Wargames Among the Warplanes, Spring 2025 Show

 I had an absolutely amazing time today at Wargames Among the Warplanes, a twice-annual 1-day event held at the National Warplanes Museum in beautiful Geneseo, New York. I went to college in Geneseo, and never knew there was a warplanes museum five minutes from campus, until now. 

Truth be told, I almost didn't make it to the show today - in the past week I've pinched a nerve in my shoulder and had my car break down (was thankfully able to get it repaired - to the tune of $1500 - on Thursday!) and this morning I woke up queasy, with last night's dinner disagreeing vigorously. I'm so glad I soldiered through and made it though. 

I ran a homebrew scenario for Fistful of Lead for four players, with me just standing to the side and refereeing. Here's the precis the players were given:

 Angela Dellamorte, the daughter of the head of the Dellamorte crime family, has been kidnapped by the Jamaican Kings, an upstart gang newly arrived in town. Her father has tasked his top lieutenants with getting her back and punishing her kidnappers. The lieutenants see an opportunity to get each other out of the way and ensure their own advancement in the family. After all, once the bullets start flying, who's to say who shot who?  

Everyone except the Jamaicans were armed exclusively with short-range weapons - pistols, submachine guns, and shotguns. The Jamaicans had a trio of submachine guns, as well as an automatic rifle and a LMG being carried by their hulking behemoth of a leader. I figured the Jamaicans could stand to have a little extra firepower since they were under siege and outnumbered, and the shorter ranges would make players move their figures around the board instead of just hunkering down and sniping at each other.

Additionally, there were a few side-missions that could be undertaken for additional victory points - collecting pallets of laundered money and hard drugs and carrying them off the table, giving a sympathetic interview with the TV news crew, and trading in their small arms for an unlicensed automatic rifle from the guy running the fireworks stand. 

Not to toot my own horn too hard or anything, but my table looked great and I got a ton of compliments on my terrain and my figures as well, which felt really good. 

To my very great surprise, I actually had more buildings than would fit on the table. Go me!

The players had a great time, especially once they learned they could hotwire the various vehicles on the table and go on vehicular manslaughter joyrides. One gang quickly piled into the Taco Truck and went on an absolute rampage of destruction before totaling it against the front of the bingo hall. Most of the pictures I took were of that rampage:

Get in, youse guys, we're going on a rampage.

They didn't even run these guys over, just gave 'em a driveby shotgunning.

Ramming speed!

The destruction smelled amazing, though.

The mobster known as "Fat Paulie" was ultimately the winner - having rescued Angela Dellamorte, put two rival gang leaders (and most of their henchmen) out of action, and having a gang member upgrade their weapon at the fireworks stand. The Jamaicans came in second place, having given an interview and collected the laundered money.

Make sure you get my good side, or you'll get on my bad side!

All Paulie is thinking about is the tragic destruction of the taco truck.

I didn't play in anybody else's games (though there was a biplanes vs. King Kong game I would have loved to have played), simply because I had a very long commute and my game took three hours to play through. I did walk around during the lunch break though and took a look at some beautiful tables.

I also had a couple people encourage me to bring my game, or something similar, to Running GAGG - the annual gaming convention put on by the gaming club at the college, which I've been attending for the past 20 years - next year, to increase the number of wargames being played there, and to better promote "Hey! There's more to wargaming than just Warhammer!" to the next generation of gamers. I'm open to the idea, but I might choose to bring something where I don't need a giant tote bin of terrain and can run 30-minute demo games instead of one 3-hour scenario. 

***

Today was really, really good for me. Like, being at Wargames Among the Warplanes today nourished my soul. I've taken a few knocks in the hobby lately - some verbal scrapping with people who think I'm an elitist for wanting to play with painted miniatures, people telling me that seeing my painted miniatures makes them feel bad about their own painting, and so, so, so many people who think tournament Warhammer is the alpha and omega of miniatures wargaming and refuse to even acknowledge that anything else exists. 

It gets discouraging after a while to be steeped in all that, but the congenial atmosphere, good sportsmanship, and just general community spirit I saw today - I helped carry drinks and snacks from the organizer's car into the venue, and had offers to help me carry my tote bins of stuff back to my car when I'd packed up - was reaffirming. This is what I want out of the wargaming hobby. I want more of this atmosphere, this community. I want to spend more time surrounded by people who just want to have a few laughs pushing painted figures around on a table with some nice terrain on it. 

And I'm going to get it. Because in chatting with the organizer, he asked if I'd be open to doing more wargaming outreach-type programs like this. He was so happy to see me add Fistful of Lead to the schedule, because he's played it before and thinks it's a great game, and regretted that he had administrative work to do alongside refereeing a Bolt Action tournament that forced him to miss out on playing it. He mentioned how happy it made him that everybody brought painted figures and terrain to the event today; there was no bare plastic or metal to be seen anywhere except the flea market table. Hearing him say that was music to my ears and affirmed that I was among my tribe. 

Plus, I bought a T-shirt so I'm now officially part of the Greater Niagara Wargamers; next up will be joining the organizer's club, the Whiskey 7 Wargamers. They've got snappy short-sleeve button-down shirts with embroidered club logos. 

I'm excited for the next show, and for what the future holds. 

organizer's photo of me talking through some of the rules with some of my attendees.

Committed: War Games Among the Warplanes, Spring 2025 Show

 There's a small, localish one-day wargaming event that takes place twice a year for the past few years; it was actually more local when I was living in Rochester, but between relearning how to socialize post-pandemic and just not realizing it was going on until day of, I haven't made it out there yet. 

War Games Among the Warplanes is held twice a year at the National Warplanes Museum in Geneseo, NY (the town where I went to college) with tables set up among the displays. Because my brain isn't wired to let me just go and play games other people are putting on and I have to feel like I'm contributing, I'm bringing Fistful of Lead and putting on a game.

Since I've got a good sized (and growing) collection of modern urban terrain, it was an easy decision to make that the setting of my scenario. Mike Demana over at Lead Legionaries has an urban game called Mean Streets, and his after-action reports from running the game at conventions are hugely inspiring for me. I knew I wanted a scenario with up to six players where alliances were possible but double-crossing each other was incentivized.

I decided I wanted something with rival gangs - organized crime as opposed to street punks. Sopranos-style Mafiosos, or drug cartels feuding over territory. Or both! Maybe a new drug cartel moving into traditionally Mafia territory? 

I did some brainstorming, and came up with a scenario in which the daughter of a mafia don was kidnapped by a rival gang, and the don's lieutenants were sent out to get her back. The lieutenants, however, have their own motives and rivalries, and this becomes an opportunity to get rid of their competitors. After all, once the bullets start flying, who's to say who shot who? 

So I have quite a bit of painting to do for this - a few gangs' worth of figures (which shouldn't be too bad since most of them are wearing suits, or turtlenecks with sports coats over them), and I'll have to do some more buildings and scatter to fill up a 4' by 4' table. 

I've got some building STLs that I'll be taking to a friend of mine to print out for me - a video store, pizzeria, shoe store and electronics store - which will likely be "quick and easy" paint jobs without detailed interiors. I might try to squeeze in a few more buildings from Atomic Lasercut Designs as well, but that might be iffy. 

I'll probably be playtesting this in bits and pieces as I get stuff painted up. One thing I do want to do is add secondary missions, possibly randomly assigned - which might be "collect the laundered money from the pawn shop and move it off your gang's starting table edge" or "pick up a pizza at the pizzeria and deliver it to Fat Paulie at the shoe store." This is intended to encourage more movement around the table and also to distract from the main mission - that way every gang isn't sending five guys directly towards the end goal and maybe we don't end up with every gang clustered at one point on the table shooting at each other. 

The figures I need are all purchased and on their way, so I'm updating my tracker now. 

We'll see how this goes! Stay tuned for updates.

Figures Purchased in 2025: 58

Figures Painted in 2025: 52

GI Joe Project

 So I've been kicking around a project for a bit. I want to challenge myself, and an idea I hit on is to assemble and paint everything I would need to put on a big, flashy convention wargame demo. That means all the figures, terrain, and put together a scenario that could handle up to six players. 

 For me, the obvious choice was to use Wiley Games' Fistful of Lead.  There's no ruleset I like better or want to see more people playing than that. But what to do with that ruleset?

The idea I hit on was a GI Joe game, with squads of Joes squaring off against gangs of Cobra troopers. Get a couple vehicles on the table, and it'll all be very eye-catching with (for gamers of a certain age) familiar characters on the table. 

 Funnily enough, I'm not a gamer of a certain age - being born in 1987, I missed out on GI Joe, He-Man etc., during their peak; I remember Christmas 1992 was a GI Joe-heavy one (including the very big electronic GI Joe base released that year), though, and my wife and I became fans of the Sunbow animated series from the 1980s a few years back through Netflix (though she loses interest as soon as Sgt. Slaughter gets introduced to the show).

I've got a couple pieces of MDF terrain from Sarissa Precision so far to build (a guard-house, a helicopter pad and a radar station) that I think will come into play, and leads on 3D-printable Joe and Cobra vehicles. I've sourced some figures as well, and painted my first gang for proof of concept - the Cobra-affiliated militarized biker gang known as the Dreadnoks, and their sinister leader Zartan. 

Also, I have a light box now for photography. Woo!

The Halloween Investigations

Yesterday, my FLGS played host to what might be the largest Call of Cthulhu RPG convention ever held in Western New York.  Three Game Masters (myself, Brandon and Dave) ran a total of five sessions of Call of Cthulhu over the course of nine hours, from noon to nine pm.

Dave ran a pair of Classic Era (1920s) scenarios, one from noon to 4 and the second from 5 to 9.  Brandon, running Call of Cthulhu for the first time ever, ran The Derelict, Chaosium's Free RPG Day offering from this year, a modern day scenario.  I began the day with "The Dark Forest," a game set in second century Roman-occupied Germania, and ended it with something a bit special: an "Elimination Challenge" game, with a scenario designed to kill characters, with some pretty special prizes for the last to die.

As far as prizes went, Chaosium sent us several copies of the "Quick-Start Guide" for 7th edition, and a couple copies of "Alone Against the Flames," a solo play adventure resembling a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book.  Golden Goblin Press, a licensee for Call of Cthulhu, offered a $50 gift certificate for the Elimination Challenge as well as providing an adventure to run.  And finally, I purchased a bunch of Reaper Bones' "Eldritch Demons" and painted them up as patina'd bronze statues to provide trophies.

"The Dark Forest" has the players taking the roles of a Roman long-range reconnaissance team, sent into the German forest to follow up on rumors of bandits preying on caravans and threatening open rebellion against Roman rule.  I had five players at the table, including my sister, her boyfriend, and Sandor, a Cthulhu veteran who made the drive from Albany to Rochester to participate, a good four-hour drive.

The scenario got a bit madcap once the players realized the "bandits" were in fact zombies, raised and commanded by a small group of cultists.  Rather than run from the zombie horde and take refuge in a nearby abandoned hill fort upon discovery that a gladius is a poor choice of zombie-killing weapon, they invented a series of schemes involving fire and barricades before finally taking the hint and retreating from the horde.

After circumventing the zombie horde and confronting the cultists, during which one investigator died to a massive, supernaturally-induced heart attack (there was a Magic: The Gathering event going on at the store at the same time, and the Magic players all stopped what they were doing to listen to my narration of this death.  It was pretty cool), the rest of the investigators took one look at the summoned monster presiding over the ceremonies and decided that two German kids didn't need rescuing that badly, opting instead to retreat, make their report to the prefect, and let someone else deal with the cult.

I decided to deal out the statue-trophies as a Player's Choice award, allowing the players to vote on who they think earned the trophy through good role-playing.  The players decided that Sandor had earned the trophy, and I awarded a Keeper's Choice prize, a copy of the 7th Edition Quick-Start rules, to the person who got the second highest number of votes - who happened to be my sister.  Honestly no playing of favorites there, she got the second most votes so I gave it to her.

After a brief break, we came back and I set up for the Elimination Challenge.  Six players sat down at this table, with Jen, Greg, Patrick and Sandor returning from my afternoon session, and joined by John and Chris.  John had not played Call of Cthulhu in close to fifteen years, and his two sessions today were Patrick's first experience with Call of Cthulhu period.

The premise of this scenario, "The Owlglass," is that the investigators are on a cargo ship traveling between New York City and Southampton.  A fellow passenger, archaeologist Hutton, has brought a large crate on board, and becomes agitated when it's damaged in the hold.  The crate contains "the Owlglass," a large, teardrop-shaped mineral deposit resembling an enormous fire opal, with a curious black spot that looks like the pupil of an eye.  Unfortunately, the damage to the crate allows the Owlglass to "see" the night sky through the open cargo doors, and a meteor streaking across the sky gives its former owner the point of reference needed to track it down.

There was a distinct air of "comedy of errors" in this session, most notably after Patrick's character had a run-in with a slug-like blob of animate, mutated human flesh; the slug-thing shot him in the calf with a dart, and fearing mutation, he proceeded to hack off his own leg below the knee with a butcher's knife.  It was only through a miraculous series of good rolls that he survived at all; as is, he spent the remainder of the session at a single hit-point.  Worst of all, when he managed to laboriously crawl to the infirmary (having hacked off his leg in the ship's galley) in search of painkillers, he discovered that the morphine was in a cabinet on the wall...about five feet off the ground.

The rest of the party went to incredible lengths to try and find a way into the aft cargo hold (where the Owlglass and the inflatable dinghies they would need to escape were located) without having to deal with the Owlglass' mutant servitors, who had gathered around in chanting and praying.

Ultimately, Jen, Chris and Sandor's characters met a variety of ends (including Chris, having hoisted the Owlglass up on a crane, riding the artifact into the briny depths like Slim Pickens riding the bomb after failing to secure himself while cutting the cable), and Greg, John and Patrick were feeling the mutation take hold.  Patrick and John both succumbed to their mutations, transforming into servitors of the Owlglass (it having not been destroyed, only relocated).  Seeing this, and recognizing that he would face the same fate, Greg's character opted to kill himself rather than become one of them.

Since Greg was the last one to die (and I counted "mutated into a servitor of the Owlglass" as "dead" for the purposes of the Elimination Challenge), he walked away with the grand prize, a $50 gift certificate to the Golden Goblin Press webstore.  Based on the speed at which they mutated, I determined that John was our second place winner, and Patrick came in third.  John took home a Cthulhu statue/trophy, and Patrick a copy of "Alone Against the Flames," a solo-play scenario from Chaosium.

Everyone had a phenomenal time, and we helped move some product on the store shelves; Brandon easily spent $200 on Cthulhu merchandise, buying a complete set of 7th edition materials as well as one of the Golden Goblin books, and Sandor purchased a 7th edition Keeper's Guide; I'm sure some of the other players bought Cthulhu material as well, plus other sales; one of the players in my afternoon game purchased a significant quantity of Savage Worlds material.  I think this might become a regular Halloween thing.

I Want War Elephants

You know what doesn't seem to exist in my neck of the woods? Historical wargaming, of the "paint some minis and push them around the table" model.  There are groups who meet to play board games recreating historical conflicts, sure, but I like the pageantry of a table with terrain and collections of painted figures.  28mm fantasy and science fiction skirmish gaming seems to rule the wargaming roost around here, and while I'm certainly not against that (seeing as how I have four Frostgrave warbands), there's an itch that can only be scratched with units, ranked deep, that have a story behind them, a layer of reality behind the painted metal and plastic.

So I got to thinking, and I came up with a plan.  I have no idea yet how well it will go, or if it will prove to be a colossal sink of time and money with no return.  Time will tell.  I want to put on a big demonstration game at a convention, with two big painted armies, recreating a famous historical battle.  I want there to be an element of spectacle, something that draws in passerby - and then I hook them, offering them command of a regiment or two for however many turns they feel like playing, giving them a taste of historical wargaming, that playing with toy soldiers can be fun without pretending to cast spells or fielding mythological monsters.

First step then, is to pick a battle.  I decided to focus on two key elements in selecting a battle to refight: Spectacle and Familiarity.  Spectacle, something about the battle should be eye-catching and lure people in as they walk by.  Familiarity, something about the battle should ring a bell, even to non-historians.  Some ideas I tossed around:

• Kadesh 1274 BCE: The massed chariots of Ramses II and the Hittite King Muwatallish would be very eye-catching, and Ancient Egypt is a perennially popular subject.
• "The Trojan War": Mycenean Greeks versus Trojans, perhaps with a big wall ("Troy") along one table edge.  Wooden horse is optional; sieges, I think, are boring to play.  
• Thermopylae, 480 BCE: Has some cultural cachet still lingering from the Frank Miller graphic novel and its associated film, but I don't know if "OK, you're the Spartans, let's see how many turns you survive" would be fun for anybody.  
• Plataea, 479 BCE: Almost all the perks of Thermopylae, without the guarantee of "Spartans, you're going to lose, it's just a matter of how long you last."
• Gaugamela, 331 BCE: Alexander the Great has name recognition value for sure, and I think most people who would be at a gaming convention would be at least vaguely aware of "the Persian Empire," even if they don't know why there aren't war-rhinos and guys throwing bombs on the table.  Refighting the battle that was, historically, the death-knell of an empire and having the opportunity to change history might be a good hook.  
• Hydaspes, 326 BCE: Alexander the Great again, this time trying to invade India and running into a crapload of brightly-caparisoned war elephants under the command of King Porus, giving a great balance of name recognition and spectacle.  

I think I'm leaning most strongly towards the Battle of Hydaspes; Alexander the Great is well-known enough to be a hook, a line of elephants advancing across the table is a visual hook, plus this was the last big battle of Alexander's career; not long thereafter his men forced him to turn back rather than continue on into India, and the battle was, from what I've read, a very close one.

As apprehensive as I feel about painting the brightly-dressed Achaemenid Persians, if Hydaspes goes well I may refight Gaugamela at a subsequent convention.  Darius fielded not just war elephants, but scythed chariots at that battle, which would be a draw I think.  

Next step is deciding on a ruleset.  I knew I wanted something that's easy to learn and to teach, with minimal granularity and plenty of dice rolling.  This was actually the easy part - Neil Thomas' Ancient & Medieval Wargaming is simple and straight-forward, without too many frills or complexities to remember, while allowing for tactics and maneuvering.  Plus, rolling handfuls of six-sided dice!

Because I'm likely insane to be taking on this project in the first place, why not go all in and have custom six-siders printed for the demonstration game? Do a big bag of "Alexander" dice with a Vergina Sun in place of the 6, and then a bag of "Porus" dice with...well, not a swastika, since that's taken on some unsavory connotations in the last century, but maybe a silhouette of an elephant? Big bag of each and then participants can keep one when they leave, because gamers love getting souvenirs from games they play in at conventions.  

Step three is going to be selecting figures, and I think I'm already there.  There's no way I can do this in 28mm and not empty my bank account in the process, plus the difficulties of storing large figures like that.  And 15mm-scale, I'm concerned, will be too small on the tabletop to be properly eye-catching.  Enter the 20mm, or 1/72 scale, plastics.  I've been combing through the Plastic Soldier Review site, and think I'm pretty well settled on HaT Industries' figures - you get 48+ figures per infantry box, the sculpts are good if not wildly exciting, and they have extensive lines of both Macedonians and Indians.  I'll likely be supplementing the Macedonians with figures from Zvezda's line of 1/72 scale figures.  

I've been discussing this with a few people over on the AMW Yahoo! Group, most notably Trebian from Wargaming for Grown-ups, who has done very similar things with the Ancient & Medieval Wargaming rules and 20mm plastic figures.  Because HaT does not supply spears for many of their figures (as it would be difficult to mold things like the 20-foot long Macedonian sarissa and have them come out well), I had been dreading slightly the prospect of carefully trimming florist wire or plastic broom bristles to length, but Trebian has suggested using pins with the heads trimmed off, and as best I can reckon it, a 3" pin would be just about the right length in scale for a sarissa.  

I'm looking at doing the purchasing and painting of figures in two stages; first, getting enough of each to field legal 8-unit armies, the standard for AMW, and use these to strengthen my familiarity with the rules.  Once I'm confident with that, then I can begin expanding; I think I want to run the demonstration game as a double-strength game, with 16 or more units on each side, and a few tweaks to the Indian list - Neil Thomas only allows for bow-armed infantry, while the HaT Indian Infantry box also comes with javelinists, hill tribesmen and a female bodyguard, so I'll be figuring out stats for each of them.

So where am I planning to put this game on? Initially I was thinking next year's Queen City Conquest, but have been worrying about this ending poorly for me - I can imagine putting in the time and effort and ending up sitting alone in a room with the figures I put in ages of work on.  So we shall see.  

Queen City Conquest 2016

This past weekend I was in attendance at Queen City Conquest in Buffalo, New York; this is the show's fifth year, I believe, and my second year in attendance.  This year, like last year, I was there for Saturday only; and again, I ran two Call of Cthulhu sessions more or less back to back, with a dinner break in between.  I'm not going to do detailed write-ups of how the sessions went, because by the end of the second one I'd been awake for going on 20 hours and they're already getting a bit fuzzy to me; instead, I'll do a write up of my overall con experience.

Our story begins with me stopping in at Wegman's, my local grocery chain, to buy snacks to distribute.  When I'm running a game, I see myself as host and my players as guests, regardless of venue, and I think it's a nice gesture to provide snacks.  My plan was to hit up the bulk candy aisle and fill up a bag with gummi candy octopuses; what could be more appropriate for Cthulhu, yes?

I get to the bulk candy aisle, and there's two sorority girls (they were wearing Greek letters; honestly, I'm at the point where everybody under the age of 25 looks like they're 12 to me) emptying the gummi octopus bin into a bag.

Girls, there is nothing you need those gummi octopuses for more than I need them, okay?

So casting about, I grab two packages of Halloween Oreo cookies.  This will do.

The drive in is uneventful; I drive past the Buffalo Convention Center where the convention is being held, heading for the nearest parking lot.  I pull in, and am told by the attendant, "Sorry, the last spot just filled, you'll have to find someplace else to park."

Pull into the next lot; the attendant says it's $5, cash only, to park.  I don't have cash on me.  He says, "Whatever, just park there anyways.  They aren't paying me enough to care." So I ended up with free parking for the event.

Queen City Conquest is not a huge convention, but it feels big to me.  I think about 400 people go through the door over the course of the weekend.  This year, QCC was sharing the Buffalo Convention Center with some sort of crossfit/gym-junkie convention, which was pretty funny to me.

Both my sessions this time around were run under the banner of Rogue Cthulhu, an organization based out of Ohio that organizes convention games of Call of Cthulhu; my friends Rich and Heather, who have been playing in my games at Running GAGG pretty consistently for years, are working to expand Rogue Cthulhu into the Western New York region, beginning with this year's Queen City Conquest, and I was more than happy to work with them on this.

For my first game, from 1pm to 5pm, I ran The Derelict again, Chaosium's Free RPG Day 2016 offering.  Having discussed the adventure not too long ago with Sean, one of my regular players who also GMs occasionally, we hit on something that had felt off to me previously; the monster in the scenario carries a gigantic bow and arrows of unknown manufacture, which doesn't feel very Mythos-y to me.  Additionally, the pregenerated characters provided with the PDF of the scenario have some elements to them that don't quite work with the scenario as written - they've all got military connections and guns, for starters, but the thing that's been a thorn in my side is a note in one character's background - that they were told the derelict freighter would be there, and that they should retrieve the contents of the captain's safe.

There is no reference to a safe in the scenario, much less mysterious contents.

So I decided to do some rewriting, to revise the monster, tie the scenario in more strongly to the semi-connected "Cthulhu Mythos" of the RPG, and create an interesting something in the captain's safe.  After playing around with various slug- and worm-like ideas in my sketchbook, I came up with a revised monster that I felt confident in - a fat, wattled worm-creature that dragged itself along on two stubby, webbed arms with a one-eyed, slug-like face and a tongue it could project like a chameleon's, only tipped in a sharp barb; this would replace the bow and arrow as the creature's primary weapon.

I tied this creature in to Lovecraft's short story "The Temple," and more specifically to "Gloon," a worm-like entity with a strange connection to certain Greek-style statues; Gloon is, as far as I know, wholly a creation of the RPG.  I placed a Gloon-connected piece of statuary in the captain's safe, noted in the captain's log (which the investigators in this case never got a chance to read) the statue's origin, and sent the creature to retrieve the statue and kill the unbelievers handling it.

The scenario moved at a leisurely pace, ratcheting up the creep factor; the players decided to head

my set up for the 1pm game

straight to the radio room upon boarding the derelict freighter, rather than explore as they went, so the creature slept through a good portion of the scenario before rousing itself to menace them; the players worked themselves up over finding the mangled remains of crewmembers and damage to the ship's controls and radio room, desperately trying to figure out what had happened.  They did retrieve the statue, having visions of Atlantis as they handled it, which woke the monster up from it's post-binge eating nap in the hold.

Ultimately, the creature killed four of the six investigators; one got impaled through the chest on the tongue-tentacle, the second survived an impalement through the thigh only to be killed when another investigator dropped a molotov cocktail on them; the third got impaled through the head, and the fourth, now obsessed with the strange statue, was dragged under water and drowned when he refused to release his hold on it.

We had one new player and three who had played in one of my games at last year's QCC; two scheduled players weren't able to make it but Rich and Heather were able to jump in.  I really liked the changes I made, and while the characters never learned the origin of the statue or the monster, at least one of the players looked at me and went, "This is from Lovecraft's 'The Temple,' isn't it?" so the connection was not lost.

I had dinner with my sister and her boyfriend at the Pearl Street Grill, a short walk from the convention center, and I'm pretty sure I had the same thing I had last year - a bacon cheeseburger topped with onion rings, cooked medium, side of fries.  Below the Pearl Street Grill is a wonderful little place called Brawler's Deli - I was treated to lunch there by my coworkers the day I left my job at HSBC bank, the day before I moved to Rochester.  Giant, meat-filled sandwiches.  Unfortunately they're closed on weekends, otherwise I would have insisted on a pastrami on rye from Brawler's.  But I digress.

On the way back from dinner, I stopped at my car and grabbed the Oreos, which I forgot to bring in when I brought all my game stuff; as such, I placed one package of Oreos on my table, and one the next table over, where Heather was running a very dark, somber WWII-era Call of Cthulhu scenario.  This was quite a contrast from my 7pm adventure, "The Haunting of De Morcey House," which began life as an attempt to update the classic scenario "The Haunting" to the modern day.  I used a team of fraudulent TV ghost-hunters as investigators, brought in elements from M.R. James' short stories "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" and "The Casting of the Runes," and replaced the lich in the basement with a Crawling One, a wizard's personality and intellect transferred to the worms that ate his corpse.  Finally, I brought in a few touches from an episode of the TV show "Supernatural," specifically one dealing with the "Ghost-Facers," a group of inept ghost hunters trying to get a TV deal.

Two of my players from the earlier session returned for this one, and I think the other four players were either completely new to Call of Cthulhu or hadn't played it in years.  It ended up being a fairly light-hearted scenario, even as they were attacked by swarms of rats and pelted with exploding china cabinets.  Sanity was nickel-and-dimed away by so many "small" events, and then the final reveal when the Crawling One boiled up out of the ground, plus the discovery of a crystalline idol of the Great Old One Yibb-Tstll, really cracked some brains.  The Crawling One blasted two investigators out of existence with castings of the Shrivelling spell, and a third player, having lost almost half his sanity in one failed roll after being granted a vision of Yibb-Tstll in the flesh, woke up three days later, two towns over with no memory of who he was or how he got there.

As an added bonus, one of the new players had recently taken a cryptography and code-breaking class - and so when they discovered the coded message hidden in the stained glass window, he was able to solve the code without needing me to give any help.  An unexpected use for a class he took as an elective, to be sure.

Both scenarios basically took of their entire time slots, which took me by surprise; I had anticipated them both running about three hours, but The Derelict ran for three hours and thirty-seven minutes, while The Haunting of De Morcey House ran three hours and fifty minutes.

I didn't end up buying anything at any of the vendor tables at QCC this year - nothing really jumped out at me, and I didn't want to buy something just for the sake of buying something.  I was surprised to see no miniatures for sale anywhere - one vendor had a couple boxes of ships for the "X-Wing" fleet battles game, but that was it.  I did get a T-shirt with the con logo on it, but I'm not sure I'll get to wear it - I think Gina has already declared it "soft" and thus claimed it.

The drive home wasn't too bad, but I definitely wasn't caffeinated enough - next year I either need to not do an evening game or make arrangements to spend the night in Buffalo, but I'm not sure I was really good to drive home - my eyelids were dangerously heavy.  But overall it was a good show and I'm looking forward to next year's show.

What's Next?

I'm vastly behind on my painting.  I have a couple miniature projects in various stages of completion, and I've completed my entry for the "L'amour" bonus round of the Painting Challenge.  I'm particularly pleased with my entry for the "Defensive Terrain" round - I interpreted the name literally, and had the terrain be on the defensive, as an Earth Elemental struggled to fight off a team of undead miners directed by a witch.  Here are some pics:

The reason I haven't been painting too much is that I've been writing a whole lot - I've had two story proposals accepted for inclusion in upcoming anthologies.  One of my stories is complete and has been submitted, the second is in the works.  I'm also working on a third piece, my first try at fantasy fiction, to submit to a new magazine.

In other gaming news...

My two Call of Cthulhu games at Running GAGG this year have me feeling pretty good about that, and I'm looking ahead to other cons to run Cthulhu at, plus the possibility of arranging a monthly store game at a gaming store in Buffalo.

I've been invited to take part in a Savage Worlds game in the Deadlands weird west/horror setting, which should be fun, though I'm a little wary - I sometimes think I'm under a curse, that any RPG I join as anything but the Game Master is fated to die after the session I join.  Every game I've joined since I graduated college in 2009 has died after the session I participated in.  It's eerie.

I'm also considering the possibility of another home game - probably some form of Swords & Wizardry again, as I really like that system, though I'd use Ascending Armor Class this time - it really is just a more sensible system than the attack matrices.  I would do either "regular" D&D, without any science fiction elements of the sort I had last time - though I'd operate under the same sort of campaign framework, with the player characters free to wander and find their own adventures rather than adhering to a pre-planned story - or use the Swords & Wizardry rules in conjunction with the Warriors of the Red Planet book to run a full-on Barsoom-style game.

A lot is going to depend on my time and attention - right now writing fiction is holding on to my attention very tightly, to the point where I don't want to divert attention from that to preparing game material.

Cult of Chaos Write-Up: Helping Hands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cult of Chaos Write-Up: Darkness Prevails

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building a Mystery, Part 5: Kill Your Darlings

art by Fufu Frauenwahl

Continuing on with my series on how to construct a Call of Cthulhu one-shot scenario for use at conventions, we come to an interesting conundrum.

"The Haunting of Holdernesse Hall" needs a massive, well, overhaul.  Reading and rereading through my notes, I realized how reliant the adventure was on the players following through on almost-red herrings and side-acts, with no real, solid "main story" to explore.  It would essentially rely on the players to follow every NPC around, get their stories, and then they would still stumble unarmed and unprepared into Gol-Goroth's lair and, presumably, gaping maw because nothing is tied together particularly well.

If I were writing a short story of Lovecraftian fiction, this would not be a bad thing; this is essentially the structure of "The Call of Cthulhu" in the first place, after all.  But I have grave concerns about it working as a convention game where we need to be on point and keep digressionary adventuring to a minimum due to time constraints.  I'm not sure if I've mentioned it previously or not, but I don't even like to completely fill the standard four-hour time slot if I can help it - I'd rather run a three-hour session, because A) that's a bit less exhausting for me to deal with as running games taking a great deal of energy out of me and B) it gives players time to find food between games, shop at the vendors' tables, etc., and not feel rushed between games.

So I'm not feeling real confident about running "The Haunting of Holdernesse Hall" right now, and that's a good thing.  I've run a lot of crappy one-shot adventures over the years, especially at conventions.  I had one mortifying experience where the Call of Cthulhu adventure I showed up to run was completed by the players in under an hour because it had been so poorly written (by me - this was no published adventure.  It wasn't even really an adventure so much as a setpiece).  But writing and running bad adventures allows us to learn and write and run better adventures later on.  A big part of my education as a Game Master was a crash-course, rewriting the classic Cthulhu campaign "Shadows of Yog-Sothoth" as I ran it.

This is okay.

I've removed the listing for "The Haunting of Holdernesse Hall" from the event board at Running GAGG XX in 2016, and replaced it with a new adventure, "Helping Hands," built using the methods I've already outlined, which will be a modern-day game with the players taking on the roles of a CSI team confronted with grisly and possibly occult homicides.  But I'm not going to talk about that.  I'm going to move on to the next stage in the procedure with "Holdernesse Hall" still being my example.

The next step, for me at least, is to create the pregenerated characters I'll be handing out and tying them in to the story I've constructed.

Six investigators is the maximum I'll do at a convention game, having learned the hard way how difficult it is for me to deal with anything more than that, and with each additional investigator it gets harder and harder to give them a reason to be there.  So I've already laid out my six or "Holdernesse Hall":

1. The American Heir(ess): the grandson/daughter of the old Duke via an illegitimate son, as the only living blood relation of the Duke, while they cannot inherit the titles they can inherit the property.  They are hated by the Duchess for being continued evidence of her husband's infidelity.  Is not really interested in inheriting much of anything, but the recent death of a spouse has them in need of time away from home.  
2. The Doctor: the Duchess' live-in physician, she financed his way through medical school years ago on the understanding that upon completion he'd serve her faithfully.  Was the only one present at the Duke's sudden passing.  Is of the opinion that the Duchess "owes" him for something best left unspoken, and intends to inherit much when she passes.  May or may not be descended from Colonel Sebastian Moran, the sharpshooter deemed "the second most dangerous man in London" by Sherlock Holmes.  
3. The Chauffeur: A career criminal and long-time armed bank robber, he's taken a job with the Duchess in order to lay low until the heat's off.  In the meanwhile, he's buried the loot from his most recent bank job behind Mary's Tower, leaving it there until it's safe for him to start spreading the cash around.  Jumpy and nervous because two compatriots from the last job, whom he double-crossed on his way out of the heist, have been lurking around, looking for him.  
4. The Groundskeeper: Posing as a simple gardener and traditional English man of the soil, he is in fact an undercover detective from Scotland Yard, looking for evidence of the Chauffeur's involvement in the recent heist in order to arrest him.  He also has his eyes peeled for the Chauffeur's former companions and may come to suspect some of his Hall-mates of causing trouble.  
5. Grandchild #1: The offspring of the Duchess' adopted son, this one is a rowdy drunk and rugby hooligan who cares little for the Holdernesse titles and sitting in Parliament and all that, and is only concerned with the amount of rampant totty he could get with the family fortune.  Is just the sort of belligerent who isn't afraid to bully everyone around him to get his way.  
6. Grandchild #2: The other offspring of the Duchess' adopted son, this one is more scholarly and less athletic.  Rather than bully and use aggression to get their way, Grandchild #2 is a slimy little toady, flattering and manipulating, and not above a bit of blackmail.  Edmund Blackadder would be proud.  

You can see in these brief descriptions that I've tried to give all the PCs ties to the Hall and reasons to interact with each other.  Most of them also have reasons to interact in various ways with the Duchess.  As mentioned previously, I like to give PCs in convention games reasons to distrust, or even dislike, each other, and then thrust them into a situation where they're forced to put that aside.  It makes for very memorable play, I find.  And if they die because they were too invested in bickering among themselves to form a united front against the Mythos, so much the better.  I've never personally seen that happen, but I'm sure at some point it must.

I keep the actual generation of the characters simple - nowadays I use the 7th Edition Quick-Start rules to create characters quickly and have characters be pretty roughly balanced between them.  I try to keep everyone within about 10-20 Sanity Points of each other especially; I generally try not to let it seem like one character or another is "protected" by having 20-30 extra SAN points.

So the scenes that compose the scenario are now written, the NPCs are written up, and the player characters have been generated.  What comes next?

I'll generally give the adventure a last going over to tighten any loose pieces and to look for places where I can specifically tie the player characters into the story - for example, "PC #3 will recall having read something similar to the story he's hearing from the NPC.  A search through his personal library will turn up the book he's thinking of."

If there are any handouts called for by the adventure, I'll make sure they're written here as well.  For example, if I were to be continuing with "The Haunting of Holdernesse Hall" this season I would probably do four handouts:

• A modern book of folklore's recitation of the legend of the Holdernesse Toad
• A medieval account of the battle against the Toad, potentially in Latin
• A Roman-era account (in Latin) detailing a cult and its unclean, toadlike god
• A Regency-era diary suggesting the former Duke of Holdernesse reawakened the Holdernesse Toad.

Once that's done, I make sure everything's printed out (I *hate* the idea of having my laptop at the table at a convention game - it feels profoundly disrespectful to the players in front of me, plus some conventions don't allow GMs to plug electronics in, so it's just easier to have a binder with my notes in protective sheets), organized and ready to go.  I've got a special binder that's just for Call of Cthulhu scenario notes and a special bag that I just carry my gear in for conventions.  Unnecessary, maybe, but it's part of my ritual preparedness.  

And that's it for this series.  Hope it provides some other Keepers out there with help preparing adventures.  If it does, write me and let me know.  

Building a Mystery, Part 4: The Plot Thickens

Cthulhu by Fufu Frauenwahl

Greetings readers, it's been a bit now since the last entry in this series.  I'd hoped to have more of the adventure plotted before writing this post, but that hasn't really been happening - so now I'm hoping that maybe writing about the process of creating an adventure plot will help me break through that creative block and finish writing this adventure.  I'm planning to run "The Haunting of Holdernesse Hall" at Running GAGG 2016; so I have a few months, but that does not mean I want to leave anything until the last minute.

When I say I'm writing an adventure plot, I don't mean that I'm writing something that's tightly scripted, where the players are tightly bound to a railroad that they can't control or get off of.  I try very hard not to do that.  The way I generally like to write adventures is to provide a strong opening scene to hook the players in and then set up a mystery that demands investigation, either through being particularly gruesome or by playing to the nature of the Investigator characters.  I've got some nebulous ideas in my head for a couple different Call of Cthulhu scenarios in which the player characters are a CSI team, and that's how they get hooked into the scenario.

Once they're hooked into the adventure, I try to let them drive the investigation as much as possible; this is A) sometimes very hard, because sometimes players just want to sit there and be entertained and not take a proactive role, in which case they really should just be watching Netflix instead of wasting everyone else's time at the gaming table, and B) it takes a ton of effort on the game master's part, far more so than an improvisational dungeon crawl does.

To this end, I try to plot out short "scenes" that I can guide the players to when their investigation begins to flag or they start to wonder if anything is going to happen.  With these I try to include either action or a strong expository clue that advances the investigator's understanding of what's going on.  Including both is ideal, but not always feasible.  Here's an example scene from the "Nightmare on the Slopes" modern day adventure I ran at Queen City Conquest:

A Hunt Gone Wrong 
A small posse (consisting of Joe Svenson, Tom Rill, Sheriff Fred Baker, two deputies and a local hunter) is organized and sent to take out the “rogue bear,” aka Sasquatch. If this event takes place after A Robber Reappears, they may be aware that there are in fact three Sasquatches.
 Spot Hidden rolls will reveal footprints in the snow and the occasional oddly snapped branch or piece of tree with the bark peeled back strangely.
 Track rolls will allow the PCs to follow the tracks and, at least once, recognize that the tracks are doubling back and leading the hunters on a circuitous route through the dense pines.
 Listen rolls will allow the PCs to hear heavy breathing among the pines and, once a high-pitched, howling scream echoes among the trees, will allow them to hear a fainter response scream and differentiate it from an echo.
 From the time they entered the woods, the posse was being stalked by the Sasquatches. The big male went ahead, leaving tracks for the posse to follow, while the female and young male followed behind the posse. This is not something the Sasquatches would have thought of on their own; the Lloigor is directing their actions.
 The Sasquatch will attempt to lure/herd the PCs into a particularly dense stretch of woods where they can be separated among the dense, dark pines. Here, they will pick off the posse one at a time, attempting to beat them unconscious or simply disarm them and carry them off to the Lloigor’s lair. They will carry off three victims before breaking off the raid.

As you can see, I don't organize every scene around every investigator being present; with "Nightmare on the Slopes" I decided to test myself and wrote it so that the scenes could be arranged in any order and still tell a coherent story, and ultimately the investigators were not all in one place at one time until the climax of the session.  It made for a very different style of play than the players were used to, and I think it went very well.

I don't know that I'll use this style of scene-plotting, where anything could take place before or after anything else, for "The Haunting of Holdernesse Hall," but before I get too deep into scene plotting, the first thing I need is the Big Problem.

The Big Problem

The Big Problem is the Mythos incursion into our reality - cult activity, summoned horror, etc. - that needs to be addressed by the player characters.

I think for this scenario, the Big Problem needs to be that Gol-Goroth has grown tired of the meager, irregular sacrifices its tiny coven of cultists has been able to supply over the years, and has demanded something more from them; I'm leaning in the direction of this sudden change in desire relating to a milestone in its cycle of existence on Earth; if we go with the idea that the year of the scenario, 1928, is the 200th anniversary of Lady Elizabeth of Holdernesse throwing herself off the balcony in response to the miscarriages caused by Gol-Goroth, maybe Gol-Goroth was revived in 1728 and now needs an extra strong offering to maintain his toehold in our reality.  Maybe he's just sick of squatting in a basement and wants to improve his lot.

Maybe, he's reached out and made telepathic contact with the current Duchess, and has offered her restored youth and vigor (perhaps an empty promise, perhaps not) in exchange for a sacrifice of the right kind.  Such as, for example, the American Heir(ess).

Maybe that's why the American Heir(ess) was contacted and invited to Holdernesse in the first place!

I like this.  I like this a lot.

Opening Scenes and Hooking the Players

Now that we have our Big Problem, we can start hooking the players.  The opening scene needs to introduce the player characters to one another, possibly in media res, as well as introduce the players to the major NPCs.  Lester Dent advocated introducing all the characters of a story in the first 1500 words; it worked for churning out pulp adventures in the 1930s, and it will work for you in producing a Call of Cthulhu adventure now.

Heck, that'd be a good project in and of itself, using Lester Dent's Master Plot to write adventures.  One thing at a time, Bill, one thing at a time...

"The Haunting of Holdernesse Hall" is actually proving to be a less than ideal adventure to use in showcasing how to build an adventure, because I'm realizing how much of it is going to be predicated on the player characters interacting with one another.  And while this is great for me as a game master - I get to sit back and watch the players drive the session and just respond to them, rather than lead them by the nose - it does not lend itself towards interesting discussion or a valuable look under the hood of adventure design.  But we've come this far, and we're not going to chicken out or start over now.

So.  Opening scene.  This I do have already in my notes, drawing off, again, the novel The Evil of Pemberley House.  The session will open with the American Heir(ess) getting picked up at the nearest train station by the Chauffeur just as the skies open up in a torrential downpour.  On the slow drive back to the Hall, their car is shot at - by former associates of the Chauffeur, feeling he chintzed them on their shares of the last heist, but the players and their characters may not necessarily find this out at this point.  The rain will halve all shooting percentages, making death or injury at this point far less likely, but if things start to seem rough the Groundskeeper will hear the shots and (hopefully) come running.  The two ne'er do wells will scurry off into the woods if they see their attempt isn't looking so sure.  The Heir(ess), Chauffeur, and Groundskeeper will make it to the Hall without further incident, where we introduce the other three PCs as well as most of the NPCs.

We're technically starting the adventure off with a red herring, which I've never done before, but I think it should work very well for seizing and holding the players' attention.  I'm a little hesitant about it because this is, recall, a convention game, limited to a four hour time slot, so I can't get too sprawling in my adventure design.

Following this I'm going to run a scene introducing the Duchess and showcasing her attitude towards each of the PCs - including utterly vitriolic towards the American Heir(ess).  I won't say too much about this scene, other than to note I've ripped off a few lines of dialogue wholesale for the Duchess from the Colonel in THE BIG SLEEP.  I ain't ashamed.

I should note, following up on that, that I tend not to script NPC dialogue if I can help it, because there's no predicting what players will ask or say to NPCs, and if I write a piece of dialogue that I consider especially good, the temptation will be there to use it when not appropriate.

So that's two scenes right there,  I'll probably drop a reference here and there within those scenes to the Holdernesse Ghost and the legendary Lambton Toad to whet player curiosity and to quietly get across that these are things relevant to the adventure as a whole.

From here, I think 3-4 more short scenes will do it before the climactic encounter.  I want to do something with the ghost, something with the butler, something on the moor, and maybe one more scene.  And these will not necessarily be utterly discrete scenes; they may flow into each other organically.  So let's take these three and put them in some sort of order:

1. Lights on the Moor: one or more of the PCs sees lanterns bobbing on the moor in the vicinity of Toad Hill late at night.  Investigation reveals these to at first glance belong to a small group of Irish Travellers, i.e. "pikeys," crossing the moor and valuing their privacy.  This is a front for the cult of Gol-Goroth to ensure they're left alone.  
2. The Ghost Appears: One of the PCs (most likely the American Heir(ess), but not necessarily) is visited by the ghost.  While frightening at first, if the character can get past the fact that they're interacting with the dead (and believe me, there's going to be a SAN cost to do so), the ghost can reveal that they're bound to the Hall until "the curse" is lifted.  Like most ghosts, this one is vague, and won't just say, "yo, banish that thing in the cellar and I can go to my rest, y'dig?" Maybe they can reveal that the curse was awoken or revived by her husband 200 years ago, and that this year's calling for a big sacrifice.  
3. The Butler's Scheme: Awoken by the ghost, one or more PCs will encounter the Butler sneaking around with some of the family papers.  If confronted, he can be compelled to explain that he believes the Holdernesse Ritual leads to buried treasure dating back centuries.  Assisting him in his calculations and investigation (with the promise of a share of the treasure) leads the PCs back to Toad Hill.  I think this should be interrupted by the maid hysterically demanding that the butler take her to town now, to marry her, and to get out of Holdernesse.  This, in turn, could be interrupted by either the cultists or the two bandits from the opening scene, leaving the players to deal with some small scale anarchy.  

And that's something to keep in mind: We have these two random elements in the form of the bandits, who want to take a cut out of the Chauffeur's loot from the last heist (buried in the vicinity of Mary's Tower until the heat's off), and the cultists, who want to appease Gol-Goroth for another year.  If the momentum of the session slows or bogs down entirely, as Raymond Chandler said, "have two guys come through the door with guns."

I'm planning for all the PCs to actually be armed in this scenario, or nearly all, for various reasons - the Groundskeeper has a fowling piece to address the issue of varmints, while the Chauffeur is an armed robber waiting for things to cool down so he can come out of hiding.  The Doctor and the Grandchildren are just terrible people who are willing to wave a gun around if it gets them what they want.  So having the cultists armed is not as one-sided a contest as it might be otherwise.  Given that the Call of Cthulhu rules do give stats for Colonel Moran's Air Gun from the Sherlock Holmes stories, and the Doctor in the novel The Evil of Pemberley House is a descendant of Colonel Moran who has the Air Gun, I'm tempted to carry that over into this adventure.  Sadly for him, given that this adventure takes place in the 1920s instead of the 1970s, I don't think he'll have access to a portable air-compressor to reload the gun on the go.  I'll look into it though.  

And that brings us to the final scene.  The PCs will find their way into the buried temple in time to see the cultist's making their offering to Gol-Goroth (potentially, this offering will be one of the PCs; otherwise, the maid, butler, or cook would be of use) and can try to disrupt the ceremony.  Gol-Goroth slithers up from the pit, making his unclean presence known, and brought face to face with a Thing of the Outer Darkness, the player characters can go mad or try to slay the beast or both.  

This is kind of a mile-high view of breaking the scenario into scenes, and I'm leaving a lot of detail out because I don't want this to be a 20,000 word blog post.  Scattered through and between the "scripted" scenes will be clues and hints to help guide the investigators through the adventure -- a medieval account of Sir Richard of Holdernesse slaying the Lambton Toad with a sword forged especially for the occasion, with three priests laying benedictions on the metal as it was being forged; a Roman-era account of a temple housing an ancient local god on the edge of a moor; etc., etc.  I'm not going to be holding the players' hands, but neither will I be letting them flounder in the wind.  

And I think that's where I'm going to leave off for this post.