Here In Arkham, We Play By Our Own Rules.

                                                                                Yo my peeps! I'm your resident undead-cowboy, and host back with another action packed Arkham Heat update that will knock you to the moon and back baby! Just watch out for Mi-go on the re-entry, word is there into the probing of the anal variety. But hey, maybe your one of those people who are into that sort of thing....

If your confused, (more than me) or just checking this out for the first time now, I'm referring to my new Call of Cthulhu Campaign compadre, coming exclusively to a gaming table somewhere around the island of Montreal. In Part 1 I discuss what inspired me to get the ball rolling on this thing. Part 2, is the down low on the protagonists of the campaign. And today, (that would be Part 3 meat-head) I shoot the shoggoth shit about rules, systems, and all that jazz.

So rules.

The Call of Cthulhu rules are pretty venerable. Not much has changed in the 30 years they've been around, and I'm not holding my breath that 7th edition will be much different. Don't get me wrong, I dig the rules, and I love the simplicity behind the system, yet after running The Realm of Shadows using the d20 rules, and the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth campaign using the classic rules I found myself wanting a little bit more from the system. I think it's a dude thing, wee like to get dirty under the hood and tinker. To quote Tim Allen "It needs more POWER"!

So taking a page from the Binder 2000 play book I decided to check out a product that I have long wanted to get the 4-Eleven on, The Basic Roleplaying Rules 4th edition.

OK, First off there is a lot of stuff here. I had no idea the long history that BRP has had in the RPG industry.

Second thought, wow, I had no idea just how stripped down the CoC rules really were when you compared them to the BRP rules!

But what I really liked about this book was all the options that you have at your disposal both as a player and GM for creating characters and running the game. Ultimately, I didn't take too much away from the book. I decided that I wanted to remain rather rules light. But I did swipe the rules for a point buy system. It's too early to tell how this will work in the long run, but like a lot of what I'm doing this is part of the experiment.

The second mind blasting tome of un-carnal knowledge I checked out was the excellent Unknown Armies 2nd Edition. OMG my brothers and sisters! Praise be too all that is unholy! This is an awesome, gnarley-gnarligton of a RPG. The writing is second to none, and the mechanics, in addition to being a percentile system are bloody easy to run with and understand. I can't praise this book enough. So I ripped off a few combat rules from here that I'm going to experiment with as well.

So in the end I'm running this thing as a hybrid monstrosity combined with 2parts Classic CoC, 1 part BRP 4e, and 1 part Unknown Armies 2e. Stew in a broth of awesome sauce and BAM! that's the rules system powering this campaign.

Like I've said before this is an experiment. Who the eff knows how it will all turn out. Maybe it it will just end up being a big pile of Deep One doo-doo. But hey, one of the things that I've discovered about myself is that as much as tinkering with rules can be fun, I tend to run pretty rules light. The most successful campaign I( in my mind at any rate) that I ever ran was powered by d20 Modern, and I pretty much ignored most of the rules except for chucking a d20 here and there for attack rolls and skills checks when I though it made the most sense. It's my theory, that the enthusiasm of both the players and the GM are way more important than any one system can ever be. So in the end, my rules tinkering may fly out the window and into the mouth of madness. Only time will tell. Of course at some point in the future I will revisit this topic and let you all in on what worked, and what didn't.

Till then have a safe weekend and see y'all Monday.