And Then Dice Happened: Trail of Cthulhu

Showing posts with label Trail of Cthulhu. Show all posts

Monday, 5 November 2018

The Haunting of Caliburn Fell

It was time for the Halloween Game again, and once more our chosen game was Trail of Cthulhu. Two of the same characters from our previous game were joined by two new characters: the Reverend Ephraim Pennyweather and Thomas Middleton, slightly dodgy scientist.

This was not a published adventure - it was one I wrote myself. So I'll include all the various handouts and gubbins in case anyone wants to use it themselves. So, what was the set up? Here was the introduction. And the Reverend had some extra information....

Our brave heroes arrived on a cold November day in 1935 to met by the groundskeeper, Grady. Ignoring his dire warnings, they bravely enter the Mansion.

Running true to form, they brought no equipment. Nothing. Well, a torch and one set of batteries. And a camera. No weapons - apart from Thomas, who brought a colt .45. This will become important later.

Investigating the squalid confines of the Fell, they discover evidence of debauchery and pain; their nerves are already on edge when Bernard discovers a painting which has a peculiar effect on him...

It is about this point that some of the more sensitive members of our intrepid adventurers begin to notice that things seem to be moving when others aren't looking. This includes the dustsheet they removed from the dining table being put back over it.

It was around this point that they armed themselved with cutlery. Yes. Facing down the denizens of an uncaring universe with steak knives. Or a butter knife, in you're a man of God.

The Library provides a treasure trove of information:

Photographs of the construction:

A sworn affidavit

Notes on the history of the house.

By now the Intrepid Investigators is starting to develop a very definite idea of what is going on in the house... re-inforcing this are the notes they find in the bedrooms.... They also find some interesting tomes in the Library.

Bernard pockets the Necronomicon and Branston settles down to read the King in Yellow. This is a Bad Idea, as anyone familair with Lovecraft or Chambers could tell you. But this doesn't slow down the others, who are convinced they are dealing with a massive haunting...

Unfortunately, they are wrong. You see, the house is designed as a massive invocation. As their grasp on sanity slips, they open the way for the King in Yellow. As they decide to flee the house and burn it down, Grady - actually the reanimated corpse of Fisher, the psychic killed in the previous expedition - bursts in with a shotgun.

It was at this point - as the sight outside of the house shifted from the hills of Vermont to the endless plains of Carcosa - that our Intrepid Investigators show that grit and determination and skill which marks them out as true heroes. Bernard legs it - followed by Thomas (the only one with a gun, if you recall) leaving the Reverend and the parapsychologist to fight the living ghoul. The reverend proved himself to be a dab hand at the old fisticuffs while Branston waded in with a steak knife and cleaver. Thomas - as the firearms guy - takes control of the shotgun. No-one makes any comment about this, even given what happened with the gun.

The immediate danger over, they head down into the cellar and discover the Stadkrone like altar which is channelling all this energy and realise they must do something about it...

Well, most of them do. Thomas stays upstairs. With the shotgun. The Reverend is screaming that they need to destroy the unholy thing while Bernard starts singing a hymn to the Yellow King in the hopes this willl molify him or something? I don't know but there's certainly the undertone of the guy hearing a lion pulling on his running shoes.

In a final ecstacy of terror, the Reverend throws his Bible at the altar which disrupts the flow of energy. The heroes escape from the Fell just as the mansion falls about them.

Well, Branston runs back in to take a photo of the floor. It obviously seemed like a good idea to him at the time.

Another great little game. I've said it before but Trail of Cthulhu really is a fabulous little system and ideally suited to playing in an internet environment. I can't recommend it enough.

Sunday, 30 October 2016

The Murderer of Thomas Fell

This is a chat about how our game of Trail of Cthulhu went; as I cannibalised big chunks of a published adventure, it should go without saying that HERE BE SPOILERS. If you're ever intending to play The Murderer of Thomas Fell read no further; if you're intending to run it, feel free to nick the handouts I've created.

I am aware that a couple of my players will read this blog. I have therefore cut out any discussion of clues set up for the next adventure or comments about which bits of the adventure I fiddled to provide hooks for the future.

Scanned this from one of my old CoC Sourcebooks.

Part I: The House

Arkham, October 29th, 1932. Branston Gibbons, broke parapsycholgist and recent arrival from blighty, and Dr Bernard Templeton, absent minded antiquarian from Miskatonic U's History Department, arrive at 239 West Curwen Street to look for their friend Thomas Fell who has bene missing for a week...

A cursory investigation of the downstairs shows some signs of disarray as though Fell has been organising something. They find lots of evidence of Thomas' interest in stelae or standing stones.

Our two brave characters are, as it turned out, almost perfect Lovecraftian protagonists. They're academically gifted, but useless. As I observed partway through the evening they've aimed for Indiana Jones but built two Marcus Brodys. Branston, for example, enters the adventure and only then realises he forgot to bring a gun and so ends up armed only with an umbrella he takes from the stand in the hall. They miss most of the important clues on the ground floor, including all of the information that would tell them that Thomas is organising an expedition - and the photographs of the expedition members. They also, crucially, miss the unused airplane tickets which would raise the question of how they got there and back.

They are astonished to find that the core of the house has been replaced with an alien landscape; obsidian rocks and an enormous tree. Branston is of the opinion that the tree is a wrong 'un and suggests electrocuting it forthwith. Bernard decides that wiring the tree to the mains of Arkham is probably not the brightest idea.

Weirdly, given the way they were played, Branston was managing to keep a grip on his sanity, while poor Dr Templeton started to fluff every Stability roll going and started to come a bit unglued at the seams. Perhaps being a bit... odd to start with provides you with some mental cushioning against Things That Should Not Be.

The upstairs is almost entirely gone; they use the vantage point to get more photos of the incredible scene before them - and notice the stairs down to the cellar are unblocked. Like good investigators, they head down to explore what lies beneath the house.

In heading down the cellar, they missed Thomas library which was the second door at the top of the stairs. Which they totally forgot about in their rush to get down into the cellar. Honestly, for middle aged academics these guys were more like teenagers in a slasher movie. In any case, they missed all the clues from the library, including the information on the other members of the expedition and the journal that suggests that Thomas is maybe getting mixed up in things that are not good for his mental health...

The cellar provides a lot of interest, not least in terms of a rock in a birdcage. Our intrepid heroes are unable to open this birdcage and so end up carting it round with them. they are indeed still carrying it when they find a much more disturbing stele in the next little room of the cellar...

Perhaps inevitably, it is Branston who decides to take a rubbing of the stone. As he touches the surface, red lightning claws and it him and both he and Bernard feel a sudden wrenching and falling...

Part II: The Andes

This bit I'll sort of skip over for two reasons; first it will totally destroy the adventure for anyone who has not played it and secondly it's difficult to talk about with tipping people off which bits are original and which bits I retrofitted to

Our intrepid investigators find themselves on a mountaintop, high in the Andes. A mountaintop, moreover, which has been engineered into a massive glyph for some eldritch purpose. Here they come across the remains of the expedition; some killed by human hand... others not.

They find one poor soul being consumed by the very rock itself, being metamorphosed into something else; he begs for mercy and asks they leave him with a gun so he can end his suffering.

They refuse. Their reasoning is that they will need the guns themselves to defend themselves from what has killed the rest of the expedition.

Yeah, real heroic, guys.

They leave him with a knife, though.

So that's OK.

The final confrontation goes impressively, with Bernard - hanging on to the last shred of his sanity - showing enough wherewithal to shoot the antagonist in the back after reasoning with him enough to get him to drop his guard. And Branston rips the stone needed to return them home from the still living guts of another person, showing that beneath the dilletante exterior beats the heart of a ruthlessly driven survivor

Seriously, didn't miss a beat. The parapsychologist is a sociopath.

And so the adventure ends with our heroes returned home; shaken, older, perhaps wiser. But neither of them will probably every discuss the identity of the murderer of Thomas Fell.

The game went pretty well, I think. As I mentioned in the previous post the fairly light rules set and focus on interpretation and deduction works well in an internet gaming environment. Although this first adventure is Purist Lovecraft in design - think At The Mountains of Madness - it seems clear that the group's playstyle is more Pulp - think The Dunwich Horror - so if we play again there's a good sense of how to construct the adventure. Lots of nice loose ends to play with.

From a technical standpoint, designing the adventures for Trail of Cthulhu is an interesting challenge as you have to ensure that the clues build up a network of deducative opportunities. In designing Call of Cthulhu adventures, the key was to build the spine of the adventure and then provide multiple methods of gaining the clues needed to progress - think of it like a flow chart or Sandy Peterson's famous image of the layers of an onion.

But because in ToC the clues are automatic, anyt attempt to write an adventure like that will create a simple linear tale which wil quite quickly become rather boring. So the trick is to design a network where each clue provides enough to allow the party to move on in the spine of the tale but not quite enough to build up a complete picture. In essence, in a Call of Cthulhu tale you're likely to arrive at the end knowing exactly what's going on; but in ToC you could arrive at the climax missing some vital bits of information - and worse, you don't know you're missing it. That is a very interesting narrative twist.

To finish off, here's a few shots of my notebook and some of the scrawlings that pass for planning.

On the Trail of Cthulhu

This is the first of two posts this weekend; this one is a kind of review of Pelgrane Press' Trail of Cthulhu RPG while the second will be a write up of the actual game.

I'm assuming at this point that no-one reading this blog needs to be told anything about Lovecraft or Cthulhu or, indeed, Chaosium's venerable Call of Cthulhu rules. CoC was the first game I ever ran and we played it every Saturday night for years before we moved on to other games. But CoC is almost as old as D&D and the rules are a little creaky.

Trail of Cthulhu, then is a newer game. It's about 10 years old - I've just not had a chance to run it till now.

The main rules change is reorientating the focus on investigation; in any horror game the key is always in figuring out what has happened and how to stop it. ToC assumes that the player characters are competent - a strange feeling for anyone who's played WFRP - and that they will immediately find any clue they are capable of finding if they look for it. So someone with Geology who looks at the weird rock will immediately gather that it is from some strange underwater environment.

The key thing here is that the emphasis immediately shifts from finding the clues to interpreting the clues - and in the modern gaming environment that's genius.

What do I mean like that?

Like most people I don't have a regular rpg group who love near me any more. So this game, like most others I've run over the last few years, was done over video conferencing. The advantage of any system which forces the players to talk to each other and try and deduce what's going on is clear in that kind of environment.

The rules for general abilities are pretty elegant, using a points spending and resource management system to allow the players to be proactive and competent.

Overall, ToC is a cracking game which works well for playing over the Web. It's well worth checking out and is supported by a wide range of supplements. One thing I will flag up is that my hardback is.coming apart at the spine. It was one of the first print run so I don't know if any newer editions would have the same problem.

Now plan the next story...