Casting Shadows

This is a very easy question to answer as at time of writing the game that I have been playing the most these days – in fact this entire year – is Call of Cthulhu and, as luck would have it, that is also the game that I have played most recently – but as the Keeper (GM). In fact, I played it Wednesday night, Thursday morning, and again Thursday night – as usual. How cool is that? Does that arrangement need a little explanation?

No time for such explanations? Check out this Short:

One Setting, Many Perspectives

For much of my time in gaming, I have been playing in shared worlds with multiple GMs taking turns and with many players taking on different roles from troupes of characters. As often, I have been the sort to dream up a world that I can use as a foundation for multiple groups operating separately from each other. These types of play have become much less common, but my fervor for them has not waned. As the opportunity to engage in my favorite way to set up a campaign offered itself to me with friends who had not experienced it before, it has been a complete joy to share it with them and with those who tune in on YouTube to watch the horrors unfold.

For about a year now, we have been playing a 6th Edition campaign of Call of Cthulhu called Turn of a New Leaf. It was put together as an open-ended sandbox wherein multiple independent investigations could be run at the same time. At present there are four branches going on weekly, sometimes with cross-over events, sometimes as solo play. We have single investigators digging into the machinations of sorcerers in the Agent’s Branch, we have a dying gangster seeking meaning in life while the dead rise all around him in the Gangster’s Branch, we have a trio of old friends struggling with immense and psychologically crushing burdens seemingly ungluing the world around them in the Reporters’ Branch, and we have a lost but not forgotten son of a misunderstood father, cut loose in time and space in the Doctor’s Branch. All of this is set in the same span of days in the same fictionalized version of Boston in a very cruel imagining of 1931. After a decent backlog of sessions had been built up, we started releasing them slowly on YouTube and supplementing them with annotations, pre and post session discussion about play, and with notes about how the game was run and the concepts being demonstrated by how it is being played.

Sessions

So, most weeks on my Wednesday nights after work I have the great fun of hosting one branch of play as the Keeper of Arcane Lore, and then the following morning before work I host another. After work that same night, the third branch gets its turn, and on infrequent Sundays the fourth has its moment to scream in confusion and terror. Between them they have played through events great and terrible, brief and poignant, and utterly absurd. The characters have thought themselves lost, but found defiance. They have felt their minds going, but rallied. They have felt alone, but realized both the depths of friendship and the depths of betrayal…. and there is much more to come.

This has been running since August of last year and you can imagine how rich and nuanced – and stressed – the characters are now.

System

I am an old hand with BRP in general and with Call of Cthulhu in particular. We chose this particular edition of the game mainly at random. Had the group of players all been new to the game or gaming rather than mostly veterans, I would have run 7th for them. It is the current edition and the one they are most likely to encounter out there among other gamers. However, we got to do something that combined new experiences for some, nostalgia for others, and a blend of the two for everyone.

How nice is that?

See you tomorrow, gamers~