Today is day 10 of my Lovecraftian Challenge. Having written for and played Dark Streets & Darker Secrets, Eldritch Tales and starting today the Big One, Call of Cthuhlu, Light is not really featured greatly in my gaming recently.
Strictly speaking, that isn’t true, there has been a great deal of blasphemous, undulating green light, shafts of half light casting grey shadows, shadows that hide unspeakable horrors.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel, is the oncoming train.
Taking on a game like Call of Cthulhu is no small task. It is a big game, detailed, and has a long history. I also need to be able to offer something that the other solo toolbox for Call of Cthulhu doesn’t. You can check out The Solo Investigator’s Handbook in the Miskatonic Library.
The Handbook is 95 pages of PDF and provides a lot of content.
Everything I do tends towards the rules light and tries to fit in with the dice philosophy of the game. I am looking at the top four entry and I can imagine those 200 hooks and rumors being a set of d100 tables, 2% each entry gives you those 50 entries.
In the Eldritch Tales solo rules, which are d6 based, I had a simple table complete the same function.
It may look extremely simplistic, but 6 x 6 x 6 gives 216 combinations. If I go down this same route, d10 x d10 x d10 would be a 1000 possibility table.
The next section is the spooky stuff I am not going to try and touch. It has been much better by other people. Take a look at this section of Azukail Games books. While you are at it, look at those prices. For under $2 you can get hundreds of spooky prompts.
The last four sound like a version of the Mythic GME. The oracle, its Chaos factor and Improv. prompts.
I can see why the Mythic engine would appear to fit here, both are naturally d100 systems.
Most of my solo material is not derived from the Mythic GME. I am a fan of Donald Featherstone’s solo wargaming. He in turn was inspired by Monopoly of all things. What inspired Donald Featherstone was the Chance deck in the Monopoly game. How a simple random card could swing a person’s fate one way or another but using the context and flavour of the setting.
Featherstone rules use a single suit at a time to give 13 options and a countdown mechanic, where an ace can be either exceptionally good news or bad. Because these rules were written back in 1973, you won’t find a lot of dragon dice. I think he only had d6s.
Would it be terrible if I said I was trying to shed some light on how I am going to approach this? (Was that too cringy?)
If I am going to get these CoC rules written, I have 11 days to do it. That is not a lot of time, but don’t be surprised to see the Featherstone card mechanic appear in there somewhere, and maybe a 10 x 10 x 10 table to give you a thousand options.