Review: The Necropolis (Call of Cthulhu)
Yesterday I GMed the scenario "The Necropolis" from the collection Gateways to Terror for a group of random strangers from the internet. The bite sized scenario seemed perfect to brush up on my Cthulhu Keeper skills and presents an interesting premise: being locked up in an ancient tomb in 1920s Egypt. In practice though, this scenario leans quite far away from what makes Call of Cthulhu so special to me: it is essentially a small dungeon crawl with a combat heavy finish that lacks any opportunities for role-play or investigation. Seth Skorkowsky provides an excellent overview of how to improve on some of these aspects, but you can only do so much if you want your PCs to enter the tomb. I also found Chaosium's actual play very insightful as an aid in understanding when and how to ask for rolls and how to manage the final phase in initiative order. The players were a bit on the beer-and-pretzels side of things and didn't really dig into the mythos aspects of the scenario and the evening played out as a simple dungeon romp with D&D instincts leading the players to attack the monster right away and killing it quickly with an unexpectedly lucky string of extreme successes. It was fun, but did not feel like an evening of Call of Cthulhu, more like a d100 version of D&D. I am sure the scenario is only partly to blame, I might be at fault as well, still getting to grips with the system, and enrolling players on a 5e focussed server might also not have helped. Lesson learned! Conclusion: so far I still like the Lightless Beacon as a starter scenario best, also because it directly relates to some of the most famous writing of Lovecraft. Easily finished in less than 2h. 5/10.