MUP 099 - Making Contacts to Help Lift the Box at Your Door

[Keeper Dan]

Episode 99 features Keepers Jon, Chad, and Dan this time. People all around the world are getting their 7th Edition books, and Jon opens his on the air! We also discuss contacts that Investigators can use in scenarios, both pre-established and made up on the fly.
This episode was recorded on May 2, 2016.


Campus Crier
The Campus Crier is brought to you by our new sponsor: Golden Goblin Press!

Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition book sets are arriving to backers all over the world!
Keeper Dan got his on Friday, and it’s an amazingly well crafted book set.

Keeper Jon unboxes his on the air!

During the unboxing, Jon mentions a post by MOB that shows a beautiful leather satchel being produced by Pegasus Speil in Germany.

With the CoC 7e books included € 299.00
Just the bag by itself. € 199.00

Building a Lovecraftian Video Game with Frogwares’ The Sinking City

Article from Geek & Sundry-
Cthulhu Company Kickstarted Itself to Death, Then This Happened.

“Issue 0” of theArkham Gazette is available on DTRPG, now with update CoC 7e stats!

More Sentinel Hill Press news: Mike Mason Q&A about A Time to Harvest


Golden Goblin Press Release!
Our next RPG Kickstarter is slated to launch in early February 2017. It will be the company's first campaign, seven scenarios set in 1932, with chapters in Arkham, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, the wilds of Hungary, and beyond.
Entitled Children of the Black Stone (based on the classic story by R.E. Howard, The Black Stone). Authors attached to the project are Jeff Moeller, Dan Harms, Brian Sammons, Oscar Rios, and Adam Scott Glancy.


Cryptocurium Spotlight-

The June Parcel of Terror will be the Creepshow box!


Topic -

Use of investigator contacts. how to create them, use them, turn them against the player, etc.

In both the 6e & 7e Investigator’s Handbooks, every profession has a list of common professional contacts.
Contact rules are located in the 7e Keepers book, page 97

Social Security Administration Top names of the 1920s

[Shannon Mac]

Good one. Jon was off the hook! Get it?

[Keeper Jon]

Good one. Jon was off the hook! Get it?

[fallingtower]

I got my 7e...it's glorious.

The stack of Call of Cthulhu in my living room is impressive. Orient Express, 7e, all of Jon Hook's Age of Cthulhu books (via person to person sale with autographs and art...thanks Jon) and a couple of Miskatonic River Press titles.

[fox01313]

Really excited now to get the keeper screen for 7e as it sounds great plus the core books too.

Agreed on Creepshow though I always felt after reading a lot of the King fiction that many of his ideas are really good but work best as short stories & a bit painfully long in novels. Creepshow & the sequel are nice little bits of horror done rather well.

Slight tangent, also look up the Friday the 13th the tv series, more fun little bits of horror with haunted antiques. Lots of ideas there in that show on how to twist things or steal ideas so when the investigator or their family goes antique shopping, plot threads are all around now.

As for contacts as a skill in other Gumshoe settings beyond Nights Black Agents, I don't believe it's in there as the helpers in Nights are a little more disposable due to rapid loss of blood. However a simple way around it if you have a player organization established is to just use the same mechanics. Say that as a part of this organization, the GM will have some key NPCs & a group pool of small # of (maybe 3-5) points to start. Now similar to the ability in Nights, the GM asks them a little on who they want to have as a contact in the group, let them come up with the basics & profession (then the GM can fill in the dark secrets), then ask how many points do they want to put into this character to show how good they are. The players can make that one contact NPC (and future character) really good with many pool points or just put one in for now to make them average at their job but a good resource in that field that maybe the players are lacking. If any points left over they can save up to get better contacts later, make more average ones or boost up a few other things in the organization. With some group that the players are with (like the Laundry or Delta Green or Shield or whatnot), give the players some points that can be used to make the home base better & let them figure out what to do with some of these improvement points be it in defense, better gear, a lab, a vault & etc. They won't have enough to cover every improvement but it's a good way to show progression & more exploits for the GM to take advantage of (like the better gear being stolen & puts the PCs in the spotlight, a vault that the cultists know about after possessing the random dude that happened to work on installing it, better walls that keep things in causing more damage, etc.).

I'm going to start pacing for that Golden Goblin campaign as the names on that list plus the Black Stone will definitely put it up in the top tier of CoC books to get for 7th ed. And guessing that once the kickstarter/intro stuff is out for all the things going on with Delta Green/Unknown Armies that some of the writers will be free to at least toss out a few scenarios into it.