Our group finally finished a campaign I started back in August 2022!
Curse of Cthulhu is a classic Call of Cthulhu campaign published by Chaosium, originally appearing as The Fungi from Yuggoth before being revised and expanded. The story follows the investigators as they uncover a sinister conspiracy involving the alien Mi-Go, who are secretly harvesting human brains and manipulating events to awaken the Great Old One, Nyarlathotep, in his avatar as the Black Man. The campaign spans multiple locations, including Vermont, Boston, and beyond, as the investigators piece together clues, battle cultists, and face cosmic horrors in a desperate bid to thwart the impending doom.
This was our first ever long-form Call of Cthulhu campaign, having come together to play a number of one-shots on Discord. It was a good finish and overall we had a lot of fun. I’ve certainly gone to love playing with the group. It was a challenging campaign for a number of reasons and I definitely learned a lot about being a Keeper.
The fact it took us so long to finish (31 months!) doesn’t reflect the scope of the campaign but rather the challenges of getting a regular game in. Even in the age of easy Internet meet ups, life can get in the way. In that period, I was trying to finish my PhD and I have two young kids. I also got quite sick several times. And that’s just me – some of the players had their own challenges.
We also made the mistake of trying to meet every 2-3 weeks rather than weekly. This meant when we failed to meet or that particular session time didn’t work out, we would go through long periods of not meeting. In fact, overall I think the campaign was only about 2-3 sessions per chapter and we played 10 chapters in total.
The Good
The campaign has some excellent call outs to Lovecraftian fiction. Some of Curse’s addition to the older Fungi campaign in particular were really fun because they were so heavily modelled on stories by Lovecraft.
Some of the art is evocative and helpful to bring the spartan descriptions of the various entities to life.
Not in the book, but I decided to have the players form an investigators oganisation which they enjoyed and gave them a pool of characters to draw on. The Midnight Society as they called it is now a staple of our Cthulhu gaming.
The campaign starts out quite mild with few losses due to insanity or physical harm. But certain chapters were absolutely dreadful for sending player characters to the asylum or morgue.
The other major change I made was to shift events to 1986 with a view of syncing it with a big financial collapse that occurs in 1987 if things go well.
The players loved the 1980s setting. Using a video store as base camp, drawing on 1980s music and films. On my part the biggest challenge with this was trying to make the handouts and historical references work! Some of the global conspiracy events could be shifted to the 1940s or 1960s without a problem. Other things were harder to do.
The episodic chapters made running a campaign that could be quite deadly easier to do as the roster of characters could adapt.
In reality, I think the vagaries of the skill system meant the characters chances didn’t improve a whole lot even as I tweaked the required skills based on what the players had available. Or gave them hints as what to bring. A classic moment is when the expert geologist failed to recognise anything about the geology in one chapter. So in the end, some handouts and research back home filled in the gaps.
(For a summary of what I’ve learned about making good investigators read this.)
The Bad
My biggest two complaints is how badly this is written in some places and how badly designed! By the latter I mean, its railroads all the way and critical path clues that if the investigators aren’t able to pass a skill test basically means they just fail the chapter.
Of course, I could fix some of this but some of the chapters were so hard on player characters that engaged with the material, that a less willing group would have walked away from the game entirely. Even with my trusted crew of players, it was hard to watch them resigned rather than engaged in trying to overcome the challenges on offer at times.
This may be a reflection of its drawing close to Lovecraft’s fiction. There are possible scenarios you may just about survive but its really stacked against you. The best case in most chapters is the scenario where a single survivor takes vital clues back to homebase before retiring for several weeks in an asylum.
The overall arc has a truly epic feel to it but given how it plays out, I’m not sure if you showed the description of the campaign I wrote above to my players they’d really have known the stakes until the end. They got the details – enough for a successful finale – but the overall picture is often lost in the heaps of character casaulties.
As for the writing, clearly Chaosium didn’t believe in proof readers at this time. Whilst there are lots of good ideas by Keith Herber and others, their ability to express it in a way helpful to Keepers was clouded by what I hopefully surmise was a secret eldritch pact to put them to sleep in fits of confusion.
The campaign overall doesn’t make an engaging globe-trotting adventure and is best when its local to the Arkham area. Clearly, by the final chapter the writers had given up on trying to make sense of it. It basically comes down to “Hey Keeper, no idea how this is all going to work out so… erm… its your problem now.”
The Ugly
Oh the casual racism! I don’t mean the 1920s setting stuff. I mean the 1980s writers’ world view. Referring to different ethnic groups with terms we rightfully recognise as slurs. The complete lack of sensitivity to other cultures or really much appreciation of the actual particulars of those countries.
It was hard reading it at times and I noted when I played out some of the dialogue the NPCs are given as written (in the San Francisco chapter), my players noticed it.
Final Thoughts
I deliberately chose one of the smaller(!) early Call of Cthulhu campaigns as our first foray into long-form play for two reasons. One I wanted to have played at least one of the classics and Fungi / Day of the Beast are considered as such. Second I hoped the next campaign I’d run would be more recently written / revised. Going for something written by writers in the 21st century to something 30 years ago would have made the flaws even more noticeable. On this I feel somewhat justified.
Curse proved to have been a good test in some ways. A group of strangers who met on the Internet stuck it out over a very long period. I’d like to think we’re friends now. We had some very memorable moments which predate my recent blogging energy so I can’t share all the fun stuff without this being x10 longer.
The most important thing is I’m now energised to play even better campaigns with them.
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