Arben

My group finished Star Brothers this week. Thumbs up. This is the kickoff to a mini-Innsmouth campaign for a group that are mostly new to Call of Cthulhu and some new to RPGs in general. I think we spent 8 or 9 hours on this scenario over two and a half sessions with a homemade team of Photographer, Occultist, Engineer, and a retired Cop to watch over them, on assignment for Fantastic News magazine. We had an abridged version of the Freak Show scenario as a prologue, the news team stopping off to get some photos of carnival freaks that the magazine would surely buy. They were unable to prevent the MIBs from rescuing / kidnapping / absconding with the baby Deep One in the circus. Later remembering (via a flashback to their assignment from their editor, Eli) that they were on the clock, they found their way up to Ipswich, and immediately sought out Gore's Hardware, and from there a brief montage of interviews with local shopkeepers where they heard more about gold, MIBs, and the idea that Otis is usually seen walking out to the east side of town somewhere. The group checked into the hotel. With nothing to fill their evening, they decided to check out the east end / outskirts of town. Having no particular preference myself, I had made up a chart of the homes out there and let the player driving roll to see what house they stopped at. The choices were the 4 homes with NPCs and clues, an empty house, or the one with an irate, shotgun-wielding homeowner. Of course they rolled the last one. At the sight of a car full of people pulling up to his house after dark, banging on his front door, the homeowner came out waving a gun and yelling for them to leave his family alone. The occultist pulled his gun to her own head and said "do it!" You may tell me I'm too kind, but I let the cop react to try to slap the gun away. The homeowner fired and she only lost an ear, her hearing, some points in APP, Listen, Stealth, etc. The engineer, hoping to prevent a bloodbath, tried to grab a gun away from the photographer who was raring to return fire. He rolled 100 and everyone rolled luck to see who was getting hit. Turns out, the guy trying to prevent more violence ended up murdering the homeowner himself. This provoked bouts of madness in two of them, and their first combat experience was against one another. Session one ended with the two crazed investigators subdued. Session two began with them, to my surprise, not interested in hiding the body. There was a real player conundrum at this point though. The team had not yet seen anything particularly engrossing / otherworldly in the town, a man was dead, and the cop wants to do things by the book. He wants to report the incident, the others want to not go to jail, and while the players want to continue, they struggled to find reasons why the characters would look the other way on this when all that's at stake is interviewing a local nutcase. The investigator least covered in blood sneaks back into the hotel, gets caught by a chatty front desk man who wants to be his buddy, takes their newspaper preferences, breakfast order, etc. It comes to pass that they get no wakeup call or breakfast because the daytime guy didn't show that morning. I made the dead man a hotel employee AND the father of the missing bootlegger, but I'm not sure if they connected all the dots there. The next morning, after some madnesses have cleared up, they called Eli for a pep talk. I enjoyed playing Eli. I looked up a bunch of 'news of the weird' headlines from the 20s and 30s and whenever someone calls him, he's always finishing a conversation with someone about one of them. He propped them up, but I think we all felt it was a touch unconvincing. Maybe good enough for an old movie where the leads fall in love just because they're in a movie. The cop called Deputy Dingby in Arkham to give them a heads up on how they'd been involved in killing a man in self defense. (Dingby: "Oh man, you too? Powell just killed a guy in 'self defense' too. His eighth this year.") I planned for the police to come around to question them the next morning, since they'd have their hands full at the crime scene full of strange and unhelpful evidence from the scuffle. From there, the group returns to the scene of the crime. They drive past and see police, Elsie taking notes, a grieving widow being consoled on the porch, etc. The cop goes to the local PD and makes friends with the desk Lt., and gets an address on Hannah. Some PCs meet Hannah while others scout around the property for Otis' spaceship. For some reason, the group never wants to say they're reporters, they always stop to come up with some extra lies. A kind of sketch takes place with someone new knocking on the door every time Hannah pours herself some tea. She shows everyone around, finds them very charming, shows them all her pictures. One PC stays on her for the rest of the night, talking meatloaf recipes and asking her if she's ever had anything strange happen to her and so on ("One time I swapped baskets at the general store with Mrs. Brock. I didn't even notice until I got to the counter!") Two PCs drive back into town, the engineer goes to the newspaper, the cop back to the PD. The guy who went to the paper is playing up his nerd character who has massive engineering skills and no points in anything social, and was unable to convince Titcomb or anyone else of his credentials. Just then, Elsie bursts in with her write up of the grisly murder, introduces herself, and starts interviewing the PC who can't seem to get a conversation started on his own. She shows him the Innsmouth Gold, which I happen to have a nice prop for. The Player tells everyone that she must be out of info at this point and I look over the huge spread full of clues she would be willing to offer up. Unlike an above poster, my players don't care about her at all so the cop swings by in the car and they leave her behind. Back to the others at Hannah's. Hannah sees the coin. 'Say, where did you get one of those? I have a whole jar of those!' End of session. At the start of the next session, Hannah gets her cookie jar down from the cupboard and finds it very much lighter than she thought. Some PCs distract her with questions about her family photos while another steals the remaining gold. The photographer PC wants to head back to town with the gold, but stops in to charm Hannah once more for good measure. 03. As he leaves she tells the other PCs about her good friend the photographer and shows them some pictures he's taken of Otis that she has had framed. Photographer hits the scrapyard, says he's here to pickup some stuff Otis ordered, flashes the gold. I move Douglas Jenkins over there and he's happy to pull some junk down for the money and talk about what he knows. They drive back to the outskirts area, Jenkins talking about how bad he feels for Mrs. Brock, losing her son and now her husband. Back at the house, one PC catches Otis sneaking in the back to get some things from his room. By the time the photographer is driving back to meet up with the group, he encounters Otis and 2 PCs walking along the road, Otis pulling his wagon of junk. They all follow him to his hideout. The MIBs are tossing their hotel room at this time, but by and large the investigators did not engage with the MIBs whenever they managed to notice them. I think it's a little bit to do with being new and perhaps just considering them to be like cut-scenes in a video game. I tried luring them into a car chase but they didn't bite. I'd also planned for anyone conducting a stakeout in town to provoke the cops and the engineer going to town to draw Elsie's attention ("Hey! Where's my coin?") but since that player couldn't make the last session, his investigator stayed at Hannah's house, and every now and then we'd cut back to him fixing her appliances or something, well out of harm's way. The trio see Otis' house, and his machine, and don't have an engineer to tell them if any of it is real, but they're impressed when it turns on. Hours later, two fall asleep and the third is pulling pranks on them when they notice the bog lights are coming. The noises of the swamp get louder, and then cease. Flares arc out over the clearing. The photographer makes a critical spot hidden and notices not only the gills on Otis but on the things coming out of the reeds, and starts snapping pictures. Watching the moment the penny dropped on them as he shouted to the others that Otis was some kind of "fish boy," the term they'd been using for the baby DO at the circus, was a lot of fun. The cop freaks out and starts shooting. The group kills one hybrid and wounds another before a couple of proper deep ones put them on the ground. Otis is ecstatic with the results of his machine. I can see the value of having him get scared, but it seemed like letting him go with mania was more inconvenient to the players. The hybrids smash the photographer's camera, take the remaining gold away from him, and say threatening things. Then I had a moment not unlike LordAbdul described, of a hybrid conferring with the deep one holding down the cop, then making an unusual hand gesture to him and a little nod as the flares burn out and the monsters all slip away. This makes it very convenient that the damage roll when the cop got hit just happened to be minimum. I knew since it was an Innsmouth campaign that there was a good chance someone was going to have something unusual in their family tree, but I didn't make any decisions up front about the details of that. However, I have been providing them with portraits of the NPCs they meet, and during the Freak Show segment the cop happened to bump into Jacob Marsh very briefly, and when he saw the picture he said "Hey, he looks like me!" And so he does...

I found a few things leafing through this afternoon: (ETA: and then after posting, began looking carefully at Slow Boat to China...) Skills of 100% (p. 60) - "propbabilities" should be "probabilities" Linguistaphone (p. 80) - "languagesof" should be "languages of" (already reported!) The Disintegrator: Game Effects (p. 139) - "The base chase for firing" should be "The base chance for firing" A Slow Boat to China, Overview (p. 205) - "There's no reason at all, if you want a very high level of pulp, for the climax of the scenario to see the ship filled with the walking dead, crazed tcho-tcho, and multiple Mythos monsters attacking the ship." doesn't make sense in context. Maybe it was intended to be "for the climax of the scenario to not see" or "that the climax of the scenario might not see" A Slow Boat to China, Dramatis Personae (p. 213) - "strange events and bodies' start appearing" - remove apostrophe after "bodies" A Slow Boat to China, First Class Passengers (p. 214) - "Chad Peterson's fiancé" should be "fiancée" if Virginia is a woman Stuart "Bunny" Bates, dominated gangster, notes (p. 216, second column) - "the crawling one is drives Bates into paranoid insanity (and he wasn't that sane to begin with)." should be "the crawling one drives Bates into paranoid insanity (and he isn't that sane to begin with)." Delete the first "is" and change "wasn't" to "isn't" to match the tense of the rest of the entry Up the Gangway (p. 217) - 2nd paragraph: Change "fiancé" to "fiancée" Cabin Mates (p. 218) - 3rd paragraph: Change "Pai gow" to "Pai Gow" 5th paragraph: "Wang Mau" should be "Wang Ma" The Empty Suit (p. 218) - 2nd bullet point. Change fiancé" to "fiancée" The Stolen Book (p. 220) - 1st sentence: "Wang Mau" should be "Wang Ma" 1st sentence: "the crawling ones believes" should be "the crawling one believes" 3rd sentence: "Wang Mau" should be "Wang Ma" Looking for Bunny Bates (p. 221) - 2nd paragraph: "he babbles about 'The voice within,'" change "the" to lowercase 3rd paragraph: "Soon thereafter, the crawling is able to..." should be "the crawling one is able to" Honolulu and Beyond (p. 221) - 1st paragraph: "SS President Coolidge" should be in italics. 1st paragraph: "Wang Mau" should be "Wang Ma" 2nd paragraph: "Wang Mu" should be "Wang Ma" 3rd paragraph (page 222): "Wang Mu" should be "Wang Ma" 4th paragraph (page 222): "Wang Mu" should be "Wang Ma" Troublesome Heroes (p. 222) - 1st paragraph: "Senor" should be "Señor" Missing People (p. 222) - Miles Hardaway section: "Senor" should be "Señor" The Tcho-Tcho (p. 226) - Last sentence: "could event become a replacement" should be "could eventually become a replacement" Conclusion (p. 228) - 1st paragraph: "SS President Coolidge" should be in italics. (I don't think I've been completely comprehensive with this section, but I do think it's bedtime. I hope this helps!)