One roleplaying game I am particularly fond of is  Trail of Cthulhu  by Robin Laws and Kenneth Hite. It’s the perfect blend of old-school Lovecraftian horror with new-school rules, and its  Gumshoe engine -based mystery clue mechanics are brilliant. However, there are two things I am not particularly fond of with this game: I don’t care for how pacing works in Trail of Cthulhu. It uses a skill point pool mechanic that works excellently for extended game sessions, creating a feeling of building suspense and impending doom. But if you ever try breaking a mystery up into a few shorter sessions, you’ll quickly see the suspense factor only really comes into play when you get closer to the climax — which is a problem when a single mystery spans the course of a month. This also makes the game rather inappropriate for narrative Play by Post or Play by Email mysteries, which can take even longer than that. The game’s mechanics also don’t lend themselves well to improvisation, which is