the prompt for Day 25 is challenge. With the end of the event less than a week away, it can be a challenge to cross the metaphorical finish line, but this has been another good year for participants finding effective ways to keep posting as August makes its way toward September. Another challenge this year’s participants have been quite good with is keeping the focus on the positive things. These are major challenges in a 31-day event via social media and I think attention on those successfully dealing with both of them is well-deserved.

Day 25: Challenge

For our campaign element for today’s post, quite honestly I laughed when I saw the pairing for Days 25-27 as the first thought which leapt into my head was what tactic I could use to handle the challenge of not talking about a nemesis for the days leading up to it. Don’t worry, I held out for a second thought.

Going back to some of the earlier posts for this year, one of the questions (and possible challenge) I set for myself when conceiving of this pitch was to see what I could do differently while maintaining the same level of satisfaction. Where I ended up was to take the approach used in our ongoing, open-ended, IC-focused, sandbox, adjective-heavy, Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition campaign called Turn of a New Leaf. The video below will take you to a playlist of all of the episodes, but separate playlists are available for the different investigations taking place simultaneously within it.

In Turn of a New Leaf, the theme of the campaign has been a contest between hope and despair. In classic cosmic horror, of course, hope is baseless and despair is appropriate, but when incorporating the Dreamlands as the campaign does, something has to give. The challenge for the players is finding a basis for hope in their characters’ lives, and making good on it. The effort has, of course, set us on a good course for bleakness, but the character interactions on that journey have been warm, sincere, and often showing the best that individual humans have to offer humanity.

Many things in the campaign are a challenge, including finding the place to stand where their various levers might move the world. What I would like to do with whatever campaign this pitch leads to is to find a way to make where to go, and who to get help from, much more obvious and to remove much of the ambiguity from actions taken to stop the Cult of the Sleeper. This is the sort of campaign where decisive action is based on confidence and a sense of what is right.

To support that, what I also want to do is place more challenge on dealing with the horror aspects. What the cult does, how they do it, and what they become – not to mention what the upper echelons of it really want – I want to make unequivocally repugnant in the eyes of the characters…. in a fun way.

No easy task~

See you tomorrow for Day 26: Nemesis