Miscellany: Running a "Call of Cthulhu" campaign, part 9

Eventually, every game master needs some inspiration for the next adventure. One possible source is the wealth of published supplements colloquially known as "splatbooks" that feature pre-generated material for role-playing games. For games that are at least partially based on the real world, like "Call of Cthulhu," these books can help add invaluable realistic detail that might otherwise require fairly extensive research and/or personal knowledge.

I acquired one of these recently; it's "Secrets of Kenya" by David Conyers - a fairly complete guide to running CoC in 1920s British East Africa. The book covers everything from tribal weaponry to colonial British racial prejudice to indigenous fauna, so as far as content goes, the book has most of what you'd expect. Unfortunately, Africa is way too big to cover in one book(imagine the sheer amount of stuff you could write about Egypt and the Congo), so the supplement only covers Kenya.

How much you get out of these things is pretty variable. You could conceivably use all of the content here, but few GMs will be so lazy as to crib everything here and play it by the book. The underground ghoul world lurking beneath Africa is pretty cool, so I believe that might be useful to me, but the other adventures here weren't very impressive.

Anyway, there's a lot of reasons to play in Kenya: