Running GAGG XXIX - Sharp Practice Demo

 Greetings, readers! This past weekend was the annual gaming convention put on by the university gaming club I've belonged to for almost 20 years now - Running GAGG, hosted by the Geneseo Area Gaming Group. I joined as a freshman in September 2005, and have only missed the convention twice since then. 

This year I committed myself to playing more games than I ran, something I've never done before. I signed up to take part in two wargaming demos - Sharp Practice and Bolt Action - and two RPG sessions, both played with 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I also ran a session of the RPG "Barbarians of Lemuria" with an adventure I'd written set in Alex Bates' Lost World of Azor, with miniatures available on his website. 

Playing AD&D from 10pm on Friday night until 2am Saturday morning meant I was in no shape to attend the 8am Saturday game of Bolt Action. However, I did get to learn to play Sharp Practice on Friday afternoon, which was a lot of fun despite a late start!

The scenario was a simple meeting engagement between American colonists and British regulars in the American Revolution. I took the British, while the gentleman hosting the event played the Americans. We were dead center in the student union ballroom so it was a bit noisy, but overall I had quite a bit of fun.

I don't recall the names of the units - I know I had three 8-man blocks of Highlanders with an officer, two 8-man blocks of Grenadiers, a 3 lb cannon and a small unit of scouts. The Americans had similar unit sizes as well as a preacher and a sergeant. I did take a few pictures as we went:

My deployment

Scouts meeting on the road

Cannon moving into position (disregard the pile of tokens)

The British Highlanders in retreat

We were coming up on the end of our timeslot, my forces' morale were much lower than his, so we called it there. Overall I had a good time and would absolutely play this again. And this counts towards my two games a month!

Figures Purchased in 2025: 27

Figures Painted in 2025: 21

Perilous Tales: The Werewolf of Rat River

I attended my first gaming convention since February 2020 this weekend - a return to my beloved Running GAGG, hosted annually by the students and alumni of the Geneseo Area Gaming Group at SUNY Geneseo. Attending college at Geneseo and joining the gaming club literally the first week of my freshman year was a formative experience for me, and made me the tabletop gamer I am today, and Running GAGG is to me the single best gaming con out there. I've missed it only twice since 2005, and while I wasn't in a position to run or play games this year, it was really good seeing friends I hadn't seen in person in three years being able to donate copies of RPG books I'd worked on for the charity auction meant a lot to me. 

Feeling energized by the experience, when I got home I set up another game of Perilous Tales for myself - set in an Arctic Camp Site, with Werewolves as the antagonists. With that settled, it was a simple matter to get out some Pulp Figures' Canadian adventurers and get going!

Our heroes:

• Lefty LaRue (Leader), with Tough and Eagle-Eyed
• Quinn the Eskimo (Teammate), with Hair-Trigger
• Frenchie Sinclair (Teammate), with Medic
• Sgt. Burke of the RCMP (Teammate), with Marksman
• Sasha the Sled-Dog (Teammate), with Brute

Our objectives:

• Kill the Master
• Hunt the Fiends
• Call for Rescue

So our stalwart heroes needed to get in, kill the master werewolf, kill at least three of its minions, and activate the radio in the cabin to call for rescue.  

Our heroes began moving up the board cautiously, keeping close together and using Eyes Peeled actions in case a threat marker triggered; Lefty used his Eagle-Eyed trait to start scouting threat markers. It wasn't long, however, before they started activating threat markers, with Quinn being attacked by a wolf.

 

 

 And Sasha finding herself snout to snout with a Young Werewolf!

At this point the party somewhat broke cohesion, and Sgt. Burke made a dash for the cabin to activate the radio, though activating one of the environmental perils in the process - no one was getting into the cabin without risking a case of frostbite!

Sasha managed to take down the Young Werewolf herself, though was wounded in the process and getting Marked - if she rolled a misfortune on a skill check at any point later in the game, she'd turn into a Young Werewolf herself. Frenchie healed her injuries, but the taint of lycanthropy wasn't coming off that easily.

Quinn and Lefty take down a number of wolves that spawn near the bridge, and advance to check out the furthest threat marker; at a glance (using the Eagle-Eyed trait), I thought it was a "1," which would have been the Master Werewolf. When Quinn activated it, I realized it was a "7," and he was caught in a snow-drift. 

Sgt. Burke activated the radio, calling for help, which spawned two more wolves placed randomly - and one of them was in the cabin with him!

At long last, the Master Werewolf revealed itself - and in so doing, bumped the Threat Level to 9! At 10, it's game over. The heroes had one activation phase to beat the Master Werewolf. Fortunately Lefty and Frenchie had their Eyes Peeled, and put a few bullets into the Master Werewolf the instant it appeared.

Sasha lunged for the werewolf's throat, biting and then dancing out of the way of its savage claws, leaving room for Frenchie and Lefty to fire everything they had into the hulking brute - and managed to put the beast down! Between the three of them they managed to put 13 wounds on the werewolf, more than its maximum health of 12. The werewolf's death brought the Threat Level down from 9 to 7.

A few more wolves popped up after this, tangling with Quinn and Sgt. Burke. While Burke managed to escape the wolf, he did succumb to frostbite trying to leave the area; the only casualty suffered by the heroes this game.

So tallying up my victory points:

• +3 for killing the Master Werewolf
• +3 for killing at least three Minions
• +3 for at least three heroes still alive when rescue arrives following the radio call
• +1 for the Leader surviving

For a score of 10, "a truly heroic performance!"

Cult of Chaos Write-Up: Helping Hands

Last night's game was a bit more challenging than Darkness Falls - I was running in the 8pm-midnight time slot, and I'm just not used to staying up that late any more.  Add to that how warm the room we were in was, and it's no surprise that one of my players was having difficulties staying awake.

This adventure was a modern day game, that we decided was set in our locale of Rochester, NY, with the investigators consisting of a Veteran and Rookie Homicide Detective and four CSIs - a blood spatter analyst, a crime scene photographer, a coroner and a toxicologist.  They're called to the scene of the death of Dr. Robert Blake, a neurologist working for the Thompson Center for Neurological Research.  Blake was found dead in his garage in front of the vintage muscle car he'd bought as a project car, with a quarter-inch hole bored into his aorta.  The scene was surprisingly bloodless however, much the consternation of the blood spatter analyst.

Examining the body revealed that it had been almost completely drained of blood, and what little was left was surprisingly still fluid.  Ligature marks on the neck suggested that Blake may have been restrained in some way - the marks were not suggestive of strangulation.  His wife Elizabeth had taken a Valium and gone to bed early the night before, and heard nothing, while the next door neighbors reported hearing a sound like audio feedback around the time of death, and that a dark, four-door sedan driven by a heavy-set, balding man in dark glasses had circled the block slowly two days earlier.  A spilled bottle of motor oil showed Blake's footprints on the concrete floor of the garage, but no signs of an assailant.  Shreds of a mushy, gelatinous material, translucent and pale pink, were found under Blake's nails, while the neighbor's gutters and roof showed signs of damage as if something heavy had come to rest there.

In the lab, it soon turned out that the gelatinous material evaporated over the course of the next several hours, with freezing it slowing the rate of sublimation.  Talking with Blake's spouse and coworkers turned up no evidence of any enemies, mistresses, gambling debts, etc.  They learned that Blake was part of a team researching a neuromuscular disorder known as Strickler's Disease, in which over time the nerve cells degrade and lose the ability to deliver messages from the brain to the muscles.  No cure is currently available, though Blake's team has had some luck with an experimental treatment involving spinal injections of a drug cocktail designed to amplify electrochemical response in the nerve cells.

Two days after Blake's death, his coworker Dr. William Crane is found dead in the park, having suffered the same injuries as Blake - blood loss and the quarter inch hole in the aorta.  Crane's dog, a golden retriever named Bucky, had a similar hole in the neck, but retained most of his blood - but every bone in the dog's body was broken, seemingly from having been beaten repeatedly against a nearby tree.  Picking up Bucky's body resulted in blood pouring out of the wound like water from a faucet, and chemical analysis of the blood revealed that there was a huge amount of an anticoagulant mixed in - an organic substance similar, but not identical to hiruden, a substance produced by leeches for that purpose.  Analysis of the blood patterns on the grass and trees brought up a curious possibility.  A gout of dog blood had been splashed across the grass, and a computer recreation showed that it had hit the ground at a 70-degree angle.  The investigators began to wonder about an occult angle, and the possibility was raised that this gout had been drunk - and then spat out as inferior to human blood.

A pair of uniformed cops were stationed at the house of Dr. David Sandford, the other member of Blake and Crane's team, while the PCs conducted a discreet stake-out of the house of Dr. Sarah Reynolds, the head of the team and director of the Thompson Center.  A radioed message that the front picture window of the Sandford house had just imploded, followed by screams and gunfire, brought the PCs racing to Sandford's house, arriving perhaps minutes too late - both cops were dead with one having been dragged halfway out the squad car's window by his neck, and the other drained inside the house.  Sandford was dead, his aorta punctured but not drained - blood had sprayed out like a firehouse, coating the far wall and big screen TV.  Worse, Sandford's wife Abby and three year old son Tommy were curled up in the corner, Abby's body wrapped protectively around her son, but to no avail; both had been drained.  More of that gelatinous substance was found on the shards of glass from the window, and when examined in the lab were discovered to absorb the blood coating them; placing a gobbet of the substance on a clean slide and applying a drop of blood with a pipette under a microscope showed the substance sponge up the blood, darkening to a deep red when doing so.

With officers dead, it would be a matter of only about a day before the Feds arrived to take over the investigation; working on a tip from Dr. Reynolds regarding a patient who hadn't shown for a monthly check-up, the PCs arrived at the house of Ted Long, a research technician for Bower Prosthetics.  His son, Ted Jr., suffers from Strickler's Disease, but was not a good candidate for inclusion in the experimental group due to his young age.  Ted was not at home, but breaking in and doing a quick sweep of the kitchen, living room and bedrooms turned up a lot of empty fast food containers and beer cans strewn across the floor of the living room, coupled with a week's worth of newspapers - and the decaying corpse of Ted Jr., dead for about a week with a quarter-inch hole in his aorta.

The two detectives descended into the basement, despite hearing a wet, slithering, rustling sound down there.  The rookie's head began to hurt, but the veteran detective suddenly had an epiphany - the rookie was the killer he'd been seeking this whole time! She certainly knew an awful lot about the case, and suddenly it all made sense to him.  Drawing his gun on her, he disarmed her and put her in handcuffs - an especially traumatic experience for her, as after seeing the rotting corpse of Ted Jr., she'd latched on to her partner as a security blanket.

He brought her upstairs to the bafflement of the CSI team, and exclaimed, "You should see all the evidence down there!" and led them into the basement after depositing the rookie in the back of a squad car, still handcuffed.

Down in the basement, with a burst of audio feedback noise, the toxicologist is attacked, grabbed and pinned by some invisible force.  He manages to squeeze off a shot at where he thinks its center of mass must be, but the shot goes wild.  The sound of gunfire snaps the veteran detective out of the mental haze he'd been in.  The blood spatter analyst fires off three shots at the area the toxicologist had been shooting at, without success.

Blood began to drain from the toxicologist, flowing up and filling previously invisible veins and capillaries, creating the image of an octopus-like creature floating in the air above the toxicologist, an image of empty space between visible veins as long, trunk-like tentacles flailed out, a pair of enormous, three-clawed hands clutching at its victim.

The toxicologist faints in shock, while the blood spatter analyst and the coroner descend into hysterics, with the blood spatter analyst particularly screaming "There it is! There's all the blood! THERE'S ALL THE BLOOD!"

The veteran homicide detective and the crime scene photographer open fire on the creature without result, and the thing flails at the detective with a number of tentacles but can't seem to latch on.  The photographer managed to break the creature's hold on the toxicologist, but when the bullets aren't doing anything, she grabs the coroner and flees up the stairs while the detective swings wildly with a length of lead pipe.

When the photographer and coroner brought back-up to the Long house, they discovered the drained bodies of the veteran detective (he was only five days from retirement, too), the blood spatter analyst and the toxicologist, with no signs of a floating blood octopus to be found.

Meanwhile, in Epilogue land, Ted Long was arrested that day trying to half-heartedly rob a blood bank; his only comment as he was loaded into the back of a squad car being "What took you guys so long?" His rantings about an invisible demon from space that took over his life after he summoned it to help care for his son land him in a sanitarium, where three years later he breaks out, steals a lighter and a gallon of gasoline, and immolates himself on the lawn.  His last words were reportedly a sobbing "I'm sorry, Junior!"

***

So a good time was had by all, and this session I had four players who had little to no prior experience with the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and everyone had a great time, though they missed some interesting clues by giving the Long house a light skim before descending into the basement; mixed in with the garbage in the living room was Ted Long's journal, which would have netted the PCs a handout of select journal entries detailing Long's frustration with the doctors at the Thompson Center and his conviction that if he can devote the time to it, he can find a cure for Strickler's Disease and save his son.  A chance reference he'd come across years earlier in his work as a prosthetics research technician led him to Ludvig Prinn and assertions that his day-to-day chores were attended by invisible servants, leaving Prinn free to devote himself entirely to his studies.  Requesting the relevant pages from De Vermis Mysteriis from the Huntington Library, he set about summoning one of these "invisible servants" to handle Ted Jr.'s care while Long researched the disease.  It went poorly for him.

I thought this added a strong dimension of pathos to the events, but the players didn't search the living room, so it didn't find its way into their hands.  C'est la vie.

This is my first time playing around with using a CSI team as investigators, which worked well - they all had an immediate reason to begin looking into the unnatural aspects of the case and had a lot of good skills to work with.

They ended up getting so involved in investigating the initial scene of Robert Blake's death that they spent close to a third of the time slot there; it ended up being a good thing they fought the Star Vampire in the basement, because as is we wrapped the game up with less than a half-hour left in the time slot.

Looking at the demographics for the two games I ran this weekend some interesting things jump out at me.  First off, four of the twelve players I ran for this weekend, a solid third, were women, which is wonderful.  The Geneseo Area Gaming Group, at least during my association with the club (which has been restricted to attending Running GAGG since graduating in 2009) has always been very inclusive and supportive; the very first person I saw upon walking into GAGG for the first time as a freshman in 2005 was a lovely young woman named Bridget, who happened to be playing the crime scene photographer last night; in the ten years of my knowing her it was the first time I'd gotten the opportunity to run a game for her.

Given how strongly gaming conventions in general are associated with men, and the extent to which RPGs are seen as a hobby unwelcoming to women, it's heartening for a third of my players this weekend to have been women.  I hope next year it's a solid half.

I did have a total of six out of twelve players - or half - who were either brand new to Call of Cthulhu or who had only played one or two sessions prior to the one they had with me this weekend.  And they all had a blast, which means I'm counting these two sessions as roaring successes for the Cult of Chaos.

Cult of Chaos Write-Up: Darkness Prevails

Last night I ran my first Call of Cthulhu game of Running GAGG XX, an adventure based on the
adventure "The Dead Light" in the book TERRORS FROM BEYOND, though heavily rewritten - the setting moved from the Orkneys to northern Maine and the Ny'ghan Grii aliens that provide the main threat replaced with a Hound of Tindalos.  Two player characters, a pair of police officers, were added to bring the Investigator total up to 6.  Of the players, two I'd run Cthulhu games for at past Running GAGGs, one had taken part in the very first Cthulhu campaign I'd run almost ten years ago, and two had never played Call of Cthulhu before - one of them having actively avoided Call of Cthulhu for years from the mistaken assumption that it was a game of no-win scenarios.  The sixth player was new to me, but was familiar with Call of Cthulhu.

The set-up for the scenario was that an isolated lighthouse had been dark the previous two nights, and so a relief keeper, two police, and a team of three sailors from the lighthouse tender landed to investigate and relight the lamp, against a backdrop of a growing storm.

The first half of the scenario, the exploring of the empty lighthouse, went pretty well - since I'd replaced the Ny'ghan grii with a Hound of Tindalos, the method of killing changed, so now there were bodies to find, a failed SAN check on the sight of one of them almost took out the entire party - one of the policemen had a Bout of Madness, panicked and fled down the stairs, almost bowling over the other five investigators in the process.

I gave the Hound a pair of mantis-like forelimbs, and described many of the injuries on the bodies as looking like they'd been slashed with heavy blades, smeared with a strange glowing blue slime.  I also played up legends of the island being haunted to try and give the players a bit of a red herring and suggest vengeful ghostly sailors, a la John Carpenter's THE FOG.

The players did a pretty good picking up on clues throughout the lighthouse - the Time Pellets, the notes of the professor who'd accidentally summoned the Hound - but they missed the most vital one: a letter in the bag carried by the relief keeper, explaining how the Hound could be banished.  He put the bag down in his room in the lighthouse as soon as he could and forgot about it, and afterwards told us, "I thought the reference to mail on the character sheet was just flavor text."

So when the Hound emerged and began stalking the party, they really weren't in any shape to try and fight it off - it grinned at them, if an entity that looks like a Cubist painting of a shark, mantis and wolf rolled into one can grin, when they blasted it in the face from point-blank range with a shotgun without effect.  The investigators escaped, though not without injury and nearly dying of hypothermia, as the Hound was in no hurry to pursue them - it knew it could follow them at its leisure.

The two police manage to convince their superiors via the wireless radio on the lighthouse tender that there's a dangerous maniac on the island and they'll need backup with heavy firepower to deal with him.  As the lighthouse tender is returning to port, the relief keeper decides he needs to return to the island and ensure the light stays lit.  He steals the dinghy and rows himself back to the lighthouse.  When the Hound starts following him through the lighthouse, he gets the idea of throwing oil on the grated iron stairs and setting the stairs on fire to dissuade the creature.  Unfortunately, he makes his fiery last stand in the room where the tanks of lamp oil are stored.  The oil fumes are ignited by his efforts and everyone else on the tender discover he abandoned ship and returned to the island when they hear the roar of flame and see orange flickerings from the lighthouse.  They then saw the Cherenkov glow of the Hound walk out of the fire...

We ended the adventure there because we were starting to get close to the time limit, and my players had other events to get to, either to play in or to run.  We did get to discuss a little bit about what people (since pretty much everyone in the room was an accomplished Game Master of one form or another) thought worked and what they thought didn't work.

I think if I were to run this adventure again, I might make a little bullet-pointed list of goals for each character, and put "deliver the other keepers' mail" on the list for the relief keeper to draw attention to the fact that they are carrying mail for the guy who's been getting occult info by mail, without putting too fine a point upon it.  I'll also be sure to call for an INT roll if they still aren't getting it - I didn't this time because he was so quick to divest himself of the bag and with six players all going on full cylinders, often having multiple in-character conversations at once, it was a little tricky for me to get a word in at times, and with some of the players having voices as large as their personalities, I know I sometimes had trouble hearing two of the quieter players when they spoke up.

Maybe in the future I'll bring something small but eye-catching, like a stress ball or even a plush Cthulhu doll, and have that be the speaking token - the person holding it can speak up and everyone else needs to bring it down a notch and listen.  At least for six-player games like this one.

I also need to find a way to remind myself to make sure players are making sanity rolls every time they see a monster, not just the first time - one glimpse of the Hound of Tindalos is not enough to desensitize one to it, ESPECIALLY the way I was rolling for sanity loss! Guess who learned the hard way that the d20 in their new set of clear blue dice is unbalanced and comes up almost exclusive "1"?

Regardless, everyone had a good time, especially the two players new to Call of Cthulhu.  Tonight I've got a modern day scenario that's entirely my own design, with two homicide detectives and six CSI as the player-characters.

Interlude: Convention Gaming, "Dead Light"

This past weekend was my home gaming convention, Running GAGG - put on by the Geneseo Area Gaming Group of SUNY Geneseo, my alma mater.  This year was the 19th annual Running GAGG, and I've attended almost every one since the 10th - I missed last year because I was moving my girlfriend from Maryland to New York that weekend, and I think I missed the 14th or 15th as well, but other than that I've hit every one, usually running at least one session of Call of Cthulhu.

Between work and some family stuff, I was only able to be at the convention on Friday night this year, and I'd decided to run the first 7th Edition CofC module released, "Dead Light," a survival-horror scenario taking place over the course of a single stormy night on the road between Arkham and...I think the module has it as Ipswitch, I might have done Aylesbury because I read over the module a time or two before running and then pretty much ran it from memory with a heavy mix of making it up as I went along.

I had five players, at least three of whom I'd run for at past Running GAGGs -- I'm not sure if Mike had played in my games before, but I knew the two Daves and Ben had both played in my con-games in the past.  Everyone was familiar with the game from 6th edition, and I walked them through character creation under the new 7th edition rules.  Our investigative party ended up consisting of:

A Speakeasy Owner (Ben)
A Bootlegger (Dave)
A Photographer (Dave)
A Jazz Musician (Mike)
A Chauffeur (George)

On a stormswept night in late April, on the road from Arkham to Aylesbury, the party had to quickly slam on the brakes to avoid running over a pale, half-dressed young woman who stumbles into the road.  She's barely responsive except to mumble "the light," and "Granddad" over and over.  Recalling a diner and gas station up the road, they take her there to try and find out who she is and to get her a doctor.  One of them notices a flicker of silvery light, like the after-image of a lightning strike, out of the corner of their eye, but when they turn their head, see nothing.

The gas station is half-blocked by a still-running pick-up truck, its door hanging open.  Inside, they meet a grouchy, half-drunk farmer whose truck it is, and he mutters something about "you'd be in a hurry too if you saw the light."  He's resistant to saying anything more.

As for the girl, they find out she's Emilia Webb, the granddaughter of a retired local physician, Dr. Cornelius Webb.  She lives with him at his cottage up the road.  Forcing a little bit of whiskey and then coffee past her lips, they manage to revive her enough that she can tell of a break-in at her grandfather's house, two masked men forcing their way in.  She can't remember anything past that, however, and they decide to investigate the house.

They soon find that the power's out at the Webb house (the speakeasy owner and chauffeur working together manage to get it working again), and stumble across - literally - the scene of a horrible crime.  They find Cornelius Webb dead, apparently of blood loss from a gunshot wound.  They also find one of his attackers - or half of him, anyways, his lower half having been seemingly burned away.  The upper half was worse - every blood vessel in his body had burst as if the blood had boiled in his veins.  On the ground between them is an overturned casket, like a jewelry box of wrought iron, its edge sticky with black sealing wax.

They also find a series of strange, deep burn marks at about waist-height on a line of trees on the property.  The bootlegger notices a flicker of silvery light, like the after-image of a lightning strike, out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned his head, saw nothing.

They clean up the area as best they can and decide to get Emilia back to the house and asleep - they found some powerful sleeping pills and discharge papers from the Sandhill Institute for Girls, a high-end sanitarium, in her bedroom.

Once she's in the car again back at the diner, a lighting flash reveals a figure standing on the edge of the road.  The bootlegger and speakeasy owner (I think...it was a late night game) investigate the figure and find he's the second masked assailant, now out of his mind and babbling about "the light."  They quickly subdue him, tie him up and shove him in the trunk of the car, then take him and move him to the basement of the Webb house for interrogation.

Emilia drugged and asleep and the masked man too insane to give sensible answers, they decide to leave him tied up in the basement and catch a few winks of sleep themselves.  They're awoken by screams coming from the basement, and discover a silvery light, flowing like liquid, pouring in through a hole in a ground-level window into the basement, coiling around the masked man and burning its way into him.  Soon it's inside him, burning its way out, pouring, syrup-like, from his mouth and eye sockets as his flesh collapses into fine, white ash.

In a panic, the bootlegger fires three shots from his shotgun at the light, and while it seems to flinch back from the flash of gunpowder going off, the shots themselves do nothing.  The party runs upstairs and barricades the basement door behind them.

The jazz musician starts trying to wake up Emilia and get her out, while the bootlegger and speakeasy owner tear through Webb's study and bedroom looking for information on this strange light.  They manage to find a diary in which only a few pages are written; a brief history of the light as a "sin eater," passed down from physician to physician in Arkham since the 1600s, used to quietly dispose of stillborn children, especially those born out of wedlock or deformed.  There's also a page of dates, initials, and fees paid that sends a brief shiver down the speakeasy owner's spine as he realizes that these are dates and fees paid for the sin-eating light's service.

They do however find phonetic instructions of how to talk the light back into its casket.  They run back in the room just as the chauffeur, holding the casket out to try and catch the light in it, is consumed as the light burns through the basement door and flows over him.

They say the words and the light coils its way back into the casket.  Sealing it shut, come morning (and the end of the storm), they take it out into the deepest part of the woods and bury it, along with the remains of the half-eaten burglar and Dr. Webb.  They leave Emilia asleep and get back on the road to Aylesbury.

***

The session went really well I thought, especially since it was way past my bedtime these days when we began play.  Everyone had a good time and I got to hand out a bunch of custom D6s I'd had printed up by Chessex with Elder Signs in place of the "1"

I also got to talk to Meghan of Chaosium who was there working a booth and got to express my love of Call of Cthulhu directly to a representative of the company that makes it and asked her about if there was still any support for Chaosium's old "Cthulhu Cultist" GM program, because I'd love to have the company's blessing to do outreach for my favorite RPG and spread the love at conventions.  There's a lot of small college gaming conventions in my area because every local college has their own gaming club and their own convention, so it's a fairly easy thing for me to go around to Simcon, UBCon, etc and run games.  I mean, I'm probably going to do that anyways, but I'd love to have Chaosium catalogs or something I can give to players at the end of sessions.