A Time to Harvest Session 9: Bug Hunt

Last week's Call of Cthulhu session ran long, but things were going entirely too well - for me as Keeper at least - to be willing to end the session at our usual cut-off time.  Things began to really ramp up here, and I think within the next few sessions we'll see the animal waste really start to hit the electric oscillator as far as the player-characters are concerned.  This was also, sadly, Greg's last session with us - his work contract had ended and he's leaving Rochester, so won't be able to be here on Tuesday nights any more.  Don't worry, we gave him one Hell of a send-off!

 Dramatis Personae:

• Darren Gray (played by Mike), engineering major and member of the fencing team 
• Perry Webster (played by Dan), journalism major, on assignment for the Miskatonic Crier 
• Nathanlie Wingate Peaslee (played by Kai), folklore major, daughter of psychology professor Wingate Peaslee, granddaughter of economics professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee 
• Nick Jackson (played by Greg), private investigator 
• Roni (played by Katie), Finnish-born history major and member of the swim team 
• Randall Vhloche (played by Sean), geography major

Despite the untimely death of Abelard, the Federated Oil and Chemical-backed expedition to Cobb's Corners in search of the Outer Ones, or "metch kangmi" as they may be known, has gone forward as planned, now as much, perhaps, of a mission of revenge as anything else.  For Darren and Perry, it was a return to the MacLearan farmhouse where their adventures began, for Nick and Nathanlie, it was all new.  FOC had renovated and reinforced the farmhouse, installing a radio antenna and powerful electric lights around the outside.  Morrison, their security chief, supervised the installation of a variety of traps and snares around the perimeter of the property.

Randall and Roni, having not been brought into FOC, had pursued their own investigation that led them back to Cobb's Corners; reuniting with their old comrades (and joining the FOC expedition), they shared what information they'd encountered - that Blaine and Daphne Devine, the formerly-missing woman whose brain had been installed in Professor Harrold's body, had been in contact with a woman named Emelda Cratchett to acquire her husband's grandfather's diaries.

Once established (and confirming the local presence of metch kangmi when one apparently loses a leg to a bear trap), the team divides up, with Darren, Perry, Roni, the psychologist Drake and security chief Morrison patrolling the sugar maple forest behind the cabin; this was at Perry's suggestion, recalling the unsettling dreams he'd had the last time he was in Cobb's Corners.

Nick and Nathanlie, meanwhile, went into town to size up the local law enforcement and to investigate Darren and Perry's claims of creepy children.  Randall manned an impromptu watchtower atop the roof of the farmhouse.

Darren, Perry and Roni soon realized that something was wrong with the forest, noticing small, mouthless humanoid figures, pinkish gray in color, watching them from the trees - the same as a creature Roni had seen near the outhouse weeks earlier.  Morrison shot one of the creatures out of the tree, sending the others scattering - and the one he shot sublimated into an ozone-scented smoke within the next few minutes.

Coming across a dilapidated cabin in a clearing, they noticed a piggish smell coming from the shack and a faint grunting, squealing sound.  Stealing as close as he dared, rifle at the ready, Perry tried to peer through the shack's single window.  As he did, a porcine head lifted up into view, peering back through tiny, jaundiced eyes.  Clawed hands grasping the window frame, the swine-thing heaved itself through the window towards Perry, but died quickly to a single shot from the Lee Enfield, dissipating into smoke as it did.  Squealing from the forest told them more of these creatures were on their way, and they quickly barricaded themselves inside the cabin.

I have gotten so much mileage out of this image.

Two more of the swine-things died quickly as they approached the window, but an enormous boar, half again as large as its fellows and sporting a pair of wickedly-curved tusks, circled around the other side of the cabin and began to batter against the door.  Ramming its huge, bony head through the rotten wood of the door, the creature began to break through - only to be knocked senseless by a bullet between the eyes from Perry.  The creature stumbled and fell backwards, its breathing wet and wheezy.  Darren decided to toss out a grenade to finish the creature off, judging the distance to throw the explosive to where it would damage the creature without damaging the cabin or themselves.  His aim was a little off, coupled with the rottenness of the wood, resulting in Darren getting a back full of splinters.

In the root cellar under the cabin, they found a catatonic little girl - and realized that the original swine-thing they'd encountered had been trying to get at her when they'd disturbed it.

[GM Aside: Personally, I really dislike mixing material from Lovecraft's "Dreamlands" stories into my Call of Cthulhu games.  I feel like the tones don't mesh at all and I'm just generally not a fan.  So when the campaign called for Zoogs, Men of Leng, and a Moon-Beast, I replaced them with "Dover Demons" and William Hope Hodgson's "Swine-Things" to suit my own preferences.]

Nick and Nathanlie, meanwhile, after assessing Sheriff Spenser as an authoritarian blowhard and Deputy Cutter as hiding something, go looking for Jason Haggerty, the teenage boy seen drawing "creepy trees" weeks earlier.  Talking their way past the school-marm, they managed to isolate the boy.  Nathanlie laid on the charm, leaning in seductively and using the boy's raging teenage hormones as a lever to pry loose information.

It worked, and they soon learned that most of the children in town were part of a group calling themselves "the Young," that Deputy Cutter was their leader (even though he was almost "too old") and that they would be summoning "Mother" to Earth in accordance with her wishes.

As Nick digested this information, Nathanlie opened her mouth and began to emit a strange, subsonic droning, putting the private eye in a hypnotic state and rewriting his memory to erase all evidence of what the boy had told them.

After having the girl checked out by Matherson and Drake back at base, Darren, Perry and Roni took her home to her parents, and then paid Emelda Cratchett a visit; she was at first irritated to hear reference to Blaine and Devine, blaming them for her husband's mysterious demise just days after he spoke with them.  They managed to talk their way into her good graces, however, and even managed to gain access to her husband's grandfather's journals.  From these they learned of legends of a cave network under Broken Hill, in which the Outer Ones lived.

Taking some time alone back at the base, Nathanlie mixed up a cocktail of heavy opiates and lemonade, distributing it to anyone in the base who would take a cup.  Darren, Perry and Roni returned to base and immediately sensed something off in Nick's explanation of what Jason Haggerty had said, their questioning making him begin to question his own memory.

At this point, something big began to set off traps behind the farmhouse.  As they watched through the kitchen windows, a tree seemed to begin to uproot itself from the ground - or rather, to extract itself from the pit trap it had blundered into.  Towering twenty feet tall, the "tree" was a thick, cylindrical trunk of dense black jelly, pocked with drooling, sphincter-like mouths and patches of coarse, dark hair, balanced atop three digitigrade legs ending in cloven hooves.  Crowning this horror was a mass of squirming, greasy tendrils, four larger "trunks" emerging from the mass of smaller "branches." With a hooting bellow, the thing launched itself against the reinforced wall of the farmhouse.

Behind the group, Nathanlie planted herself firmly in the doorway out of the kitchen, the skin on the back of her neck splitting open as she began to molt out of "her" disguise - revealing the Outer One that had replaced her weeks earlier to observe and report on the Investigators.

The tree-like thing outside was too great for Roni's mind to handle, and in the darkness of the new moon she latched on to electric lighting as a safety blanket.  The sight of an Outer One emerging from Nathanlie like a five-foot cicada was more than Nick could comprehend.  Tommy gun in hand, all he could think was that if Nathanlie had been replaced, the rest of them must have been as well.

Perry managed to put a rifle bullet in the thing wearing Nathanlie's skin, but did not manage to kill the creature.  Squeezing the trigger, Nick swept the entire room with the submachine gun, emptying the thirty-round magazine.  Other than placing three bullets into the creature in Nathanlie's skin (finally killing it), the shots went high from the recoil of the gun, sparing the rest of the expedition.

As Nick stood there, breathing hard, barrel of the gun smoking, the tree-like thing outside burst through the wall, seizing him with two tentacles and pulling him into its bulk before retreating into the darkness of the night.

A Time To Harvest Session 2: "The Darkest Part of the Woods"

We had the second session of the Call of Cthulhu organized play campaign "A Time To Harvest" this past week, and while it was a short session (I try not to run super long, due to one of my players having anxiety issues that makes it hard for them to spend long periods of time around strangers, plus I've been having wicked insomnia problems lately, meaning my energy levels aren't where I'd like them to be) I feel like a lot was accomplished.  The players divided up and spread across the small town of Cobb's Corners, Vermont to gather information and then came back together to share what they'd learned, piecing together dissociated knowledge in true Cthulhu Investigator fashion.

Once again, our Dramatis Personae:

•  Darren Gray (played by Mike), engineering major and member of the fencing team 
• Perry Webster (played by Dan), journalism major, on assignment for the Miskatonic Crier 
• Rip Steakface (played by Gina), folklore studies major (Gina is my girlfriend, and this is her first RPG campaign, and she's not taking it entirely seriously. She has stated her intention that every character she plays this campaign will have a name taken from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode in which they riff SPACE MUTINY) 
• Roni (played by Katie), Finnish-born history major and member of the swim team 
• Randall Vhloche (played by Sean), geography major 
• Oliver Goss (played by Dave), anthropology major

I'm not sure how we ended up with half the PCs having first names beginning with "R," but here we are.

When we last left our heroes, Perry had just been handed a photograph, seeming to show something flying in front of the moon, by local newspaperman Richard Wendell.  Wendell believed that it was to destroy this photograph that his darkroom was trashed by forces unknown.  Perry asked Wendell to run off a few copies of the photograph, arguing that it would be best to go public with this - whoever tried to suppress the photo can't if there are copies circulating throughout the town.

That night, another round of strange and confusing shared dreams struck the group, afflicting almost all the player characters.  In the morning, on his way to the outhouse, Roni spotted a strange creature, a small humanoid shape about two feet tall with an oversized head, pinkish-gray skin and no facial features save a pair of glowing green-orange eyes.  When he dropped his copy of the Sears Roebuck catalog at the sight of this thing, it glowered at him and took off running into the Sugar Maples behind the property.

Robert Blaine, the expedition leader, sub-divided the folklore students for this day's work, putting the player characters in one group and the NPCs in another (to ease the GM's burden, haha).  Darren was assigned to the "soil" group to assist the archaeologists and geologists, while Perry, a journalist, was left to his own devices.

The folklorists (and Perry, conducting independent research along similar lines), soon came to the realization that there were a few trends showing up in their interviews:

1. A place called "Broken Hill" was significant - some legends marked it as a Native American burial ground, others as a burial ground for massacred white settlers.  Supposedly guarded by a huge, spectral hound that can be turned away by the sign of the Cross.  
2. The valley in which Cobb's Corners sits is largely devoid of insects and wildlife - "only man and what man brings with him dwells here."
3. There is an unusual high death rate among children in Cobb's Corners.  The entire graduating class of 1919 (five students, but still) were dead before the end of that summer.  
4. Agnes Bellweather, living alone past the edge of town, is a witch.  Allegedly, when she caught her husband with another woman, she cursed his privates off and left him to kill himself.  

A visit to the town physician, Dr. Perry, confirmed that there's a high death rate among children.  Dr. Perry voiced his opinion that, as fantastic and unbelievable as it may seem, he's come to the conclusion that a vampire is at work - the children are often found drained of blood, splashed with pig's blood to disguise the loss.  He speculates that Sarah Maclearan, dead 20 years, is the vampire, as shortly after his arrival in town he got called on an unusual case: her grave had been vandalized, and he was asked to ensure that nothing untoward had been done to her body - only to discover that her casket contained a dead calf.  The whereabouts of Sarah Maclearan's body remains a mystery to this day.  

A visit to Agnes Bellweather revealed her to be an elderly woman, barely 4 feet tall, blessed with an abundance of common sense and humor.  She explained that she'd been the village midwife and apothecary until the sheriff forced her into retirement at Dr. Perry's arrival, though people still come to her for remedies for toothaches, infertility, and less medical maladies such as bad luck or feeling jinxed.  Rip made friends with her cat Beltane.  

Meanwhile, the digging team turned up a single arrowhead (Darren's player Mike, being a wise guy, asked me if it was a Clovis point.  Without missing a beat, I said, "No, Solutrean." He's not the only wise guy at the table) and otherwise labored fruitlessly in the sweltering heat and humidity.  Darren did his best to try and catch the eye of the attractive young botanist Clarissa, but without much luck.  

Dark, heavy storm clouds were beginning to roll in and the PCs reconvened at the Maclearan farmhouse, sharing what they'd learned with each other over spaghetti.  Noting that the dig site was nowhere near Broken Hill, they raised the possibility of digging near there to Blaine, who claimed that last summer, the team he'd been a part of had dug near there and turned up nothing of value, plus the terrain is treacherous and choked with thorn bushes. 

That night, Randall, laying awake in a puddle of sweat as the humidity built and built, heard the door to Blaine's room creak open.  He sat up.  "Where are you going, Blaine?" he asked suspiciously.  

Blaine jumps a little, and swings his flashlight around.  "I just have to pee," he mutters, heading for the door.  

When Blaine doesn't return to the farmhouse after about fifteen minutes, Randall wakes his fellow investigators.  "Blaine went out fifteen minutes ago.  I wanna see where he went."

Stepping outside, Oliver began calling Blaine's name, getting no response.  Knocking on the door of the outhouse likewise got no response.  Pulling open the door revealed it to be unoccupied - where had Blaine gone?

***

We ended the session on that cliffhanger, leaving the players to kind of simmer on that mystery until our next session, which will be May 31st.  

I do have some exciting news on the Call of Cthulhu front as well - because demand is so high right now at my local game store, I will be adding an extra game day to my schedule and running an open table event one Sunday a month for people who are interested in Call of Cthulhu but have perhaps never played before, and possibly working with the store owner to arrange an extra game master to begin running Cthulhu games as well.  

This is, to be blunt, amazing.  Call of Cthulhu is a long-standing, much beloved game, but not one that seems to get a lot of love in game stores; Just Games Rochester is the only store in the area with Call of Cthulhu events on its calendar at all, and right now those are all full, so we're creating more to keep up with demand.  

Matt, the store owner, pointed out to me as well that I'm starting to become the public face of Cthulhu in Rochester - I'm the guy busting my hump to run great games, I'm the guy going out and talking up the game, I'm the guy people are getting referred to when they have questions about Cthulhu gaming.  It's kind of surreal, but I'm willing to roll with it.  

I would like to get to the point where I'm helping to arrange more events not just through Rochester, but all of Western New York; there's a game store in Buffalo that I'd like to look at starting to run periodic games at as well to increase the visibility of Call of Cthulhu, with an eye towards bringing in other GMs (unfortunately, I can't run all the games) and getting big monthly Cthulhu events on the calendars of a couple stores.  There's a Savage Worlds group here that I'm looking at as a model of how best to achieve this.  

ADDITIONALLY, Matt asked me to help organize a release party to mark the arrival of the 7th edition Call of Cthulhu books in store, and I'm very excited for that.  Todd Gardiner, Chaosium's director of organized play, was kind enough to provide me with a demo adventure, not yet ready for publication, to run at the release party, and we're going to have that running simultaneously at multiple tables throughout the store to maximize visibility and expose as many people as possible to the infectious madness that is Call of Cthulhu.  I'm debating getting a black robe to wear in my role as master of ceremonies for this event, which will be June 5th starting at noon.  

So there is a ton of Cthulhu gaming going on in my life right now and in the weeks to come.  

The Tentacle Beckons

I was talking with a coworker and fellow RPG enthusiast recently - I'd introduced both her and her boyfriend to Call of Cthulhu not too long ago, and they had a blast with the game, and that's impressive given that they both come from a background of hack 'n' slash dungeon crawling Pathfinder.  They showed up to the one-shot I ran with characters prepared and ready to go - a war correspondent and a big game hunter, complete with backgrounds and personalities.  She was telling me about how, after that session, her boyfriend (who is a longtime DM and player of D&D himself) couldn't shut up about how blown away he was by Call of Cthulhu.

Call of Cthulhu is really where I've always shined as a GM.  My first real experience behind the screen was running a heavily-modified Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, with several additional scenarios interspersed between each chapter and the Scotland chapter completely replaced with material I wrote set in a Silent Hill-style town.  The campaign ended up lasting something like 16 or 18 4-6 hour sessions, and featured the development of what we termed the "Shotgun Mythos" -- more Investigators died due to being shot with shotguns or having shotguns malfunction catastrophically in their hands then due to Mythos horrors.

After that a ran a short campaign set in Roman-occupied Alexandria, in which the PCs were manipulated by Nyarlathotep into exterminating a cult of Shub-Niggurath worshipers to further his own bid for cosmic supremacy, culiminating in the PCs calling up Shub-Niggurath to smack Nyarlathotep down.

Next campaign, again a fairly short one, only about eight sessions, used modern day Flying Saucer mythology and the Shaver Mystery in place of the Cthulhu Mythos, I think to excellent effect.  The high point of this campaign was the final scene, in which I revealed that everything past the first session was a hallucination shared by the PCs in a sanitarium following a toxic overdose of experimental dream-suppressant medication.

After that, I converted Nigel Kneale's teleplay for "Quatermass and the Pit" into a short campaign, with Nyarlathotep again manipulating the PCs into opening and activating the Martian cylinder, sending out psychic waves activating latent Martian genes in the people of London.  Under this psychic influence, Nyarlathotep revealed, the people of London would mutate into locust-like creatures, which he termed "the Megiddo Swarm," and wipe humanity from the globe at his direction.  The PCs managed to avert this fate using a Gate spell and, through a great deal of psychic effort, sending the cylinder off-planet.

After this, I took a break, as one of my players commented on my tendency to lean on Nyarlathotep as a villain, and I wanted to refresh myself creatively.  Since then I've run some Pathfinder, a couple assorted sessions of various OSR games, and a short (five session) campaign using the BRP mechanics set in the Caribbean at the time of Elizabeth's reign (which I originally started this blog to use as a campaign journal for, which just didn't work out).

Now maybe it's time to pick up the percentile dice and roll for SAN loss again.  Maybe that's why I'm so flighty and indecisive towards fantasy games lately; maybe I need to sink myself back into horror.  I recently got a copy of Dan O'Bannon's excellent adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, THE RESURRECTED, on DVD -- most published Call of Cthulhu campaigns tend to be very sprawling geographically, on the model of The Shadow Out of Time...maybe I should try to do something that sprawls chronologically instead.

Maybe set each player up with three Investigators, one for each of three different eras, with each character being somehow descended from their character in a prior era.  Have the main arc of the campaign take place in the 1920s, say, and one of the Investigators stumbles across an old diary belonging to an ancestor...and when they start to read it, I play a "flashback" sound effect, collect the 1920s character sheets and hand out the players' 1750s (or whatever) character sheets, and have them play out the events of what the character in "the present" is reading.  And later they get access to older documents (such as a ledger maintained by a cult, decade after decade, for hundreds of years) and read about the exploits of their ancestors further back (flashback sound effect again), and I had out character sheets for 1028 AD or whatever, and it's only be piecing together the information they've found in the present with the incomplete information their Colonial ancestors and Dark Age ancestors had that they manage to tie together all the clues and defeat the cult once and for all.

It's a thought!