Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Entry #5 or "The QR Code of Doom"

     I've been looking at the Call of Cthulhu Role-Playing Game, recently. It's kind of interesting-to me, at least-that in the 21+ years I've been playing Role-Playing Games, I've never given Call of Cthulhu or it's licensees much thought. Horror never had much of an impact on me, I suppose.

      Lately, however, I've been giving games and genres I'd normally not be interested in a chance. This is thanks in part to my friend Jason calling me out on it. Jason is big supporter of indie-RPGs and "alt-settings" and was always introducing new games to the group we both used to be part of. The rest of us were in the proverbial rut as far as our RPGs went and we usually blew off Jason's attempts at showing us new stuff. One night he became frustrated and chewed us out about it. Jason is usually a low-key type of guy, so this naturally caught us off-guard. He didn't (quite) guilt us into trying new games, but he did point out the problem.

     When I realized the problem, I started to wonder just what I've been missing out on. So we started to really get into the games he brought in. Not all of them were winners, but enough of them were fun to have me pay attention to indie-game more often.

     What does this have to do with the Call of Cthulhu RPG, which has been the industry standard for Horror RPGs for 30 years? Only that it's one of may games and/or settings I never gave much thought to recently. So I buy a PDF of Call of Cthulhu RPG and get The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft ebook for my nook and start reading.

     I read enough of the RPG to give Scenario writing for a shot. Deciding to place it in the modern era, (as opposed to the 1920s and '30s of Lovecraft's writings),  I set up an outline for "The QR Code of Doom". QR Codes are those funny looking labels you see everywhere that you scan with a smartphone and it opens a link to a website of some sort. I thought that would be an interesting jump-off point for a group of investigators or even "Ordinary people in Extraordinary Circumstances" that I to read stories about.

    I don't know if I'll ever get to run it, but it would be interesting to see how it would play out, for better or worse.

I've done enough rambling, need to start writing more regularly.

Until next time,
                      Josh (Sweeper) Brumley