Pre-Game

I’m a little torn regarding where to place this game in the grand scheme of things. It was originally run as a Call of Cthulhu one-shot at some big con Not Near Here. GenCon? Origins? Something like that. The GM wanted to playtest it before hand, but we couldn’t get a firm enough RSVP going for it to be viable. So this was a repeat of the game she ended up running at the convention.

We barely interacted with the rules, so it was more playing through the scenario than playing with the game itself.

Character Creation

We had pre-generated characters for the game. I gather the GM used specific software for it that randomly created characters. There were some peculiarities, like attributes that didn’t correspond to the description of the character. But otherwise it was fine.

Our characters were cast and crew for an off-Broadway production that was designed to be spectacularly offensive.

In Play

Only a couple characters had any sort of hook into the plot, while the rest of us were expected to chew on the scenery with our eccentric characters in an absurd situation. There was a lull in the middle where the few people with plot hooks were involved in following up some clues, while the rest of us had no in character reason to do anything.

We had very little in the way of dice rolling, very little combat. I missed the one combat that took place, so I can’t comment on how the combat system worked. All in all, I came out of it with some thoughts on how I would handle it differently and no thoughts on how the system worked.

Compared to the Leading Brand

Largely inapplicable, unless I want to compare it to other horror one-shots I’ve played.

Final Verdict

We had some fun, even with a rough spot in there. I ultimately want to have another stab at playing something with the Basic Roleplaying System. Maybe I’ll try and get a game of Elric! going.

Next on the chopping block was Castle Falkenstein, using its rather unusual card mechanic.