For the past several years I've been working on a Keeper's Companion / Player's Companion for playing Call of Cthulhu in the British Home Front. I've been doing this off and on for about a month at a time and thus the project has drawn out quite a bit because, well, let's face it. It's a LOT of work tracking down all of that information, writing it in, laying out the pages, and even drawing my own pictures. Especially as I'm not the greatest whizz with a pencil. Not too shabby, but not all that great for I lack the patience to just sit there and keep working on it.
Anyway, enough of my faults.
I'm pretty excited about this project because I love the British Home Front. I adore it. There's a lot of story potential there as it's both quite a familiar environment (the 1940s wasn't that long ago) and yet quite an alien one. It's also almost post-apocalyptic in vibe and I really quite enjoy that. It also certainly has the hope and horror mood going for it as there's a whole bunch of people working together to try to make it through ... as well as a bunch of jerks trying to spoil it for everyone.
Also, blackouts, air raids, and busy bureaucracies really add together nicely to make for a really cool horror game. Imagine this: you're sitting at home drinking tea around the radio with your family when the air raid sirens sing out. Unfortunately, the warning is too little too late and as you run out to the backyard Anderson Shelter, you can hear planes charging overhead in dogfights and bombs are soon dropping all around. Yet as you head inside, you notice that someone seems to be asleep in your shelter and they're not responding when you try to wake them. You realise their throat has been slit and there's a torn off fragment of a book clutched in hands that have been tightened by rigor mortis. What do you do?
I keep wanting to run another game in this setting so I figured why not produce a supplement for Call of Cthulhu so everyone else can as well. I'd have to do the research myself, after all, why not share it with everyone else? It's especially good because Chaosium will actually buy the book off me. It's not a lot of money, but it is something, and it ensures that a lot of other people will have the chance to see it and hopefully play it.
And maybe other people will produce supplements of their own in this era. Juicy little adventures that I can rush home and devour and run with evil Keeper relish!
So I've started working on it again and have been impressed in a surprised kind of way of how good the draft was, if I may say so myself. It doubtless has its faults and the jam-packed-with-facts style may not suit everyone, but I think it contains just about everything you need to run a game in the era - from playlists to adventure creation advice to encounter ideas to adventures to new equipment and plenty of historical detail. Heck, I'm even including an Index!
I'll keep you posted once I've completed it which should hopefully be by the end of this month.
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