As Murder of Crows and Midnight Harvest enter into wider and wider circulation, and The Doom From Below prepares to ship from the printer, we're starting to see more and more reviews. They are, by any measure, fairly flattering in their assessment of our work so far. However, even MORE flattering on a personal level is the fact that so many of the people writing about our adventures have NOTICED some of the things we've done very purposefully to make Super Genius Games adventures a bit different from those you'll get from other publishers.

Our products are shorter than those you usually see for Call of Cthulhu products, usually around 32 pages and having more physically in common with classic D&D adventures than with Masks of Nyarlathotep or Beyond the Mountains of Madness. That was a specific choice. We wanted to produce products that were not only easy to use, but easy to decide to purchase ... almost impulse buys. And something you could run for your group on relatively short notice, without needing to commit to many sessions (probably over the course of many months) to complete.

However, perhaps the biggest intended difference is the scope of the adventures. Rather than being tales writ large on the cosmic scale, involving the movers and shakers of the Cthulhu Mythos, our adventures for the most part are focused on smaller horrors. That's not to say they're necessarily less dangerous for the investigators -- the result for them will be the same whether they fail in the face of a Great Old One, a member of a servitor race, or a cabal of cultists. There's only so "dead" you can get (reanimation not withstanding). But it always seemed odd to me how many of the Call of Cthulhu adventures focus on the actual return or direct influence of deities or major entities. In a setting where all things must wait until "the stars are right," astrological alignments seem to happen with alarming frequency.

Don't get me wrong. I LOVE playing in those kinds of big, apocalyptic games. But I ALSO love to play in ongoing campaigns where the characters can develop over a period of time and a series of adventures. I've had the good fortune to play in two or three fairly long-running CoC games, and they are among my favorite campaigns of my long gaming career. But many people out there just don't understand how you can play a Lovecraftian game as a campaign. "Aren't those the games where everyone goes crazy or dies at the end of every session?" they often say.

"Not necessarily," I usually answer. "That's certainly ONE way to play, but you can also do something more in line with a standard RPG campaign."

"Really?" They often seem incredulous as they ask this. "How?"

Well, the Super Genius Games adventures are in part intended to help answer that question. Our INTENT is for you to be able to use many of our adventures as the basis of an ongoing campaign ... say, one that meets once or twice a month and has continuity in both characters and story. A campaign where the investigators start out relatively unaware of the Mythos and learn more as they go, where the level of Mythos involvement ramps up over time and may eventually lead to a cataclysmic event.

Certainly, you can do this with the basic Call of Cthulhu game, but it was not built specifically for long-term play with a single character. Although investigators DO gain skills over time, the improvements are small in nature, and it is unlikely that a player will notice a significant change in how the character feels mechanically. And players who are used to modern RPG characters, where each level introduces some new or improved facet to the character may feel something is missing from the game.

On the other hand, there are now a whole handful of alternative Lovecraftian RPGs on the market. From material that you can use to expand your existing Call of Cthulhu game (in the recently released Basic Roleplaying volume from Chaosium) to whole new games like Trail of Cthulhu and Cthulhutech. The most recent entry into the realm of Lovecraftian roleplaying games, may also be the one that is most easily adaptable to the standard campaign model -- this is because Shadows of Cthulhu is powered by the True 20 game rules, themselves a variation on the core OGL/d20 System rules. In other words, the rules for Shadows of Cthulhu are constructed with long-term campaign play in mind.

Gamers who come to Shadows of Cthulhu will be building their investigators with the preconception that the character will survive long enough to advance in levels and gain new abilities. That's just the way the game is played. Even more than the d20 Call of Cthulhu published by Wizards of the Coast back in 2002. That volume was more about using the d20 System to play game in the classic Call of Cthulhu style than it was about being able to use the Cthulhu Mythos as the basis for an ongoing campaign style of play. Shadows of Cthulhu does BOTH, making the Super Genius Games adventures especially good for adaptation. An adaptation that, as I look at the game, would be relatively easy to perform (for ANY Call of Cthulhu adventures, not just ours).

Stan!