JM Hauser

I’ll try to tag to the previous WtWAWYNW entries  for consistency and easier reference.  My “Whatawowinew”.  Or however you want to pronounce that weird acronym. So I put it on my other blog but I want to mentioned it here too – I’ve been looking over the 7th edition Call of Cthulhu rules and I’m really liking them.  Now gaming can be escapism or a creative outlet or a waste of time or a fun social gathering, sometimes all at once.  It really depends on how much time you invest in it.  And what it ultimately means to your emotional well being.  That said, the nature of Call of Cthulhu is by default one of ghastly horror, grisly doom, and confronting indescribable entities from other dimensions that want to feast on your soul.  So fun stuff. Regardless, it is an immensely cool world to play in, one that I have delved into many times over the years, swam around in its yuckiness and eventually climbed back out and showered (metaphorically). The new 7th edition of the game promises more of the same, and it looks really fun to play, and now in full horrific color to boot.

There’s a new adventure out for it as well, Horror on the Orient Express, no less than a 9 lb. boxed set that could club someone to death it’s so heavy.  If I WERE to run Cthulhu again, this is the adventure I would pick up.  It looks to be chock full of handouts, clues, a timeline, and more convoluted red herrings than you could possibly imagine.  And red herrings in Call of Cthulhu are fun. Instead of THIS thing driving your character insane, it might THIS completely unrelated thing instead. Which brings me back to the point I brought up earlier – what does gaming mean to me?  Is it pure escapism, a way to waste time instead of doing something more productive, or is it a built-in creative outlet or is it a dedicated social mechanism for getting together with friends?   I guess for me it’s all of the above.   It’s definitely a form of storytelling, cooperate storytelling, but from experience, it can ultimately be a waste of time pumping that much creative juice into a project that only about 5 other people on the world will care about.

That kind of creative devotion can write entire novels and crap like that, which ya know, can be a career and make you money, both of which are really neato things. So ultimately, like anything else, moderation is the key.  Finding a balance between how much time you invest in a hobby like this is important.  Too little and the game suffers from lack of preparation; too much and you’re investing all your time into something that not many people will care about;  just right is just right, the Sweet Spot.  That horrible, horrible, terrifying and madness-inducing sweet spot of Sanity-draining terror that the game is famous for. I love it.