Cult Scene Investigations: R'lyeh

[The_Black_Cat]

Paranormal Investigations
I've always loved horror gaming. I love the idea of regular people trying to stop unthinkable horrors, I love how you're never safe from danger and it's possible - likely even, that your character will die in forgettable, unspectacular death after just a few sessions. And lastly, I just like scaring the heck out of people.
I'll admit I'm not the best person to run horror. My group can role-play, but they're used to getting away with unbelievably silly things and they routinely survive things they really, really shouldn’t. This probably has something to do with the fact that they usually play D&D. Furthermore, I’m a very lenient GM, but I’m trying to curb my bad habits, like letting my players get away with all sorts of things and giving them too much information, a lot of which they shouldn’t know.

With that out of the way, I’m going to be using the Crimes People Play rules and throwing various creatures and entities from the Cthulhu Mythos, Fear Itself and lots of other sources at the players, including many of my own invention. Crimes People Play is very rules light and lets you craft almost any character you want extremely quickly. It speeds up play and lets us stay focus on the story instead of the numbers, which is great. It’s also free, which is an awesome plus.

The rules can be found here:


Haunted Attic


Player Characters
I’ve put the first letter of the player in control of the character in brackets. I have four players, D, N, C and R. R’s also tried his hand at running the game, so I’ve got a few characters as well. The second pair of brackets indicates the character archetype chosen by each player.

Keagan Fox (N) (Fast-Talking Reporter)
Keagan is a crime reporter raised Los Angeles. He is very intelligent and charismatic. He spent a few years reporting on warfare with the army and has acquired a decent amount of combat training. He knew Iris Periwinkle and Dr. Wilson before the campaign started.

Wilson Born (N) (Inquiring Doctor)
Wilson is a doctor at the Solace Hospital. He lives nearby with his grandfather, who he cares for very much. His grandfather is in his eighties and is a war veteran. Wilson joined the army as well for a short while before realizing it wasn’t his calling and returning to medical school, which he originally left to spite his tyrannical parents. He and Keagan know each other from the army.

Horace Cooke (T.B.C) (Stage Magician Custom Archetype)
Horace is a retired stage magician in his early sixties. He has two children, Eric and Stacey, and is divorced. He was married for ten years and has been divorced for twenty, but he still finds himself waking up in the morning expecting coffee to be made downstairs or referring to Margaret as his wife by mistake. He lives in a small apartment, hiding from reality and reliving his glory days.

Michel Beaubien (D) (International Spy)
Michel is a French Canadian police officer that moved to the U.S to escape from his old life. His partner came along with him. He was a well-respected officer when his life was ruined by the brutal murder of his wife and infant son. Since then, he hasn’t been the same man. He’s itching for a fight and throws himself into danger at a moment’s notice, hoping that he’ll eventually make up for the fact that he wasn’t home when a psycho came knocking. His family’s killer was never found. Also, he has a grudge against reporters, for some reason or other.

Cyrus Kane (R) (I haven’t the foggiest)
Cyrus is the perfect pawn. Smart, good with a gun and unquestioningly loyal, Cyrus quickly climbed the ranks of the CIA and became one of their highest ranking field agents. When faced with a suicide mission or a lose-lose scenario, Agent Kane is the man that’ll turn the tables.

Moriarty (R) (Hard-Boiled P.I)
Moriarty is a P.I who left the police in order to pursue justice on his own. He comes from Chicago and lives on his own, tackling whatever crime comes his way. He’s an excellent investigator and would probably be a high-ranking detective by now had he remained with the police. They call him in because of his skill, but there’s no love lost between Moriarty and the police.

Guy Tremblay (C) (Odd Foreigner)
A Quebec-born cop with a negligible understanding of the law and more bravery than brains, Guy gets things done with gratuitous explosions, flying fists and hails of gunfire. He tries to do the right thing, and doesn’t let pesky things like law enforcement or the laws of physics get in his way.
That’s the roster of characters so far. I’m not using a sanity mechanic yet, because my players have always hated numerical sanity mechanics and I’ve been brainstorming some other sanity mechanics, which I’ll incorporate soon enough.
I’ll post the beginning of the campaign soon enough.

 

[The_Black_Cat]

GM Notes:
The first session went really, really well. The players didn't even know it was going to be horror before they arrived, we had a small group (three players plus me, the GM), I had done a lot of prep work, and it went fantastically. I managed to scare one player quite a bit and ended the session spectacularly. One of the session I'm most proud of.
Episode One: Never Suicide
Part I: The Scene of the Crime
Moriarty was walking into the apartment complex when he heard it. The sound of a car veering into the parking lot (no doubt breaking the speed limit by a fair bit) accompanied by... some sort of music. It was some kind of rock, but the words all sounded like gibberish.
''Je le sais ben que t'as eu de la misère!''
Spinning around he saw that the vehicle in question was a police car. Two officers sat inside, both tall, powerfully built men in their late twenties.
''T'as tout fait ce qu'y était possible de faire!''
The car screeched to a halt, crookedly parked in a handicapped parking space, the only one left available.
''Tu t'proteges, t'as les yeux comme des pierres!''
The music stopped. The police officers stepped out of the car, speaking to each other in some language he didn't understand. Noticing him, the second one - the one that wasn't driving - waved.
''Hello!'' He exclaimed cheerfully, the way someone would greet a friend. He had an accent, that sounded Canadian, but just a little... off. And then it hit him. They were French Canadians. He was going to be working with two colossal idiots, and they couldn't even properly communicate with him. It was days like these that made him which he'd ditched the Sherlock Holmes routine and become a fisherman.
''Excuse me sir'' said Moriarty ''You're aware that you were just speeding, parked in a handicapped parking space, didn't park properly and have a broken tail-light and only have half a lisence plate?''
The men stared at him blankly.
''We are police, no?'' replied the same man who had greeted him. ''We don't follow the law. We are the law!''
It was Moriarty's turn to stare blankly.
''F-follow me.'' He said dejectedly ''The corpse is up on the sixth floor''.
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The deceased was Dennis Baldwin, a young college student who had drowned in his bathroom. The official story was suicide, but the local cops weren't so sure. The man was found on the floor of his bathroom, the apartment door and windows locked from the inside. However, the bathroom contained signs of a struggle. Shampoo bottles, cleaning products, rolls of toilet paper and other bathroom products had been flung about and there was water everywhere. The walls, floors and ceiling were soaked.
Searching the apartment revealed all sorts of interesting things. The defunct had a secret library full of books on the occult, especially water-related entities. Furthermore, his brother had drowned a year earlier, having fallen out of a yacht.
In the office, a calendar had a multitude of dates and locations circled, and a good deal of hacking brought up a slew of MSN conversations with two of his friends, Alan Lars and Humphrey Trent, all written in a strange code that could only be cracked using a bible as reference. They didn't understand all of it, but from what they could tell, two things that came up pretty often were the meetings on the calendar and guilt about what had hapenned on the yacht where Dennis died. Apparently these three had been there too.
____________________________________________________________
Later.
''I'm telling you, he killed his brother!'' Exclaimed Michel.
''We have no evidence to support that whatsoever. Guilt is a common reaction to the death of a loved one.''
''What about his friends, then? Whey are they so freaked out about it. They barely even knew the guy''
Moriarty ignored the statement.
''We'll figure that out later, for now, I think we should call Trent and Lars in for a little chat. See what they spend their saturdays doing. For all we know they're part of some kind of cult.
''Alright'' said Guy. ''While you do that, we're going to check out the local police's reports on both of the drownings. See if we can get something that ties in with what we found here, something that'll earn us a warrant.''
''Sure, sounds great'' replied Moriarty, eager to get the pesky frenchmen out of his way and get some real work done.
____________________________________________________________
Michel flicked the car into reverse. ''We're just going to break into their houses, aren't we?''
''Did you even need to ask?'' snapped Guy.
''Just checking'' chuckled the older of the two cops, driving his foot into the gas pedal.
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Coming up Next: Part II: Breaking and Entering
Sorry about the lack of action in this segment. The players spent the beginning of this session being good little investigators and researching stuff. Part II should have some honest to goodness paranormal activity and more action, and the conclusion of the scenario was quite dramatic and action packed and whatnot (and the next sessions are faster paced as well).
Feel free to tell me what you think, I really appreciate it. Also, if you have horror scenarios to reccomend, tell me about them, I'm always looking for material to work with and I'll probably run them or incorporate aspects of them into another scenario of my own design.

 

[The_Black_Cat]

Episode I: Never Suicide

Part II: Breaking and Entering


The officers arrived at Alan Lars' house near lunch. It was a shabby and old suburban home with a single floor. Making their way to the front door, they silently picked the lock and stepped into the house. The building was in every way ordinary, it seemed to radiate plain-ness. The walls were painted in soft creams, paintings of flowers hung on the walls. Michel and Guy made their way into the bedroom. A Queen bed lay in the center of the room, along with a cheap Wal-Mart bookcase on the left wall and a set of california closets. Nothing seemed out of place. Everything was perfectly classefied and clean, order reigned in the room.

The investigators proceeded to turn the room topside-down. After a few minutes of rigorous searching, they discovered that Alan's room, much like that of Dennis, had a secret compartment full of books on (you guessed it) aquatic supernatural phenomena.

''Hey, Michel, I think I found something over here'' exclaimed Guy, gesturing to Alan's desk, a fine wooden desk that didn't fit in with the room's boring demeanor. ''What is it?'' replied Michel, disinterested. His partner had a predilection for misinterpreting clues (often in ways that led to local bars).
I think this bi-

A frying pan to the back of the head broke Guy's train of thought. Standing over the cop, who had been knocked to the ground, was a tall woman with average features and shoulder length hair with a sharp red hue. Guy lay there, too hurt and surprised to react. The frying pan came down another few times before Michel could intervene.

''Ma'm, calm down!'' he yelled.

Guy's assailant stopped striking, but didn't lower her kitchen implement.

Michel pulled out his badge. ''My name's Michel Beaubien. I'm a police officer. We believe your - he glanced at her hand, which had an engagement ring on it - fiancée is in grave danger.''

She lowered her weapon. ''Sorry. I was just scared. Alan's friend died the other day, and, well, I thought you two might have been the killers.''

''Don't worry about it. It's completely understandable. For you and Alan's protection, though, I think it'd be best if we kept this visit between the three of us.''

Getting to his feet, Guy asked the woman ''Wait just a minute, Miss. How exactly did you know about the death of Mr. Baldwin. He was killed early last night, there hasn't even been an official statement on the death yet.''

''Please, call me Amber. Allen found an article about De-'' she paused for a second '' About what happened. in the local paper. If you need my help for anything else, just let me know.''

Michel shook his head. ''Thanks you, Amber, you've helped us a great deal. I think we're pretty much done here.'' He shot Guy a glance, and the man pocketed Alan's copy of the bible.

They left the building, declining coffee and sandwiches, and drove off to their next victim's house.

''You, you're good, you.'' said Guy thankfully. ''You're very, very good, you''

Michel didn't answer. His eyes were on the bible in front of him, and his mind was somewhere else entirely, perhaps wondering what it would be like to have a family, to walk home and find people happy just to see you go through the door.

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Alright, so not much of anything happened in this update. I'll try and get another one up tonight.

Coming up Next: Part III: Intruder Alert