#RPGaDay 4th - Most Recent RPG Purchase

The Laundry RPG by Cubicle Seven. I'd always heard good things about the Laundry Files books, and I finally got around to getting the first book. And then over the next two weeks, I read the whole series to date. I'm an old fan of Call of Cthulhu, and since the Laundry uses the CoC ruleset, it was almost impossible to resist. And, of course, since I bought the game, I now want to run it. I really don't think CoC is in my regular group's wheelhouse, but I will probably run it at OwlCon.

The Laundry makes me think of the old days of running Call of Cthulhu at NanCon. NanCon was Houston's big RPG convention. I was part of a group of folks that ran CoC, which was a strange experience. You see, I hadn't read more than one or two of the Lovecraft books and I didn't have a copy of the rules. But I had training wheels. The group used a co-GMing style, with a GM and "a Thing". First year, I just helped out, voicing NPCs and when the group split up, I'd take one half. I did well enough that the next year, I was promoted to GM. I never wrote any of the adventures, but the group would playtest the adventure and everyone would chime in. I ran a few years, and it was loads of fun. It was an insane schedule, running the same adventure 3-4 times a day for two days, but it was a fun kind of insane. There's an art to running a CoC con round properly. You can't just drive them all mad and kill them right away. You've got to work up to it. Nobody gets out alive, and if you manage to drive the PCs mad to the point that they kill each other, it's considered a perfect score.

Here's the really crazy part - I never actually owned a copy of Call of Cthulhu. Not until long after NanCon shut down. I always kept meaning to buy one, but I only theoretically needed it for NanCon, and I never looked at the book when I was running.