A Place to Call Home: The Legacy of Cthulhu Quick Play Adventure

This is an introductory adventure for The Legacy of Cthulhu, a tabletop Role-Playing Game that lets players act as one of the few Survivors of the apocalypse brought to Earth by the Great Old Ones and their minions.

The game’s main goal is survival, hiding in Shelters and waiting for the best windows of opportunity to go on supply runs. Food, medicine, weapons, and gear are the essential tools to resist the dooming future ahead, filled with regular folk possessed by pure desperation and madness, scheming cultists, shadowy priests, and the most dangerous Enemies of all: the perverse spawns of Cthulhu and other Great Old Ones, powerful enough to shatter someone’s mind just with their presence.

A Place to Call Home is a small demonstration of what the game offers and puts the player in the role of a Survivor who just barely dodged death by escaping an attack from the hordes of Cthulhu. With their Shelter destroyed, the Survivor leads a group of refugees to a small town in the middle of nowhere. Surviving in this post-apocalyptic scenario is almost impossible. Still, the group must do whatever it takes to find a new refuge to tender their wounds and, with a little bit of luck and a lot more of faith, find a way to thrive in such a doomed world.

There are three ways to play The Legacy of Cthulhu:

• Solo Player: create one or more survivors and interact with them in the premade scenario through dice rolls on the pre-defined tables, slowly unfolding the characters’ story.
• Group of Players: on the second way of playing, you and one or more friends will use the tools for generating and conducting the game without the need for a Storyteller to tell you what will happen. Thus, events and characters will appear according to random rolls and pre-defined tables. At the same time, your group will react to the events the way your characters would find most common and, when necessary, by rolling the dice to check if your actions were successful.
• Mediator: finally, the third way to play is by one of the group playing the role of Mediator, similar to the Game Master/Storyteller. The Mediator will answer the questions through the role of the Oracle, ask for the dice rolls to carry out the basic actions, roll the game events and mediate the players’ actions, giving the freedom to insert different elements through the story.

A Place to Call Home includes:

• Small Campaign for demonstration
• Simplified rule set
• 2 premade characters
• Blank character sheet
• 2 tiles with a limited number of pre-defined branching events
• A limited number of skills, items, enemies, and other game features

This is a FREE demo for the crowdfunding campaign. Add any sum as "Pay What You Want" if you wish to help.

FAQ for the Quick Play:

The Quick Demo doesn’t specify the time to perform basic actions. What should I do? If there’s nothing specified, take 1 hour as the standard. In the final game, these will be the recommendations:

Hunt for Food

Wreckage: 2 hours

Wasteland: 1 hour

We see items and equipment in the pre-made characters, but there isn’t enough information about creating your character.

To streamline the Quick Play, we omitted many character creation rules since we expected most people to play with the premades. If you want to know more about creating your own character, follow these rules: 

1. Choose one Weapon and one piece of Armor from Table 10;
2. Choose one piece of Equipment from Table 11;
3. Roll two Random Items from Table 09 (if you roll 1-2, roll again);
4. You begin with 5+1d10 units of Food, 1d10 Medicine, and 1d10 Ammo.

Do we have to create all Survivors like a regular character?

It is really up to you. Creating so many characters can be laborious, so we added instructions to make them quickly with the box on page 16. In the final book, we will add more premades, and we are also studying the possibility of creating a random generator that you can use to print extra Survivors.

Why do you say the day starts at 6:00 am, and is there a specific hour to roll the Horde Attack?

Your day will start at 6:00 am, and as you do your actions and go through events during the day, you always need to think about the possibility of a Horde Attack at night. So make sure you dedicate a good portion of your day to preparing your defenses – you must roll the likelihood of a Horde Attack before 6:00 am of the following day.

A Horde Attack could have dozens of enemies plus multiple Survivors rolling attacks. These invasions seem very unfair as well! Everything looks exhausting! Is there a way to make things simpler to digest?

Losing shelters could be a constant outcome in a Cthulhu campaign because that’s how you survive in a post-apocalyptic world – imagine The Walking Dead and how many different places to live they had across the story. However, we agree that you are not on the best terms with your dice; things could get ugly fast – for those, it is possible to use an ‘automated’ method:

Every Survivor healthy enough to fight will use their weapons to suppress the Horde Attack before the Horde can destroy and penetrate the Shelter (remember, the players always act first). Survivors with melee weapons or low fire rate guns will attack one-on-one, just like the standard combat rules. However, those with high fire rate weapons, like machine guns and rifles, can hit Body+3 enemies with a single check – they will spend ammo equivalent to the number of targets, and those targets will be eliminated instantly. Grenades destroy 1d10 targets, while other explosives destroy 5+1d10 targets. 

There’s more to it since the final game has different types of enemies, many with supernatural attacks and other gimmicks, as well as the use of player magic. But in sum, there are alternate rules to make fewer rolls.

Example: Imagine a party of 5 Survivors in a Shelter with 50 defense (no upgrades) about to be attacked by 50 undead. Of the 5, 3 have high fire rate weapons (machine guns, rifles, etc.), while the remaining 2 have pistols but can improvise Molotov explosives. The shooters all have 3 body stat, so they run the attack check, succeed, and can destroy 18 undead – 32 are still powering through.

Then, the other 2 throw/detonate their explosives and can kill 20. That will give the group a second round to finish the zombies before the shelter is breached. The 12 remaining zombies will damage the Shelter automatically for 48, but that’s not enough to destroy it.

However, imagine the same situation again, but with the group unable to kill as many zombies, so 20 undead attack the place for 80 damage, destroying it right away– meaning zombies start pouring inside the site like in a Romero movie. Then you go to round 2, where the group will have to kill the zombies or run away since the Shelter is in crumbles. Then they will search for another Shelter the following day; that's the life in the degraded world of Cthulhu.