A Cold Fire Within: Pulp Cthulhu Campaign Review

[@theczarek]

Foundry VTT has implementation for Chase rules. By no means perfect but still very helpfull in running chases

[@davidgibson7991]

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[@davidgibson7991]

37:55

[@travisjohnson4681]

Appreciate the review. We just finished The Two Headed Serpent and Horror on the Orient Express (2 separate groups) and looking to dive into this one in the coming months. Helps to have a keepers perspective of the campaign post run.

[@tangpau93]

Just found this video. Thinking about running this as my first Pulp Campaign. Thank you so much for the insight and notes.

[@matthewconstantine5015]

Awesome. Thanks for watching. I hope it helps. Good luck. It's a cool campaign. I'm hoping to run it again someday with more experience under my belt.

[@SimonSedgwick]

Fantastic review thank you very much. It's just come out for Fantasy Grounds Unity, so will certainly wrap some of your advice into it.

[@matthewconstantine5015]

Thanks for saying that & thanks for watching. I hope you enjoy it. I definitely plan to run it again at some point, using some of what I've learned. I'm also hoping the next time I run it, I don't have so many time constraints and am able to play up the "sandbox" parts of the campaign.

[@rebeccagrawl7653]

It will be interesting to hear your thoughts if you run it again!

[@SpookyGroovyPolitoCatMum]

So far this is actually a pretty good review but I'm hearing about the same problems that are common even prevalent with seven addition and that's across the board I don't know what gas light is going to look like but it's probably going to look like this. And this sounds overwritten, a little too open-ended, poorly thought through with major concerns like it's the map just a picture map or is it supposed to actually be useful for the players or the or the keeper for that matter and if it's not really useful for the keeper and or the players then it must just be a picture map. But I'm also hearing that some areas were difficult to run because while they were fairly thoroughly written over and and detailed they lacked a storyline Coheed cohesion that made them fit in with the other events. So much of the 7th edition has like this catalog of dramatic personal and I at the beginning sometimes at the end and then a background that the keeper will know but there's no transmission of this information to the players within the campaign or the scenario. And then there's just a kind of jumping around I hear some a paragraph about this faction or person and within this paragraph there are kernels of a story and then there's another paragraph about a place and the history of that place and within the history of that place here's another Colonel of the story and it's it's just to much of an Easter egg hunt to really just pull out the story and make it easy to run the campaign and then plug in the details as the players get to those elements get to those areas get to those people get to those interviews get to those digging around points with spot hidden and snakes and ducking and dodging. It really really really really really really makes me miss second through 4th edition. I love what Paul fricker and Company largely did in 7th edition, especially with the new rules for luck and the pushed roll and spending luck on failed rolls. I do not like the chase system that takes the game out of the RPG and into the board game you almost need a map of pads and spaces and Monopoly pieces to move along in order to accomplish Chase things with the chase rules. I've always found them to be about it's interesting is cardboard. So I describe the same and ask for the roles but tell the story The Mechanics feed the story with speed dexterity obstacles hazards but the story has to be the biggest part. And I think that grabbing the action and plopping it into a board game it might as what we shoot some letters. With monsters granted but still. So every time I have a chase scene to negotiate I look for new ways to keep that going without fogging down the mechanics. This campaign it doesn't sound like something I'm going to spend $35 for a hard copy but I might spend $17 for the PDF file. I'd really like to have a look at more content so I'll go in have a peek at the samples that are available on the chaosium.com website and fish around for more information some people who have actually purchased and run it like you like yourself. Congratulations bill on your first hope campaign! Congratulations for stepping back into the game after you know a long stretch. I did that myself. Raised my kids up into their late 20s before I was actually able to start running the game again had time and and things like that and had a group of people that were largely interested in playing including my daughter and son-in-law! That's a lot of fun and I could I could do a primer myself on having couples at the table and having your own offspring at the table you got to cut all those ties and get them to play for themselves and not protect one another incessantly oh no don't do that you might get hurt LOL or mom quit telling me what to do I am just asking for a roll here LOL I'm not your mom I'm your keeper of Arcane War drop that Mom stuff I'm going to have you make Insanity checks until you're 40 okay I will have her making sanity checks until she's 40 and she's loving every minute of it. I can't recommend the two-headed serpent more enthusiastically enough. I'm actually running it for the second and third time. What? No I don't have a Time Turner but I do have the home group who wanted to play it a second time, and a group about 20 mi away that I'm running at 4:00 every other week. So I'm running it for the second and third time almost simultaneously. Because of some delays and a convention that we all had in the middle and people being sick and other people moving and a lot of other other things we've had enough delays in both groups that they're both almost in the same place now. And what group is only supposed to be playing two-headed serpent every other week but we hit a particular portion of the campaign that takes place in Iceland that's going to take several weeks and we don't want to break away from it and play masks ofNyarlathotep in between so and I'm not ready to run the next portion of masks anyway. This which is deemed the most dangerous campaign written as a 7th edition pulp Cthulhu Adventure is pretty cool but there's that overwritten thing and 30 something pages of drama persona. No. I'm not kidding. I originally ran it in the 90s as a consolidated softback book and honestly I keep reverting to the original from the hugely elaborately presented 7th edition $150 to volume 42 LB book and handout set. I did buy the prop set from things we love her at Historical Society. Seth has a box opening of that. You should check it out other people have done so as well. And it's it's worth buying the handouts are so well done. So there's that but the original is a little under 200 pages no it's not even that! And the 7th edition is 700 pages. Yep. Takes a lot of text to fill up that many sheets of paper. Not that it isn't worth it and it isn't beautiful and that isn't really a lot of fun but I run into the same problems so many pieces of the storyline are sequestered in paragraphs about people places or things meant to give you information but the storyline such as it is has been deconsolidated and Scattered like seeds of grass throughout the campaign which is considerable. Okay thanks again for your comment here for your video review. I'm definitely going to check out this particular book. And see what I think

[@matthewconstantine5015]

If I ever run this one again, I'll definitely be doing some re-writing. I usually do, but I'll probably do a lot. The time travel chapter I mention that could happen at any time, for example. I'd probably just lock that down and have it be something they could figure out at one or two specific points along the way. Same with the Dreamlands, which to be honest, I'd probably just drop completely. It never came up in my run-through, but I think I might just leave it out. I'm sort of torn. On the one hand, I like having all the characters with good roleplaying notes and whatnot. And I like things being somewhat open ended. But, there's such a thing as too open ended. There's enough in this one I really like that I do think I'd like to revisit it, and in fact, I think I'd like to dramatically expand several parts of it. But it would definitely require a lot of work on the part of the Keeper. When I think back on it, I'm bummed I didn't have more real-world time, so my players could have spent a lot more adventure time in the underground world. I have heard really positive things about Two Headed Serpent. When I was looking for a campaign to run and settled on A Cold Fire Within, Two Headed Serpent just wasn't quite what I was in the mood for, but I think it's one I'd like to check out none the less. Sadly, I've only managed to get a single one-shot of Call of Cthulhu run in the last two years, so I'm not really holding my breath for the point where I run another ongoing campaign.

[@user-gj7lp5iz6k]

You keep referring to Melody & Brendan STERLING as Melody & Brendan SANDERSON. 🤨

[@danmcvehil2452]

I gave up after 12 minutes. This isn't a review. This is a discussion of how you played this.