About a year ago, I started playing in a Call of Cthulhu tabletop role-playing game, run by a friend. I had not done an ongoing tabletop RPG in many years, but the circumstances arose where the team was short an adventurer, so I thought, why not?
I was not ready to jump into the chaos with a character of my own making, so I opted for a pre-generated character. The “private detective” pre-gen jumped out at me. That was a role I could play.
I’ve been a big fan of detective stories for a while. My favorites include Lew Archer, George Gently, and Albert Campion. (I really should get some women detectives in there.) Part of this is because of the television I enjoy – where I will say that women inspectors abound, including Annika Strandhed, Sarah Lund, Saga Norén, Mared Rhys, Ellie Miller, and many more – but also because my latest original story centers on a pair of amateur sleuths.
I gave my detective the name Cameron West, though everyone calls him West. I can’t tell you where his name came from, only that when I started playing him, I tried to channel my inner Archer/Gently/Strandhed. It partly worked.
While I can write a pretty good observant smartass, playing one on the fly was a different matter. West was a lot more brute force than subtle detecting. Which, lucky for me and the rest of the investigative party, has turned out fine.
Call of Cthulhu is one of those games where characters can die. Characters are often expected to die. West has at least one more scheduled adventure in him as of this writing, but in case he doesn’t make it through, I wrote a diary of his exploits that I’ve shared on this website, called The Ruminations of (Cameron) West. You can read all the entries starting here, with his first adventure, in New York.
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