Week 1: Why design, not lore

The opening lecture — why this course teaches the design process behind a CoC scenario rather than Mythos trivia or system rules.

22 February 2027

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Call of Cthulhu is easy to teach as trivia — which Great Old One does what, which skill covers what — and that’s exactly the course this isn’t. What makes a scenario work at the table is a design process: five decisions, made roughly in order, that turn one spark of interest into something a group of strangers can sit down and play. This lecture sets out that process and where the semester’s studios and assessments sit against it.

Before any of the five stages, there’s a decision this course only asks you to make once: what kind of scenario is this actually going to be? A straight Call of Cthulhu scenario draws its entities and stakes from the Mythos itself; a fan-fusion instead borrows another setting’s own factions, creatures or tone and runs them through Call of Cthulhu’s rules and skill list — using the ruleset without importing its default cosmology wholesale. Neither option is more legitimate than the other, but settling it before you go looking for a spark saves you from falling for an idea that turns out not to fit the ruleset you’d already picked.

First you need to settle what genre the scenario is even in — you can’t write a story without the inspiration for it, and only after that should you start pulling in the Mythos’ generic elements, checking which of them actually fit that inspiration, and folding them in to tell a Cthulhu- flavoured story. There are two broad categories to choose between: a straight Call of Cthulhu scenario, or a fan-fusion scenario that borrows Call of Cthulhu’s rules for an entirely different setting — for example, a Lord of the Mysteries fan scenario.

Outline

Teaching team