Call of Cthulhu, Greyhound style

[kipling]

I want to do a CoC campaign where Mythos elements underlie it but early on they come in only every few sessions. When I was thinking about it, I kept referring to the "American Gothic" sequence in Swamp Thing lo these many years ago, and that triggered something for me.

I think it'll be neat to have the entire thing be a physical journey as well as a metaphysical journey. I want the PCs to be on a cross-country Greyhound bus trip, and every stop takes them a bit further into the madness.

The implication is that they have some kind of financial need to be taking the bus, so the extremely sensible idea of getting off and quitting is less likely to happen. (Not impossible...I'll have to work around that; the party still needs to have a reason to keep together besides impecunity.)

Part of the fun is that this is going to stop in all sorts of little towns along the way. Winchester house? I can go to an analogue of it. Ghosts? Sure. Bunch of ghouls actually working in a slaughterhouse? Sure, maybe they need to take the bus early one morning. (Well, it's a little trickier getting them onto a Greyhound, but you know what I mean; the composition of the bus passengers will change, and most adventures will take place at the stops.)

Getting there should be half the fun; once they arrive in the destination city, they then have the choice of facing the actual foe, whatever it is.

Comments? Suggestions? Ideas?

 

[Tom Cashel]

That's a neat idea!

My suggestion is that the Investigators be following the trail of an insane cult leader who took the same bus route to the destination. They could pick up clues about him on the way, and sometimes get embroiled in the non-Mythos tales as well. They'd be walking in his tracks, as it were.

You should have at least one scenario take place entirely on the bus. Not sure how you'd do this and keep it interesting, but if a mysterious stranger gets on the bus in the middle of nowhere...

 

[Tom Cashel]

...and then the bus passes into a strange pea-soup fog that has no apparent end...

Ooh, you could have sleeping Investigators pass into the Dreamlands, where they meet the dreaming aspect of the Stranger. The Dreamlands would be the way to pad out that All-Bus scenario, all right.

 

[kipling]

That's a neat idea!

My suggestion is that the Investigators be following the trail of an insane cult leader who took the same bus route to the destination. They could pick up clues about him on the way, and sometimes get embroiled in the non-Mythos tales as well. They'd be walking in his tracks, as it were.

Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way. Private investigators, perhaps paid to work with a psychic. The cult leader has taken someone's child, and one group takes the bus while another group (NPCs) has been sent ahead by plane. When they arrive at the destination city, they discover that the other group has all been killed.

You should have at least one scenario take place entirely on the bus. Not sure how you'd do this and keep it interesting, but if a mysterious stranger gets on the bus in the middle of nowhere...

Right, this is a variation on the ghouls-meatpacking plant thing I was noodling with. Or I can think of two other ways to go about it.

One is that they end up having a Mythos tome right there on the bus; they find it somehow. And the adventure is about the effects that tome has on the bus ride.

Another, more difficult to do but very HPL, is to have someone on the bus talk to them, and at the end of it the information all comes together for something horrible (and the concomitant Sanity loss). You could even vary that by having secondary characters for them to role-play out the flashback. (My players would go along with either, so long as the story is interesting.)

Or you do something like Romeo and Juliet on the bus, where the two families, both alike in dignity, are hillbillies and have been both forced to sit on the same bus, and then the intervention of the PCs uncovers the relationship between the kids. Of course, this being CoC, one of the families is degenerate and the other consists of people with the Innsmouth look or something.

Thanks for the ideas.

 

[Tom Cashel]

CoC is probably my favorite RPG of all time. Glad to be of help!

Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way. Private investigators, perhaps paid to work with a psychic.

There you go...the psychic follows the trail, and is drawn toward any nexus of emotional energies along the way. Sometimes the psychic discovers things related to the cultist, and other times red herrings--supernatural ones, but red herrings nonetheless. Then you get to have all your meatpacking ghosts.

(By the way, not sure if you read comics, but you might want to track down a recent Dark Horse comic called B.P.R.D. (the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense--Ghost Train. Nice treatment of ghosts riding the rails, trying to finish what they started.)

 

[kipling]

There you go...the psychic follows the trail, and is drawn toward any nexus of emotional energies along the way. Sometimes the psychic discovers things related to the cultist, and other times red herrings--supernatural ones, but red herrings nonetheless. Then you get to have all your meatpacking ghosts.

Right. Don't know if one of the PCs will want to be psychic or not. We'll do a variation where the police aren't allowed to look--she's an adult, and estranged from her father, so they don't want to look. The B-Team (for bus) gets to track with the psychic; occasional reports from the A-Team will keep them on the strangeness path even when nothing overtly weird is happening locally.

Have to figure out what my hook is for the first adventure.

(By the way, not sure if you read comics, but you might want to track down a recent Dark Horse comic called B.P.R.D. (the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense--Ghost Train. Nice treatment of ghosts riding the rails, trying to finish what they started.)

I'll keep an eye out for it. Thanks.

 

[Tom Cashel]

Don't know if one of the PCs will want to be psychic or not.

I'd suggest making the psychic an NPC. First, contact with Mythos beings can crush a sensitive's sanity pretty quick (as pointed out by Daniel Harms on shoggoth.net). Second, you have a whole new kind of tension building through the campaign if the PCs are wondering if their "guide" is becoming completely unhinged. As an NPC you have the option of playing the psychic as a little "off" as events transpire, and you can watch the PCs squirm.

 

[Wraith Form]

One is that they end up having a Mythos tome right there on the bus; they find it somehow.

Just a little something to remember: this is the 21st century. We live in the age of PDFs and DVD/digital video recordings. You could have someone find a laptop or digital video camera that contains the same essential contents as "an ancient tome" would. Once they boot up that laptop, they could find a "tome" on CD-R (or several on a 40 - 200 GB hard drive). If they play the last video back, it could show a cult ritual (in all it's bloody, visceral horror) complete with a summoning of a Friendly Neighborhood Tentacled Thing...captured right there to witness!

I understand that dusty books add a certain "nostalgic" flavor to CoC scenarios, but don't you think smart cultists would preserve those expensive, precious, ultra-rare, can-only-be-found-in-museums tomes on a portable hard drive (maybe a USB-connectable keychain style mini-HDD?!?) than flammable old paper?

I like the direction of this thread, so that's why I'm trying to contribute in a small way!

 

[Tom Cashel]

If they play the last video back, it could show a cult ritual (in all it's bloody, visceral horror) complete with a summoning of a Friendly Neighborhood Tentacled Thing...captured right there to witness!

Good notion! Except on video, the Thing should be all blurred out and distorted. If the Investigators have a video tech among them, they might discover that it's not a data flaw...it happened during the recording...(lose 1/1d2 SAN).

 

[kipling]

Good notion! Except on video, the Thing should be all blurred out and distorted. If the Investigators have a video tech among them, they might discover that it's not a data flaw...it happened during the recording...(lose 1/1d2 SAN).

And I rather like the idea that unless your laptop is specially prepared (in some way that the PCs don't have access to), that PDF of the Necronomicon gradually distorts data on your hard drive.

And your screen saver becomes, well, hypnotic and ultimately disturbing.

And the modem connects to realms you might not want to know about. (I wonder what the cyber equivalent of Caelano or Caracasus is?)

The MPEG file over there is the ritual that must be done ten thousand times, and all it does is suck some magic points or attributes from the person running the laptop each time. (Or it's a ritual that needs to be done a million times, which is why it's a startup item on a thousand laptops scattered throughout the country...)

I had in mind a couple of more modern "tomes" including a bootleg music demo by a band called Wolves of Nethardiri which seems to have voices in the background, and the mroe you listen to it, the closer they become to intelligible, without ever quite getting there.

It's on the walkman that one of the people on the bus is listening to. On a tape loop. She's to the point where she thinks she understands what they're saying.

Also thinking of what I can do with the urban legend of snakes crawling up into the engine block to stay warm during the ride, then coming down when they arrive somewhere....