Building the Sandbox: A Pulp Cthulhu Campaign

The Box isn’t First

Ok, before we get started, you really need to have read the first post in this series. These posts are about monthly, so you might need a refresher. Go HERE, get caught up and then come back to read this one.

This whole post will deal with the start up of the campaign. How one gets the ball rolling and addresses the strengths and weaknesses ahead of the game.

For clarity, most of this project is just an exercise in writing/storytelling. I will probably never get the chance to run this as an actual game. But I will be approaching it as if I have a dead line and as if I have people to please.

Now, we’re going to start building the box, but that is NOT out first step.

How Do You Start a CoC Game?

Call of Cthulhu, CoC, is a unique game. Even in the Pulp version of the rules you aren’t always creating a “HERO” but rather someone who is going to get caught up in an investigation. The characters can be quite normal.

It is not unheard of to have a game start at a dinner party, or at a bus stop and have a cop, a waiter, an artist, and a hobo all be your starring cast for the story.

This is both a strength and a weakness for CoC.

If you’re playing a single-shot game at a convention, or as something between other long-term campaigns, it is quite easy to be dropped into a mundane role of a bunch of strangers at a party, or the reading of a will, or whatever.

The problem becomes when these strangers don’t want to interact, or if they all run off in different directions. This can happen a lot in CoC, where players are all individuals running their own stories.

How Do I Deal with the Problem?

As mentioned in the previous post, a “Sandbox” is meant to give total freedom to the players. They can move around in your box and interact with numerous stories and plots at their own choosing.

It is supreme freedom.

As far as I can see it there are only two ways around the strangers-problem.

First, only have a single or two players. At the very least a small group. By having only a single player and the rest being NPCs you’re free to role play out the smallest details and not have many other bored players waiting for their turn. Once you get to three or more players however, this no longer works.

The second solution, and the one we’ll actually be following, is to enforce a small amount of background on the players.

But You’re Taking away Freedom!

Kind of.

First off, I’m not the first person to think of this, and secondly, it has actually been written into many of the modules for CoC for decades. (And to be honest, the modules are FAR more invasive than I plan for this project. Some of those modules include selecting one character who is dying or turning into a Deep One and railroading them as a timer on the game).

For this campaign, the players are going to have a shared history before the game begins.

They are all soldiers who served together in WW2 and survived a horrific battle that drove them slightly mad. They finished the war in a sanitarium and recovered. Returning to the states, they made plans to have a reunion in two years to see how they’ve been recovering.

Now, before you protest, I have given the characters two years to start new professions and create backstory. So, I have not “taken control of their history and lives and forced them to play X character.” (Had a comment about that while talking about this with a role-playing friend).

The benefits far outweigh the detriments.

Pros and Cons of this Approach

A reminder that this is for PULP Cthulhu. The game is intended to be a little more two-fisted. A little more heroic and tough.

Having characters who were soldiers allows a little more leeway.

First off, they can all take the “hardened” trait. Which allows them to see violence and dead bodies without having their sanity start to slip.

Secondly, the connection between soldiers can often be stronger than familial bonds. Meaning that as Keeper (game runner), I have a tool to steer the players back on track when they start wandering around the Box too much.

As mentioned in the first post the game is set up during the reunion of these four characters, and one of them doesn’t show up. Thus, the initial hook of the game.

Now, there are some CONs to this approach. The players are forced to be of similar ages, even if one of them is playing an officer and one of them is playing a doctor, that only adds a few years to their age brackets to allow them to serve within my timeline. And it kind of asks that some of their skill points should reflect their soldier background.

Character and Story

I think it’s a minor enough price to pay to have characters who will be the center of the whole story. After all, from this point forward everything that happens in the Sandbox is wholly of the players choice.

So, we have our characters established and we have our initial hook, the first story.

Now we can build the box.

The Box

Our box is Boston, 1947.

At least, that’s the side of the box that the characters will enter from. This being CoC the other sides of the box include the whole of “Lovecraft Country.” So, Arkham, Dunwich, Kingsport, and beyond. (Not to be confused with the novel and HBO show of the same name).

So, we have our box and now we need to fill it with adventure, with story.

Filling in the Box

How do we accomplish this?

In the previous post I mentioned that sue of limited rails. There is no escaping rails, even if they are tiny one.

What are rails? Rails are on a single path; they drag a player/character along a plot from beginning to end. Unless you tweak them.

Our hook into the story is a short length rail. The players are all drawn to Boston in 1947 to attend a dinner and reunion with their commanding officer.

The rails bring them to Boston, specifically to the same hotel where they all have rooms reserved. When they arrive, one of them is missing, and they have strange messages waiting for them. Rail ends and now its wholly their choices from there.

But what will their choice be?

How Do You Plan for the UN-Plannable?

This is the hard part. Very hard part.

How you outline the game is the key to success.

What works for me is I write the overview of the story (and 3-5 other stories that are also happening at the same time—we’ll get to those later). I answer a bunch of the main questions in writing before hand.

So, #1 I know where the missing character is located, why they are missing, and where all my other NPCs are at and what they are looking to accomplish during this scene.

I then write out the physical description of the scene, where all the NPCs are located and then I predict Three Outcomes for the scene.

Rules of THREE

There are several rules of Three that we’ll be discussing (I know it might be a little confusing to have multiple, but it will make sense, I swear).

Basically, three is an important number. The first rule of Three is to plan for three exits from a scene. (The players might invent a 4^th way, but YOU need to think of 3)

In the above scene, the players arrive at their hotel after lengthy travel to Boston and enter the lobby of the hotel, only to discover a message that their host won’t be able to attend, but since they already arrived the rooms and dinner are still paid for. BY a chance of timing, they bump into the missing character’s sister who has just left the note for them.

Now, in my notes I have three options for how this proceeds:

One, they question the sister and immediately want information about the missing character (yay).

Two, they shrug their shoulders and decide to stay at the hotel and get a free meal.

Three, they say screw my hook and they leave the hotel to book passage back home.

I’m going to share another secret with you, I always put down #3 as the Players jump off the rails and say NO to my story and go look for something else.

How to Proceed with the Three Options:

Now, saying you’re not improvising a 4^th option for the characters, I have each of those choices mapped out leading to anther scene.

Yes, even if they turn around and leave the first story.

In that case, Rule of Three #2: What I do is I throw out three more hooks to catch their attention. Now if I have three players, (and this game is planned around three as that is average number of players at most of my games) I will throw a hook to each of them. Then the players need to role play which one interests them and convince the others to take their hook.

In this case the players are proactively picking their own story, and role-playing the others into following. I love this part.

Usually, my three hooks would be 1, a second hook back to the story they just left; 2, another adjacent story that uses the same location; or 3, a story linked to one of their backgrounds or something they mentioned having an interest in.

That third choice is often ad-libbed on the spot, but you can plan for it if you allow your players to get colorful with their backgrounds. (Hence the two years I allowed my players to create new professions and post-war lives).

Between games you have to be working on Interaction Webs and Timelines. (We’ll save those for the next post).

Staying on Track (if the Players Follow the Plot)

So, back to that hotel lobby and our players have chosen to talk with the sister, or even to stay and have dinner. We’re still on the main story.

This is where we come to the last (and best) rule of three. 3 Clues.

This is also the biggest cheat, and I don’t mind revealing it here. Always have three clues leading to the next scene, or next clue. If a player sees the name of a character, or place, three times, it starts to register as important. But here’s the cheating part… MOVE the clues. NEVER tie a clue to a single location.

In the above example, if the party talks with the sister that get clues that something happened to their friend, he’s not just missing, he’s been taken. But if the party doesn’t talk to her, they decide to have a free meal. The clues to the missing person can also be found during the meal. They might be a little different, but the same prod to get the players moving one way or another should be present.

This allows you to have a handful of clues and merely salt them where the players are. It bears repeating. NEVER, ever, place a clue in a single spot and give the players a pass/fail to find it.

Never have, the map to the treasure is located in this one place and the only clue to its whereabouts is a single index card tapped underneath 1 chair in main branch of the Boston Library. NO. There needs to be several clues to the map, and ideally that index card should be found in a random place the players are looking.

Failing Forward

This is a rule I learned from TORG Eternity.

Fail Forward. Don’t put pass/fail into gathering clues. I know that CoC is a skill-based system with LOTS of failed rolls as part of the game.

It is built into the history of Call of Cthulhu that players will often fail rolls. Failing a roll is fine. It should have a detriment. But that detriment should not be the stoppage of the game.

Luckily the 7^th Edition of the Rules agrees with me.

IN earlier editions of the game a failed roll was the end of a line of inquiry, and a critical failure invited danger, death, or insanity. With 7^th edition a failed roll usually means wrong information, lost time, or headaches.

Fail a drive roll? Now it doesn’t mean you crash and die, instead you might take a wrong turn and add an extra 30 minutes to travel, or perhaps you merely get a flat tire. Fail a Spot Hidden roll? Does that mean you never find the clue? No, it means you might have to find it elsewhere, or you have to take another hour or two of searching.

Rounding it up

I realize I have gone on quite long, so we’ll wrap up here.

We’ve thought of our characters and story, we’ve built our box, and we’ve started to bring in the sand.

The three Rules of Three are our main tools, and out outline is crucial to keeping it going.

I’ll be back in a month, where we’ll talk about Timelines, Webs, and tracking a bunch of stories and villains, and seeing how our players interact with it all.