In Which I Attempt to Run Call of Cthulhu
watch out for evil furniture
This has spoilers for the adventure that comes in the back of the main rulebook, but if you're a big enough geek to play obscure role-playing games, you've probably already run that one.
I've forgotten exactly why I decided to run a game of Call of Cthulhu. I hate being in authority, am not a very good actor, and to this date haven't fully grasped the Call of Cthulhu dice mechanic.
It was probably the same reason I put on a costumed LARP and took on the project of editing the Claydonia rules into coherency: somebody had to. I've always wanted to play Call of Cthulhu, and I figured the thing to do was convince some other gamers of how cool it was, so they'd run it next time and I could play.
Being intimidated by my first try at game-mastering, however, I only invited people who'd never played Call of Cthulhu before and who I was fairly sure I could beat in a fight, should we disagree about called target modifiers. I invited my ex-roommate Dyn饼/A>, my then-roommate Spider, and Sarah G, who lived down the hall.
The setup of the story was simple:
There's a house that can't be occupied for long without the occupants going crazy or dying or mysteriously disappearing. (This is not unusual for Call of Cthulhu.) In the basement, hidden behind a fake wall, is the original owner. He is, of course, an evil, dead-but-magically-preserved sorcerer.
The dead guy can make ghostly stuff happen in his old bedroom, he can walk his dead body around, and he can make his magic knife fly around and stab people. The ghostly stuff - rattling windows, moving furniture, making blood drip from the ceiling, chilling the air - takes a lot less energy than moving his body or his knife. The dead guy's usual plan is to convince people that the source of the evil is in that room and not behind the really fake-looking wall in the cellar. If they came down there, he'd have to get up.
Then he scares them away and his body remains undisturbed in the basement until the next buyer comes along. (I think he was slowly gathering energy for some Nefarious Purpose.)
Because I am a horrible GM and also bad at writing one-shots that hang together, it's the adventure right out of the book with the dates moved fifty years forward. It's okay that I'm a horrible GM, though; I picked two people who'd never really role-played and one who only played one-on-one freeform.
Rather than make us all try figure out how they know each other, they were all just grad students at Miskatonic University who share a house. (They were just walking along when they were hit in the head with a big club that said "Plot Device" and when they woke up, they were sharing a house.) The ghost-hunting part was also very Cthulhu ex machina: their landlord offered to waive their rent this month if they could clean the last renters' stuff out of the haunted house he'd just purchased for a song and also make it stop being so
The cosmic horror started early for Dyn饻 her character got the lowest Luck roll and had the toilet back up on her, necessitating a call to the landlord. I forgot that she was, in real life, deathly afraid of plumbing.
It's always good Cthulhu when none of the players has SAN over forty.
So the players, astutely noticing the big sign on the landlord's back that said FOLLOW ME TO THE ADVENTURE!, decided to go clean out the haunted house. I had the landlord say "clean" largely because Miskatonic U or no Miskatonic U, nobody goes up to acquaintances, admits they believe in ghosts, and then asks the acquaintances to destroy a ghost for them.
(In my book, "I believe in ghosts, and there's an evil one here" should usually be followed by, "and so I have hired this priest, Wiccan, pest control technician and G. Gordon Liddy to deal with said ghost.")
Now, judging by their actions later, they weren't playing ultra-cautious Call of Cthulhu PCs just yet. They did a little investigating, but were pretty confused/bored by the library and newspaper research. They wandered out to the dead guy's old church, and weren't terribly bothered by poking around in its burnt-out ruins, even when they fell in a hole and found skeletons in robes, a sinister altar and a book bound in strange-looking leather.
Even when they made the Medicine roll and realized what animal the leather came from. All in a day's work! So they piled into the car, bought buckets and mops and soap, and went to the house.
After they made a quick check of the house, the group went upstairs one by one and each picked a room to start cleaning.
ANNNA: Okay, you climb the stairs and go in the first room. It's dank and moist, yet oddly colder than the rest of the house. There is a dark, thick fluid slowly dripping from a spot on the ceiling. There is a powerful smell of raw iron.
SPIDER: I put a pan under the drip.
Spider got the haunted room and walked over to shut the rattling window, at which point the bed did a great job of smashing her into the wall, but didn't manage to push her out the window. She got to rest downstairs and go through the papers she'd found in the garage while the others moved stuff out of their rooms.
Never one to be left out, Spider, who'd actually put most of her points into academic skills like I suggested, started looking through the dead guy's diaries. She got a really good roll (and okay, I was bored) and learned the spell contained therein. I said that he'd titled the spell "Bring Forth the Space Ape," but that didn't stop her. Bring on the space apes!
Her character went outside the house and started casting the spell on the driveway. They'd set up a kind of garage sale on the driveway, basically just a big "FREE" sign and anything they didn't want to keep or clean, so bargain hunters were stopping and looking and losing Sanity as a hideous, rugose THING materialized from nowhere.
It was, of course, a dimensional shambler, which I described as "what it would look like if an orangutan, except about five times bigger, skinned your old fat uncle Frank and put on his skin. And also it's orange." Thank goodness I actually had a picture to show them.
Spider had incredible SAN luck all game, losing the absolute minimum Sanity on each roll (and I never learned to make my rolls out of the players' sight). After goggling at the shambler, then realizing it wasn't going to kill her, she ordered it to move all the furniture out of the ghost room for her. Its job done, the shambler waved and vanished. None of the other PCs saw this.
As a group, they cleaned most of the house and adamantly refused to go into the basement and attic. Whenever the cursed but now empty and defenseless room made noise, Spider swore at it.
Never has housecleaning been roleplayed so zealously. I actually had to appease the players by making rolls; "[clatter] Yup, you clean the fridge out. It smells okay now." Whenever I mentioned that it was getting at all dark, they all said as one:
"WE GO HOME AND WAIT FOR DAYBREAK."
I don't know how I was getting the atmosphere of eldritch spookiness across, exactly; not much scary actually happened.
The fleeing family left a rotting casserole in a big dish on the kitchen table, lid closed. I described it as being "oh, about yay big (sketch size of human head with hands)" and very, very smelly. None of the players wanted to open the lid, so they ended up opening all the windows and putting the casserole in the garbage.
SARAH G: I'll put the..."stew" in the garbage.
DYNÉ…: It's stew. It's stew. It's gotta be stew.
SPIDER: I'm not looking at it. I'm standing over here.
Then they went into the basement. The dead guy's floating knife flew across the room -
At that point, Spider decided that they should call the landlord for whom they were cleaning the house. He agreed that they did a good job on the cleaning, but he was a bit frightened when they showed him the creepy knife, the room that dripped blood and the rattling window.
They showed him how most of the basement walls were stone, except one which was wood. And how the blueprints said that the basement was meant to be all stone, and larger. And that there was a weird, fruity smell coming from that room. The landlord, keeping to my theory of realistic NPC motivation, made his excuses and got the hell out of there.
After a little discussion, the characters were breaking down walls to get to the guy's hiding place. They had a little argument over who got the big axe, who got the shiny axe, and who got the crowbar, but that was settled amicably.
Behind the wall they found a kinda big room, cobwebbed and musty and with a shriveled-up dead guy on a pallet in the back. Next to the bed was a table with interesting-looking papers with symbols all over them.
Spider and Sarah G were looking at the papers, backs to the dead guy. Among Dyn饦#39;s chief virtues is that she is amazingly easy to scare. She was huddled up in her chair, careful not to let her feet hang down, and her character was cowering and cringing without any prompting from me.
The dead guy, of course, got up and started to walk towards the people who were ignoring him. At this very instant, our pal Kit opened the door to the room in which we were playing and yelled a cheery "Hello!"
Everyone (except me) jumped. I took that as a compliment.
Anyway, Spider made her Sanity roll and ran like hell from the dead guy. Sarah G hit him with her crowbar, then failed her roll while the dead guy worked on his spell to give himself magical body armor.
Spider ran into the regular half of the basement and summoned another dimensional shambler, this time with a magic knife so it cost even less Sanity. Dyné¥ continued to cower. The dead guy worked on magically hypnotizing Sarah G, who was bit of a pushover at the moment. She had been feeling the effects of losing Sanity for the floating knife, and was now busy losing the maximum amount of Sanity for the walking dead guy, the spell across the room, and the shambler that promptly showed up.
She should have gotten a Long Temporary Insanity, but I hadn't planned on anyone rolling that badly and hadn't told the players much about the Sanity rules. So I rolled a die behind my screen (hooray for remembering!) and declared that she could think about the bunnies for a few combat rounds.
Also rolling poorly, the dead guy didn't get his magic armor to show up before Spider chopped his arm off with her fire axe at the same moment the shambler whacked his head off. Coming out of her paralysis as it rolled towards her, Dyné¥ hit the head with a hatchet with a roll of 01. Sploosh. The shambler, apparently from a dimension where contractors take their work seriously, continued to claw at the body until it disintegrated, which happened to be just as Spider swung at it, so her shiny new axe got stuck in the wall. The shambler waved goodbye, its task done, and Sarah G came out of her stupor in time to say hooray for the space ape.
(I should mention that I didn't ever tell them that it was a dimensional shambler, just a space ape.)
After the body disappeared, Sarah G ran upstairs and checked the ceiling. It wasn't bleeding! They all cheered, and the people who'd wandered into the room with us in the last ten minutes were really confused. Space ape? The ceiling wasn't bleeding?
Dyné¥ decided to help, and cheerfully piped, by way of explanation,
"I found a book made out of human skin!"
The landlord came back just as they were cleaning (back to the cleaning!) the last gunk out of the basement. Spider found a mysterious pendant in the guy's ashes, which she picked up with a stick and put in a Baggie (GM note: Dammit). He told them they did a good job and said they didn't have to pay the next two months' rent. Hooray!
As Spider watched him leave, she noticed he had been accompanied by a Catholic priest with a duffel bag who was looking pretty darn relieved.
All in all, the game went okay. From the number of times I mentioned her name, you wouldn't have trouble guessing who showed most of the initiative. (The other characters tended to do a lot of mililng around.) On my side, I have to remember to just ask people "Where are you?" instead of "Are you alone in the room? Right in front of the open window, with the violently-shaking bed behind you?" or "So you all have your backs to the supposedly-dead guy, who's like two feet away, right?" Again, luckily, only Spider picked up on it.
"It was like my character had ESP!" she said, ever one to look on the bright side.
It went pretty well, nothing like the second time I tried to run Call of Cthulhu. The scene that stands out in my mind from that debacle are the occultist character trying to use a taser on an invisible, angry Mythos monster, while the rest of the characters were busy accidentally setting fire to a sleeping hobo.
Coincidentally, that was also the last time I ran Call of Cthulhu.