Planning the Assault...

 Having presented the team with a variety of potential routes to get into the castle. I backed off and let them sort out a plan. I had perhaps been too successful in my portrayal of Father Andrej as being a few sarnies short of a picnic as a lot of the conversation revolved around whether or not he was to be trusted and, if not, what to do about him.

The other main split in opinion was whether to "go in loud" or rely on the stealth approach, which it was assumed would "go loud" at some point anyway! Despite the lack of trust in Father Andrej, the team decided that it was worth the risk to follow him and  his secret route into the castle. 

 

This is one of the places that the module leaves entirely without any fleshed out options. We are told that the priest has got into and out of the castle surreptitiously twice already but not how. There is an implication that Helena Svobodova may have helped, as she daily delivers supplies for the garrison. I decided to create a salle port that led into the outer keep of the castle from the woods outside. I found a plan with a simple series of  caves and tunnels that I could use as long forgotten cellars leading to a forgotten trapdoor. 

 

The possibility that this route in would by now have been discovered and either guarded or blocked was one of the dangers that the players seemed ready to face. I also added in an extra bit of horror in the form of a child "zombie" escaped from the rejects of Dr von Carlstein's foul experiments. The mini undead was not dangerous per se, but if the party attacked it would go feral and there was an opportunity for them to lose some sanity points...

The other key element of the plan, was the distraction by the resistance group. They were going to ambush a patrol returning to the castle, thus drawing a sizable response from the garrison who would leave and chase after the resistance fighters. The exact timings of this depended on when the German patrol reached the allotted place on the road to the castle where the attack was scheduled to occur. The players also optimistically hoped for some assistance from the ancient woodland spirit they had encountered but the timing of this depended on the mutual understanding the phases and location of the moon in the sky...

Rules of the Game

There is quite a variety of sets of rules that can be used to run a game set in the middle of the 20th Century. My choice of Call of Cthulhu was based on several factors. Firstly a bit of familiarity; having to learn an entirely new scheme was not an appealing prospect. My copy of CoC on the shelf was a couple of editions out of date but the bones of the system would hopefully be the same. A little research soon confirmed that the current, 7th Edition was very well thought of and recognisable to users of previous versions. 

Additionally the rules had a new(ish) WW2 supplement - Achtung Cthulhu, which might have some supplements and adventure modules that I might be able to use to flesh out my version of the Rivers world and populate a hopefully engaging campaign. I bought a bundle of pdfs from Drivethru' RPG, giving me a whole bunch of military character types and a useful range of enemy protagonists that I could use all, some or none of.

One irritating factor was that in the midst of my planning was that Modiphius, the creators of Achtung Cthulhu brought out their own system and abruptly stopped all support for Chaosium's set of rules.  This means I have to sort out my own statistics for any NPCs or monsters that I want to use in the modules.Not the end of the world but a bit tedious.

The most obvious set of rules to use is the dedicated Rivers of London game also by Chaosium. This was not available when I jumped in to running my game but it does share a lot of DNA with CoC , so I will pilfer it for ideas (particularly the magic system) once I have my copy.

The "official" game is more akin to the novelss, so police procedural will be more emphasised rather than my more action based WW2 setting. As I was to find my style as an online Keeper is more improvisational than I had remembered (It had been more than a decade...!)

And so it begins...

I am a big fan of the "Rivers of London" books by Ben Aaronovitch. These follow the adventures of  P.C. Peter Grant of the Metropolitan Police Force of London ("The Met") as he discovers that magic is real and gets drafted into the department of the Met that deals with all incidents magical...

As well as providing a cracking good read, the books did also appeal to the gamer in me. The setting is so richly detailed and exciting to explore, I considered it an obvious candidate to use in a role playing game or freeform. I was in particular drawn to the hinted at period of the Second World War and the activities of the British wizards (The Society of the Wise or "The Folly") during the fight against Nazi Germany.

There were two main reasons for preferring this earlier time to that in which the novels are set (modern day / early 21st C.) Partly this was due to the books being broadly police procedurals with added supernatural. This, to my mind, was a more difficult game setting to successfully run. Maybe I have spent too much time in a previous career writing murder mystery games... The second element is the sheer drama of wartime and the ease with which a common bond and objective could be inspired in the players. There was too the familiarity with the setting, both my own knowledge of history and the wider, general understanding of the times. Surely a period ideal for creating rousing adventure stories!

All this would have remained another of a plethora of unfulfilled ideas  if it weren't for our online RPG games master admitting to being somewhat burnt out.  He had been running an extended Dungeons and Dragons campaign since almost the start of Covid and it only seemed fair that someone else take up the reins for a bit. That someone it turned out was me. Although I'd not GMed a RPG for over a decade, I had at least the Rivers... concept in my mind if not fully formed. I had even investigated what rules set I could use to build the game around but I will go into that in due course. So, I begged for two weeks to get my thoughts together, after which we would start character creation and Rivers of Wartime was born!