Macabre Tales, Preview To A Review

Cynthia C. Miller has most kindly sent me a .pdf of Macabre Tales to review.  That review will go up during weekdays next week, once I've had a good chance to read the book through.  Since my Woodland Warriors preview has proven popular I thought I'd do the same for Macabre Tales.

Like most fans of horror role-playing games I am a really big fan of Call of Cthulhu by Chaosium.  It is still the standard by which all horror games are measured, and perhaps also the standard for long-standing, multi-edition games ought to be measured too.  Unlike schizophenic Dungeons & Dragons, which has changed radically over the years, the Call of Cthulhu 3rd Edition on my shelf is entirely compatible with the 6th Edition of the game next to it.

There are some (even amongst my gaming group) who would disagree, but I think this is an incredibly good thing!  I like that all Call of Cthulhu players have the common ground of a coherent and constant ruleset and in my experience very few of them houserule much of anything.

Now, Call of Cthulhu has its faults...  Under a poor Keeper, it can be a wretched play experience because of the sanity points and hit points making confrontation hard to survive.  The rulebook's approach to the overall mythos rubs me the wrong way, but that's because I'm a bit of Lovecraftian purist at heart and don't enjoy seeing a parade of statistically killable creatures all given a comfortable niche in some grand pantheon.  It is too much like a monster manual for me, but thankfully it is also easy to ignore.

I think the game is weakest in its overuse of scenario hooks and style of play in pre-written adventures.  Most Call of Cthulhu scenarios begin in so cliche a manner that it makes them hard to take seriously...  How many times can you be bequethed a mansion with a dark history or have a friend who suddenly goes mad/gets killed?

I prefer my Mythos adventures woven amongst more personal plots...  H. P. Lovecraft did it often enough.  Investigators as casual observers is just less interesting than investigators who are part of the bigger plot, held in curses stemming back centuries and such.  Now I accept that most Call of Cthulhu scenarios are written without ambitious hooks to more easily facilitate getting every investigator into the proceedings.  It just leaves me a little disinterested at times.

It seems a Lovecraftian role-playing game comes out every few years now.  Trail of Cthulhu, Cthulhu-Tech, etc. Some are good and some are bad, all have some good ideas (well, except Cthulhu-Tech...  I just can't get into that at all!) but none quite hit the mark for me.

Cynthia C. Miller mentioned (the then unnamed) Macabre Tales as a possibility some time ago.  Honestly I thought the project had quietly died, so I was surprised to see it and very interested to read the preview booklet.  It certainly looks different!  I'm going to spend a couple of afternoons reading it and then I'll let everyone know what I think of it next week.