a voice from beyond...
A few years back I decided I wanted to run a Call of Cthulhu campaign.
Unluckily my brain is very small, which makes me unable to comprehend any rule system that takes more than fifteen seconds to learn. Also, I’m used to running sandboxy OSR-type games. I wanted a system that minimised prep time, maximised player freedom and used as few numbers as possible.
I like pulp, horror and the whole Weird Tales aesthetic. I think it’s cool to be a pipe-smoking ghost detective beating up aliens in the South China Sea. It’s soothing to me mentally when you uncover an ancient tomb and things from before time pop out and bite you. Like everyone else I think it’s fun to play the shared universe game where Sherlock Holmes fights Dracula and Tarzan is best friends with Fu Manchu.
In order to run this I decided I would develop my own system and call it Strange Aeons. I realise there are a million systems already but this one is mine.
Smugglers, pirates, disreputable archaeologists, private detectives, ghost hunters and crooks, exploring the uncertain world between the wars, digging deep into billennia of history. Masked cults, death rays, haunted mirrors, crumbling manors at the end of windswept peninsulas where globs of unspeakable protoplasm bubble up from between the floorboards of the world. UFOs in Egypt, pterodactyls in New York. All of this is roughly the effect I’m going for.
This blog is not a comprehensive overview of the system but a place to get ideas out of my head so they don’t just rattle around in my brain forever, crowding out important skills and metastasizing into dangerous lumps. It’s basically an alternative to trepanation. I will try to post some rules soon and a few more setting details, which if you’re very clever and lucky you may have come across before.
Until then here’s a fun thought; what if tarsiers were eight foot tall and could reach into your window at night while you were sleeping and pluck you out of your bed? The moonlike face pressed against the glass, the long spindly fingers. Where would they take you? Chew on that.