Good Morning Wonderful Everyone,

Welcome to the Monday Morning Message, which we hope finds you in fine form, fetlock and fettle and that you had an excellent week wherever you were and whatever you were doing. This week’s message will follow a slightly different format to the usual ones as we will be looking back on a month of sudden announcement, prepping and running a Cthulhu themed weekend, and where we want to go afterwards.

After the RoC Tharinos we decided that we wanted to run a special Halloween event and we went with Cthulhu. It is a firm favourite around the campfire and after a quick chat, especially when we want to go for the new site and ROC heavily next year, we thought – Let’s just go Cthulhu at it. So we did, for like 20 hours a day, for a month and it worked really, really well and we are definitely going to do it again.

Basic planning led to a music themed event and a lot of Roman, conceptual work. We decided on location and after reading its history we chose to base our story around that and set the game in 1970: The year it switched over from being a school to being a village hall which gave us a lot of options for how we wanted to present the game: The Hall itself was the best phys rep we could have asked for.

A lot of the magic lay in the technology of then and the technology of today: Watching players listening to Cliff Richard, Cliff slide into a weird Roman Salii, and a bunch of peeps start participating in the dance was great. What was better was them taking the needle off the record, throwing the record away and trying to turn it all off and the music still belting out of it. This sort of thing made the game’s best moments really simple but really powerful.

We also wanted the game to be 99% rulesless. Mostly this was easy to achieve but skills wise we wanted players to be able to, at least, pull positively on their background. The phone-in system was great. Giving the players’ contacts a proper 1970’s phone and the ability for that to call an operating system that put them through to their contacts in the switchboard room was top notch: 

A player was trying to break a 40’s military cypher, called a mathematics friend and did some back and forth as they were also a mathematician. Whilst they were doing that we replaced his handouts (even made the same notes in his handwriting on them) and when he got back the code was much easier to break. This sort of thing really worked for us and we will be using it again.

Plus the phone was the focus of ghostly activity to the extent that people named it the anxiety phone.

Set dressing was awesome, even though the Hall covered most of it and handouts, costume and especially food was on point: Bourguignon, Gateaux, Twiglets and cheese and pineapple / cheese and onions on sticks were all available. Lighting, fog and all the basics were on display and the crewing were all top but we will come to more of that later on for now it is time to say:

Massive thanks to everyone that was involved from start to finish: We had a core team of people that were involved in read throughs, shopping, writing, Kilo Sale outings and prop building so to them the raising of the biggest glasses of wine: Holly Goodall, Anthony Gunfield, Lina Koevchinova and Ross Davey – Thank you for all of the hard work and I look forward to working with you on a Cthulhu project again soon.

Next up the glorious crew, who included all of those that have already been listed: To Neil Gunfield for his most excellent dodgy banker, The enigmatic Sphynxie for their wonderfully adventurous Doctor, Matt Hussey for his depressed failed actor, Kayleigh Taylor as their Artistic Dreamer and Socialite, and to Nick Reynolds for his role as the Grand Prize winning tailor and factory worker! You were all wonderful and brought the game to life, Dancers and Foxes alike. 

Special mention to the other cast: Holly as Colette the starry eyed and very accidental cultist, Anthony as the skin changing and eternal Edmond son of Aiulf (Norman and Used Car Salesman), Lina as Trish the murderous Dinner Lady and Ross for his scythe sharpening, staring, handyman. (Along with all the other minor roles that were thrown out there.)

Much love to all of you, you are absolutely the best team and working with you is wicked cool.

Finally – Thank you to all the players, I wanted a small Cthulhu team, I wanted the players to arrive blind and I wanted them to get involved. So from arriving at the Hall expecting it to be an archaeological exhibit but you were two days early, everything was still packed up and you were thinking about going home to committing the singing of the Silver and melting Titus you were all fantastic. 

We’ll be putting up a page to do with the game and we WILL be running another game as part of the campaign that we seem to have accidentally written. Discord servers and the like will be going up soon. In the meantime we will be getting on with the ROC work, land sorting and everything else. But for today and for now:

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

I think we will leave it there for this Monday, there will be more to come in the following days but in the meantime if you want to get involved, tell stories, play games, run games or whatever we are continuing to build that community and you can find us here and that goes doubly for anything you need for the LARP or just for company on long locked in days. Equally If you want to join us on Patreon we are here.

As ever folks: If you need us, for any reason, let us know and if we can help in any way we will, whatever you are up against.

In the meantime have a Foxes and Crows week people, we look forward to seeing a whole bunch of you at the online game and bumping into even more of you, online, between now and then. 

Take Care of Each Other

Much Love,

Stephen and the RoC Core Team x