"Horror on the Orient Express" is a huge, 19-scenario, continent-spanning campaign for the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Usually set in early 1923, it takes the player characters ("Investigators") from London to Constantinople, via one of the historical routes of the real-life Paris-Simplon Orient Express trains. Of course, not every Investigator will make it that far...
I don't just want to dive right in, though. We're starting up a new group for this game, and the majority of the players are either new to CoC or haven't played in years. None of us have run or played 7th Edition yet, so we may have some rust to knock off before we get to the serious business of insanity and death.
There are a number of good starter scenarios for the game, some of which ship with the Keeper book or the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set (which is an astonishingly good buy, by the way!) My plan is to weave three of these starter scenarios into a "mini-campaign," a Prelude to the main Horror on the Orient Express Campaign, to give the players and their Investigators a chance to gel as a group.
I call this prelude "Zone Rouge," after the "red zone" of bombed out, uninhabitable land in France following World War 1. It was described as:
"Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible" (MessyNessyChic.com, May 26, 2015).
Sounds cheerful, yes? So - why France? Why the zone rouge? Because it is much more horrific to me than the Lovecraft country of Boston, Arkham and backwoods New England.
I grant you, one of Call of Cthulhu's main selling points it its "classic" setting: the Roaring 20's, Prohibition, private eyes and flappers and academics mixing it up with extra-dimensional horrors and ancient undead sorcerers. And for many scenarios, and many campaigns, this is fine! But I want to ratchet up the horror before my players ever set foot on the Orient Express, and if you want "horror" and "Europe" in the same sentence, you're talking the post-war Continent.
The physical, emotional and spiritual trauma France suffered in the Great War is unreal: over a hundred thousand serving men came home as amputees, over forty thousand came home blind, many from gas attacks. Untold thousands were permanently psychologically scarred by PTSD, then known as shell shock. More than half a million women were widowed, and the war made orphans of three quarters of a million children. And that's all before the Spanish Flu, which swept across the country and killed tens of thousands more - many of them young, healthy survivors of the war, looking to finally live the life the Great War denied them.
In late 1920 - when "Zone Rouge" begins - the Influenza ended just the year before, and the country is finally ready to enter the 20's, the annees folles. But the scars of the recent past remain, and as the curtains go up, our Investigators step into this shell-shocked world of the lost generation.
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In the next post I'll describe "The Vienna Club," the meta-fictional conceit that unites the Investigators and allows for easy swapping-in of new characters to cover for missing players and replace casualties among Investigators.
Want more of what I do? I have a number of best-selling Adventures and GM guides for the 7th Sea system available via DriveThruRPG! They are reasonably popular and shockingly inexpensive, so check them out!
I'll soon be working on writing my first-ever CoC scenario for publication, giving it the same "behind-the-scenes development" treatment you've seen so far - so watch this space for future posts on that topic!
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