I've been contemplating a solo mechanic for Call of Cthulhu, or other games with a similar "uncovering the true horror," aesthetic. This idea borrows some from Cthulhu Dark and a few other places.
Track a "mythos score," on, say, a d10. It starts out at 1. For every investigative move your character makes, roll 1d10 before you decide what they discover. On any value equal or lower than your mythos score, increase the score by 1. This should hopefully give a feeling of gradually creeping horror, though I'm not sure if the effect will work so well at the upper part of the range, when everything is likely to be supernatural in some sense or other.
For elaboration, use the mythos score as a gauge of what's likely to happen. At low values, the horror is relatively tame, higher bringing increasing weirdness. Nothing can have an overtly supernatural explanation without the mythos roll being a "success." The mythos score doesn't drop during the course of a single adventure, though I suppose if you're feeling charitable you might allow particularly heroic or stalwart character actions to lower it.
I hope this is helpful for anybody who likes Cthulhu gaming as much as I do. One of these days I'll try to actually test it out. :)
PS: My CoC plans got delayed. The 20th anniversary edition of Wraith: The Oblivion, which I contributed to, is out, and I have to go drool over it a while. :D
ReplyDeleteBruce Baugh always heard good things about that game, but struggled to get into the world of darkness in general. I guess I just came in at the wrong time, playing the monster always seem to bit odd to me.
ReplyDeleteThat's one of the advantages of Wraith: you're playing a random person who died with strong enough unfinished business that they're still around, relatively close to the lands of the living. There are monsters in the Underworld, but the presumption is that you're not one of them. But I'll spin off a separate thread for that soon. :)
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