theuglyamerican

Yes, the problem with the London chapter is the players are still buried with too many clues, and it's hard to figure out which direction to pick. But you're right, they need to focus or they will die. I believe when I ran it I played down Tewfik heavily, just because the one-two combination of him and Gavigan can be brutal (as you pointed out). I think, also, at the time the party had just three PCs, which makes overall survivability chances very low.

You also make a good point about people holding onto their PCs. In my Masks game, by the time we finished Egypt, there was still one original PC, but he was so batty he had begun to believe he was one of the Carlyle Expedition and had adopted a whole new persona. In hindsight, I should have just given him a horrible shock and sent him over the edge, but we were having fun, so whatever. Still, just to your point, players love their PCs.

Anyway, thanks for putting up your thoughts as you follow the write ups. Always good to hear how GMs run their games.

Thanks for the kind words as always. One of the main reasons I'm blogging this is because the campaign is so complex, so I reckon future Keepers can benefit from my mistakes. In retrospect I would likely have been even more ham-fisted in dragging the investigators to the Penhew Foundation than I was, but when the group arrived in London they were perversely determined to ignore every hint I gave them. I dunno.

Anyway, the basement of the Penhew Foundation is, IMO, by far the most important place the investigators can visit in the London chapter, and they did finally get in there and plundered it thoroughly. It would have been good to knock off the two sorcerers at Misr House...or to achieve anything, really...but barring that, they at least got a really good idea of the scope of the conspiracy, links to Cairo, Shanghai, and Australia, and some tomes and magic daggers than can help them on their way.

Very good blog, I have enjoyed reading it. I have started MoN campaign so your writing helps a lot! Thanks!

Originally Posted by Nico

Very good blog, I have enjoyed reading it. I have started MoN campaign so your writing helps a lot! Thanks!

Oh wow, thanks! That's what I'm doing it for, so others can benefit from my mistakes in what is, by any reckoning, a daunting undertaking. My group will be hitting Cairo tonight, and I look forward to seeing what mischief they get up to there!

Ive got my hands recently on the CoC system, and as it had several ready-made campaigns I was thrilled that I would be able to run it even now that my busy schedule prevents me from creating my own work. So after browsing through the material I decided on running MoN. And after one session of play I felt totally in need of some opinions/helpful tips and after scouring the net I have to say this is one of the most helpful resources I've come across, so thanks for writing it.

My investigators will be arriving London next session, and after reading how yours did I fear my own group, knowing how they like to play after ten years of gaming together, won't do any better. They too have developed an ignorance to my "tips" over the several years of gaming, so it is funny to see you wrestling with the same problems. Sometimes these guys, even with their extensive gaming experience of tens of systems and hundreds of sessions can't seem to get anything right. In CoC this might end up quickly as a TPK... I however love the system for inventing a thing like the "Idiotics" roll (I could just not get the name right during the entire first session, but seeing that it constantly prevented idiocy, I thus dubbed the Idea roll), a saving grace for any Keeper who wants to force his ever ignorant players to just get something once right!

New York was a blast, and after deciding to avoid the greater Horrors and Mythos artifacts of the Ju-Ju House after getting scared of a cultist guard running away from the "fight" with Silas and meeting the mummies I still have the whole orginal party, mostly sane and totally unharmed. They got most of the clues and surprisingly even sweet talked (!?) Erica Carlyle to finance the trip (or Wild Goose Chase (TM) as the players themselves put it). So the book suggests that the sorcerer/cult-leader of the NY Bloody Tongue warns Gavigan if the lousy investigators escape his clutch, my question is, how should this affect the gameplay in London? Gavigan will have them followed anyhow, but I would like to penatilize them a bit for bullying everybody around and leaving witnesses with good descriptions of the group, but no actual real information, at New York. I wasn't sure if a Hunting Horror would be the right course of action, as they seem quite deadly ... and what would the sorcerer even ask of the creature, not knowing the identities of the culprits? I really would like to scare the living s**t out of them right at the beginning of the session, as there wasn't much physical or sanity depriving conflict in NY the way the players went about it. In hindsight I would force some cult action in NY, but at the time of the session I considered the NY cell of the cult very impotent with such few members and mostly consisting of poverty stricken Kenyans in the US.

I went on a ramble it seems, but the point was to Thank You Good Sir for this Most Useful Resource, which might help me avoid some future mistakes, or prepare for particular problems which arise sooner or later.

Thanks for the compliment! That's wonderful, especially because I started this whole thing as sort of bread crumb trail so people could avoid my mistakes. So if this has led to even one group out there having a better time, I consider it a rousing success.

As for London, it's tough. It's VERY tough. I completely understand wanting to sort of...nudge the players a bit for not thinking things through (not even as a penalty, but as a corrective, because other games let you get away with a lot more sloppiness than CoC does) but keep in mind that hunting horrors strongly dislike the light, so they'd be unlikely to strike in the City. However, a dimensional shambler has no such restrictions, and it can attack when someone is alone in their hotel room...

Before I ran this, it had been many years since I'd run CoC and I was a bit leery of investigator death. I had only played Pathfinder with this group, and losing a character there is much more of an ordeal than it is for CoC, especially if the Pathfinder character is 5th level or above. But much to my delight, the players love to lose characters, with the single caveat that the death must be memorable. When the group was beset by the cultists in El Wasta, one of the players muttered, "Man, I hope I don't die from getting stabbed." Describe the character death, even floridly, and make it something they want to tell their non-gaming friends about, and they won't mind dying at all.