Dev Diary: CoC Adventure Scenario

December 27 2025

Involving myself in something new, like this, my project to produce and publish a pre-written RPG scenario, is beginning in classically overcomplicated fashion. At the start these things appear as a vast landscape of aesthetic, theoretical, and practical concerns unfolding like a triptych before me, revealing a mass complication in need of contemplation and tidying. Looking at the details, I can see challenges which will be easy to handle because they are familiar. But among them are problems that are less similar and merely analogous to other problems I've encountered in the past. Because it is very easy to become distracted with things that don't matter to your practice--and because it is pivotal that this doesn't happen at the beginning--I sometimes have the good sense to leave these alone forever or at least until a later moment. The overwhelm that accompanies trying to handle a problem you don't even understand the intricacy of via means that are inappropriately suited all in service of an aim that you haven't even thoroughly considered may not be actually worth your while, is, I think, what leads to a lot of failed projects.

Luckily I am just stupid or arrogant enough to think I can eventually sort through most great confusions, so it just seems like a fun challenge to try to overcome. But honestly I think this feeling I have is actually based on something. There's an interesting problem before me. As an essayist/fiction trying to create that archaic and often scorned document, a pre-written RPG adventure, how do I make sure I'm not accidentally writing a novel when I should be writing... well, what the hell is a pre-written adventure exactly?

The greatest challenge this project has so far posed is the need to discover a practice for developing an adventure scenario with characters, scenes, and a plot that is intelligently distinguished from a practice you would deploy for use in the similar but distinct prose fiction/non-fic form.

The kind of story that is created and experienced by players of an RPG is clearly not the same as a novel, or likely any other prose forms that are meant to be read for entertainment or conveying a story. But the craft and theory behind a pre-written adventure isn't something I have heard any discussion about. Where to begin discovering your idea for a story except just by telling it? Get to writing. The problem is it has so far tended to come out in paragraphs of sketched personalities or a plot structure. But among the mostly fully-formed sentences were, I started to notice, graphical and informational forms like bullet points and webs which seemed to hold promise. Knowing that it would be important to break free from writing this scenario as a novel that I would later need to translate into an adventure scenario, there was a time a few weeks ago where I found myself fleeing from prose paragraphs into the organizational logic presented by those bulletpoints, lists, and diagrams that I found absolutely necessary for establishing even the scenario's most basic premises.

There is a lot I need to research further, but at this present moment, in my ignorance, I feel like a pre-written adventure scenario should present the scenario to the referee as a database written in prose and graphical elements. Maybe I am trying to come around describing the concept of a manual in a very hard way, but I just want to explore possibilities here. Tables and prose are not strangers in a world filled with published RPG materials. Wargaming, etc. The B1 adventure module "In Search of the Unknown" for the 1981 version of Dungeons & Dragons reads almost like a 30 page bullet point list with description thrown in as handholds to prevent a would-be dungeon designer from drowning. Glancing at the materials published for the same wizard game in more recent times, it's unclear, but innovation they perhaps have claim to over those modules from 40 years past is that they found that there is some benefit (to players, referees...?) in increasing the amount of prose.

My foolish hope is to find innovation somewhere between In Search of the Unknown and the creation of my scenario that presents a revelation the way that Quentin Fiore's collaboration with Marshall McLuhan on The Medium is the Massage, which translated McLuhan's sociological media analysis into a different form with different affordances (something I attempted to do with Situationist theory for a zine I made years ago), maintaining its intellectual goals, which could reach people in ways previously not easily accomplished. So far I haven't read too many pre-written scenarios. Besides the previously mentioned, and the B2 "The Keep on the Borderlands" scenario, the only other I have really studied is a particularly interesting example of what I am talking about, the learning scenario by Skerples and Co. titled "Tomb of the Serpent King". But I mean to conduct a broader survey throughout 2026 to see what people are doing, and hopefully find some inspiration for ways I could pull it off and make something cool but unique too.

November 21 2025

I am spinning up this web page to document my process as I develop an adventure scenario for the Call of Cthlhu RPG (7e). I began working on this untitled scenario on October 20 2025. My intent is to produce an investigative horror scenario to run for three of my players (my partner, Grace, and Luke) either over a play-by-post discord I have set up, or synchronously via voice chat on occasion. Besides making something quality, which is informed by the history of the early 20th century American setting, the noir detective genre, and the spirit of Lovecraft's weird horror, my secondary goal with this project is produce enough of a document to self-publish this scenario as a free PDF for other players.

My desire to design, produce, and publish a scenario goes back to the last time I was running Call of Cthulhu for friends when I was in grad school. I was running them through a vaguely sketched out scenario of my own creation that provoked some genuinely fun, or eerie, or intriguing moments of play. I always thought I could return to my notes from then and turn them into a functional and thoughout and complete scenario. I feel starting on a new project is the move to make now. Compared to who I was in grad school, my understanding of RPGs and genre has changed. I have had a bit more experience running games, too, and know a little bit about what makes for fragile scenario plotting. This new adventure should be scarier and more intriguing on its merit as a horror investigation story, with a strong premise and a well thoughout mystery. But it should also invite my players to play an active role within it.

Basically, my goal here is to do good work. And from my time creating stories and games I know doing good work is very very hard. I'll be leaning into my instincts on this project, trusting my gut (which isn't and hasn't always been easy) to discern when my ideas are actually worth keeping because they are good or if I think they are worth keeping only because they make it easy to just keep working. This isn't work for the sake of it, but work in service of doing something well. And that feels liberating. It excites me.