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allicorn

Tatters of the King

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by
allicorn
, 18th September 2011 at 04:07 PM (866 Views)
Hoy... blimey... I've been meaning to run this for about 2 or 3 years now and - finally - after the sudden and surprisingly bloodless finale of the GURPS-based homebrew campaign set in Ian M. Banks' "Culture" universe that I'd been playing in for a few months... its my turn to DM tonight.

Still not sure I'm going to be ready. Prepping merrily away right now. Tatters is full of characters - characters who know stuff and have quite well fleshed out personalities and motivations. One of the early challenges for the Keeper is, I think, dumping the players into a social setting with a whole bunch of characters like this and orchestrating a series of hopefully engaging conversations. Tricky, I think.

Gunfights are easy. Exploration, encounters with mythos fiends, the inevitable player burglary expedition, these things are easy to do. Lengthy conversations with complex NPCs... that's hard.

Anyway, hope I can pull it off at least passably. Tatters is a wonderful campaign. Just reading the campaign book is a thrill in itself. There are some utterly monstrous moments - things that'll make you explete loudly when you first read 'em - and they're generally not of the "and then the great old one eats 1d6 party members" type. For the most part, Tatters' big confrontations are much more technically survivable but full of really shocking and dramatic spectacle. Awesome moments you can throw your players into without guaranteeing the next session is spent rolling up replacement characters.

Well, I better get back to it. I'm starting either tonight or next weekend, depending on how ready I feel by about 6pm today.

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Categories
‎ Campaign Journal , ‎ Call of Cthulhu

Comments

  1. christian's Avatar
    Good luck. What I loved about TotK was the fact that the cultists were fleshed out, human, believable characters.
  2. allicorn's Avatar
    So true. Some of them are even kinda forgivable. My players' motto in most games tends to be something along the lines of "there is no situation which cannot be improved by the application of hand grenades" so this ought to be interesting
  3. Radical Therapy's Avatar
    I ran Tatters in its entirety, and loved just about every session. The group loved the antagonists. The strict firearm controls in London worked out very well, making many players reluctant to carry heavy firepower. The middle of the campaign is the hardest to get through, because a few events rely on letters from NPCs, which I hinted to my group once or twice to avoid complete frustration (the team was very proactive as CoC investigators should be).

    The first major climactic session (the one before Nug's farm in the book) took me long time to prep; each and every encounter there is dripping with atmosphere and opportunities for detail. Definitely give that one a long look!

    Oh also, if it is your style of Keeping, consider putting in a light SAN drain every few days for the nightmares; I had a psychiatrist investigator self-medicating to knock himself out and a writer who drank himself into oblivion every night to avoid having them. On rare occasions characters just didn't sleep. Once Coombs shows up he heaps on even more paranoia. By the midpoint of the campaign the entire party (many of which who had jobs and families) slept in a group in the back of a bookstore a PC owned while drinking, reading tomes, and keeping watch for any other surprises.

    The campaign is full of amazing moments, looking forward to hearing a report!
  4. Lisa's Avatar
    Ooh, the constant nightmares is something I should've done. Maybe next time.