Call of Cthulhu one-shot [session report]

 

Well, it finally happened.  I ran something other than Cha'alt for my face-to-face gaming group.

This time, especially considering the season, I decided to run Call of Cthulhu.  Except, it was my own rules-light, O5R hack of the game using Advanced Crimson Dragon Slayer as a model.

In a 3.5 hour game, I think each player rolled maybe 4 or 5 dice.  So, the system was virtually invisible, which is exactly what I wanted.

Instead of the usual character creation which can burn up to 30 or 40 minutes of game time, I opted for pre-gens.  After all, this was a one-shot (or was it?) and why bother the players with character generation if they're never going to play these characters again?

Last Gary Con, I decided to make my life easier by coming up with a one-page list of available characters - each having 3 or 4 sentences describing that character's concept (including name, class, race, background, etc.) along with relationship ties to both the setting and other PCs.  

I gave every player a sheet containing all the possible characters.  Since I made more than enough characters, there was not only a decent amount of choice, but if something happened to one of the PCs, it was assumed that the non-chosen PCs were sort of hanging around in the shadows and could be played in a pinch, so no one had to sit out for even a short period of the game.

Worked fantastic for Cha'alt at Gary Con, but I think it makes even more sense for something like Call of Cthulhu.  There was a 7-person investigative team that formed Two Jacks Detective Agency.  Some investigators were part-time consultants, so it makes sense for only a handful of agency personnel to tackle any particular assignment.

I had 4 players and each chose a pre-generated character with instruction to invent some little character detail on their own, that wasn't written down for them.  This gives players some creative control while allowing for customization and future roleplaying opportunities.

The PCs included (this is the truncated version)...

• Jack Hawkins - Private eye and co-owner of Two Jacks Detective Agency + marksman 
• Jack Princeton - Private eye and co-owner of Two Jacks Detective Agency + plays the piano
• Billy "Knuckle Samich" Cannoli - Mob enforcer and hands on security + good cook
• Finneus Smythe - University forensics professor and amateur parapsychologist + took boxing lessons from Billy

I started writing this homebrewed scenario the day after our last game and it took me until the morning of our actual session for me to say that it was "done."  Something like 6 pages of notes, descriptions, key NPCs, eventualities, clues, timeline, and so on.

It was literally double )in some cases triple) the amount of preparation that I'd spent on any session of the Cha'alt campaign, but that's the nature of the beast with RPGs like Call of Cthulhu.  If there's a way to "wing it" and still have a reliably satisfying investigative horror game, I don't know what that looks like.  If you do, teach me!

I might release my house-rule hack for Cthulhu as a free one or two-page PDF sometime down the road.  And since the adventure is already written, it's a no-brainer to self-publish the thing in the near future as a system neutral scenario.  Would go well with The Outer Presence of any Lovecraftian investigative horror RPG.

The scenario took place in 1929 Chicago.  It involved the mysterious disappearance of a retired shipping magnate.  I'm a huge fan of Masks of Nyarlathotep, so this adventure was reminiscent of that campaign.  I suppose if a group had already experienced the first session or two of Masks but not the rest and wanted to give it another try (sometimes, groups break up at inopportune moments), this could be a satisfying re-introduction.  

I won't go into too much detail, but I felt it went well and everyone seemed to have fun.  After the adventure was over, the players told me it was a success, so that was encouraging.  Shaking off the cobwebs, I suppose I still have the knack.

Towards the end of the session, things started to get weird.  That's when I should have asked for a sanity check or two, but in my slow descriptive build-up, I forgot to pull the trigger and only realized the missed opportunity when things were back to normal.

There were a few moments where we stopped to view what was happening through a Cha'alt lens... "Now, if this were Cha'alt, we'd just start lapping up the milky-green goo dripping off those tentacles," or some such.  Good times!

Predictably, there was a civil disagreement about what to do with the evil cultists at the end - hand them over to police or deal with them ourselves?  I remember that hotly contested dilemma from back in the day when I was running my Call of Cthulhu campaign almost 20 years ago.

In two weeks, I'm going to run something else in the horror vein... and could possibly continue the Cthulhu game with the same players + new people since I'll be hosting that meetup game at the local library, instead of my house.  I did that specifically to give some new meetup folks a chance to game with us.

If I did stay with my own take on Call of Cthulhu, I would write another scenario for the same cast of characters.  The revolving PCs inside a fledgling detective agency just worked too well to abandon the idea.

Ok, that's it.  Thanks for reading!

VS

p.s. Yeah, it's not until July, but my Madison, WI old-school RPG convention, VENGER CON III: Revenge of the OSR, is currently selling weekend badges!  Also, I still have Cha'alt hardcovers for sale - I need to sell a couple dozen more trilogies before kickstarting Book 4 of the Cha'alt trilogy.  So, order yours today.