Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa Part Two

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

In our first part, I focused on the Guide to Character Creation and its incredibly robust tools that lead to unique player characters every single time you go through the book. Now, we get the adventure with the Guide to Carcosa. For the unfamiliar, Carcosa was originated by Ambrose Bierce in the short story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (1886) where a character described the city in hindsight after its destruction. Nine years later Robert Chambers would borrow the name for stories featured in his eerie fiction collection The King in Yellow. From there, authors who wrote in the cosmic horror vein of Lovecraft would fold Carcosa and The King in Yellow into the Cthulhu Mythos associating the king with the deity Hastur.

The Guide to Carcosa is a solo adventure designed to permanently alter the city with each playthrough. While a few locations have already been determined, the player is provided with three maps of areas in Carcosa: Metropolis, Disturbia, and Necropolis. When a player moves to a blank location on a map they roll on a list of Acts and what they land on establishes what location is on that space now. In additional playthroughs, if a player chooses to use the same map, their new or returning character will always find that location in that place. There is a reward awaiting the player if they can reach the center of the Necropolis, but the likelihood of that is very low. There’s a lot of fun to be had exploring this nightmare city though.

Every player who enters Carcosa must choose or randomly roll for a Mask. A Mask is a weight you carry with you be it Addiction, Guilt, Loss, or Self-Hate. During the player’s journey through Carcosa they will come upon opportunities to Break the metaphorical chains that bind the Mask to them. With each Break the character is one step closer to resolving the trauma that has haunted them. However, there are encounters that can reforge a chain causing your character to fall back into their trauma. Even if you don’t buy the Guide to Character Creation, The Guide to Carcosa provides a very easy method of quickly generating a PC. I will say that I had to do a lot of Googling about Call of Cthulhu 7e rules so having the Keeper and Investigator books feel like something you will need.

The more you play through the game the more achievements you can unlock. These are linked to either how your characters exit the story or through defeating key adversaries you can encounter. The result of unlocking them means you access alternative Epilogues giving the character on that particular run a chance at an especially unique ending. Heinrich has essentially made a tabletop rpg roguelike that encourages multiple playthroughs. For this series I played through the game twice, but I do wonder at how many playthroughs would you begin to feel the Choose Your Own Adventure fatigue where you know all the possible events and paths. I do think it would take awhile to get there but that is always the moment when a gamebook or something of that type loses its fun for me. 

However, I loved the experiences I had with this unique horror story, which I share below:

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The train has stopped at a station. It’s still the middle of the night. Through one window, Charlie can see the station in this unfamiliar place. The architecture doesn’t resemble anything he’s seen in the Netherlands. It’s all very Gothic, and the platform is like the open mouth of a cave, ready to swallow Charlie up. Through the windows on the other side of the train, he sees a bay that looks to flow out into the ocean, the North Sea? Then he comes upon a sight that unsettles him like nothing he’s ever seen.

There is no moon, sun, or stars in the sky. There are two orbs, both black and easily missed, unless you concentrate your eyes on the blackness of the sky. There’s a slight halo of light around them, and Charlie remembers Madelyn and her prayers, imploring the unseen light of God to bless her and her son. Not her son, she wasn’t his mother, Charlie tells himself. Just a crazy woman who stole me.

[Sanity check, lose 1. Gain 3 Cthulhu Mythos]

There are structures on the other side of the bay. Charlie finds his eyes drawn to a massive, towering ruin rising above the rest of the city. He’s reminded of some of the older parts of the cities in the Netherlands, reminders of the medieval era. This looks the same, but the victim of some great war, never repaired. Charlie presses the button to open the doors. They slide apart, and he’s on a completely empty platform. After some brief exploring, he found a rack of brochures. One of them has a photograph of that ruined monolith – The Necropolis, it reads. He grabs one of them.

The station exit is a line of glass doors revealing a fully lit city before him. Charlie has nowhere else to go; he’s not returning to The Hague, so he pushes through them to see what he can make of this strange place. Charlie notices the bay has no waves. Still, shadowy water sits unmoving. No birds either. No sounds of ships’ foghorns in the distance. Concrete steps lead down to a natural shoreline. A rowboat sits on the crushed seashell beach.

[Explore – The Game Room]

First, Charlie spots the pawn, then the rook, the red checker, the handful of jacks, and a trail of game pieces spilling out of the front doors of a brightly neon-lit store with the flashing sign “The Game Room” across the front. Charlie feels compelled to wade through the piles and discovers tubes and gears woven through the establishment. An automaton, resembling a human but not entirely, is behind a card table, a deck in its hand.

A game. Charlie thought back to Madelyn imploring him to play those chess games day and night. He thought of the prayers he was told to make, freeform & to a faceless god. Something ran a finger across his spine and caused the man to shiver. Was he in the realm of that unknown deity? Was this the game he’d been prepared to play his entire life? Charlie took a seat.

[Play a Game]

Sorting through the waist-high piles of game pieces, Charlie finds Trivial Pursuit “pies,” wooden Meeples, a silver shoe, and black & white stones. Steam pours forth from one of the tubes. Charlie feels the temperature swelter as the mechanical thing on the other side of the table whirrs to life. Multiple arms – Charlie counts four…six…eight? They all snatch up assorted pieces from the nearby piles and plunk them down on the green felt table.

[Must accumulate three wins or three losses to move on. Using skill: Chess (Craft)]

First round result: Success – despite not knowing what game they are playing, Charlie watches how the Player sets up its pieces – the number & positions – and does something similar – the Player clears his pieces off the board.

Second round result: Failure – Charlie tries to repeat his previous win but must have misunderstood something. The Player clears all of Charlie’s pieces off the board. He goes back to the piles to find new ones.

Third round result: Failure – Dammit, Charlie mutters to himself. He pauses after this, eyeing the machine. It doesn’t seem to be able to see. How does it know where the pieces are? He glances under the table. There are no magnets or similar mechanisms at work.

Fourth round result: Failure – The construct shakes, clearing all pieces from the board. All of its appendages, save one, retreat into its complicated mechanical interior. It extends this flipper towards Charlie. A handshake for a game well played? Or a punishment? Did Charlie lose a game to God?

Charlie remembers Madelyn telling him he must rise and meet his opponent’s hand regardless of wins or losses. It was one of the few things she would emphasize. Charlie does just that.

[Shake Hands]

The flipper switches its grip, curling around Charlie’s thumb and little finger, prying open your hand. With preternatural speech and machine-like efficiency, another appendage descends.

This is a sharp-tipped needle dripping a black ichor. Charlie pulls, screams, and tries to escape. The Player will not be denied victory. Charlie watches as the tip zips across his flesh with piston-like movements, striking across his palm & leaving it permanently marked. When it is done, the machine releases Charlie’s hand. The last appendage disappears into its metal husk. Charlie looks down at his now tattooed palm; the words etched on it read: “Good game.” The man stumbles away from the table, almost tripping over the game pieces scattered across the floor, back into the night, panicked.

[Explore – The Hall of Mirrors]

Charlie realizes this Game Room was on a boardwalk of other carnival-like attractions, glowing like candy along a short strip of the coastline. Without realizing it, he stumbles into the Hall of Mirrors. He sees his own sorrowful looking back at him a dozen times a dozen times. Charlie’s tattooed hand reaches out and quickly withdraws when the mirror’s surface ripples like water. He returns the hand, letting it sink into the slimy, viscous liquid. He pulls it out again, unmarked. However, something about his reflection has changed.

[Mask of the Addict]

Charlie sees himself sneaking out of the old apartment in Bangkok while Madelyn is gone. He rushes downstairs while Daisy waits faithfully inside. The shop clerk is different. He keeps heaping piles of snacks and junk food into Charlie’s hands. Charlie is standing in the Hall of Mirrors. He is watching himself gorge on sticky, sweet, poison-colored cakes and candies. It leaves a toxic rainbow smear across his face. The veins of his face bulge out, his eyes bloodshot, and he strains for breath as his airways fill with the yellow cake, crumb, and assorted syrups.

[Break the Mirror]

In anger, Charlie lashes a hand at the mirror, hoping somehow to shatter it into a million pieces.

[APP check – result: Success]

Just ripples, but Charlie finds the more time he strikes the liquid surface, the longer the ripples remain until there is no reflection at all, just water rippling for infinity across the mirror’s surface.

[1st chain of The Mask of the Addict BROKEN]

Soon, Charlie notices he’s not reflected in the non-rippled mirrors either. He bolts out of the Hall.

[Explore – The Statue Garden]

Charlie runs through a forested park lit by long black gas lamps hanging like upside-down fish hooks. A pale figure is standing ahead. Not a figure, but a statue. More of them. They are human–humanoid. Charlie looks closer at them, and the features of their faces, the details on their appendages, are something else. Some are rooted to the ground with strange marble tentacles instead of feet.

[Find a path through]

Charlie needs to see if he can find his way back to the station, but he’s still determining which direction he came through. He reasons that on the other side of this statue garden, some signage should point him towards the boardwalk again. Charlie begins to feel like he is walking through some dark, foreboding forest where the trees have been turned to marble.

[Navigate check – Failure]

Has it been minutes or hours? Charlie can’t seem to tell the difference. He starts naming the statues in his head: Octomouth, Fish Hands, Creeping Smile. Are they moving? Wasn’t that one back there a few paces? How could it be ahead of him? Are there duplicates? He’s more disoriented than ever now.

[SAN check – result: failed]

[A series of brutal Navigate checks follows until Sanity is gone]

[Driven Insane – Insane]

Charlie slows down but keeps walking. A few steps in this direction. Stop. Then a few in another. The faces of the statues leer down at him, frozen marble grimaces baring their teeth. It’s just a little more this way, he mutters to himself. No, no that way. Yes, that’s it. Soon he can’t seem to see the lights of the city anymore. It is just the creeping shadows of the forest growing closer. The statues bunching closer.

Next time: a new visitor to Carcosa…