Talking about Call of Cthulhu

It was the week before PaizoCon.

I was busy like crazy.

Preparing my adventure, helping my wife for her month-long trip to Montreal (aka Dad’s time off), packing my terrain into my luggage, thinking of everything I had to do and the usual work fires to put out. Then my Facebook chat popped up with a simple “Hey JP”. I had no idea where that inconspicuous instant message would lead…

For the record, I have Trillian hooked in to my Facebook so I can see who is on and chat with them without going on FB.

First off, let me introduce the man who sent that message, Oscar "Osk" Rios. If you ever purchased one of Chaosium’s Monograph dealing with olden days (I own like five or six monographs, at least three by Osk) OR if you ever navigated the forums at Yog-Sothoth.com, you have heard of or met Great Cthulhu or Osk. At the time (late 2008), I was engrossed in my massive campaign for Cthulhu Invictus (Call of Cthulhu in Roman times). So Osk’s feedback and comments were invaluable.

Osk and his group agreed to playtest the first draft of my campaign. It was very rough. VERY rough. The feedback I got back really forced me to re-evaluate the whole idea – it was a train wreck. Not one to shy away, I got back to the drawing board, using Osk and his group’s feedback and re-drafted the whole thing. The final result was much more interesting, I think.

In case you wonder why I abandoned that project, the rewrite I did really added to the campaign. It made more sense, flowed much better, had a lot of ties and links together (much more than the version Osk got) and generally touched on the themes and topics better. However, after playing it for five months, I came to the conclusion that while fun and exciting, it would require a 300 pages book (at least). So I decided I should do other things. There were a few elements I had no idea how to have the players discover and I’m not one to write fifty pages of background if the players only have a realistic chance to know about two. So the project was shelved.

For the past few years, Osk and I kept touch through Facebook as he moved from being "just" a great Call of Cthulhu author and writer to being Vice President and RPG Director at Miskatonic River Press.

So "Hey JP" led to much more than a usual casual conversation. This whole post is to announce that I will be posting a Q&A with Oscar Rios from MRP on this blog during the month of July. I hope I can get him to reveal some of the things they are working on for this year! After my hugely successful Q&A with Peter from PCI, I will be posting one with Osk from MRP.

JP