Keeper Tips: Collected Wisdom on Running Games

by Mike Mason, Scott David Aniolowski, Sean Branney

A gathering of wisdom, advice, and tips from Keepers for Keepers of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game

Genres: Role Playing Games, Nonfiction

113 pages, Hardcover

First published December 5, 2021

About the author

Line Developer and Editor for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, freelance author and game designer.

Reviews

[Tom Andersson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Boken består av tips till spelledare till rollspelet Call of Cthulhu. Boken är en samling av tips från flera olika erfarna spelledare. Varje tips är dock fristående vilket gör att vissa saker återupprepas eller motsägs i ett annat tips. Sedan tyckte jag att vissa kategorier som sanity eller monster gott kunde varit större.

[Matt Rhine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an excellent collection of tips and tricks to help one run a better Call of Cthulhu (or really any TTRPG) game. However, it is important to know going in that there is no narrative, and the tips are presented essentially as a bullet list organized by subject.

The tips however, are brief enough that your mind can twist and turn on them, gleaning the advice they give and giving your mind room to wander and imagine. I recommend giving it a quick read through, and then flipping through in the future for advice later on.

[Malcolm · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this and it's partially my fault that I don't. I thought this would be something that it wasn't and what it is, is stated plainly on the cover.

Keeper Tips is just what it says. It is a pile of tips for being a Keeper for Call of Cthulhu. The tips are 1-2 sentence blurbs loosely organized by topic. It warns you early on that they will be contradictory and often they are. The editor clearly enjoyed pairing up tips that tell you do one thing with another tip that tells you to never do that thing. GM advice, like so many things, is a "take what you find useful out of all the noise" affair. And that's fine it's just the format of this makes it read in a deranged manner. Some of the tips are quite good. Some of them are not great. One of them advocates using Stephen King as an example and then misspells that author's name which does tend to throw doubt on the tip.

So, what did I want? I dunno. I kinda wanted RPG philosophy essays in the vein of what Seth Skorkowsky (a contributor to this book) posts for his youtube channel. An in-depth examination of how to run Call of Cthulhu and other horror games. A celebration of Call of Cthulhu's 40th year!

I just don't really know what to do with this book as it is. It might be useful to someone but I also don't think I could advocate paying MSRP for it.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4 stars.

A bunch of great little tips and insights, some for running any role-playing game, some for horror role-playing games specifically, and some just for Call of Cthulhu in particular.

It's a shotgun scatter shot of tips, presented haphazardly. A bunch of contributors provided tips, and they've been stripped of attribution and arranged in lists of sentences or paragraphs by broad theme. Grouping by contributor, or better yet, short essays by contributor, would probably have worked better, but it's a great little book of advice nonetheless.

[Maja · Rating 2 out of 5]

So this is not one coherent book, it's like someone stuck an empty sheet to a wall at a con and then people could write little pieces of wisdom on it. So things will contradict each other, they will repeat the same point but phrased differently, and that's over 130 pages. I read about a third of this, but the format really doesn't work for me – I get that you're supposed to read through and them only pick some things as advice, but to me it was a very exhausting reading experience, especially because some points like "give your players agency" really do get repeated a lot.

[Keeper Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book is jam packed with tons of useful information for both veteran and beginning Keepers alike. While some of the tips can be a bit repetitive due to the various offers offering variations on a theme, almost all the similar ones have a little something different. Would highly recommend buying it if you’re going to be Keepering or DM’ing Call of Cthulhu, or to be honest - any roleplaying game!

[Harun Musho'd · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the one hand £18 for a small small hardcover book with 113 pages of poorly organised tips with lots of repetition. On the other hand, I marked out 84 tips that I would find useful, so there is gold amongst the chaos. The pdf on its own at around £7 is probably much better value though.

The book is mainly aimed at Call of Cthulhu, although some tips are transferable to other RPGs, particularly horror or mystery ones.

[Aragorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A unique resource for an even more unique game. I found a lot of the anecdotes very useful and many quite insightful as well. If you run Call of Cthulhu games or are just interested in being a DM or Gm in other game systems then I would say this little tome would be beneficial. Highly recommended to the Keepers of Arcane Lore.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am just getting back into running Call of Cthulhu after a bit of a break, and this was just what I needed to get back into the Keeper mindset. In fact, I think this book is perfectly suited to that purpose, providing encouragement, a refresher on good practice, and some fresh ideas. Being readable in a single sitting concentrates the effect.

[GreyIC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interested in running a Call of Cthulhu game, which I've never done. Never even really run a horror game of any sort! Pretty good advice, though most of it is standard fare; if you've been judging RPGs for a while, most of this will be familiar to you. The horror and prop-specific guidance was helpful for me as were the references to Call of Cthulhu resources online.

[Johan Thilander]

Kortfattade råd och tankar kring en av mina favorit-hobbier, vackert inbundna i fuskläder.

[Scott Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book for Keepers old and new. Certainly something to keep to had to remind yourself of the dos and donts as you see fit for you and your investigators!

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Get one for yourself, and pick one up for a friend as a gift who's just getting started. There is something in here for everyone either new or experienced.

[Arthur B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming collection of advice for running Call of Cthulhu. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...