Call of Cthulhu Friday: Gaming in Arkham

My very last CoC campaign in the late 90’s was set in 1922 Arkham. This was around the point when that current long-time group had pretty much petered out where I had just Terry and Janet Planet left as regular players. Yep, two players. Terry and Janet had been around in my games since around 1988, 10 years at that point, and I was pretty comfy running games for just the two of them. In fact, around 1989 there was a period of around a year when they would come over to Venice Beach once or twice a month on a Friday night to play a little two player Champions, which was just great times. Sometime in the mid-90’s there was also a point when I was doing campaigns for a group of all women (not by choice), of which Planet Janet and Terry were a part of.

So around 1998 or so I ran what was going to end up being some of the last few games I would be doing before my several year semi-retirement from gaming.

At some point a dude had let me borrow and copy some of his Cthulhu material, including the Arkham sourcebook. I loved reading that book, and all the little 1920’s details that came with it. The big apartment building with interesting NPC’s that the characters stayed in, to the small lunch diner where they “served meatloaf and mashed potatoes in big white crockery,” it was just brimming with period flavor. The shopping district, the city hall, the Miskatonic environs where all cool, and there was even a speakeasy for Terry’s torch singer “Lila” to perform and get caught up in gangster activities (and even meet Al Jolsen who attended one night, who offered her a job when she made a great singing roll if she ever went to New York).

Terry ran her singer, a veteran and survivor of no less than two CoC campaigns (maybe a little light in the sanity department, but she had been a very lucky and well played PC). Planet Janet came up with a new character, a rich English country girl who came to the U.S. to attend Miskatonic. Oh yeah, a buddy of mine and longtime player, Gary, also played here and there, but missed many sessions due to commitments. When Gary did play, he ran an American Indian guy based on the Indian soldier from “Predator.” You know, the dude who seemed to be able to sense the Predator’s presence in the woods (Gary figured he would hear things, but that it would be Cthulhu stuff instead of a dreadlocked Alien).

Anyway, there were just a handful of those games, and most of the ones with just the girls were about shopping and exploring the places in town; mixed with the occasional weird happening. The group tangled with gangsters, evil seamen, and even visited an old Civil War bone yard in a cave that rose from the dead when they took some Necronomicon fragments. They made a few friends in town too, including an English jester dwarf and “Colonel Sausage,” a limbless midget from the local carnival.

Alas, the campaign did not go as long as previous ones. Both Terry and Janet were tough to schedule for get-togethers, and after almost two months of no gaming at one point I said “fuck it” and more or less started my long game-less sabbatical that pretty much ended with my current group a couple of years ago.

But again, I loved that Arkham supplement. Maybe I’ll drag it out one night for inspiration. Although I am kind of leaning on Victorian England or The Old West for my eventual new campaign, Arkham is the classic setting, and a hellacool one.