A few months ago our Call of Cthulhu DM ran a one night game of It Came from the Late, Late, Late Show. I had never played the game before, though I had read through the rules a while ago. For a long time now I have had a love for what I call the one-book-wonder role playing games. My preference is for games that are low in rules as I find they are more fun to play. When you have multiple rule books, like in Shadowrun for example, it is easy to get caught up in the myriad of rules and forget that the joy of the adventure and the interaction of the characters is what makes a really good story and therefore a really good game.
In this case the game was epic in nature and well worth writing about. Our DM got his inspiration from the Grave Robbers from Outerspace card game, which is another great card game I will need to write more about someday. He used the cards to help generate the plot locations and encounters, which I thought was a terribly novel approach to getting ideas; a really great way to get the creative juices flowing. Even the name of the adventure came from the cards, which is a part of the rules of the card game but I will cover that in another post. As per the name of the post, the adventure name was The Ghost Returns for High Adventure on the Coast of Crusade.
If you have never played It Came from the Late, Late, Late Show I would recommend it. In it you are playing an actor that gets cast into various roles to be in a late night movie. Needless to say, these shows are low budget so a bit of cheesiness is in order. For example the major bad-guy in our adventure was this horrible tentacled creature, with several arms that waved about seemingly at random. We found this large creature was only affected by sharp objects and the more that we punctured it the more that it let out a hissing sound until it eventually deflated and laid flat across the ground.
In case you are looking for more details on our adventure, or need a one night run for your group. My DM has blessed me with his notes from our High Crusade, and allowed me to post them on my blog.
I hope you enjoy it, I know we did!
