Regency Cthulhu - Hardcover

TLDR: It was a lot of work to prepare and a lot of information to keep track of, but was such a memorable and rewarding experience as a Keeper and a game my players still talk about a year later. I've watched lots of Call of Cthulhu content (shout out to Becca Scott!), but this was my first time running the game; I've never even played myself. I have, however, DM'd 5e for a few years now so I have game running experience. I really enjoyed reading through this book, the Long Corridor was a very fun adventure and my players really enjoyed it; they still talk about our game to this day. Historical/Pre-Game Content: I didn't know anything about the Regency Era going into this, so the historical information was very helpful. I feel as though it was as concise as possible so it was fun to read through and really helped introduce everyone into the era. I also want to briefly shout out the writers for their guidance on Consent at the table, Sex & Sexuality (inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people, going as far to incorporate historical figures) and Race & Ethnicity (the historically accurate truth, but also highlighting figures who broke past those constraints to inspire telling your own story at the table). My players and I were very encouraged by this and incorporated some of their suggestions into our game. Scenario Preparation: As a first-time Keeper, learning the rules of CoC plus preparing everything for The Long Corridor was A LOT. It's a bit of a long story I think compared to most scenarios(?) with A LOT for players to uncover (I believe it took us 3 sessions, one of those being a session 0. I think we did 3hr sessions, the last went way overtime though.) There was so much information to uncover that I was jumping around my notes doc like crazy. My players were so excited to uncover so many little things though, and really loved how information came together, so it was definitely worth all the work. The Long Corridor: This scenario was just so fun. It was fun to watch and fun to run. I love the absurdity of having to worry about your reputation while all hell is breaking lose. Literally. It was so fun to hang reputation over my players' heads and to see them worry about a married woman alone in a corridor speaking to a man that wasn't her husband. How scandalous! I ran the scenario as-is with the exception of the timeline. As-is, the scenario takes place over two days-ish. I had everything happen in one night to speed things up and pressure the players which resulted them actually getting anxious and pushing them to use their luck (and that really backfired on them which made things more interesting). I'd happily run this again.

As a standard Chaosium Call of Cthulhu release, this is a good one. It has all the great things we have seen lately and what I expect from them: Great Layout Interesting background / setting information Adventures Interesting pregens Pulp options But this should not have been a standard Call of Cthulhu release. I’m not a Regency fan, but my wife is one. This is a topic / setting that would probably get a lot of people who are fans of that era / literature / movies / tv-show into the game. My idea was to use this to introduce my wife to Call of Cthulhu and use it for one-on-one games. And this is where this fails. It includes two adventures which seem interesting enough, but are too complicated. The first one is supposed to be the short / easy one, but that is still too complex and long for this use-case. I would have liked to see more but shorter adventures, maybe 4-5 of them, something similar in complexity to Gateways to Terror or Doors to Darkness. Something that lets you introduce new players (even keepers) to Call of Cthulhu and / or the Regency Horror genre. Short but interconnected adventures, maybe getting longer and more complex as we go on, but they should have culminated somewhere like the first adventure. You should have kept these two for a separate release instead. Even though the scenario introduction structure is detailed, I still would have liked a better introduction to the scenarios, some kind of summary that gives you the gist of it and tells you what would ideally happen in the scenario, before getting into details. I will be bold and go another step. I would have even liked some kind of cinematic scene-based scenario structure for this book.