How to bring together weird assortment of investigators

[snitch963]

Hey guys, I am about to start a longer Call of Cthulhu campaign but am struggling with ideas for the first session where all the players will meet and decide to become investigators.

Normally this would not be too difficult but the occupation choices have made a sensible origin quite difficult to come up with.

The player line up is: a soldier, a Yakuza assassin, an occult university professor, a scientist, a zookeepr with an interest in cryptids, and two mediums, one that's legit and one that's a fraud. 

 

If anyone has any potential ideas of how this odd group could join up I'd love to here them cause I'm struggling.

 

[Mike M]

This can be a problem if you did not help to guide the players before they chose occupations - we strongly suggest that you advise the players of the set up for the campaign, helping them - as a group - work out who is who and what their occupations are, so they can more readily form a group. This is also why using an investigator organization is useful (see Investigator Handbook).

In this case, an investigator organization seems like the best approach - what group, club, organization, agency, etc. could all of these characters belong to - to give them a group purpose and unity. Some sort of paranormal investigative group maybe? For those PCs with less of a connection to the paranormal, perhaps in their backstories there are personal reasons why they are involved/interested?

Alternatively - make them unknown to one another, but have circumstance bring them together. Perhaps they are the only survivors of a train wreck? Perhaps they all are having the same dream and that dream brings them together. Perhaps they all see or touched the "thing" and are all cursed and will die unless they work together to end the curse. etc. etc. 

[soltakss]

That's an interesting selection.

Here are some possible ways:

• Have them all making a train journey and be in the same carriage, when something happens.
• Give them a common purpose, but that doesn't always work out well.
• The occult professor and scientist could be investigating the mediums, for different reasons, maybe the soldier, zookeeper, and assassin want to try to speak to the dead, and they all meet in a parlour on the same day
• Having some of them related, or connected in their backstories, might help.

In my experience, getting them together is the easy bit, but finding reasons for them to stick together after the first scenario is harder.

 

 

[jajagappa]

8 hours ago, snitch963 said:

a soldier, a Yakuza assassin, an occult university professor, a scientist, a zookeepr with an interest in cryptids, and two mediums, one that's legit and one that's a fraud. 

A common social club perhaps something modeled on the Theosophical Society.  Perhaps investigating spiritual phenomena.  The soldier may have experienced such in war (e.g. "guardian angel" or spirit that saved him and not others), the assassin (or their victims) has experienced such (e.g. Japanese yokai).

[EricW]

The Yakuza was sent to retrieve a valuable artefact from the occult professor. The rest are there to help identify the artefact.

[svensson]

To the OP: My sympathies. I've had to rodeo a clown car like that more than once and in more than one game system 🤣

OK, a question I think is valid:

- Does the party know about the two 'oddball' characters, the yakuza and con artist medium? That knowledge can alter relationships in more than one angle.

My assessment of party composition is that you have two 'toughs' [soldier and yakuza], three brains [professor, scientist, zookeeper], one arcane [the medium], and a 'talky guy' [the con artist].

Presuming you're setting this in the Classic Twenties, find out if any of the PCs are veterans of the Great War. Perhaps they met in relation to that. The Great War is an aspect of history that many Twenties Keepers tend to forget. It's a GREAT way for people of diverse backgrounds and nationalities to meet. If an American or European male with a CON of 11 or better was an adult in 1917, the odds are VERY good they were drafted into their nation's military. This provides a common experience from which to work. Even if the characters are from different nationalities [perhaps the professor is English and the con artist is French...] they can still meet via military service.... They met in an influenza ward during the great Influenza Outbreak of 1917-20, for just one example.

To take a page from @soltakss suggestion, they could meet aboard a luxury liner. THAT would provide a vehicle [pun very much intended] for everyone to meet... most PC's are paid passengers, the con artist is working the passengers, the medium may be an entertainer [seances etc. were HUGE entertainment in the Radio Era], the yakuza could be the bartender or steward aboard the ship [maybe things got a little hot with the authorities and he had to ship out], etc.

Edited October 27, 2022 by svensson

[Nozbat]

IMO this is always a problem and as above contributors have pointed out can be avoided by discussing with players the proposed interconnectivity of the group (@Mike M) and using clubs, organisations, gangs, organised crime etc but I also feel it takes away the ability of players to create interesting characters that they want to play. There is always a balance between being directive and allowing player self-determination.

As @jajagappa noted being part of a Spiritualist Club might be a good to bring people together. In Europe, after the Great War and because of the huge death toll, there was a growing interest in spiritualism. There were many people offering to contact dead loved ones through seances and groups that rejected the materialism and imperialism of societies by having 'alternative' philosophies about the world. Although I have never researched it, I believe the same thing happened in North America. There was a natural flow of interest in Romantic nationalist thinking and groupings to spiritualism, although IMO they also tended to be racist, white-supremacist, misogynistic and highly into ethnographic-nationalism, so I have always used them with care.

@svensson noted several useful ideas of how players might know each other, specifically through the Great War, where in Europe at least, nearly all the adult males will have had experience of military service. It might have been in the same Battalion. I have had several Officers and their Batmen types which have spawned some great lines:

Officer: Kurt, what is my Spot Hidden?

Kurt: You'll find it on your character sheet on the third column, half way down, Sir.

Officer: Oh, I see. Would you mind rolling it from me? My dice are a bit heavy for me to lift.

On a more serious note, I have often used a crisis to unite disparate groups. At the start of my recent Berlin: The Wicked City, I had the PCs all in the same Café when the Spartikistbund uprising occurred and they were stuck in a Spartikist occupied Café while the FreiKorps tried to dislodge the Spartikists using extreme force. They were captured after the subsequent firefight and accused by the FreiKorps of being KPD sympathisers, particularly when when one of the doctors in the PC group had treated a wounded Spartikist. They were about to be summarily executed when they where incidentally 'rescued' by a Golem sent to save another FreiKorps prisoner. Their motivation to stay together was that the surviving FreiKorps had their IDs and knew where they lived and who they were. They needed to either escape Berlin (unlikely) or solve their problems of imminent execution. Portraying the leader of the FreiKorps, Leutnant von Meyler, as a sociopath helped the PCs decision making, even when some of them politically would have supported the goal of quashing the Spartikistbund uprising.

I agree with @soltakss that getting the PCs to stick together after the initial scenario is difficult and not easy to justify (other than the PCs would like to play a game). I have used favours owed to NPCs, blackmail, PC goals, professional integrity to keep the group going. As long as you can live with whatever internal rationale used to justify the group staying together, there should be no problem.

I hope you succeed and do tell us how you managed it. It would be useful to add it to our own narratives for future reference.