Solo Call of Cthulhu playthrough: Heinrich's Guide to Carcosa, Part 1 (Character creation)
Hi, it's me from a few paragraphs down. Turns out I have to TW: suicide this.
Let's get into it. Heinrich's Guide to Carcosa was released earlier this year and seems to be doing pretty well on DriveThruRPG. It's a "replayable solo campaign for Call of Cthulhu, 7th edition, but a schematic for generating your own personal vision of Dim Carcosa," according to the marketing copy.
I'm in the market for such a thing, as it turns out. I'm not sure how solo it ends up being if I take the occasional readers of this blog along with me, but here we go.
Solo RPG gaming is something I've always thought I should be more into; as a longtime GM, I enjoy the so-called lonely fun of role-playing game admin.
One thing that I do find true about solo gaming is that it's hard for me to do this for more than an hour, and time is sometimes in short supply, so you should expect a short update once or twice a week, sometimes less, as a general rule.
My goal for this post is to create my character. I'll be using the custom rules in The Guide to do this.
Character creation
The character creation in Heinrich's Guide to Carcosa, hereafter referred to as The Guide is a series of random rolls intercut with scenes of your character trying to pull themselves together in an unknown restroom. It's hot outside and they've been traveling for a long time. There are no other details.
I rolled a result of 3 on the created entity section, giving me Cassidy, a non-binary 18 year old from Kingsport. Cassidy has a POW of 80, so we got ourselves a Wizard, folks.
The second roll for occupation gave me Librarian, which gave me some gear (a fiction & non-fiction book for starters: I wrote down Ubik, the book I'm currently reading, and The Power Broker, the first non-fiction book that popped into my head.
I also got some training in some useful skills: History, Credit Rating, Latin, English, Listen, Library Use, Occult, and Spot Hidden.
You can sort of imagine the kind of person Cassidy is with a set of skills like that. Except the text tells me as I gaze into this grimy mirror that I was never meant to be wearing this librarian name tag. Turns out I should have studied more.
A roll to examine myself reveals scarred over criss-cross cuts on my wrists. Another roll tells me: this is what I deserve. I hate myself.
(Oh no, Cassidy, my friend.)
Intrusively, I (Cassidy) worries about whether they turned the oven off. I see a flicker in the mirror as I ponder the unanswerable - my face is someone else. My child!
I wish I was back in the library, I think, and then it's off to the first prologue.