Week 1 Studio: What is a scenario?

The opening studio — the five-stage design pipeline the semester follows, and the first raw idea you bring to the table.

22 February 2027

A Call of Cthulhu scenario is five linked decisions, made in order: turn a spark of interest into a premise, fuse it with a Mythos truth and antagonist, commit to a structure, build a clue web that survives a bad die roll, and staff it with puzzles, checks and NPCs that all exist for a reason. Nothing else in this course is Mythos trivia — it’s practice at making those five decisions well.

Blase’s scenario design guide (source #5) works the same five moves at a finer grain — a ten-step “build a scenario from scratch” workflow he notes fits “on two pages of notes”: pick an ordinary starting world, introduce one wrong thing, write the hidden truth, write an opening that gives one lead, name a handful of nodes reachable in any order, put three independent clues behind every conclusion that matters, write an antagonist timeline of visible escalating moves, prepare NPCs with a goal/fear/resource each, choose one action scene and one horror reveal, and list several possible endings. It’s worth having both versions in your head at once this semester: the five-stage version is what this course structures its weeks around, and Blase’s ten steps are a denser checklist for when you’re deep in a draft and need to check nothing got skipped.

Why the course insists on going through all five stages in order, rather than writing a draft in one pass: handing players a first draft as-is tends to surface problems a read-through never catches — which is exactly why this course builds toward a real playtest (week 11) instead of treating “finished on paper” as the same thing as “finished.”

Before the session#

Bring one idea, however rough: a creature or entity you find genuinely interesting, a news story or unsolved case that stuck with you, or an object that unsettled you for no obvious reason. It doesn’t need to be Cthulhu-shaped yet — that’s next week’s work.

In the session#

A worked walkthrough of the pipeline end to end, using Chaosium’s own free introductory scenario, “The Haunting” (source #1) — neither of your teachers wrote it, and it’s legally available to everyone in this room. Chaosium’s own published retelling of a real playthrough is worth knowing about going in: the players there skip whole locations, improvise past a locked door with a bribe instead of the intended approach, and still land on the same closing hook — evidence that a scenario’s skeleton is meant to survive real players reordering and skipping things, not a script to be run word for word. Then, in pairs: two minutes to pitch your raw idea, one probing question back from your partner. The question is the point — it’s the first sign of whether the idea can carry other people’s attention.

Afterwards#

Open a scenario notebook — one document, any format — and write down your idea plus the question your partner asked. Every assessment this semester builds on what goes in that notebook, starting with the Scenario Pitch.