First-Time Keeper

MrEben · Post by **MrEben** » Sun Apr 07, 2013 11:04 pm

As a fellow new keeper, I would like to recommend "Malice Everlasting" from MRP's New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley. This was the first CoC adventure I played in, and also the first I ran (which I did yesterday). I think it introduces players to CoC well with a nice balance between research and combat. It is also a very slow burn scenario, which gradually introduces the characters to mythos threats, leading up to a fun climactic battle with a great old one. High risk of character death (although all my investigators survived), and an almost guaranteed temporary insanity.

My two cents.

jovial1 · Post by **jovial1** » Mon Apr 08, 2013 12:55 am

Well, that was a learning experience.

The game quickly became much more pulpy than I expected, but I did my best to roll with it. I wound up going with Dead Man Stomp at the last minute. I was ready to run Edge of Darkness, but my wife - who had talked about playing a psychologist - ultimately chose to play a hooker instead. My brain waffled a bit at trying to fit that together, so having the characters all seated together in a jazz club in New York just felt more natural.

The other two characters were a British pair, a wealthy heiress explorer and her accompanying field researcher.

My wife's going to roll a new character, though. I didn't kill anybody, but her character took some very large blows to her SAN. (Which she didn't have that much of.) We are going to try this again, I believe. One of my players is running a DeadLands game for us as well, so we'll probably alternate to some degree or another. I'm going to bone up on the NY chapter of Masks of Nyarlathotep. Having a wealthy heiress as a character will help them out with the international travel, and it feels like a campaign that's got a fair bit of both pulp and horror.

So it really didn't go as expected, but I'm not going to be run off that easily.

Post by **Keeper Dan** » Tue Apr 09, 2013 12:10 am

Thanks for the additional tip MrEbon. First-time Keeping/Playing CoC scenarios are are a valuable resource, and we need all the great ideas we can get.

Congratulations jovial1! The scale of Pulp to Pure can shift from one adventure to another in the same campaign. Just roll with what your players seem to want and have fun. :cthulhudance:

fox01313 · Post by **fox01313** » Sat Nov 09, 2013 11:31 pm

Just throwing this out there for other future keepers like myself as I've been looking into this too & looking for smaller games once I get a group together that might be scared off with the depth of Masks. I was reminded of this myself while making sure I have the 7 ed. quick start pdf, is that on the Chaosium website there's a bunch of the older 1-2 shot scenarios hiding in the download pdf section of the website. Now it's just a trick here to find which ones look interesting but there's plenty of them out there but plenty of scenario only books or ones like the Miskatonic U/Arkham/Gaslight books where it's part sourcebook & part scenarios.