Alone Against the Flames, Call of Cthulhu

I've just played through Alone Against the Flames which is a choose-your-own-adventure style short solo adventure using Call of Cthulhu 7th edition. I've not done a solo Cthulhu game before so I was pretty excited to give it a try.

The book is designed as an introduction to the 7th ed' and so you literally follow instructions built into the text of the story to build your character. This is pretty clever, there's no need to spend half an hour building a character before you start. You read a few paragraphs, do your stats, do a few more paragraphs, do your career and skills, do a few more, calculate your hard/extreme values.

Its really well done, and fun to play. Alas, my character didn't make it on the first play through. Am I inclined to try again? Not yet. Once is enough for me at least, but I'm the same way with the full length game books too. I only go back to them after a few months, when I've forgotten enough about them to keep it fresh again.

Recommended if you have an hour or two to fill. I printed out the character sheet, and used the PDF on screen. You could go all digital if you can find a fillable character sheet. You dont need the core rule book to play, I  only had to look up one thing, "what is a hard skill check", but if you want you can download the quickstart rules for free.

And as I'm mentioning Call of Cthulhu ... please consider listening to my fiction podcast which is called "Cthulhu"