Hey All, was hoping to get some help/advice from the community on a campaign idea. Looking for PbtA games that have a good selection of mundane character books (so no magical powers or adventurer style heroics, more investigators and normal folk). This would be like a Call of Cthulu game, but it would spread out over a century or more with players making new characters on the regular so I’d want to have a wide variety.
The idea for the game is this. Starting sometime in the mid to late 1800 a group of people hear about a town being terrorized. Some sort of monster is killing people (the details of the monster are unimportant). This monster is very powerful, and it’s weaknesses will be very difficult to determine, so it’s likely that that first group will die in the attempt or flee. The game would then pick up 25 years later with new PCs (and possibly 1 or 2 from the previous group if they escaped). They would investigate how to defeat it, and ultimately either succeed, die or run away again. If they die pick up 25 years later….you get the picture. Any suggestions, thoughts or possible pitfalls in a campaign like this would be much appreciated as well.
Tremulus?
Yeah Tremulus is basically what you want.
But The Hood would actually be a super neat game for a horror scenario
I was considering switching games between era where appropriate, Hood was one I was eyeing if we go to the mid 20th.
Very neat idea!
Select playbooks from Monster of the Week might work for you, especially if you want the characters to eventually kill the creature. Or if you wanted you could use the Simple World hack to make playbooks. http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/simple-world/
At the least the Principles section of Simple World is a great jumping off point for getting the feel of a *World.
Maybe Mythos World or Black stars rise?
I’d say go with Black Stars Rise. I found tremulus to be an unreadable mess. 😛
Can I recommend Trail of Cthulhu or Call of Cthulhu? they’re not PbtA games, but it doesn’t sound like the game you’re describing is a PbtA game either, if you’ve got a plot in mind and are looking for discardable characters.
If you’re definitely looking for something with the ApocWorld skeleton, go Tremulus. It’s very flawed, but i don’t think its flaws will get in the way of the game you describe in the way they would a game that sticks closer to ApocWorld principles and Agendas.
And it’s definitely got a LOT of very mundane playbooks.
One of the reasons I was thinking PbtA was because these characters will be iterating quickly. I’m think each generation would only be 2-3 sessions and I want character creation to be quick and easy with minimal decision making. Do you feel that Trail or Call fit those criteria? Honestly I’ve not played either game.
#TheHood certainly has a lot of mundane, down-to-Earth playbooks you could use for the late 20th/early 21st stages of the campaign, but I think +Alan Scott makes a good point: PbtA games hand the players a lot of agency, which doesn’t sit well if you have a prepared plot ready to run.
Can I chime in with a suggestion of Graham W’s Cthulhu Dark? It meets you main requirements of having simple rules, with characters who are very quick to create, plus the basic rules are totally free!
http://catchyourhare.com/files/Cthulhu%20Dark.pdf
Sweet, I’ll look into it.