One of my bucket list items for October was to play in a horror D&D campaign. On Friday, October 5th I cooperated in a D&D Call of Cthulhu campaign held by a couple players in a Facebook Group I belong to. Besides playing D&D, I was able to visit a new game store I had never been to; the Gaming Goat in St. Paul.  I drove 45 minutes from my apartment to The Gaming Goat during rush hour traffic because I was looking forward to the story. Our session flew by and we ended up playing the campaign for five hours straight. Call of Cthulhu D&D is probably my favorite format because of the horror element of the game.

I wasn’t the DM, but I do know a couple of the mechanics in Call of Cthulhu. When you roll the dice, you want to roll under your skill. For example, my character, Dr. Tamela Wissler has a high biology skill of 70. In order to succeed, I would need to roll a 70 or under to pass. However, Dr. Wissler has a 5 in fast talk which makes it impossible for my character to talk her way out of a situation. A critical failure would be to roll a 99 or even a 90 may count as a critical failure. Therefore a critical success would be under 10.

To start the campaign, all of the characters were on a ship similarly built to the Titanic traveling to Massachusetts. Initially, all players could sneak items on the ship and I rolled to sneak a vial of acid in my pocket because Dr. Wissler is a scientist, and who wouldn’t want acid to pour onto a creature. As the days pass in our campaign, different characters go missing, are murdered, or pushed overboard. In between all of the missing passengers, I did roll a critical success to pour a drink and yell obscenities at Nazis which I was proud of.

As our players ventured out on the boat, we uncovered the ship captain performing a sacrificial ritual to a black tentacled octopus creature underneath our boat. All of the characters who were murdered were sacrificed to this creature. Thankfully, the group of players stopped the ship captain before we had to fight the ugly monster so we successfully survived our campaign.

A year ago, I participated in a Call of Cthulhu D&D session with the same group of people I played with this year. The DM still had my old character sheet from the previous year so I played as the same character from last year. That was an extra bonus to this session.

I enjoy the Call of Cthulhu D&D mechanics and would highly recommend it. It’s perfect for the month of October but can be played all year round. I’m attending another session next Thursday and I haven’t decided if I’m going to play as Tamla or as another in-depth character trying to stay sane in the Arkham universe.