Achtung! Cthulhu - Prelude to the Secret War

I've only run five game sessions since Curse of Strahd finished at the start of the year, which is odd for me as I'm usually running something. All those sessions have been at conventions, and I've enjoyed them immensely. Running at Furnace a fortnight ago confirmed to me that I really wanted to start again. 

The Wednesday group - Graham, Tom, Dr Mitch and Alex - continued after we left Barovia with the Shadow of the Sorcerer campaign for Conan 2d20, run by Graham (another eternal GM). It was great fun as we carved our way across Hyperborea, in a quest that involved cultists, serpent people, ancient magics and enemies rising again, and lots of genre appropriate fun. We finished on Wednesday.

Conan 2d20 is an earlier iteration of the 2d20 engines and it shows it, as the edges are still a bit rough. It's not as smooth as later iterations, but in play that wasn't a barrier. The talents for characters stack up to let you do crazy things. I'd focussed my character as a rogue type, a burglar and liar, rather than going for a strong fighting build. There were times when I kind of regretted not building the character with a bit more focus on combat, then I had moments when her ridiculously good acrobatics talents kicked in and it made it all worthwhile. Anyway, I digress.

We'd agreed in principle that we'd run another campaign once the Conan game finished. I'd pitched Mutant Year Zero: Elysium and Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20. We opted for the latter, as one of the players didn't fancy the character-vs-character shenanigans that come with that setting, plus you get to punch Nazis. Pulp WW2 felt like a good option. Achtung! Cthulhu does a good job at holding the mythos at arms length, and then shooting it repeatedly with a Sten gun (you can read my review of this here).

I had two options; Shadows of Atlantis (the first campaign released) or the more recent The Serpent & the Sands. Reading both of these, there's a slightly different design ethos from other settings. Some of the scenarios feel very episodic, and quite often they're constructed with a particular end-game in mind (the villain escaping having shown some more of their threat is quite common). Initially, this jarred for me as I read Shadows of Atlantis, but once I imagined this playing out as a Saturday morning cinema drama with something like the Pathé News fanfare at the start and a voice over, it worked. I had been looking for more direct connections between the missions, but in some cases it's just the boffins back at Section M who use the material the characters find to get them their next mission. The Serpent & the Sands does have much more taught interlinks between missions, but sometimes it is a clear plot direction from the GM.

In the end I've opted for Shadows of Atlantis as the players gave me the choice of which to use. I think that The Serpent & the Sands is a stronger campaign narratively, but it has too many echoes of the Conan game we just played. Deserts, Serpent-People, Ancient threats rising again, they're all there. It's set chronologically after Shadows so I'm going to keep it in reserve in case people want to revisit the setting later. That said, Shadows of Atlantis is a fun campaign which does a grand job of showcasing the difference from the traditional Lovecraftian mythos, so I'm really looking forward to it.

Sadly, Alex has decided to take a break from the group, so we've looked for a new player. Simon (who also does the admin for the Tavern) has expressed and interest, so I hope we're sorted. Alex has said he intends to return, once he's had a little time and space. 

Now the campaign is decided, the next choice is the VTT. At the moment, I'm leaning towards using Role, as it's a nice, light and rock-solid platform. It's probably my favourite VTT. There appears to be a good sheet on Roll20, but at the moment Paypal and Roll20 have managed to lock my account(*), so I don't think I'll explore that further. The plus for me with Role is that it runs happily on my iPad Air, so I don't need to take the MacBook Pro with me if I'm travelling for work. I did consider Foundry (there's a good unofficial set up there), but I've come to the conclusion that I'd prefer to stick to something I know. Although there are character sheets on Role, I'm going to suggest that the players use the form-fillable PDFs and we just have a shared set of sheets for journals and meta-currencies (threat and momentum). I'll probably post more on this as I finalise.

Anyway, new beginnings. The Secret War begins.

21 October 2023