Cthulhu Confidential

Today we talk about Cthulhu Confidential.  A nice little tabletop RPG from Pelgrane Press, makers of the Gumshoe RPG (which I have not read).  Cthulhu Confidential is based off the aforementioned Gumshoe, but is a “One-2-One” system that is geared for one GM and one Player (go fig.). The genre is Noir/ cheap detective set in the 30’s – 40’s and the perquisite Mythos components.  The book contains rules and 3 scenarios with pre-gens.

The rules are summed up on a Quick Reference page towards the back of the book, and a single page is all the summary you need.  Characters have Investigative and General abilities. Investigative abilities allow you to gather clues just by being in the right place and right time, no roll required.  If you don’t have the correct Investigative ability you can hit up a Source for info.  You can also spend a resource called a “Push” that ups the result, giving you more info for instance.  General abilities are used in tests to determine if you succeed.  You have 1 or 2 dice (d6s) per ability.  You roll one die at a time since you might succeed without rolling all your dice and then the unused die generates a Push.  Challenges have 3 levels of outcome; Advance, Hold, and Setback.  These determine the result’s effect on the plot.  Advances give you Edges, Setbacks give you Problems. You can even accept an extra Problem to give you another die.

On the Tech Side

In electronics news, I purchased a refurbished Surface 3 from Amazon.  Quad core, 4 GB RAM, 128 GB drive with a “10.8” inch display.  I also picked up the pen, the Type Cover/keyboard, a 128GB MicroSD card and a 128GB USB 3 thumb drive (all from Amazon).  I was a little apprehensive on the “refurbished” aspect, but it came out of the box like new.

I’m liking it. A lot.  I use it mainly for reading gaming .pdfs in portrait mode, but it’s got the moxie to connect to work through VPN.  It has full windows 10 and runs Office 365 well enough for my needs.  The 10.8 screen is eminently readable with 10″ x 7″ usable area within the black borders.  I don’t think I’d be happy with anything smaller, as it is I don’t have to scroll to read a page.

The back camera is pretty good, compensates for my shaky hand quite nicely and good resolution.  The selfie camera is a bit grainy, but this is a few generations back, so I’m not terribly upset.

The pen changes written notes into text in notepad. That’s a nice plus I hadn’t anticipated.  It’s learning my handwriting too.  With the pen you can mark up your documents, even .docs and .pdfs.  It came with a couple drawing apps with different brushes available for those of an artistic bent.  not so much for me…