Feeling the Wargaming Bug Again

Traditional historical wargaming, for whatever reason, is essentially a dead hobby in America, I think.  I don't know if the evolution of Dungeons & Dragons from wargaming contributed to its decline, or if it's somehow seen as an "English" thing that we, as Americans, have turned our backs on out of some sense of patriotism, or what.  Either way, I cannot drum up interest locally for historical gaming; wargaming, if it occurs at all (especially where I live), is strictly Warhammer/40K stuff, with a little bit of Malifaux seeming to float around as well.

I don't have the money, nor the time, nor the steadiness of hand and keenness of eye to handle that sort of gaming.  I'm realizing that as I putter at applying paint to a few Reaper Bones figures; even my big, chunky Bugbears are giving me trouble (in part because I can't lay down a basecoat on these figures without clogging the detail).  I think, for financial and eye-strain reasons, if I resume wargaming I'll need to go down to 1/72 scale plastic figures or similar.

Nevertheless, I'm craving the act of setting up painted toy soldiers, pushing them around a table, and creating a narrative of a battle being fought between them.  This flared up extra-hard yesterday; I was listening to the Hardcore History podcast's newest episode, on the rise of the Achaemenids, and I just desperately wanted to recreate the battles fought by the powers of the time - the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, all of them.

This is probably because I'm some sort of crazy person.

I also want to not spend money on things right now; Gina and I have agreed to do a giftless Christmas because the consumerist urge and the constant media barrage demanding that we SPEND SPEND SPEND BUY BUY BUY takes away from what really has value in our lives.  I don't want to keep up with the Joneses; I want to celebrate what I have that's important.

Instead, we're putting money away instead for two trips to Columbus, Ohio in Summer 2016; in June, to attend Origins Game Fair, which we may attend strictly as civilians or which I may try to run a game of Call of Cthulhu at.  Haven't really made up my mind yet, and I have a few months yet before event registration closes.  Then in July, we'll be returning to the same hotel to attend Pulpfest 2016; we both had a very nice time at the 2015 show, and met some really great people and ate wonderful food, so we'd like to return to that show.

So what's a crazy person to do?

I won't lie, I came close to pulling the trigger on some 1/72 scale plastic Egyptians and Sea Peoples yesterday; each box would have sufficed as a full-sized army for Neil Thomas' One-Hour Wargames (which I still want to try out one of these days; and there are solo play rules in there...) but restrained myself; even if it only came to $25 for the two boxes of figures plus shipping, that's still $25 that could have been a meal for Gina and I at Origins or Pulpfest, or a new book at either show.

I took a pretty significant pay cut when I switched jobs back in August, and I'm still adjusting to the new pay-schedule (I get paid every other week now, whereas every other job I've held since 2004 paid weekly), plus Gina just went down from working a per diem job plus two part time jobs while going to school full time, to just school and the two part time jobs, so we don't have a ton of excess money right now; we can cover our bills just fine and have a bit left over for fun, but it would feel very irresponsible of me to throw away money on a hobby on a lark like that; What does it matter how little I'm spending on armies if I've got nobody to play with? Playing a solo game just seems lonely.

So I'm going to bank this for now and see how I feel in the coming weeks; if the desire's a passing thing brought on by listening to the history of Cyrus the Great, I'll feel better about not buying two boxes of soldiers.  If this keeps up, I may just have to bite the bullet and play by myself for a bit.

Building a Mystery, Part 3: Send in the Nouns

So, in the last segment I began to flesh out the scenario skeleton I came up with in part 1.  I filled in some of the details relating to the NPC who brings the investigators into the adventure (i.e., the Duchess of Holdernesse), the supernatural hook (the Holdernesse Ghost) and the locale (Holdernesse Hall and the Roman ruins underneath).  In this section, we'll flesh things out further, with a focus on People, Places and "Things."

People

This isn't just the NPCs, but covers the Investigators as well; since this is a convention one-shot, I'll be providing pre-generated characters, which is a nice opportunity for me to tie the player-characters into the story.  This is actually something I know I have a lot of trouble with, so I'm going to be extra careful about ensuring the characters are well-connected to the adventure.  But before we get to the Investigators, let's take a look at who all's in Holdernesse Hall during the course of this adventure (drawn from The Evil in Pemberley House).

The Duchess
The Butler
The Maid
The Groundskeeper (secretly a plant from Scotland Yard)
The Chauffeur (not so secretly a former career criminal)
The Cook
The Duchess' live-in Physician
The Duchess' two adult Grandchildren (children of her adopted son)
The American Heir(ess)

I don't want to go crazy with tons of NPCs running around because A) that's harder for me to keep track of, and B) it's harder for the players to keep track of.  It makes good sense from a story perspective that the Holdernesse fortunes are not what they once were, and with the Duke dead and the family consisting of the aging Duchess and her two adult grandchildren, the property has probably gone somewhat to seed and they don't have the staff of servants they once had.

Furthermore, rather than have these characters running around as NPCs and then trying to shoehorn in six player characters (I don't run convention games larger than 6; for that matter, I don't run games larger than 6, period.  I learned that lesson the hard way), I think it might make for a very interesting and role-play heavy session to have the player characters be six of these individuals, and provide, alongside a pregenerated character sheet, a brief blurb detailing what the character hopes to inherit when the Duchess finally croaks and what they're prepared to do if things don't seem to be going their way.

This is something I've begun doing lately with convention games that's proven to be a lot of fun - providing the Investigators with reasons in their back stories not to trust or want to work with each other, and then put them in a situation where survival requires them to work together.  I attribute this to lots of years spent watching horror movies; look at Romero's zombie films, for example -- the zombies are actually not that dangerous and easy to escape from, but the living characters tend to spend so much time bickering and arguing and trying to assert their dominance over one another that they all get munched.

And I don't go crazy with Investigator back stories for convention games; a few sentences and a list of equipment is enough.  Here's an example from a recent one-shot:

Sheriff Fred Baker: Nominally, you are the law in Pine Valley. It’s a small enough, sleepy enough town that you and two deputies are enough to cover almost every situation, even the crowds of drunken tourists at the annual Winterfest. Now a trio of bank robbers may be hiding out in the vicinity of Pine Valley after stealing $25,000 from a bank in Bluff Creek, and pursuing them are a pair of FBI agents. You’re not too keen on having Feds stepping all over your territory like this, and you’re hoping to catch these guys before the Feds do. Wouldn’t that look good in the papers? Equipment: Cell phone, badge, Glock 27 (17 bullets), handcuffs, squad car.

So you can see I don't get overly detailed.with these back stories.

Looking at the list above, who do I want to be the investigators?

For the Investigators, I'm going to go with the American Heir(ess), the Duchess' two adult grandchildren, the Groundskeeper (who is secretly from Scotland Yard), the Chauffeur (a former career criminal who may or may not be trying to make good) and the Duchess' personal physician.  We will come back to them later, possibly in another blog post, but rest assured that they will have back stories making them horrible greedy people who would not appear out of place as replacement characters in a game of "Clue" (or "Cluedo," for those outside of North America).

For now, let's take a look at the NPCs.

• The Duchess:We gave the Duchess a little bit of back story last time, but who is she now? I'm picturing her as a little physically infirm, but mentally still completely present, despite her advanced age.  You can tell she was once a very beautiful woman, but now the flesh of her face has drawn tight and her aquiline nose and high cheek bones, coupled with the wattling of loose skin on her neck, gives her the appearance of a gigantic vulture.  Her tendency to dress exclusively in black does not soften that impression.  She's bitter and cynical, having seen little in the past several decades of life to endear her to people in general, and people connected with her late husband even less.  She's quick with an acidic comment, and not terribly susceptible to flattery, but if you express a genuine interest in hearing about her life, she's happy to talk for hours about people she's known and places she's been.  She despises the American Heir(ess) on principle, dotes on her two grandchildren (though can be quick to comment on their failures or setbacks), enjoys conversation with the Chauffeur (living vicariously through his stories of criminal exploits) and relies on the Physician.  
• The Maid: Youngish, maybe late teens/early 20s.  Slender and waifish, kind of a delicate mental disposition, prone to overreaction.  She's been carrying on a relationship with the Butler, despite him being twice her age.  I'm basing her heavily on the maid who goes crazy and runs into the lake in "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual," and I think her going cuckoo-bananas during the adventure could provide a good red herring/side route of investigation if the players bog down on the main storyline.  I think she must be a strong believer in the legends of Holdernesse Hall and its surrounding environs, and maybe the instigating factor in her going cuckoo-bananas is discovering she's pregnant by the Butler.  Being terrified that the Holdernesse Ghost will cause her to miscarry, she wants the Butler to A) make an honest woman out of her and B) take her out of Holdernesse.  In interacting with the Investigators, she'll be all smiles and curtsies to everyone except the Chauffeur and Groundskeeper, whom she views as below her, seeing as they work outside the Hall proper.  
• The Butler: Late 30s/early 40s, big beefy guy, bald/shaved head, but not dumb muscle; going off the butler in "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual," he's trained as a schoolteacher but couldn't find work in that field, and so accepted a position as Butler for Holdernesse Hall.  He's done excellent work at Holdernesse for twenty years now, and even the Duchess can't find fault in him.  In addition to schtupping the Maid, he's been applying his intellectual abilities lately to the "Holdernesse Ritual" - a meaningless bit of doggerel that's been a family tradition for centuries, with each Duke having to memorize and recite a few lines of call-and-response upon ascension to the title.  The Butler is convinced the call-and-response is actually coded directions to buried treasure hidden on the grounds of Holdernesse, and is working on figuring out just where it is.  This gives the Butler reason to sneak around and act suspiciously, drawing the attention of the Investigators.  Right now I'm 50-50 on whether I want it to actually lead to buried treasure, or be coded direction as to how to get into the tunnel from Snake Hill, and thus tie the Butler/Maid subplot into the main Mythos action.  In interacting with the Investigators he'll tend towards aloof deference, though he'll look down on the Chauffeur and the Groundskeeper.  
• The Cook: I don't have much in mind for the cook, to tell you the truth, but it makes sense that she'd be present and can provide an extra witness to weirdness that she can report to the PCs if their investigation stalls, and an extra body to stumble across once the Mythos really bleeds up into the Hall.  I picture her looking like Kathy Bates.  

I'm not going to bother assigning detailed stats to these NPCs, because it's very unlikely to come up; my usual method if it does come up is everyone has completely average stats (in older editions of CofC, I'd say a 10 in each ability score, with 7th that becomes a 50), and a percentage chance of success on a skill roll somewhere between 30 and 50 percent for most skills, or no chance of success for unusual skills (the Maid, for example, should not have a good chance of success when trying to Psychoanalyze).  The NPCs aren't there to show up the player characters, they're there to go mad and die as a warning to the player characters, so I never make their skill percentages very high.

I also tend to sneak little references or hints into NPC (and at convention games, Investigator) names, something that subtly hints at their natures or calls back to a piece of source material; for example, in the Kolchak: The Night Stalker-inspired one shot I ran at Queen City Conquest, one of the Investigators was a reporter named Carl McGavin - after Carl Kolchak, and the man who brought him to life, Darren McGavin.

The naming thing is something you should feel free to skip if it doesn't suit you - I know it's kind of needless effort on my part, because in my own games it tends to end up fairly obscure (for example, I ran a campaign a couple years back based on the film QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, and there were a number of villainous NPCs whose last names were all taken from actors who'd played Quatermass over the years) and I've never once had a player, in my home games or at a convention, catch a reference.

Places

Having already covered Holdernesse Hall, the Roman ruin, and Lambton Moor in some detail, I won't go back over them here.  However, I would like to address the town of Lambton, as the possibility exists that the players may decide to visit the town to look for information not readily available in the Hall.  I'm not going to detail the entire town of Lambton, as that's outside the scope of this adventure, but I will detail three locations that Investigators are likely to check out: the Pub, the Church and the Newspaper Morgue.

The Pub: Every role-player, I think, at heart has an instinct to go to the tavern for information.  I think this is best suited, for the purposes of this adventure, as a place to hear local lore in general - if they don't get it in the Hall, this would be a source for gossip about the Holdernesse Curse, or legends regarding the Moor (moors in England tend to be associated with ghostly dogs and miscellaneous hell-hounds; it would be wholly appropriate, I think, for their to be a Black Dog of Lambton Moor that the PCs can hear about here, which would serve as local color and possibly a red herring), maybe even a little bit of information, or at least rumors, of unsavory practices of Dukes past.  Calling this place The Slaughtered Lamb, after the pub in AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, might be fun and get players thinking in the direction of werewolves.  Other vaguely-unsettling names, like "The Waiting Owl" or similar, would be good as well.

In case you can't tell, I LOVE providing misdirection for players.  The Mythos should never be a straightforward thing, it should heave and squirm and slip through the Investigator's fingers like a writhing ball of eels.  There should never be a straightforward or easy path that leads to the Horror Behind It All; it's only once they've dug, and dug, and dug that the Investigators should look up and realize they're in a pit too deep to easily climb out of.

The Church: I'm picturing the Anglican church in Lambton as being not just a site of worship, but also a place for the antiquarian; the vicar is also the town historian and has shelves and shelves of books, bundles of manuscripts, genealogies, reams of old papers and deeds and wills on file that can be delved into to research the history of Holdernesse Hall and its inhabitants.  For added fun, maybe the church also holds, as a sort of relic of local history, the skeleton of the Holdernesse Serpent - whether this is dinosaur bones or fakes created from cow bones and paper mache, it doesn't really matter, but it provides some interest and something for the players to try to puzzle out.

I imagine the Holdernesse Serpent display looks something like this 19th century
Sea Serpent hoax.

The Newspaper Morgue: I think most players nowadays are of too late a generation to know what this is and go visit it for information; I know I've certainly never had a player ask for the sort of information one would find here.  Maybe newspapers are just too far gone for today's players to consider.  As such, I won't dedicate a lot of brain-power or time to this one, just to say that the records only stretch back 20 years or so, with older records having been destroyed in a fire, but it's there in case a player does think of it.

"Things"

These are our monsters.  I tend not to go monster heavy in convention scenarios, favoring just one monster in most scenarios.  It's Call of Cthulhu; even the weakest monsters tend to overshadow even the mightiest of mortals, so why add insult to injury? Five shoggoths are not scarier than one shoggoth, they just say that the Game Master is sick of your shit.  I prefer not to insult my players  that way.

So far we have two "Things" in this scenario: the Holdernesse Ghost and the Thing in the Ruins.  I'm not planning to make the Holdernesse Ghost particularly monstrous; I almost consider her more of an NPC that happens to be slightly incorporeal.  The 7th edition of Call of Cthulhu has this to say on ghosts:

Ghosts especially seem to haunt locations in order to communicate the awfulness that prompted their formation. Sometimes a ghost gives clues or instructions, which, if carried out, let the anxious shade dissolve and find peace. Though all ghosts are terrifying, some are more loathsome than others; a 1D8 Sanity point loss should be the maximum loss for seeing a ghost.

Maybe the Holdernesse Ghost only exists because the Thing in the Ruins keeps her bound to the Hall, savoring her suffering, and only be defeating it and banishing it from the earth can she rest in peace.

So what is the Thing in the Ruins?

I'm still working on that, to tell you the truth.  With the LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM connection, and the emphasis I've been placing on the "Holdernesse Serpent," I've been looking at some of the more serpentine monsters in the book: Chthonians, Hunting Horrors, Dholes, Lloigor...Ultimately what I want is something intelligent, that can make bargains and offers in exchange for sacrifices, and generally act like a malevolent godling.

Chthonians I think might be *too* alien for what I'm looking for, while Dholes are just absurd.  Who can fight something the size of a cruise liner? The Lloigor fits well with a lot of what I've got so far, but I'm slightly disinclined to use the Lloigor since I just used one in my last convention game.

But what if I take the "Serpent" a little more metaphorically? Maybe there are degenerate serpent-folk, like Robert E. Howard's "Worms of the Earth" down there.  Having stunted little creepy pre-humans creeping up into the Hall would give the scenario a DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK vibe.

If I replace the "Serpent" with "Toad" we get even more options, and helps disguise what I'm stealing from LAIR.  Perhaps a Nagaae, one of the bloated servants of the Great Old One Cyaegha, is down there.  Or speaking of Great Old Ones, maybe something akin to Gol-Goroth (identified by Chaosium with the tentacled toad-like horror in Robert E. Howard's "The Black Stone") is even down there.  I've never used a Great Old One in an adventure before, and a convention one-shot where players are expecting their characters to go mad and die would be an appropriate place to use one.  Gol-Goroth is not exceptionally powerful, and the creature in "The Black Stone" was even cornered in a cave and killed with fire and blessed steel, so it would be entirely possible for the players to score a victory.  For a tougher fight, Byatis could be an option, being imprisoned in England (not that we need be beholden to the source literature) and being variably known as "the Berkeley Toad."

The more I turn this over and over in my head and chew on the matter, the more I think my two best options are to have it either by a Lloigor or Gol-Goroth in the ruins.  The Lloigor is pretty much perfect for what I have in mind - it's intelligent, sadistic, reptilian and has some nasty powers and thick, bullet-resistant scales.  Gol-Goroth, meanwhile, straddles a line between "god" and "monster," something I've enjoyed toying with ever since I first saw the 1982 film Q: THE WINGED SERPENT.  From the stats in the 6th edition book (since it hasn't been formally updated to 7th edition yet), I'm guessing it's something of a sadist, given that "the toad-thing's worship usually involves orgiastic dancing, copulation, flagellation and human sacrifice," It's as smart as a very smart human being as well, and knows the spell "Create Gate" (which seems a little pointless to me, and I'd swap that out for something else, something it can dangle over a greedy human's head to ensure their service).  It's not armored the way the Lloigor is, but instead its unearthly atomic structure causes all physical attacks to deal minimum damage.  No weird powers other than spellcasting, instead preferring to stomp, strangle and eat its foes.

Honestly, I keep getting this nagging feeling like I bungled the Lloigor's powers in the adventure I ran back in September featuring one, and maybe I could use this adventure to make it up to myself and "get it right." On the other hand, Gol-Goroth's minimal power set makes it a much easier creature to run, operating largely as a physical brute rather than a subtle manipulator.

Plus, if we count the toad-thing in Howard's "The Black Stone" as Gol-Goroth, then there's a literary antecedent to ghosts hanging around this thing - in the story, the ghost of Gol-Goroth (slain, recall, by fire and blessed steel) still squats on its ancient monolith, surrounded by the ghosts of its followers, on Midsummer's Eve.

Yeah, the more I think about it the more I think I want to use Gol-Goroth as the Thing in the Ruins.  So go back and replace all references to the Holdernesse Serpent with ones to the Holdernesse Toad or the Lambton Toad (and that skeletal relic in the church is now a hippopotamus skull that someone paper mache'd up to make it more imposing). Because of the creature's toughness (55 hit points are a lot harder to kill when every weapon does minimum damage) the players will have to be a bit smarter in confronting the monster; I think through records in the Hall library, as well as at the Church, they'll be able to find both Roman-era accounts of the creature and medieval-era accounts of the first Duke "slaying" the toad, and between these the Investigators will be able to synthesize a means of either permanently banishing/killing the monster or at least sealing it up for another couple hundred years so that it becomes someone else's problem.

And who knows, maybe that first Duke's sword is still hanging over a Holdernesse mantle, silently charged with some enchantment that will let it actually harm the monster - "Blessed steel" and all that...

Anyways, this post is running very long and I think I've covered much of what I wanted to say with it, so join me next time when I start synthesizing a story out of the elements we've come up with so far.

Building a Mystery Part 2: Adding Flesh to Bones

Happy Halloween, readers! When we left off at the end of Part 1, we had the skeleton of a Call of Cthulhu convention one-shot.  In this post, we'll begin to add flesh to that skeleton and develop it into something that will knock the socks off six players when they sit down to my table, unsuspecting.  The steps covered here are not always ones I go through one at a time; often, and indeed in this case, I've got multiple trains of thought and development running in my head simultaneously, and I'll flow back and forth between steps, as ideas I come to in one train inspire me to revisit ones in other trains.  I'll try to break this process down into steps that a reader could follow and work from.

The skeleton I had at the end of the last post was "the Duchess of Holdernesse is 103, has no blood descendants to inherit the title but plenty of people looking to inherit the property and money associated with the title.  The property, Holdernesse Hall, is reportedly haunted by the ghost of a murdered ancestor, whose appearance may affect the resolve of those seeking wealth from the aging Duchess.  The Hall itself is built atop the ruins of a buried Roman temple."

Much of this is taken from the novel The Evil of Pemberley House, with additional material coming from Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Priory School" and Ken Russell's psychedelic film adaptation of Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm.

I finished The Evil of Pemberley House on Wednesday, and re-read "The Adventure of the Priory School" Thursday on my lunch break, along with another Sherlock Holmes story: "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual," which I think will also find its way into the delicious stew of this adventure, and I'll be re-watching THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM over this weekend to refresh it in my memory.

This is, for me at least, an important part of the fleshing-out process; by reacquainting myself with the media I want to borrow from, I can sometimes pick up on elements that I didn't necessarily remember from prior read- or watch-throughs that will make for a richer adventure, or, (as in the case of being inspired to reread "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual") my memory will be jogged and some other bit of inspiration will be brought to my conscious attention.

One thing that occurred to me today is that, by moving the time-period of events from 1972 to 1928 and keeping the Duchess of Holdernesse 103, the events of "The Adventure of the Priory School" don't quite work; if we place that adventure in 1904, when it was published, then the Duchess was 79; far too old to be having a 10-year old son.  Even if we set the events far earlier in Sherlock Holmes' career, say, 1882, she's still too old to have a 10 year old son.  So we need to either make her a significantly younger woman, or rewrite Holmes' interaction with Holdernesse Hall (given the popularity of the BBC's Sherlock, and Holmes' enduring popularity as a character, I believe that the players will respond very positively to following in Holmes' footsteps).  

I did some brainstorming between files while at work today, and jotted down some notes during my afternoon break on how I'd adjust the back-story.  Here's what I came up with:

"During a period of estrangement between the Duke of Holdernesse and his wife, during which the Duchess was on the Continent, the Duke was the target of a blackmail scheme, threatening to make public his predilection for prostitutes.  The Duke hired Sherlock Holmes to retrieve the incriminating documents from the blackmailer, the notorious Charles Augustus Milverton.  During the course of this, Holmes determined that the Duke's secretary, a young man named James Wilder, was Milverton's agent in the Duke's household, funneling information to the blackmailer.  He also determined that Wilder was the Duke's illegitimate son, and that he'd taken part in the scheme to further his own desires - to be officially recognized as the Duke's son and thus be placed in line for inheritance.  Milverton was sent to the gallows, Wilder was forgiven by the Duke on the condition he leave England for good, and with Wilder out of Holdernesse, the Duke and Duchess were able to reconcile.  The Duchess returned to Holdernesse with a young boy she adopted in France following the death of his parents.  The Duke would die of a heart attack three years later in 1885, leaving the Duchess to run the estate."

I think that's pretty solid back-story for the Duchess right there, and can form part of the knowledge of the Hall that at least a couple of the PCs are privy to from the start.  Plus, if I go through with the idea that one or more of the PCs is a grandchild of James Wilder, it sets up conflict between them and the Duchess, and I love interpersonal conflict in Call of Cthulhu games, which I will come back to later.

Even better, with the popularity of Game of Thrones, players who grokk ideas of bastard sons and muddled lines of inheritance are at an all-time high.

So moving on from the Duchess, what's the deal with the ghost? Above I mentioned a "murdered ancestor" but my thought processes on this point (and I literally have a page on my notebook where I have written and underlined, "What is the deal with the ghost?") ran more in the direction of "died unpleasantly."

The story behind Bess of Pemberley's death, as given in The Evil in Pemberley House, is a bit long and involved - long and involved enough that it's not something that can be conveyed quickly and effectively at the gaming table, and not something that the players are likely able to hold in their memories once conveyed.  Rather than reiterate the sad story of Bess five or six times in a three-hour session, I decided to come up with a simpler tragedy.  Here's what I came up with:

"In 1728, Lady Elizabeth, the Duchess of Holdernesse, threw herself off a balcony to her death after having three miscarriages in as many years.  She was 21 at the time of her death, and this year (the year in which the scenario will take place - 1928) is the two hundredth anniversary of her tragic passing.  It is said her ghost appears in the room that was once her bed-chambers three nights every year -- the night before, the night of, and the night after the anniversary of her death, precisely at the stroke of midnight each night.  Moreover, her presence is felt year-round at Holdernesse; in two hundred years, no woman has successfully carried a pregnancy to term while living in the Hall, invariably either experiencing a miscarriage or failing to conceive entirely.  Every Duke of Holdernesse born since 1728 was born abroad due to Elizabeth's Curse, as it has become known."

This fits very well with the whole Gothic theme; a woman driven mad by personal tragedy, the implied judgment levied against her for failing in her "duty" as a wife to provide children for her husband, the rules governing her appearance and a very thematic curse that is ambiguous enough that it's reality could be argued for either way, and which also explains why the current Duchess never had any children by the Duke.

We will revisit both the Duchess and the Ghost of Lady Elizabeth later on, when we go whole hog into fleshing out NPCs, but for now I think we've got a good handle on back stories for them.  So the final thing to address in this blog post is Holdernesse Hall itself and the Roman ruin underneath it.

Regarding Holdernesse Hall, the description given of Musgrave Hall in "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual" really jumped out at me - a large L-shaped building, the short side having been built in the 16th century, and the long wing having been a more recent addition.  The inhabitants of the Hall live almost exclusively in the newer wing, with the original building having become largely a storage unit for the accumulated bric-a-brac of 400 years.  I would say then that the Roman ruins underneath Holdernesse are underneath the old wing that no one really goes in much any more.

To this, I want to add "Mary's Tower," a structure from The Evil in Pemberley House that gets its name from the legend that Mary, Queen of Scots once visited.  This is an open-topped stone tower, three stories tall, with a circular ramp on the inside from the ground to the second floor, and a narrow set of stairs leading from the second to the third.  I'm including this for two reasons: One, that it's the sort of thing players are likely to get interested in and want to explore (and which would make a fun site for me as a Game Master to place a skirmish against cultists or the like) and Two, because it reminds me of the open-topped tower used as a summoning site in August Derleth's posthumous collaboration with Lovecraft, The Lurker at the Threshold.  I'm going to locate this tower about thirty feet from the old wing of Holdernesse Hall, and on a slight diagonal; this may lead the players to believe that the structure predates the Hall, with the physical separation creating a sense of chronological separation.

Finally, in true Gothic fashion (or at least, in true, "I really like The Hound of the Baskervilles" fashion), I'm thinking about putting Holdernesse Hall, and the nearby town of Lambton, on the edge of, or just inside, a desolate, windswept moor.  A moor, or moorland, in this case is an area of uncultivated hill country characterized by low-growing shrubs and grasses and acidic soil, often dotted with bogs or marshland in between the hills, making the land dangerous to cross.  This creates a further sense of geographical isolation once the Investigators make their way to Holdernesse Hall, and a sense that the land itself is as unforgiving and treacherous as the NPCs in the Hall.

In the real-life Dartmoor, which formed the basis for Doyle's Great Grimpen Mire in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the granite hills are often weathered to bare stone at the peaks, with these outcroppings called tors.  I like that imagery and I think I'll include some of these tors in Lambton Moor -- in fact, I think I'll have one particularly large tor be known as Snake Hill, and have local legend state that the Holdernesse Serpent, before being slain by the first Duke of Holdernesse, laired there.

The Lambton Worm or the Holdernesse Serpent?

Now for the Roman ruins underneath Holdernesse; Roman temples don't really offer much excitement in terms of architecture, being commonly either rectangular or circular structures - however, they don't have to, because we're not designing a D&D dungeon crawl here.  A simple rectangular structure under the old wing is probably all we really need - maybe add a circular "inner temple" for interest's sake, and to house a pit or other entranceway into a cave system wherein the Thing in the Ruins lairs.

Now, obviously, the Investigators should have no prior knowledge that there's a Roman-era temple under Holdernesse Hall; kind of gives the game away too quickly, doesn't it? I would have it be known to people who have lived in Holdernesse or in nearby Lambton for some time that the Hall was built on a foundation dating back to the Roman occupation.  Maybe the first Duke of Holdernesse bricked off the temple when he built the Hall, or maybe he was unaware of it - it is a buried structure, after all, and only later did one of his descendants find it.  Maybe there's a room connected to the temple that's accessible from the Hall (perhaps being used as a wine cellar by generations of Holdernesses) but the doorway which would connect to the temple is bricked up and plastered over.

Of course, the cult of the Thing in the Ruins would need access to the temple still, and they couldn't very well keep their pagan godling a secret if they had to get into the Hall every time they needed to offer sacrifices or whatnot, so maybe there's a tunnel, either manmade or a natural fissure, connecting the temple to Snake Hill on the moors.  In fact, I really like that idea; the cultists steal out to Snake Hill and sneak into the temple through this secret passageway; maybe it's really narrow and low-ceilinged so you have to slither through it on your belly like a snake.

Hell - if one of the Dukes of Holdernesse in the past (say, perhaps, the husband of Lady Elizabeth) was a member of this cult, maybe he bricked up the entranceway in his basement for plausible deniability and established the tunnel to Snake Hill.  To tie this back to Lady Elizabeth's ghost, maybe that Duke revived the cult and awoke the slumbering Thing in the Ruins, and some malign emanation produced by the horror are what caused Lady Elizabeth's miscarriages, and those of subsequent Duchesses.  After all, the ones who miscarried in the Hall conceived and carried healthy children successfully to term when away from Holdernesse Hall.

This post is running exceedingly long and starting to get into things I want to cover in a separate blog post, plus I really want to get a screening of LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM in before Gina gets home from work - she's not much of a horror fan, and the sight of Amanda Donohue wearing nothing but blue body paint and a gigantic bladed strap-on will get me the side-eye.  So I leave you with the song retelling the story of John D'ampton, as the movie names him:

Building a Mystery: Creating a Call of Cthulhu One-Shot from the Ground Up, Part 1

I've been reading the novel The Evil in Pemberley House, by Philip Jose Farmer and Win Scott Eckert - a part of the "Wold Newton" universe of shared fiction, it thrusts Patricia "Pat" Wildman, daughter of James Clarke Wildman (better known as Doc Savage), into a scenario right out of Gothic fiction, despite it's 1970s setting; learning that she stands to inherit the once-noble estate of Pemberley House and the titles that come with it, she struggles with whether or not she wants it, whether or not the estate is actually haunted, and whether or not her insane relatives are trying to murder her or seduce her as a prelude to murdering her.  It's a pretty enjoyable read, and I'll be writing a full review over at my other blog, Paperback Perils, within the next couple days.

While reading it, it occurred to me that the basic set-up here could be used as the skeleton to hang a Call of Cthulhu one-shot on, and from there it didn't take long for me to decide to do so; my home convention, Running GAGG, is rapidly approaching, event submission is already up and eager to take my games, and with it being the 20th annual Running GAGG, and my first as a member of the Cult of Chaos, you goddamn better believe I want to up my game.

Self-reflection being the key to self-improvement, I've been thinking very seriously about where I fall short and where I can improve as a game master, especially when running Call of Cthulhu at conventions.  To that end, I think I will be best served by writing out, and presenting to the world to comment and offer feedback on, my methods of building an adventure.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin.

Step One: What's the Situation?

The first step, at least in this instance, is to come up with the skeleton of a situation; I won't say an adventure, or a mystery, because we're not at that point yet; for now, we're just at the point of coming up with a situation.  I often take my situations from other media; for example, at Queen City Conquest last month, I ran Call of Cthulhu adventures taking their situations from the 1977 made-for-TV movie SNOWBEAST and from an unproduced episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Take a look at various movies, books, comics, etc.  You'll find something.

In this case, our situation is "the Duchess of Holdernesse is probably going to die soon, there are people who want that Holdernesse money, and the house may be haunted by a brutally murdered ancestor."

Because this is going to be a convention game, I need to be mindful of my audience; chances are, I will know few, if any, of my players before I arrive to run this game.  This is less a problem at a very small con like Running GAGG that I've been attending for years, because there are a number of "familiar faces" who sign up for my events year in and year out, but the point stands.  So I need to be real careful about what sort of material I include; to that end I'll be leaving the rampant sexuality of The Evil in Pemberley out of the adventure.

Now, this doesn't necessarily sound like a Call of Cthulhu adventure yet, but we're getting there.  Certainly, the idea of buried family secrets coming back to haunt the current generation is a very Lovecraftian one, and I'm making a note of that to ensure I come back and develop that theme more fully in this adventure.

I'm also beginning to think about what era of Call of Cthulhu I want to set this adventure in - the three biggies are the 1890s, the 1920s, and the modern day.  The novel taking place in the 1970s, I'm tempted to make it a modern game, but I think I'm actually going to go with the 1920s -- doing so preserves the clash between gothic horror and "modern" scientific sensibilities, which I like, and also makes it easier for me to tie in some of the Sherlock Holmes canon, as the novel does, without the Great Detective showing up to overshadow the PCs.  The Duchess of Holdernesse, in the 1880s, hired Sherlock Holmes to find her kidnapped son, with the reveal that the Duke's secretary was secretly his illegitimate son who kidnapped the legit son in order to force his father to publicly acknowledge him and allow him some measure of inheritance (joke's on him, British inheritance didn't work that way).  I think that's great, and ties back into the family secrets, and allows me to make one or more PCs the offspring of that bastard, giving them a deeper tie to the story.

What's the Twist?

This doesn't have to be an M. Night Shyamalan level twist.  It's my way of saying, "how am I twisting the situation to make it more original?" I generally try to avoid leaving a situation as is, because that makes it too easy for players to recognize what I'm ripping off and generally makes for a flatter, less exciting session, and the last thing I want, especially for a convention game, is a flat, unexciting session.  So here's where I'm bringing in elements of another piece of media to mix things up - For example, with my "Nightmare on the Slopes" game at Queen City, I twisted SNOWBEAST by bringing in the bank robbery and monster-in-a-cave elements from the '50s B-movie BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE, and the "psychic leads investigators to alien horror" element from THE CRAWLING EYE.

The Twist is where I tend to add supernatural/Mythos elements, as well as any other red herrings or complications to keep the adventure from being too linear - though as is often the case, these are best used sparingly, especially in a convention game where you're typically restricted to a four-hour block, and personally I try to keep my convention games to about three hours, giving people more time to get food or, if it's an evening game, I try to be mindful that my players might have a long commute home afterwards.

With this adventure, we already have a supernatural element, however tenuous it may prove to be over the course of the development process, in the form of the Holdernesse Ghost.  I've actually never used ghosts in a scenario I've run, which is kind of surprising upon reflection and also suits me nicely here - one of the ways I've been trying to challenge myself lately in adventure design is to forbid myself the use of more common monsters - Mi-Go, Deep Ones, Ghouls - and find ways to make adventures work with less-common foes.  Having never used a ghost before, it's fair game for me as a "less-common" monster.

But how can I twist the situation presented by the neo-Gothic atmosphere of The Evil in Pemberley House? Well, the nearest town to Pemberley House (henceforth Holdernesse Hall, for my purposes - according to Farmer and Eckert, Holdernesse is an alias Doyle used in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Priory School" to disguise the real participants in the events depicted, part of the conceit of the "Wold Newton" universe of shared fiction) is the fictional town of Lambton.  Lambton brings to mind the legend of the Lambton Worm, a local dragon in the northeast of England.  This brings me to Bram Stoker's novel The Lair of the White Worm, or more accurately, to Ken Russell's psychedelic film adaptation starring Hugh Grant and Amanda Donohue.

If you couldn't tell, the Twist is where my wide-ranging reading in occult literature, conspiracy theories, cryptozoology, and near-encyclopedic knowledge of trashy horror movies tends to come most in handy.

So what can I bring into "The Haunting of Holdernesse Hall" (my tentative title for this one-shot; I've found that players seem to respond well to alliteration) from THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM? Well, what if Holdernesse Hall was built over top the ruins of a Roman-era temple, and descending into the Hall's cellars is a descent into structures built during Hadrian's day? And what if that temple were dedicated, not to one of the familiar, anthropomorphic Roman gods, but to something loathsome and foul, something that dwelt there long before the coming of the Romans, the Britons, the Saxons, etc.? What if it dwells there still, buried but undying?

If we do this, then it turns the initial set-up -- the Hall, the ghost, the inheritance -- into something of a red herring, a means of bringing characters together before all Hell breaks loose.  Or is it a red herring? Can we tie the Thing in the Ruins to the Holdernesse of today? I don't see any reason why not.  Gothic fiction, from which this adventure is drawing heavily already, loves to deal in Dark Secrets; perhaps the cult that worshiped the Thing in the Ruins in centuries past has continued on, furtive and isolated, to the modern day, drawing in adherents here and there, never growing particularly large - and who's to say that one of those adherents wasn't a member of the Holdernesse family?

"The Haunting of Holdernesse Hall" is already shaping up nicely; I'm going to draw this post to a close, and next time I'll discuss the process of putting flesh on the skeleton we've outlined.

Murderhoboes Session 4: Don't Eat the Worm

We had an excellent session today, and I think I'll largely let the write-up speak for itself, though let me just say (with no small amount of pride) that my girlfriend Gina, playing Elf Fighter Brunhilda Von Sass, proved herself a natural at roleplaying, really got into her character and the act of dungeon-crawling.  So without further ado, let's get into things:

Dramatis Personae:

Johann Borscht, Bringer of Meat, Breaker of Snakes, Dwarf Fighter 3
Yngwie Magnusson, Dwarf Thief 2
Legolas "Baphomohawk" Jones, Elf Magic-User 2
Brunhilda von Sass, Elf Fighter 1

While sitting around the Chunderdome listening to current gossip regarding the caves and debating which rumors to follow up on, the PCs were approached - not by a person, but by a glowing green sphere, floating serenely through the air, perfectly smooth and roughly the size of a cantaloupe.  Coming to rest in the air above their table, the voice of Meinrad the Star-Gazer echoed from it.  He explained that he had a job for them, if they so desired; he would pay them 1200 GP in star-sapphires if they would go investigate the castle of the wizard Ambrose the Golden, and find out why he's not answering his crystal ball - also, to pick up a copy of the Complete Astronomical Treatises of Trioculus the Thrice-Mad, which Ambrose had agreed to loan to Meinrad.

The PCs agreed, and the sphere shot a beam of green energy out, manifesting Meinrad's teleportation chain on the table.  The PCs each grabbed hold and pulled, teleporting them to the outskirts of Ambrose's property.

Here, the first thing they saw was a 12' tall guy with grass for a beard, branches growing out of the top of his head and bark for skin swinging a club at a bunch of soldiers in yellow and blue livery who were hassling him with spears.  Intervening, they quickly learned that this was the Woodsman, a forest spirit whom the wizard Ambrose had taken in and given a home and purpose to - and who was being blamed by the guardsmen for Ambrose's disappearance, on the grounds that his tower was completely covered in thorny, fire-resistant vines and who else could have caused them to grow overnight?

Unconvinced, the PCs asked the captain of the guards to take them to see the tower, which he did; here, the PCs were introduced to Aureus and Halycon, a pair of young adult Gold Dragons allied with Ambrose, currently trying and failing to claw or burn their way through the vines completely covering the northwest tower of the keep.  They also met Bernard, Ambrose's apprentice and castellan, who explained that the vines even penetrated the stone in places, forbidding entrance to the tower through the interior doors as well as sealing off the outside.  Some experimentation proved that Baphomohawk's X-Ray Pulse Rifle damaged the vines better than dragonfire did, and Bernard suggested using it against the interior door, where the vines were thinner, promising them magic items from the castle vaults in exchange for getting in and finding out what happened to Ambrose.

They managed to burn their way through the vines coating the interior door with the X-Ray rifle, though the vines fought back, entangling Johann, Yngwie and Baphomohawk (and nearly killing the poor goat-headed mage in the process) before being overwhelmed by Brunhilda and her bastard sword.

Entering, they found themselves in a lounge designed for entertaining guests, where Brunhilda quickly found a secret liquor cabinet and applied a moral litmus test to the rest of the party - having argued vehemently against Yngwie looting the tower in full hearing range of Bernard, she proceeded to put Ambrose's most expensive and magical liquors in her bag to see what the rest of the party would do.  Their outrage at her actions convinced her that they were people she'd be willing to continue adventuring with.

Searching the rest of the floor, they found a smoking room containing a wide variety of pipes, cigars, and an eight-foot tall hookah of ivory, crystal and brass; they also found Ambrose's study.  Heading to the second floor, they discovered Ambrose's bed chambers, a walk-in closet full of robes in various shades of yellow, and a bathroom with indoor plumbing.  The bed was rumpled and the bed-curtains torn, suggesting a struggle took place.

if I had been smart, I would have bought Gummy Worms for
this session.  

Brunhilda and Johann went down to double-check the study, intent on opening Ambrose's desk to see if they could find any evidence of him having enemies or recent fallings-out, while Yngwie and Baphomohawk (and more importantly, Baphomohawk's talking dog Asheron) carefully searched the bedroom.  While the study proved fruitless in regards enemies, Yngwie did find a fat green worm slithering slowly across the carpet; picking it up drove it wild, and he carefully put it in a small leather bag.

Going up a flight of stairs, they found themselves in Ambrose's disorderly, overflowing library, books piled in haphazard arrangements and spilling off of mismatched shelves.  Also in this room, they encountered two guys in filthy ringmail armor, ragged bile-green cloaks, and their faces painted to resemble skulls.  When Brunhilda demanded to know their business, they attacked, charging in with heavy maces (the heads shaped like stylized skulls), though one stumbled over a book and came sliding in towards Brunhilda.

Attempting to intimidate that one, Brunhilda tried to stomp on his arm and slam her swordblade down an inch from his neck...and instead chopped his arm completely off, killing him instantly from massive blood loss.  They managed to incapacitate and bind the second one for interrogation - learning that they'd come to Ambrose's tower seeking the Gilded Skull of Malygris, all that remained of an ancient lich who'd been an adherent of their death-seeking Worm Cult.  They also learned that there were four more cultists elsewhere in the tower.

Threatening the cultist with both death and immortality (a bluff by Baphomohawk), they also learned that this cult wasn't interested in death, but rather in undeath - that those who were faithful servants of the Worm God Kyuss would serve forever as undead, a fate to be envied.  Having learned as much as they thought they would from him, Johann casually decapitated him.

Brunhilda dressed herself in the attire of the cultists, and Baphomohawk did her makeup to make her resemble the skull-faced weirdos, so that they could maybe bluff the remaining cultists.

Finding them two stories up in the attic, the bluff worked long enough for Yngwie to sneak around and kill two cultists with his laser pistol - exploding one cultist's head and boring a golf ball-sized hole through another's chest - before they caught on, at which point the party quickly executed the other two, having learned that their leader, a wizard named Azederac, was in the catacombs under the castle and could be accessed via trapdoor under the couch in the lounge.

Descending, they decided to try the bluff again - with Brunhilda acting as a cultist who'd caught an intruder (Johann) who appeared tightly bound, but was in fact free to act; the "Chewbacca Deception," if you will.

Azederac, but with a headscarf instead of a fez.

Azederac, a tall gaunt man dressed in bile-green robes and a black headscarf, was busy waterboarding Ambrose with potions of Inflict Light Wounds in which green Kyuss-worms swam, and at first seemed completely taken by the deception, and was seemingly eager to discuss the theology of Kyussism with Johann.  To prove a point, he called over a thoroughly worm-infested walking corpse, its facial orifices overflowing with fat green worms.  At the sight of this thing, Brunhilda and Baphomohawk panicked and retreated, while Johann dropped the captive act and swung his battle axe at the undead horror.  Yngwie, meanwhile, took a potshot at Azederac with his laser pistol.

The undead thing clawed at Johann, and worms shot from its eyes and mouth at him, but he deflected the attempts at infestation while Yngwie continued to shoot at the wizard, who was soon revealed to be a reanimated mummy.  With the elves recovering their composure and returning, Azederac blasted the party with a Sleep spell, to which only Johann proved resistant.  Cutting the worm-infested corpse in half, he stepped over it and challenged the undead wizard.

Shrugging off Azederac's Magic Missile, Johann charged, decapitating the mummy with a single swing of his axe.  The corpse collapsed into dust, and so did the magical vines he'd raised around the tower.

Waking the rest of the party, Johann carried the barely-alive Ambrose upstairs, where Bernard was waiting with several healing potions, two of which Johann gratefully drank while Brunhilda pocketed a third.  The rest were poured down Ambrose's throat, reviving him.

Explaining what had happened  - and noting that the Kyuss-cult had been operating under bad information; he'd sold the gilded skull of Malygris some months back - Ambrose happily rewarded the PCs with 200 GP apiece as well as the magic items promised by Bernard; the PCs received a Bag of Holding, a Cloak of Elvenkind, a Chime of Opening and a Ring of Protection, +1 for their troubles, in addition to a magic staff, the Staff of Decay, and a pair of Bracers of Armor they'd taken off Azederac's remains, plus the reward of 1200 GP from Meinrad, which they received upon delivery of the book.

Tallying up the party's wealth, they quickly realized they had enough money banked for Johann to purchase the Cosmic Ray Cannon from Old Man Walter.

***

This was really a last-minute adventure.  I wrote it yesterday in about an hour, from ideas loosely assembled Friday while at work - on a break I happened to read Chris Kutalik's blogpost Derailing Castle Amber, then pulled up the module and read it on lunch, and spent the afternoon thinking about how to incorporate more Clark Ashton Smith into D&D; the Kyuss cult was originally going to be a cult of Mordiggian, Smith's "Charnel God," and then I decided I wanted to use Sons of Kyuss out of the Fiend Folio as "muscle" for the cult, and then it turned into a Kyuss cult.  The names "Azederac" and "Malygris" of course come from Smith.

Azederac here isn't a standard D&D mummy, but rather a Carcosa-style mummy, being a reanimated sorcerer with full intellect and spellcasting ability - kind of a "diet lich." He ended up being 7th level because I needed him to be a high enough level to cast Plant Growth, to account for the vines encasing the tower.

Overall the session went really well; the players were really jazzed up and wanted to keep going even, but I had to call time because it was getting late (and I knew Baphomohawk's player had work).  Baphomohawk and Yngwie both hit 3rd level, while Brunhilda hit 2nd, and we'll handle leveling up and shopping at the beginning of next session.

Murderhoboes Session 3: "I Thought We Were Playing D&D, Not Gamma World"

We had a smaller group this week - Baphomohawk Jones' player wasn't feeling well, Icarus Dicarus had work, and Alf the Elf's player is indisposed for the foreseeable future, but we pressed on - three players is enough for me to run with, and they did pretty well for themselves here.

Dramatis Personae:

Johann Borscht, Dwarf Fighter 2
Yngwie Magnusson, Dwarf Thief 2
Lugh Light-Fingers, Elf Fighter 1

Lugh Light-Fingers was the last surviving member of the first expedition Meinrad the Star-Gazer sent down into his basement to kill the demon one of his grad students had summoned.  He'd seen his fellow adventurers killed by the demon, drained of blood and then raised as zombies under the demon's control.  Determined to finish the job or go down fighting, when he saw the splashes of energy from Baphomohawk's X-Ray Pulse Rifle and Icarus Dicarus' laser pistol, he knew where the creature was.  He also spotted Yngwie Magnusson, clinging to a support pillar, ready to drop if the creature came around the corner; Yngwie saw him as well, and signalled to him that the creature was around the corner.

The two magic-users (NPC'd for the session) fired off another fruitless volley, and Lugh called out to draw the creature's attention.  The creature turned, following Lugh down the hallway, where Yngwie attempted to drop down onto it with his sword.  He missed with the sword, and landed crotch-first on the creature's serrated, scaly back.  At this, Johann charged around the corner at the creature, while Icarus and Baphomohawk took up positions to shoot into the melee.

They managed to defeat the creature, not least because Johann's axe, taken from the dead hands of a caveman chieftain, was composed of meteoric iron - "star metal" - inimical to creatures from the Hungering Dark such as this one.  Unfortunately, he also got hit with friendly fire from Baphomohawk's X-Ray Pulse Rifle and mutated a little - he can now stretch his arms and legs out to lengths of 45 feet.


They collected the remainder of their payment - 300 gp worth of star sapphires - and were teleported back to the Chunderdome (the local tavern).  Johann took his axe to be refurbished - he wanted the blade forged into an actual blade, as the Sagoth chieftain had only hammered a crude edge into a chunk of meteorite and then they settled down to listen to the news of the day and recuperate.  Most of the rumors they overheard related to the Pig-Men that held a cave in the southern end of the canyon; these long-snouted humanoids were violent and aggressive, regularly warring against their neighbors.  Johann heard that a band of Sabertooth Apes had pledged allegiance to the Pig-Man King, and Lugh overheard someone saying that the Pig-Man King wore a suit of enchanted plate armor, the legendary Carnifex Panoply - whose wearer is invulnerable so long as the armor is regularly fed the blood of the weak.  Yngwie also heard that a local diviner was offering a reward for any who brought him the iron-bound Book of Nekron, believed to be lost in the caves.

Retrieving Johann's upgraded axe - now fully forged into a proper blade, complete with a cut-out in the shape of the Dwarven rune for "Fury" - they set out for the Sagoth caves, so that Johann could learn what they know of the Pig-Men.  From them, he learned that the Pig-Men are primarily active at night, are heavy drinkers, and the females are as vicious and warlike as the males.  Whistling up One-Eye, the four-armed Devil Ape sworn to serve him as bodyguard, Johann led the way to the Pig-Man cave.

Yngwie took point once in the caves, and soon found a room full of sleeping, drunken Pig-Men, whose throats he began quietly slitting.  While he was engaged in this, a patrol of seven Pig-Men warriors spotted and attacked Johann and Lugh, who made short work of the Pig-Men without receiving a scratch.  While they were busy with these guards, Yngwie rounded up every scrap of coinage to be found among the bedrolls and belongings of the slain Pig-Men.

Continuing down the hallway, they came to a large set of iron double-doors, set with knockers and knobs shaped like eagles' claws.  Checking for traps and finding none, Yngwie grabbed the knobs and pulled - and the knobs sprung to life, crushing his hands in their iron grip.  When Johann and Lugh pulled him free, the doors opened - and standing there was Burzak Gut-Ripper, the King of the Pig-Men, standing eight feet tall and weighing probably 600 lbs, two pairs of tusks jutting from his lower jaw and a third pair rising up out of the top of his snout.  "Looking for me?" he grunted with a wicked grin, swinging an enormous rusty greatsword at Yngwie.

The three adventurers fought back hard, but it was One-Eye who saved the day - by grabbing Burzak by the head and wrenching his head completely off in one smooth motion.  Johann quickly stripped Burzak's corpse and stretched himself into the armor, now standing eight feet tall as he put on the helmet Burzak's snout prevented him from wearing.  They quickly put Burzak's three hideous wives to the sword and began to loot his chambers, opening up an iron chest containing a significant amount of coinage.

Deciding to press on, they found a secret door in Burzak's quarters - one that led into a room with strange furniture made from a lightweight white material and a cubicle.  Entering the cubicle, they found a pair of buttons, both triangular, one pointing "up" and the other "down." Pressing the "up" button did nothing, but pressing the other caused the cubicle to sink into the floor.

Exiting the cubicle, they found themselves in a room that blasted them with icy, bitter-tasting water before allowing them to continue on through the far door.  Here they found a central gallery containing rows of glass-fronted cabinets, each containing dozens of small screw-top vials half-filled with purplish jelly.  Two side rooms each contained a large vat or tub of white material set into the floor, half-full of jelly, with a raised podium at one end, topped by a panel containing 25 holes, some of which have crystalline pegs in them.  Each of these side rooms also had a glass-doored cell at one end; one of these is empty save for a dozen or so spidery mechanical limbs hanging from the ceiling, the other contains this apparatus and a flopping, stingray-like creature covered in feathers.

The final room of this complex contained a crescent-shaped altar of white material.  Upon entering the room, the PCs were confronted with a 15' tall vortex of swirling purple fire that identified itself as "the Vat-Lord" and demanded the PCs' identities and loyalty.  It demanded that "biomatter" be brought to it and fed into the vats in the side rooms for "rendering" so that the Vat-Lord could convert it into new guardians to protect itself from its enemies.  The Vat-Lord promised to reward the PCs loyalty, and so they began bringing down Pig-Man carcasses to throw into the vats.

Unfortunately, exposure to the Vat-Lord's energies triggered mutation responses in Yngwie and Lugh; Yngwie's left arm shriveled up until he just had a tiny, flipper-like hand sticking out of his shoulder, while Lugh developed the ability to breath fire.  Angry about this development, Yngwie asked the Vat-Lord to grow him a new arm, and cut the hand off his shoulder.  Unfortunately, he did not specify "an arm to match the one I already have" and so ended up with a lobster claw for a left arm.  He decided to accept this.
The Vat-Lord admitted to the PCs that it wasn't sure who its enemies were, just that it had them, commenting that it's "memory banks" had become corrupted over time.  The PCs began asking how they could be repaired, and Johann made the mistake of asking if the Vat-Lord would faithfully serve whomever repaired it.  The Vat-Lord's response to this was to order Yngwie and Lugh to execute the traitorous Johann for treason.  At this, the adventurers decided to leave, promising the Vat-Lord more biomatter - and then Yngwie shot the "control panel" altar a few times with the laser pistol he'd borrowed from Icarus.

After this, they decided to collect and count out the miscellaneous coinage and gems they'd collected from the Pig-Men, and Yngwie resolved to try selling some of the bottled "biomatter" he'd stolen from the Vat-Lord to Meinrad the Star-Gazer and to Old Man Walter.

Call of Cthulhu Report #2: The Get of Belial

This was the second adventure of the day yesterday, and was begun at 7pm and wrapped up at quarter after 10; I'm honestly really glad it didn't stretch all the way to 11 - as is, I didn't get home until almost midnight, and I'm quickly turning into an old man who gets cranky when a 9pm bedtime is missed.  I was both surprised and pleased to have a couple people coming around asking if there were any open slots in this game, and while it was a disappointment to me to have to turn people away - the plain fact of the matter was I simply didn't have the resources to add two players to the game, nor would it have been fair to the people who did get signed up for my game on time.

This adventure was based on a scripted-but-not-filmed episode of the classic '70s TV series "Kolchak: The Night Stalker."  There are a couple unfilmed scripts floating around, for episodes rejected as either too similar to prior episodes, or too expensive to produce; "The Get of Belial" is officially considered too expensive, but was actually written around pre-existing sets.  Common thinking is that the religious elements in the script made some network executives uncomfortable, and so the episode got cut.  I moved the events from the 1970s to the 1920s, which works well given the history of the Labor movement in the United States in that era.

The adventure began with the PCs questioning the circumstances surrounding the murder of Glenn Maynard, president of the Associated Anthracite company, which manages the coal mines around the small town of Hopkinsville, West Virginia.  Maynard had been found dead, half-out the window of his totaled car, his chest caved in, marked with savage puncture wounds, and his head mostly severed.

The investigators, three miners (including the leader of the strike, an anarchist looking for opportunities for chaos, and an undercover Pinkerton agent), a muckracking reporter, and the local priest and schoolteacher, found themselves hitting dead end after dead end, even after finding a mysterious two-toed track.

A new lead surfaced when they attended Maynard's wake and funeral; his widow, Jennifer Maynard collapsing into a sobbing wreck at the wake, she was comforted when a thin, pale, plain woman touched her hand and loudly asked the Lord to ease Jennifer Maynard's sorrows and burden.  The woman, identified as Sarah Blackshear, then got into a nearby pick up truck and was driven off.

Following, the PCs soon learn that the Blackshears had been squatting at the abandoned schoolhouse - Sarah, her husband Henry, and adult sons Michael and Henry Jr.  They also had a large iron cage with them.  And for their trouble, Carl McGavin, the reporter, got a bullet in the shoulder from Michael Blackshear.  Having discovered their hideout, the PCs soon learned that the Blackshears were relocating - into the currently-abandoned mine.  They also learned that Sarah Blackshear had a third son: David, or "Sonny" as he was known, used to be a beautiful, sweet boy.

But everything changed for the Blackshears when a voice rang out from empty air - the voice, Sarah believes, of the Devil.  The voice promised the Blackshears that so long as Sarah continued to use her ability to lay on hands and heal the sick and suffering, Sonny would transform into a fiend more hideous than any in Hell.  Only by renouncing her healing powers would she be able to keep her beloved son.

Believing that "Man's extremity is God's opportunity," Sarah defiantly continued to use her gifts.  And Sonny changed, first emotionally, then physically.  Every time she lays on hands, Sonny flies into a berserk rage, breaking out of his cage and seeking out a victim to mutilate.

this is not the image I showed the players - but apparently
Tom Sullivan's illustration of the Ghast from "Sandy
Peterson's Field Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos" is not
online.

Having learned this from the Blackshears, the investigators team up with them - with Sarah healing the ragged bullet hole in Carl's shoulder - to track down Sonny and hopefully either lure him back to Sarah to calm down and guide back to his cage, or if necessary, destroy him.

They stumble across the bodies of Al Bialek and Gracie Peters, which Sonny Blackshear had surprised as they were enjoying an adulterous midday tryst, and then murdered.  Figuring that Sonny's bloodlust being sated, he would probably head back to his mother, the investigators, with the Blackshears, head back to camp, where they find Sarah Blackshear softly singing a lullaby to a hulking subhumanoid creature as she cradled it in her scrawny arms.  Motioning her back, the union leader opened fire on the beast with his shotgun - only to see Sarah Blackshear erupt in stigmata matching the peppering of shot in the creature's pebbled hide.

Thinking quickly and hoping that the connection worked both ways, he turned his gun to Sarah and gave her the second barrel.  Sarah died, her placid face erupting in a spray of crimson, but the monster that had been her child remained standing.

(And at this point, I allowed the union leader's player to see my notes, where I'd noted: "Any damage that the Blackshear Creature takes, Sarah Blackshear experiences as well. The reverse is not also true – shooting Sarah in the head won’t kill the Creature." I had run this adventure before, and the last time I'd done so the players killed the monster by shooting Sarah in the head.  I was nervous that one of the players from the last time I'd run the game would be present this time around, and I wanted to ensure metagame knowledge would help no one)

At this point, the anarchist lit the fuse on a pipe-bomb he had handy, tossing it at the creature's feet.  It exploded, and the monstrous thing slumped to the ground, where it transformed back into the tattered remains of a 14 year old blonde boy.

The Blackshear men grudgingly acknowledged that Sonny Blackshear's suffering was at an end, and Sarah's as well.  The investigators put together a cover story for what happened to feed to the reporter's newspaper and the Pinkerton agency, while the surviving Blackshears packed up and left town.

This adventure needed some more work on my part.  I think I definitely fell into a bad habit of mine with convention games - I never expect my games to fill up, so typically I have four "core" pregenerated characters who have really strong ties to the adventure and two "secondary" characters who are less tightly tied to the adventure.  In this case, those were the schoolteacher and the priest; the player who ended up with the priest had never played Call of Cthulhu before so I was scrabbling at the table to make sure he was included and having fun.  Everyone told me that they had a lot of fun, but I feel like I could have done better to tie the characters into the adventure.  So that's something for me to work on for the next convention game.

Speaking of, I'm not sure when my next gaming convention is - probably nothing until Running GAGG, my alma mater's annual convention, which typically falls on Superbowl weekend.  I'm hoping to do Origins in Columbus in 2016; I would absolutely do Queen City Conquest in Buffalo as well, and I'm sure there's other gaming clubs at colleges in the area who put on conventions.  UBCon at the University of Buffalo I've had bad experiences with in the past, so I probably would not try that one again, but the University of Rochester hosts Simcon every year.