An excellent post, Eibon. Great to have you aboard as a veteran Keeper and as a bona fide Mythos contributor!Eibon wrote:I know you've had good answers from Keepers Dan, Murph and Dr. Gerard, but as a keeper since 1984, I've run games in most situations, and although I've never had a long-term campaign with all the players being criminals, I've run games where some players are, and to be honest, in most games players are willing to break the law with little persuasion. The big question, however, is why are your people willing to indanger life and sanity to fight Cthulhu? If you beleive in law and order, that's a much easier question to answer.
There are very few published adventures designed for this type of group. I recall a few one-off adventures. There's one where the players are Cthulhu Cultists and a rival cult is trying to wipe you out in an Unspeakable Oath, which is close, and I've got a feeling that there was a rum-running adventure (in Adventures Unlimited, if I remember right), but generally, the private investigator model is far more common. There is also a Cthulhu Live book called Shades of Grey which has some adventures aimed at characters on the villainous side of that game, some of which might be usable (it also introduced a lovely idea, which has partly been taken up by subsiquest Cthulhu games -- Facade Points, which are like Sanity start at 100 and when you loose all your Sanity you start loosing Facade Points instead -- the more you loose, the less "together" and rational you appear to other people until you are a gibbering loon).
But all this doesn't mean you can't adapt existing adventures. For example, "Shadows of Yog-Sothoth" could be kicked-off with your gang regarding the Order of the Silver Twilight as muscling in on your territory and plans to drive them out of town. Adventures like "The Auction" or "Thoth's Dagger" can involve your players going to the auction to rob it, as a way in. "The Curse of Chaugnar-Faugn" might be that a cultist has hired the gangsters to steal the statue of Chaugnar-Faugn from the Museum and when they find the night-watchman murdered, they must expose the cult to clear their names.
Almost all adventures are capable of killing your players, if you are a very violent keeper. Curiously the Cthulhu Now adventures seem to be grim and seedy, in a way that most classic adventures are not. You're looking at a more Noir world than many games use.
Criminals still have families and obligations. They might own someone a favour who asks them to house sit at a dead uncle's house while the estate is being sorted out, or to escort an elderly mother across the country to attend the reading of a will. Not only does it lead to an adventure, but they have a dependent they need to look after too!
If you are going to write or own adventures (and for a campaign you probably will need to) then don't forget films books and television as sources for plots. A film like Fritz Lang's "M" could be perfect for you. In the film the underworld hunts down and puts on trial a child murderer because his crimes are attracting too much police attending to their turf and stopping them running their "normal" crime. Replace the child murderer with cultists getting victims for sacrifice, and you have a potential plot (although the outcome might be different). I once did a very good adventure base on three Doctor Who plots, "The Invasion", The Spearhead From Space" and "The Terror of the Zygons". For monsters I used Serpent People. They were being imported into London and had set up a base in the sewers. They ere kidnapping important people and replacing them with Serpent Men. They kept the kidnapped people alive so they can "steal" their memories and thus be convincing impersonators (thus allowing the players to rescue them). In time, once they controlled the government, they would take over. The story opened with a dying man being chased, running out into the traffic and warning the players that the country was in danger. Evidence on his body lead the players to the import company, and the tale unravelled from there.
One of the best "Sopranos" episodes involved two of Tony's gang taking a man unto the New Jersey Pine Barrens to execute him and just getting lost in the woods. Suppose they had stumbled on a cabin where something evil lurked, or the gave of an Indian sorcerer, or the site of a recent sacrifice? Or how about "The Malteese Falcon" plot, just replace Sam Spade and with a player. A woman approaches the gang, asking for help. The NPC who goes to help ends up dead and strange people start asking the players if they have a Mythos artifact which is beleived to be in the woman's possession.
Another thing to remember if your players are quick to become violent, is that the villains are mostly as sociopathic as your players (by the way, don't forget the SAN loss when the do really nasty things). Once, when I was running the Orient Express campagn, while the rest of the party were in the dinning car, a character sneaked off and broke into the cabin of a cultist to try and kill him. The cultist shrivelled him to a husk with the spell and hung the body up in the other player's cabin as a message not to mess with him (and leaving the players to dispose of the body). Also, my players were keen to shoot first when meeting cultists, so I had one cultist used his own death as the blood sacrifice that would let an Old One through! Remember they live in a world with laws. If they are too blatant they will get arrested (although the police do have to be a little rubbish, otherwise they would solve all the cases before the players do).
Then there is the "Terrible Old Man" type plot, where the players hole-up in an old man's house only to find that he's not as harmless as he looks. And of course, an adventure can come from nowhere. One of my favourite ploys is when the players are driving somewhere, the car breaks down, or someone runs into the road and is knocked down, or the way is blocked and they ned to take a detour. All of these can lead to adventures the characters have no direct connection to.
I'm not sure how the Clockwork Orange influence will work, particularly in a 1920s game? There are people who did go on killing sprees around this time, but the tended to get caught and that could well shorten your campaign. While taking them to an asylum and having them brainwashed (to fight Cthulhu?) would make for a plot, it would change the nature of the campaign from criminal gang to secret agents. There was a great TV series set during the Great Depression called Carnivale, which ran for two seasons, about a boy who could heal people who hides in a travelling carnival-show and a priest who might have been the devil, and how the two are fated to have a showdown. It's moody, sometimes grim and full of material which could be mined for Call of Cthulhu.
Lastly, I'd advise people not to try role playing a genuine psychopath. I tried this is a game of Traveller, to see if I could widen the scope of characters I was playing, and it quickly became unpleasent to play the character and put myself in that mindset. It's really a horrible place to be. Go for roughish criminals, they are much more fun!
I agree that a Clockwork Orange campaign could be tedious if all of the player-characters were purely one-dimensional psychopaths, but if you used the lawlessness of that dystopian setting, added sanity-blasting Milk-Plus and then threw in some Mythos, you could end up with badly behaving gangs that become unlikely heroes trying to save Reality. You'd still have to give them something to care about, just to keep the story dynamic. I like the suggestions you offer for criminals to encounter the terribleness.
