Alone Against the Flames

5th March 2015

During high school, my gateway drug to the literary horrors of New England writer H. P. Lovecraft was the pen-and-paper roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu. Set in the 1920s, it included silhouettes of marauding, tentacled creatures and a map of the world featuring lost cities and occult sites. It was an easy sell.

The attraction of tabletop roleplaying games is that you get a bunch of friends or agreeable nerds together and pit your wits against a problem, or construct a collaborative story. If the referee does their job and the players cooperate, you get atmosphere, excitement, laughter, and a little acting if you enjoy that kind of thing. With the right people it is tremendously good fun, and Call of Cthulhu is no exception.

However, not many of Lovecraft’s stories feature a plucky group of friends getting together to combat cosmic horror. On the whole they concern solitary figures stumbling across cosmic horror and meeting a terrible doom. So it felt natural to play Chaosium’s solo adventures: Glenn Rahman’s chilly Canadian expedition Alone Against the Wendigo and Matthew J. Costello’s globe-spanning doomfest, Alone Against the Dark. They told an interactive story with the “turn to paragraph XX” system. I disappeared into those books for weeks, losing sanity and dying in various ghastly ways. The originals still go for hefty prices on the secondhand market, along with Scott David Aniolowski’s Alone on Halloween and Grimrock Isle.

When I saw Chaosium were doing a major overhaul of Call of Cthulhu, I pitched a new Alone Against book. There is a perception among RPG publishers that solo adventures are a small market, despite the global popularity of Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure books. So I tried to fit a different niche.

Today’s video games have a tutorial which introduces you to the game gradually, as you play. There’s no preparation time; you just pick up the controller and begin. With tabletop RPGs at least one person has to read and absorb the rules before play can begin — and the Call of Cthulhu Seventh Edition rulebook is over four hundred pages. I wrote Alone Against The Flames like a video game tutorial. You sit down with a blank character sheet, some dice and a pencil, and just get reading. You’ll be involved with the story before you even have to define your character, and the references to the free, compact quick-start rulebook are relatively rare.

The story has you taking a long bus ride through the wilds of New Hampshire to your first job — and a new life — in Arkham. If you like Lovecraft or interactive stories, you can download and play it for free: Alone Against the Flames. It’s even hyperlinked to save you all that old-school flicking backwards and forwards through the book. But be careful out there.

I must thank Chaosium editor Mike Mason, for taking a chance on a writer he didn’t know, and my playtesters, particularly Stefan Pearson, who risked his literary reputation by sitting in full view at an international book festival, rolling funny-shaped dice.