Mr. and Mrs. Winston Arbuckle
request the pleasure of your company
at a ball at their residence
on 31.10., at half past eight o’clock.
Dress code: Black Tie or White Tie.
I pursued an idea for a «Call of Cthulhu» scenario as a «quick» just-for-fun side project. The plot changed quite a bit, and the blocked time frame of «no more than two days» turned into «almost two weeks», but yeah.
It was an interesting diversion. I used «centaur-writing» and designed the scenario with ChatGPT, mostly using it for information, some text revisions, and even delegating some writing. It also generated all images.
The review phase — where it analyzed the whole scenario and gave feedback — was of particular interest. It identified correctly that my first attempt had a horror that players could face clearly. However, I also had another idea in the back of my mind, so I went for that one: an alien principle of order that enters a human social system and optimizes it beyond human meaning.
It is a slightly different take on Lovecraft, given that the horror has a social and not cosmic presentation (not vast space/beings, but social norms) and the threat is subtle (horror is slow, conceptual, creeping). However, it still goes for indifference (not hostility, it does not hate, just applies rules without regard for human context), epistemic failure (meaning collapse), loss of human reference point (humans cannot align with it), and no clean resolution (ambiguity of outcome).
If you want to have a look, you can download the scenario as PDF here:
It is just a private just-for-fun project and the only test I did was letting ChatGPT run an early version of it (see, e.g., ChatGPT as Call of Cthulhu Game Master or Keeper), but that worked out pretty well. And yeah, there are some areas of possible improvement, e.g., doing some crosslinks and the like. But for now, I am done with it.
Overall an interesting experience and impressive what is possible in less than two weeks. Though the downside is that with the AI support it is not solely my story anymore.
Still, it was fun to create it and a much needed break.
Note that «Call of Cthulhu» is a registered trademark of Chaosium Inc. This work is not affiliated with or endorsed by Chaosium.