I've got an idea for a Call of Cthulhu scenario I think should be pretty fun, possibly avoiding some of the common tropes and settings of Cthulhu stuff (not to spoil anything!)
So I want to see if there's interest in a game before I start doing serious work on it, plus it'll be better if I have an idea of the characters.
The setting is Cold Spring, a small, dreary, rust-belt city in New York, in the year 1990. Investigators can be natives of Cold Spring if you'd like, but they probably don't live there now. That can be changed depending on what kind of backgrounds people come up with.
The investigator situation I had in mind was that you're a newly-formed and untested private investigation company, and for your first mission you get a softball pitch: One investigator's aunt calls, and your 19 year old deadbeat cousin Billy has disappeared. He's probably off shooting up in some burnt-out factory but he's all your aunt has and she's having conniptions.
Police or similar backgrounds would make sense for at least one character. As an alternative, your little organization could be of a more paranormal bent, in which case different backgrounds might be in order. This is the age of Satanic Panic after all, and Billy certainly fits the profile, with long hair, drugs, and heavy metal music.
Either way, you're a budding bunch of investigators, and you can't help but feel like you're being thrown a bone here, but you gotta build your resume one way or another. Hopefully it'll turn out as straightforward as it looks, right? Right? I'm open to completely different ideas for how your characters get involved.
Setting aside, I'm pretty sure most people are familiar with what CoC is. You play a group of investigators, initially ignorant and optimistic about the world, pursuing what seem like mundane cases until you're confronted with the stark reality of things that can't be explained, and next to which human lives are inconsequential. They find themselves fighting vainly not just against humanity's extinction, but against their own inexorable conviction that what they're doing doesn't matter. You gave up everything to stop Cthulhu but he'll just be back later. At least the end of the world isn't your fault?
I'll be using the 7th edition rules. There's not much different from 6e which people are probably more familiar with. It'll been a long time so it'll be a learning experience for me too, so I'm not requiring people to be super familiar with the rules. We'll probably meet on IRC once a week, preferably the weekends since I'll be working soon.
I need to go but I'll be editing this more in a few hours. People can post availabilities and ideas for characters, and we'll figure out actually creating them. Probably on the first session in IRC for people who don't know how.