Image by Nick Magwood
One Last Dance - 1980s Prom Call of Cthulhu
It's spring of 1987. Prom is coming and everyone is excited. You are worried about who you're going to take, but... Who is going to take _you_?
$12.00
/ Session
Details
1 player following this game
Weekly / Wednesday - 1:00 PM UTC
Session Duration / 2–4 hours
0 / 5 Seats Filled
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About the adventure
Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition — 1980s It's 1987. The hair is big, the music is too loud, and tonight is supposed to be a night you'll never forget. Sadly for you, thats likely to be very true. Something strange is happening in the town of Leed's Point, NJ. The weather is odd. The leaves seem to be falling off the trees as quickly as they grow. The local livestock has some kind of blight. Something seems to be building up to the date of the prom. A local group of residents (maybe the odd drifter) from the local high school and area have banded together to discover what's behind it and prevent something catastrophic from happening to the town. -- Call of Cthulhu is a horror/mystery RPG about ordinary people investigating things that are decidedly better left unexplored. You don't need to know the setting or Lovecraftian lore to play. Just bring a character idea, a willingness to delve into forgotten places, and perhaps a healthy distrust of authority figures. I am captivated by the shtick of the 1980s prom in movies and other media. It seems worthwhile to explore it a bit in TTRPG form. This game is rated PG-13. We get one curse word, guys. Let's make it count. Expect 1980s nostalgia, teenage drama, adult drama, elderly drama, supernatural mystery, dark humor, investigation, and things that are definitely against the school rules. (This is absolutely going on someones permanent record.) Formalwear required. Survival not guaranteed. (You may not Old Man Henderson this game. This means you. :D )
Game style
Combat Lite
Roleplay Heavy
Roleplay Lite
Sandbox / Open World
Theater of the Mind
Game themes
Meet the Game Master
5.0
(6)
Less than a year on StartPlaying
3 games hosted
Highly rated for: Creativity, Rule of Cool, Storytelling
About me
Well, hello there. I'm Daz. I've been playing tabletop games for 25 years, and I've been GMing regularly for about 20 of them. At this point, I've come to realize that I didn't really choose to GM. I have to. I _must_ It's much the same with writing: the ideas get into my head, and eventually they simply have to get out. My first games were a few rinky-dink affairs in high school, followed by my first *real* campaign in college with a few dear friends. Before long, I found myself imagining worlds of my own, strange characters with interesting backstories, settings, narrative arcs, and wild ideas that didn't quite fit into any existing box. So I decided to test my mettle and run a game for those same friends. We played a game that was a mix of Animal Crossing and Silent Hill. It was horrifying. But lots of fun! Twenty years later, I'm still at it. For most of those two decades I've been concocting plots behind my screen, running games across a wide variety of systems and settings. Along the way, I've become something of a student of the hobby itself: I love digging into the history of settings, understanding how mechanics have evolved, and figuring out what the intention was behind which dice are rolled. More importantly, I've learned that a good GM isn't simply the person who knows the rules or tells the story. A good GM makes it easy for everyone else to participate in creating the experience. That's something I've worked hard to develop over the years. I enjoy teaching systems by playing them rather than burying new players beneath a rulebook. I like games where the players and GM can actually talk to one another, reach a communal decision about what will make the game more fun, and then get on with absolutely annihilating the plot points I had planned for. I've developed guidelines and approaches that let players engage as deeply as they want to, whether that's bringing a character that is a challenge for the player to the table, or trying a bit of high RP when its a bit outside the players comfort zone. And while I certainly love a good fantasy campaign, I've spent much of my time GMing branching out. Cyberpunk. Low Magic. High Lethality. Grimdark. Heartwarming (Princess: The Hopeful anyone?). Some of the most fun games I've run recently have been one-shot campaigns inspired by movies, television, video games, and books. Both from things I discovered recently to things I loved when I was younger. How I would character myself being is GM is: An experimenter empath who tries to help the players tell the story they want to weave. I like discovering what happens when you take an idea seriously. I like finding the weird corner of a setting that nobody thought to explore. I like watching players take something I prepared, turn it sideways, and come up with something I never expected. (::sound of me dumping my session notes in the trash::) After 25 years, I'm still fascinated by this hobby. I still have worlds I want to build, stories I want to tell, systems I want to try, but also potentially develop. Probably with your help. So if this sounds like your kind of table, I'd love to have you along for the ride.
View Profile →Character creation
Creating your character
Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition, Standard Character Generation. Players should be residents or passers through of Leed's Point, NJ. This game is made with the setting of a typical 80s prom in mind with one caveat, absolutely all characters of note in this game is over 18. There arent any IRL towns with no children at all, so scene dressing only. You could be a HS student, a college student, an adult local, a passer through, a teacher at the high school or college, a local doctor. Basically, you're in the town and have to kind of care about the town and people in it. If you are new to the system, don't worry. Its really quite simple, and I'm delighted to lift all the heavy bits for you. As we prelude and do session 0, literally 5 to 10 minutes of chatting and we're done. I'll hand you the finished sheet and I'll point you to the important parts when we need to roll. You can even just ask me to make a sheet for you and have that be it.
What to expect
Preparing for the session
I typically run voice over Discord, I'll be making a server specifically for this game, its the most stable I've found for VoIP. And I run rolls on Roll20 typically. But dice as you know, are fickle, and if dice rolls are not random-seeming enough on Roll20, I also allow dicebots on discord or any other public facing dice roller. For Call of Cthulhu, there are a few excel sheets, some autoupdating pdfs, and a few other options I'm sure. The book makes it quite simple as you only roll for a few things. You do not need to read the book or be familiar with the setting. That might even be a disadvantage for RP purposes. Having things be a surprise might make it more fun. If you happen to be brand new, that is absolutely not a problem at all! I'll walk with you through the steps of the sheets, the system, and general play. Genuinely, it takes 10 minutes to go through it all, and I promise you, you will not feel left behind when we are done.
What Dazzle brings to the table
You can expect us to have a free session 0 which might seemlessly move into a session 1 if there is time left over. During that time, we'll be chatting about your expectations, what kind of story you might have, your characters you are bringing to the table/the character you are getting from me. Make last minute adjustments to your sheets like freebies and unique attributes you might have from your past. Maybe a storytime if anyone has a cool story to tell about TTRPGs (I have a collection). Lastly, this is Call of Cthulhu. Its a notoriously lethal game for characters. I consider myself a very forgiving GM in terms of lethality, but it could happen.
Homebrew rules
If I say the words, "Just don't roll a critical failure." and then you roll a critical failure, you are allowed to cuss me out. But seriously, not really any homebrew. I just point out my personal philosophy about rules. We will generally follow them. But sometimes they dont apply perfectly. Sometimes they are vague in certain circumstances and feel unfair. Unfair is not fun. We want fun. So if we run into a rule thats a problem, I will typically look to see if anyone else has had that issue, and barring that, I like to engage inconsensus based rule alterations when necessary. We look to the letter of the rule, and if that does not suffice, we look to the spirit of the rule, and if that doesnt work (hey, sometimes happens.), we will, as a group, come up with a reasonable replacement that feels fair for everyone. I like consensus for this, meaning everyone generally agrees. It should be noted that D&D, GURPs, and World of Darkness books all have blurbs saying that doing so is perfectly fine in their system.
Equipment needed to play
Internet
Computer
Microphone
Platforms used
Safety
How Dazzle creates a safe table
I do not have a physical NO-card to put down in front of everyone. But I have a direct message with all players. And simply stating "Veto" or some version of "I'm not comfortable with this" will illicit me to move on from the scene or merely abstract the events down to the necessary story bits prior to the moving on. Session 0 is typically as far as I've ever needed to go for the tempering and setting of expectations from everyone. I'm very accommodating. And if you are uncomfortable by any subject, let me know your limits whenever you feel comfortable sharing them. I can voice them as if they were my own to everyone else. And we'll probably agree on those limits anyway. I tend to shy away from gratuitous descriptions of the unpleasant or grotesque if they aren't completely necessary for some reason. Basically, anything down in the content warnings is negotiable.
Content warnings
Safety tools used