What challenges do you face while writing for an established setting like Call of Cthulhu?
Originality. I can’t tell you how many published and unpublished scenarios I’ve looked at where there’s a series of ritual murders in some kind of detectable pattern that is leading up to a climactic supernatural event. There are a number of very obvious scenarios for CoC gaming, and you have to get past them and onto new territory. The other challenge is writing a scenario, not a story. Far too much of the published Chaosium scenarios are nothing more than a linear narrative in which each scene is interrupted by die rolls: either you succeed and continue with the linear narrative, or you fail and the entire story is derailed. Much of our work at Pagan — very much led by staff writer John Crowe — was spent in developing approaches to scenario design in which the story is what happens around the table, not what you read in the book.
