Halloween Game Night – Call of Cthulhu
Well, this went about as well as it really could have been expected to, considering 5 people at the table, with 3 of them being around mid-teens.
Run a game of Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu for Halloween 2008 for a 40-something friend, his son, nephew, son’s two friends and a cousin of mine and his girlfriend? Sure, no problem. I even beat the rush by cramming for almost a full twenty minutes, trying to remember all the rules to this system I haven’t played in years, and ran even less recently (and only ran a couple of times in total).
And let’s see… I’ll take Michael LaBossiere’s free “The Black Stone” CoC adventure, and combine it with “Lanier House”, a very brief haunted house style drop-in from first edition Chill.
In a surprising turn of events, this didn’t work out nearly as well as I know you (and I) were anticipating it would. Sure, it all sounded like it was a winning combination of diverse players, under-preparedness and cobbled together freebie stuff, but contrary to my belief up until that point, things did not auto-magically resolve themselves to help a brother out.
This is not to say things went badly – just a bit rough, for me, mostly. The first clue, finding a dark stone inscribed with an Elder Sign in a kindly old lady’s house, should have taken at least two trips back to talk to her, but a combination of sterling Spot Hidden rolls and overzealous Monty Hauling by myself, not to mention the extremely curious coincidence of the only experienced CoC player spontaneously took “Stone Art” as one of his arts, for this scenario, called the Black Stone. And I left all my scenario and adventure stuff at his house the night before… I’m not saying, I’m just saying.
At any rate, as has a tendancy to happen, the cry of “burn the cabin” signaled the beginning of the downhill side of the scenario as it coasted toward resolution – even though there was nothing wrong with the structure, meaning the PCs burned a perfectly good creepy cabin in the woods where a triple murder occurred within the last day. There was supposed to be at least another day, possibly two, in the scenario, with the monster doing various nefarious things like spying and sending zombies against the PCs and the town, but in some ways I think I pressed the game forward, both to keep my own and the interest of the players (the kids sure do enjoy their table crosstalk about music, Family Guy, football, Playstations, etc.) and also because I was unsure of how long the game need to go, when was a good time to call it quits.
“Where’s the graveyard?” asked one astute young monster-hunter further along in the adventure. I froze and blinked, checked through the printed out scenario and just sighed. “I’m sure the town has one but to be honest, it’s not included anywhere in the adventure, so apparently there’s nothing relevant there”. That was a horrendous cop-out on my part and I can only blame my own attitude and recent difficulty thinking on my feet.
On one hand, surprisingly, but on the other hand, also as I predicted and expected, dropping the haunted house into the town helped draw out the length of the Stone scenario, while providing some admittedly totally irrelevant investigating and adventuring and even a fight, for the kids, though… now that I think about it, my friend, Dick, who burned the cabin down, also one-shotted the giant rat. Hmm. He also found the Elder Sign rock and gained the Elder Sign spell and 4% Cthulhu Mythos from a journal. That’s like Mark Spitz winning your local high school’s swim meet. Okay that was my fault, I wasn’t paying attention to who was doing what – my bad.
And speaking of not paying attention to who was doing what, what do you do when there is a mysterious killer running around out in the woods and slitting people’s throats, and the PCs ask if the guy they’ve got handcuffed in the backseat from earlier in the adventure knows anything about the killer. Yeah, the guy in the backseat is who that killer is supposed to be. Talk about a major disconnect. I apparently spaced out a fairly important group action that everybody but me remembered: “We’re handcuffing the guy and taking him with us”.
That should have put a fairly sizable crimp in the activities of the knife-wielding maniac, since he was actually pumped full of morphine and locked to a car door. I have to admit I boobed out and just said “Well… he just disappeared earlier an hour or so ago”. This was met with… it would be kind to say a mixture of disbelief, understanding and not a little indignation, since it did effectively take me cheating in the game to allow another part of the plot to develop, and nullied good player instinct and preparation in the process.
In retrospect, I really should have just announced the part about the knife-killings didn’t happen, but for some reason, I overdid it and retroactively altered the history of the game entirely – bad form, especially when the guy also got a shot off with his automatic handgun at the young lady who came up with the idea of handcuffing the guy in the first place. But by this time I was without pity and required not only a sanity roll for her for taking massive damage, but also one for the PC who was with her and saw it happen – but in actuality, because of my misstep earlier, I allowed the surgeon PC to arrive in time to first-aid her to consciousness.
Easily the silliest thing to happen during the adventure was the “astronaut farmer” (he picked his skills instead of choosing an Occupation), “Max Johnson” (facepalm) who was wheeled around in a wheelchair the entire time by one of his two chauffeurs. Yeah I know it is unlikely that a romp in the woods would have included this wheelchair-bound gentleman but I let it pass for the sake of just letting everyone do their own thing, though I did at least convince him not to carry dynamite in his wheelchair. And to top it off, he wasn’t disabled anyway, it was some … I’m still not sure why he wanted all the other players to think he was lame, but he came out of the chair at the end of the scenario and beat up the hapless, mind-controlled, mentally unbalanced Great War veteran.
Dick was also the one to place the Elder Sign back into the ring of stones surrounding the giant black obelisk. There were at least 4 zombies and skeletons hanging around but honestly I was discouraged and frustrated by all my own mistakes, the crosstalk and even a little bit, Dick’s over-participation, so I just took consolation in the fact that Dick took 6 damage and lost 10 magic points from the re-sealing ceremony, though there really wasn’t any more to the scenario.
The worst part, the absolute worst part, was that I totally forgot that when someone blew their Sanity check, and it only happened a couple of times, out of all the times I called for them, out of all the people that were playing, besides losing sanity, the PC is also supposed to have an episode of temporary insanity – but only a couple of san loss rolls in the entire game were large enough to have even qualified, in my mind.
I don’t think my head is right to run something as cerebral as CoC right now, and I think that game may have helped prove it, to myself and possibly to the other people playing. I do think I picked the right scenario(s) for this group and was glad one of the new 15 year old players said “this game is awesome!” and stayed at the table when his two peers went off to play video games. I guess that’s what makes it worth it, to have someone just enjoy PLAYING, not necessarily winning, and not necessarily appreciating your own work as a GM/Keeper, but just enjoying the shared imagination space and relative autonomy within a game framework.
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