April | 2023 | Dragons of Lancasm

While I wait for my Kickstarter “Witcher” board-game to arrive and give me some more figures to paint I’ve been distracted by a plan I had for a UK based Call of Cthulhu campaign.

The campaign is meant to be less SAN draining and more exploration and investigation. (Think “The X-Files” and “Warehouse 13” in 1920’s UK.) It’s based in the UK rather than America, because I know a lot more about British history and legends from decades of reading, and I’ve been there; I own physical maps, books, etc. My only time in the USA was 2 hours each in San Francisco and LA airport, changing planes. [If it came down to it, I’ve spend slightly more time in Mexico than I have in the UK, and that could be an interesting CoC setting too.] An Australia 1920’s campaign sounds a bit boring.

In addition to refining my notes on character creation for the campaign (like boosting HP’s for PC’s and defining how I will use sanity and SAN checks, etc) I’ve been researching for the intro adventure for the campaign. One great thing about games set in the real world, especially with the internet, is how easy it is to get hold of history, maps, statistics, and nearly anything else you might want to know to flesh out a your adventure and GM notes.

…why are “loose boxes” important?

The introductory adventure begins in “The George”, a hotel in Amesbury, very close to Stonehenge. In addition to pictures of the hotel, I was delighted to find census data for the hotel. I know everyone who worked for the hotel and all the guests who were there on the 2nd April 1911. I’ve had to delete some of the guests (there were 16 “boarders” during the census), and modify two or three to suit NPC’s I need for the adventure. Knowing their ages, occupations and place of birth has inspired me to invent backgrounds suitable to the area and reasons for why they might have been there. This all works into the mystery at the centre of my adventure. (It includes Stonehenge, a murder and a piece of jewellery… no more detail since 3 of my usual players read my blog.) I’ve aged the hotel proprietor, his wife and son by 11 years, to work with my starting time in May 1922.

While making notes on character creation, I realised there’s something I haven’t seen in the UK source-books that I have for Call of Cthulhu. For any game set in 1920’s UK, that is, straight after the Great War, nearly any male PC’s between the ages of say 21 and 45 would have been conscripted and served 2-4 years in the British military. There were exceptions. For example: being Irish, unfit (low CON or SIZE?), clergymen, teachers and certain industrial workers or some conscientious objectors. Admittedly, this could also be a factor to consider in terms of an American campaign, but with their much higher population I think you would have more characters that didn’t see service.

In game terms, most male characters should get a small increase in their rifle skill, but is probably balanced out by the fact that UK citizens were less likely to be skilled with firearms than their American equivalents. For my game I’ve decided that most players will need to decide if they served in the Army or Navy (or Air-force if they put skill points in Pilot) and if they have a high Credit Rating (or Lifestyle from Occupation) may have been an Officer or NCO. It certainly adds to a PC’s background.

Writing an adventure set in the real world? The computer is your friend! (Yes, I’ve also been wanting to run a Paranoia adventure.)

I’ve spent a lot of time recently learning a new (for me) mapping program – but I think that’s worth a post of it’s own. I’d decided to use it to re-do a few important rooms in my mega-dungeon and then expand on that by constructing one of the rooms. So the last week has been a terrain making experiment.

I have a room that is likely to see use in more than one D&D session, and it’s not a single level room. I’ve been thinking for a long time that chambers like this could be better represented on the table than by a simple 2D combat map. I’ve also been wanting to try something a bit different than simply painting figures. I can’t justify the expense of buying a lot of the terrain I’d like to have, but I have seen other blogs I follow where people are painting or scratch building stuff. I’ve really wanted a bunch of ruined buildings for use in multiple RPG’s. It was time for me to see what I could produce.

Here’s the finished model. It’s made from cardboard, light card, heavy paper and masking tape. It’s in three pieces to be able to move it around and store it without too much difficulty.

The first piece I made is the rear wall. This is double-corrugated cardboard – I’d wanted something solid to help support the balcony, and thick supports (on the pillars) for the side balconies. After painting I noted the horizontal corrugations create lines that resemble layers in the wall. It would be easy to use this as a guide and sketch in or mark bricks. It was something more time consuming that I wanted for this project. I could have made “proper” stairs, but I went with basic platforms to better support miniatures. Learning point 1: Thinner cardboard walls make folding/cutting easier and are more likely to stay in the shape you want as well as the dimensions. Most of my pillars turned out too thick on the corners to be square, and ended up a bit wider than they were meant to be even with some inner corner trim.

I was going to have the side balconies supported only by pillars, but then decided to construct another corner to brace the second set of stairs. I didn’t want walls to surround the entire structure as that would make positioning figures and lines of sight around the table much more complicated. This way you can see pretty much everything except from one end.

All the main components were glued. Once dry I sprayed them all black, then from slightly further away gave them a top down spray with white – leaving the lower sections darker. The effect of spraying (rather than brush work) leaves a nice speckled effect that I think gives a good stone effect. Most pieces were then dirtied-up (brush work) with thin black and various greys.

The balcony edges/railings are printed on thick paper (or very thin card). I found a bunch of useful fence templates online. Clipped a section, duplicated it in a line and stretched or compressed slightly to get the height and wide required. Learning point 2: Don’t print black on white – the contrast against grey walls is too strong. Next time I’d use a lighter grey as the base colour.

Initially I taped over most of the exposed corrugated edges, tried filling a few with moulding paste, and lastly painted exposed edges. The tape gave the best edges and painted well. Tape too thin tended to come away, so if I do this it needs a wide overlap. The bad side of this is that the tape edge is hard to hide. Moulding paste requires a LOT to fill gaps. What probably worked best overall (and not intentionally) was actually glue in the exposed gaps and then paint. I could do with a new craft glue, especially if I start a whole set of buildings. The one I have is quite viscous and tends to clump and/or string. Once fussed with enough, it does give a very firm bond and sets like a resin. (I’ve been considering using it for bow-strings on archer figures.)

The whole construction sits on a laminated colour print of the chamber. Laminated so that (when surrounding rooms are trimmed off) I can reuse it as a columned hall. My combat maps are usually black and white since they may not see much use again.

Overall I’m very happy with the way it looks, and it will be great setting it up for play when required. The next step is thinking about structure and drawing plans for maybe a dozen partially or completely ruined building sections. They may not be professionally constructed, but even a basic level construct adds a lot to a game compared to 2D printed sheet.