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Simon Crowe
United Kingdom
Sheffield
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Some of the best reviewing minds on the geek have already tackled Trail of Cthulhu, and it's got a lot of praise. Whilst I will give an overview of the rules I don't want to get into too much detail as that's already been covered elsewhere. I've been playing it a while now and what I want to give a counter opinion to the other reviews.
Trail of Cthulhu is a game of Lovecraftian horror based upon the Gumshoe system – used in games such as Mutant City Blues and The Esoterrorists. Gumshoe is built specifically for investigative games, so the Cthulhu Mythos is a great fit for that. I'll say now that I've never played another Gumshoe game, so all my opinions here are entirely based on Trail of Cthulhu.
The Product
The book itself is a nice product. Well laid out with some great art by Jerome Huguenin that really fits with the murkiness of the Lovecraft setting. The layout itself makes things easy to read. However that doesn't necessarily mean particular rules are easy to find, there's a lot of flicking back and forth between sections to find particular rules.
The game has two styles of play – Purist and Pulp – and marks certain paragraphs that are relevant to one or the other with a symbol. It's a good idea in theory, though the marking is inconsistent (the 'Improving Your Investigator' section for instance only applies to Pulp games yet isn't marked) and the two markings are abstract symbols which are not the easiest to remember. Why not use actual objects, for example a book for Purist games and a gun for Pulp games?
Character Creation
Characters are created by a point system. In a strange move the more players there are the less points everyone gets. On one hand this makes sense for balancing, but on the other hand what if a character leave player or another one joins? This highlights a common problem, often the system feels as though it was specifically built for one-shot con games and not for regular campaign play.
Character creation feels straightforward, though has some oddly picky rules to remember. Plus the book gives very little guidance for creating characters. It is entirely skill based, but there is little idea of what a good or bad rating might be. If I want to be a good driver should the skill be at 5? 10? 30? Some better examples might have helped here.
I feel like I'm getting really picky at this stage, but I need to make mention of the character sheet in the book which is bafflingly designed, missing obvious useful functions (separate space for current and total skill pools, health/stability thresholds) which would be obvious after only a brief play. Plus it decides to use space for rules that only matter during character creation rather than, for example, rules that might be useful during the game such as skill refresh rates or injury, madness and healing.
Skills
There are effectively two halves to each characters; investigative skills and general skills. These two sides have separate rules, though both work on having a pool of points that can be spent during play.
Investigative
The investigative skills are the most touted feature of Gumshoe. A character will have a number of skills, from a choice of around 40 (for example Biology, Cop Talk or Forensics). Whenever a clue is needed to move the investigation forwards the character will automatically be able to pick that up if they have the relevant skill. No roll is needed, so there is no random chance that the adventure will stall because someone failed a dice roll.
Characters may also have points in that skill, and spend these for benefits when they use that skill. Perhaps they find some extra information that will give them an advantage against a creature later, they speed up the time it would take to find the clue, or perhaps it simply makes them look like an expert in front of others. This gives a slight element of resource management, though as players usually have little way of knowing what's coming next points tend to be spent whenever they can.
Overall it's a good system, but there are a few issues with this approach. The make up of the party become important to cover a good number of the skills which is an issue if you have players coming and going, or if a character dies/goes insane (probably often, this is Cthulhu remember) and the player feels forced to come back as a similar character just to keep the skills going.
General
The general skills side is probably where the game falls down most. Whereas investigative skills are the special areas of expertise, general skills are... well... more general. They are things anyone might have a shot at, such as general athletic prowess, driving a car or shooting a gun. Again these are pools of points rather than ratings. When a test is required the GM sets a difficulty, the players may choose to spend points from their pool in that skill. They then roll a D6 and add the points spent. If they reach or exceed the difficulty then they have passed.
When I first read these rules I was interested in the resource management aspect, as opposed to most games which would just have a standard dice roll and be easier/harder depending on the character's skill. The trouble is that this is never really borne out in play. Resource management doesn't work if players have no idea what is coming in an adventure. Therefore they tend just to spend their points to pass every roll (eliminating any risk, in a supposed horror game) because they may not need those points later. But if they do happen to need that skill later then you get the odd situation where someone who is supposedly really good at something has just forgotten how to do it. It's a horrible immersion breaker.
Combat is probably the only situation this might work, since players may be able to judge that it will last a number of rounds. It's a pity therefore that combat is a boring back and forth. Whilst I understand combat should not exactly be the focus of an investigative game, if you're playing pulp mode it's going to come up fairly often. As it is combat brings up its own problems. Using a D6 for damage is just too hit and miss and since points can be spent to automatically hit this gives a bit of a dilemma for a GM – should the beasties just be spending their own points to kill investigators, or should you be giving them a chance?
A lot of this can be blamed on the humble D6. Rolling this for everything give a narrow band of options making it all too easy to pass everything if a character has the points, and with no probability curve meaning it's a crapshoot when players are just rolling without points to spend.
The rules should be easy to play, and they have been designed round a simple system. The problem with simple systems though is that when you want to anything even slightly complicated you end up with lots of exceptions and additional rules bolted on top. This is certainly the case here and it pains me that after running so many sessions I still have to look up rules for very common things because they deviate so far from normal. Skill pool refresh rates are a good example. Three general skills refresh if the players can rest in a place of safety, though eight particular skills just refresh after 24 hours. Oh but health, stability and sanity refresh differently as well despite being listed as general skills (and note you'll have to jump back and forth through the book to find out how). Plus it never helps when certain sections of the book are not written in a particularity clear manner.
Stability & Sanity
Awkwardly mixed in with the general abilities are health, stability and sanity – all really feel they could have a separate section to themselves as they behave so differently to general skills. Separating a character's mental health into two parts is a clever idea. Stability is more a short term pool of mental health, that will generally be refreshed between sessions if a character hasn't completely cracked. Sanity is a measure of how much the character believes in humanity and moral principles. A character at 0 no longer cares for humanity and is effectively out of the game. It's a great system (though could have done with two words that didn't sound so similar, it's easy to get confused between the two mid-game).
Stability and sanity are also linked to drives, pillars of sanity and sources of stability. Drives are reasons the characters get involved in adventures and keep pushing to investigate the weirdness when a normal man would have run long ago. Pillars define personality traits that a character believes in, but slowly get eroded over time. Sources are people the investigator turns back on to try and recover their sanity. These are all excellent ways of defining a character, really helping recreate the feel of mythos stories, and come up in interesting ways in-game.
Setting and Mythos
Okay I'm going to pull back from the rules here and get to where my real praise for the book begins, when it looks at the mythos. If there's one thing I didn't like about Call of Cthulhu is its attempts to categorise and give statistics for the great unknowable entities of the mythos. As soon as they have rules on a page then the mystery is gone. Instead the only stats Trail gives them are how much sanity is lost when you see them. Then, even better, each entity is given a number of explanations on what it could be. Is Shub-Niggurath a mass of fecundant growth, the elemental incarnation of Earth, the bride of Hastur or nothing more than a term for genetic manipulation? It's up to the GM to decide, and it's a brilliant way of doing things.
Sections on tomes and spells are also good, though occasionally too heavy on the rules. I would have preferred a few more examples of both even if it meant less rules for the ones presented. A section on cults is a lot of fun, with good ideas on creating your own. A section on creatures gives not only vital stats for using them in game, but also ideas for what sort of clues might appear in investigations that point to those creatures. It's a fun section and covers most of the beasties you could want, though does highlight a lack of stats for normal NPCs in the book. The section on the 1930s manages to pack a lot of adventure hooks into its twenty pages, but still give a good overview of the decade. There's a good explanation of why the game is set during this period – whereas Call of Cthulhu looks at the contrast between the upbeat jazz age and what lurks beneath, Trail is instead focussed on the desperate times of the great depression and the run up to war. Both are great settings, so it's good Trail has decided to do something differently.
Running the Game
A section on putting it all together is fairly vital, especially for those who have not played a Gumshoe game before. I especially like the suggestions for designing and pacing investigative scenarios, which would be handy for any system. A selection of campaign frames are also a great idea, giving the characters better reasons to be investigating that just being in the wrong place at the wrong time (though that can also work).
There is a sample investigation included in the book – The Kingsbury Horror – which takes a real life crime and puts a supernatural spin on it. Whilst it might be ok as an investigation, it seems like it belongs to some other grizzly supernatural game and not a Cthulhu based one. The mythos elements seem forced in, and I wonder if this was originally written with another game in mind.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, perhaps I'm being more critical because I really, really wanted to like Trail of Cthulhu. I love the setting, after all, and always found Call of Cthulhu a little clunky in some of its rules. Plus I like to champion completely new ideas and ways of playing. It's certainly not terrible, and not at all unplayable. I've run a dozen sessions, and there have been some excellent moments – but these tended to be where the rules weren't be used. With my games designer's eye I see so many problems. Whenever I have to look up another picky rule, or when a player announces his character has now 'forgotten how to do first aid' I get thrown out of the session. It's a great shame, as the presentation of the mythos here is top notch, and a lot of the issues would not be a problem out for one-off sessions, but Trail of Cthulhu is not the game I had hoped for for long term play.
So what's the solution? There are parts I do really like. Sanity, stability, pillars and drives are excellent, and could with a bit of work be slotted into other games. The whole basis of 'no rolling for core clues' is such an obvious idea, but one that good GMs would tend to put into other games anyway (as often mentioned it feels like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist). The background is great, as is the information for running investigative games. But the core rules don't work, so I can see either adding the good bits to another game or ripping out the core rules and replacing them with something else.
(As a side note whilst writing this I noticed Lowell Francis has posted a typically great blog post on the problems with Gumshoe and ways to fix them)
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I feel like it's a playable game, but there's not enough 'game' to it for my tastes.
That being said I use the primary investigative concept in every game I run now.
I'm eager to see what Evil Hat will do with the mechanic. Fred Hicks has commented that he's got some ideas for the Gumshoe system.
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stephen
United Kingdom
Burton on trent
Staffordshire
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Good review, sums up my feelings from an initial read through of the rules.
I love narrative games in theory but I cant get players to buy into them and this also seems to have a level of artificiality which I think will put off my players who prefer skill rolls and a more traditional approach to combat. I love the ideas in Trail but I also think it brings up as many new issues as it solves.
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Great review, it really covered concerns I had about how those rules might play out.
Do you still play Call of Cthulhu and if so how has this experience modified your approach?
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