Excellent! As I mentioned in the post, the exact system is something I want the group to help decide on. I have run a lot of the old Chaosium system, so I am familiar with it, and ran one of my favorite horror campaigns using the nWoD ruleset with the "Mirrors" supplement. I have run one game of Trail of Cthulhu and was so happy with it that I am ready to jump in and use the system for this. lastly I have been playing and running FATE games, and I see SO much possibility for using FATE style aspects and conditions to deal with deteriorating mental and social faculties.... While the stories we develop together can be told in any system, the system we choose will accentuate facets of the game and story. The original Chaosium CoC system is very old school dice rolling, not much in the way if player agency - which is not a bad thing for a genre where players are not supposed to have much control. Death will be common, and each encounter a source of fear. There is also a TON of stuff out there for Call of Cthulhu. FATE would probably give players the most agency, but FATE is also a game where players MUST take on negatives to reap rewards - which also fits in with a horror genre. Players will be role playing their descent in madness until their characters retire or make the ultimate sacrifice. Trail of Cthulhu is a simple game that uses a point spend system - the more you spend the better you do. I thought I would hate it, but it worked much better than I would have ever guessed because Robin Laws and Kenneth Hite are frickin geniuses. Trail allows players to decide what information they find, and where they find it. Roleplaying clues and mysteries are easy in Trail, and the system is designed specifically to handle them. White Wolf's New World of Darkness is neither Fish no Fowl in comparison to the other systems. It is a dice pool system that is less random than Chaosium, but mechanisms for player agency are not as explicit as FATE or Trial. As I mentioned before, I used it for a Call of Cthulhu campaign and was very happy with how it turned out - and there are a host of hacks to fine tune it for player preferences. This game is heavily influenced by the Robin Laws "Armitage Files" campaign. My hope is to develop a framework for missions - some of which your PC's will go on andsome of which will be attempted by other agents. You will be able to chose your missions and investigations. The success or failure of your group and the other agents will determine the advancement of PROJECT JOTENHEIM, the ultimate last effort of the Ahnenerbe SS. Failure IS an option! - and it might also set the seed for a new mini campaign if people are interested.... Michael
