I'm going to be running this in about two months and I want to make it play more like call of Cthulhu. There are several road blocks however.
1. It is a huge departure from my groups established play style. We've been running high power games(my game that is about to wrap up has an effective 48 point buy) and I plan on running this with a 15-20 point buy. I want the threats of this campaign to be very real to the characters unlike in our other games.
2. I have very little experience running a published adventure(this is probably minor)
3. I'm not really into horror, gaming movies or otherwise. I just really wanted to try something different and I've played a couple of short CoC games and thought it'd be fun to try a game like that. I like the whole Cthulhu style mythos but not really sure how to better bring it out in game, especially since I can't really put my finger on what it is that appeals to me. I like the "old ones" ancient magical/technological aliens of great psychic power I guess.
So far all I know that I'm changing up is I'm going to use the book descriptions from Spacelard. Those hit right on the spot. I'm also considering using the insanity rules from pathfinder. I might incorporate the d20 Cthulhu madness system instead, if I can find my book. Haunting seems for the most part okay, just need to add some references and encounters with Lovecraftian flavored stuff, but The Beast looks like it'll need much more help.
Any suggestions would be very helpful.
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If you've never run it before, it can get a little tricky. But it's very rewarding.
Harrowstone is already set up a bit like a Cthulhu adventure. There's a lot of studying and picking away at a creepy place, and coming back a little worse for wear each time (at least with my party).
My best advice is just to have a real clear picture of the town and people before you start. I've also got a pretty power-gamer bunch, and most don't really care to remember things like the names and motivations of NPCs. So I made a bunch of blank notecards with the names of people and places on them, and hand them out when the run into one, letting them fill in the details they think are important. For example, you could have a notecard on each of Lorrimor's books, for NPCs like Gibs, for research like information on The Whispering Way, and for locations like the Laughing Demon.
I like the idea of using the d20 Madness rules, and they should work just fine. Remember, you may need to tone down some of the encounters if you add sanity checks.
Trial of the Beast actually hits a great Lovecraft vein, that of "Man Was Not Meant to Know." Played right, Lepenstaght is a place where learned men went too far, culminating in the battle against a beast sewn together not from the corpses of humans, but from the corpses of aberrations.
Broken Moon is a bit more tricky. Maybe using the strange mindset of werewolfs to showcase the somewhat alien nature of, uh, nature? Let me think on that one.
I'm in a similar situation: wrapping up a high-fantasy campaign (Crimson Throne) and hoping to change the gaming style by running Carrion Crown. My players are not power gamers per se, but they've been enjoying the carnage wrought by high-level characters, so even going back to level 1 again will be an adjustment.
Call of Cthulhu is mostly about atmosphere, but the threat of madness or death is also significant. One very simple change that could make all the difference: tell your players that raise dead-style spells do not exist in this campaign world. If you're dead, you're dead (unless you come back as something much, much worse).
My plans for adapting the AP are a bit more complicated -- a low-magic, monotheistic world with some new rules for self-healing -- but I haven't run it all past my players yet. They may rebel, in which case, it's Serpent's Skull for us!
The 3.5 splat book Heroes of Horror has some fun rules for how raise dead and similar spells work. Instead of banning them outright (which they also suggest) they have some suggestions to make them more difficult to use. For example, it could take hours instead of minutes to cast; the body of the dead may need to be moved to a special location such a pit deep in the earth close to the underworld or a high mountain top near the heavens; or, in order for one soul to be brought back from the dead, another soul may have to be sacrificed in its place.
They also have rules that if a raise dead spell does work, something may go wrong. The person brought back may still have a rotting limb, or a cold touch, or the stench of death. They may be haunted by a shadow that still wants their soul.
I like these variant rules and will probably use them, and some form of insanity in my CC game. I'm not going to make sanity loss as bad as it is in the d20 Cthulhu book, where if you see a dead body or fight a zombie, you lose sanity. This is still Pathfinder and combat is still pretty important (whereas in a true Call of Cthulhu game, combat is pretty rare; most things that you encounter, you want to run away from, as fast as humanly possible) so I think it would be pretty extreme for characters to lose sanity every time they see something like a dead body.