I started playing the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game approximately two years ago. I became enamored with the setting, the dice rolling, and the challenge of the game. One of my friends messaged me asking if I would be the DM or, in Call of Cthulhu’s terminology, the Keeper, in a session. I was elated to accept the challenge, and I successfully led our group through a campaign. Spoiler alert: all of their characters survived.
Call of Cthulhu is created by Chaosium Inc. They’re pretty well known, as I have seen them tabling at C2E2 and Gen Con this year. To become the keeper, I bought the Call of Cthulhu starter set. It includes three books. The first book is a solo adventure, the second book is the rules, and the third book includes pre-made stories played by a group of players. This set also includes the Call of Cthulhu dice, empty character sheets, and five pre-generated characters.
Before the game started, I was nervous. What if my players got stuck? What if they don’t understand the rules? What if they get bored??? Thankfully, none of these occurrences happened. I did use one of the pre-made stories, but I tweaked it in my own way. This allowed me to be creative, but have a reference in case I got stuck being the keeper.
I underestimated how smart my friends are. My friends discovered there was an entity trapped in a farmhouse and that its main power is to reanimate dead corpses. As my friends stumbled on the farmhouse, they found various animal corpses along with the dead body of a young woman. My fiancé decided he wanted to cut up the body parts and throw them down a well. My other friends agreed, and they spent time cutting up these body parts. They took sanity damage for it, but in the end, this was a smart decision. When it came time for my final boss battle, I couldn’t reanimate the dead creatures or the woman. This made the battle easier for the characters, but life more difficult for me. In the end, my friends were able to conquer the entity.
Ultimately, I plan on playing through the other two pre-created scenarios, so I feel 100% comfortable leading a campaign. If you have ever played the Call of Cthulhu RPG, feel free to leave a comment about how the story went. I would love to hear it.
Bizarre Brunette 
Congrats on popping your DM Cherry, and with Call of C’Thulhu no less. I have to admit, I am a latecomer to this particular party, having only played it at a public game at an expo earlier this year (and I played Kult for 2 sessions as a teenager, which is similar I think as my Tommy Gun wielding gangster was an unstoppable crazy tommy gun wielding psychopath by the end of session 2). It is a fantastic game and one that players don’t need a lot of fore knolwedge to play. As you’ve seen, just getting creative works (my binge watch of criminal minds a few years back came in really handy in my recent game). I got the starter set, and the core books but still haven’t found time to read them all (yet). I should say I was v impressed with Chaosium’s customer service. And if you chance upon one of their stalls at a con, that is a good time to get the books as they might give you the pdf too. Which is always handy.
Glad you had fun
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Yeah it was awesome! I agree their customer service is supurb. I ordered everything on Monday? and they came Thursday? My session was Friday and I was full on expecting they wouldn’t come in time. I will for sure stop in their booth if they appear at a convention I’m attending.
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