There were only three of us at our session today (real life getting in the way for the others), so we played some Cthulhu Dark There was one player, and me, who had played this system before, but it's not a hard system to introduce a new player to! PC build is name, occcuation, description. So it only takes a few minutes.
I had watched the horror film The Woman in Black on TV last night and so wanted to play a c 1900 Victorian Cthulhu rather than the canonical between-the-wars America that we had done last time. The two players were happy with this, and so as PCs we had Edward Appleby, a butler in the service of the 7th Earl of Norland and a proper English gentleman; and Randal Stone, an American journalist working for a radical newspaper in Chicago, in London to report on the fate and future of the British Empire.
I started by asking the player of Appleby what he was doing in London - his answer was that he was there to hand the documents over to the lawyers, given his master the Earl's mysterious absence. This started a plot thread about the need to obtain a power of attorney from the Earl's trustees - missing from the documents handed over - which took the loyal butler to the well-appointed apartments of Willoughby Smythe, who - it turned out through subequent play - was the Earl's principal guardian with the capacity to execute a power in favour of Mr Jerome the Earl's solicitor.
When I asked Randal's player whether he was likely to be having a meeting at a Mechanics Institute or a gentlemen's club he opted for the latter, and so we played through his meeting with Sir Ronald Livingstone (distantly related to the famous Livingstone of Africa), who revealed an interest in using colonial labour and expansion in East Africa while cultivating markets in America as a way to respond to industrial strife in England. Sir Ronald was called away suddenly, but arranged for Randal to call upon him at his apartments later that evening - which he did, but after taking brandy on his own in the drawing room and waiting for much longer than he had anticipated he smelled smoke, and realised the house was on fire. Running out what seemed to be the safest way, he found himself in Livingstone's first-floor study where Sir Ronald was slumped dead at his desk. A quick look at the books and papers revealed some financial information and what seemed to be a detailed hand-drawn topographic map: he took the latter and jumped out the window (breaking his leg in the process, due to a poor roll, and so he was in a plaster cast and dependant on crutches or a wheelchair for the rest of the session).
At Smythe's apartments, the butler Percy Granville - a friend of Appleby's - had been showing him a novel device for obtaining ultra-clean silverware, involving a combination of galvinism and chemistry. (And later on it came out that this process did generate wear on the silverware, but - said Granville - that was worth it for the quality of the polish.) Granville had explained how important it was to preserve the cleaning solution after use - it was stored in cannisters - and when a fire broke out next door (ie as per the previous paragraph) Appleby helped him carry the cannisters to safety in the rear courtyard - where Appleby first spilled a small amount of fluid down a grate (mediocre roll) and then, seeing Randal and the apparently dead Livingstone through the window before Randal then jumped out, failing the fist SAN check for the session and spilling the rest of that particular lot of fluid onto Randal.
As Appleby was screaming out "Thief! Murderer!" in shock at what he'd seen, and as Randal was lying on the ground in pain, Granville took charge and bundled them all onto a cart to get taken to the clinic of Dr Armand, who also - it turned out - had a useful storage room in the basement of his clinic with a gate directly onto the Thames. Armand operated on Randal, who had a strange dream while under the effect of the ether - of animal howling and something biting on his leg - which triggered that player's first SAN check.
From there, matters unfolded on increasingly intertwined paths. The cannisters were taken to a Baltic-registered vessel - The Pride of Bohemia - due to steam through Gibraltar and the Canal to Mombasa. But Randal's clothes, including the coat in which he had hidden the map, were also bundled up with them - Appleby was puzzled by this obsessive desire to preserve the spilled fluid; Randal just wanted his map. The two PCs crossed paths several times: both ended up on The Pride dealing with Smythe (Randal about his coat; Appleby about the power of attorney); and ultimately back at Armand's clinic, where it turned out that the Earl had been taken when it was decided that the basement of Smythe's apartment was no longer a suitable place for him - something had dripped down into the basement and burned his face.
On the way through all this, it became clear that the Earl (similarly to Livingstone) had business assets in Bohemia and East Africa as well as Britain; that Smythe's files for managing the Earl's estate also included a copy of the map taken from Livingstone's study; and that the "map" was actually not a map at all, but rather a very detailed phrenological study of the skull of a hyena. And a phrenological study of the Earl, in Armand's files and inspected by Randal, showed very much the same patterns (trigger SAN check!).
Appleby's player kept including his sanity die in his action resolution checks, which was producing successes but was also causing him to lose sanity as his nerves became more and more frayed (and in a sub-plot he became increasingly addicted to a laudunum-based "nerve tonic) - by the repeated encounters with "the thief" Randal Stone; by dreams of his master screaming, and ultimately by finding the Earl in a straitjacket in the basement of Armand's clinic. His last failed SAN check took him to 6 on his sanity die, incurable insanity - and as an orderly and Armand subdued him and injected him with morphine to sedate him, the Earl escaped by jumping into the river.
Appleby's player took over Armand at this point, as things were coming to a head and the session was reaching its end. In the next morning's papers Randal read that a fire had burned down Smythe's apartments also, killing an NPC clerk with whom the PCs had dealt on board The Pride; and that two dead bodies had been found on the south side of the river, their throats torn out. This was the last failed SAN check for this character, who therefore finished with a 4 on the insanity die. Armand succeeded in finding the Earl around dawn, exhausted and sleeping in a stable near the docks. He took him back to the clinic - and when Smythe told him that the Earl was the killer, he contrived to call the police rather than help Smythe smuggle the Earl onto The Pride, and to persuade the crew members of The Pride who had come to collect him that they didn't want him on board.
In the end, as these checks succeeded and so Smythe's plans seemed to be foiled, I narrated his own nervous collapse, and so in the end three persons were taken to a sanitorium in the south of France operated by a colleague of Armand's: Appleby, Smythe and the Earl. The story going round was that the Earl had brought a tropical disease with him from Africa, which had also infected his loyal manservant and his trustee Smythe. And Randal got to write up his story about the collapse of, and the dangers of, this particular colonial venture.
**************************
There were details in the events that I've skipped over - interactions with the police (and the resulting bad relationship between Randal Stone and Inspector LeStrange); the carriage house The Forlorn Trap which was a repeated focus for happenings south of the river; and Appleby's fears of unemployment should his master's estate go broke - but the above has set out the basics.
Randal's player had picked were-hyenas as the crux of the plot maybe an hour or so out from the finish, and had drawn the link to Central European werewolves. This was probably an hour or so after I had settled on were-hyenas as the central element of the mystery. At the start I had been hoping that things might move north to the moors around the Earl's estate so I could deploy some ideas and imagery from The Woman in Black, but it didn't play out that way. And ideas about deep ones in the sewers or the river didn't get used either, in the end. The one thing the players didn't pick up on until I pointed it out was the connection between the galvanic cleaning process and were-creatures, namely, that it dissolved highly civilised silver into the fluid, making it sovereign against such creatures. So whereas the players - especially Randal's - were envisaging the conspiracy as being to create were-creatures, I was envisaging it as a conspiracy to tame them.
What never got established was what caused the fires - the papers reported that the gas infrastructure was suspected and being investgiated - and what killed Livingstone. I put thss down to being the sort of loose end that can be left dangling when the mystery and its solution is generated during the course of play.
Cthulhu Dark is the "litest" system my group has played - the next-litest is Prince Valiant. As we've deployed it, it generates enough decision points with unpredictable outcomes to generate a relatively satisfying horror mystery over the course of three-and-a-half hour's play (or thereabouts). And on this occasion the heroes won, although one was permanently insane and neither Armand nor Randal Stone was sleeping all that easily, the former suspecting and the latter knowing the truth about the Earl's "psychiatric" condition.
I had watched the horror film The Woman in Black on TV last night and so wanted to play a c 1900 Victorian Cthulhu rather than the canonical between-the-wars America that we had done last time. The two players were happy with this, and so as PCs we had Edward Appleby, a butler in the service of the 7th Earl of Norland and a proper English gentleman; and Randal Stone, an American journalist working for a radical newspaper in Chicago, in London to report on the fate and future of the British Empire.
I started by asking the player of Appleby what he was doing in London - his answer was that he was there to hand the documents over to the lawyers, given his master the Earl's mysterious absence. This started a plot thread about the need to obtain a power of attorney from the Earl's trustees - missing from the documents handed over - which took the loyal butler to the well-appointed apartments of Willoughby Smythe, who - it turned out through subequent play - was the Earl's principal guardian with the capacity to execute a power in favour of Mr Jerome the Earl's solicitor.
When I asked Randal's player whether he was likely to be having a meeting at a Mechanics Institute or a gentlemen's club he opted for the latter, and so we played through his meeting with Sir Ronald Livingstone (distantly related to the famous Livingstone of Africa), who revealed an interest in using colonial labour and expansion in East Africa while cultivating markets in America as a way to respond to industrial strife in England. Sir Ronald was called away suddenly, but arranged for Randal to call upon him at his apartments later that evening - which he did, but after taking brandy on his own in the drawing room and waiting for much longer than he had anticipated he smelled smoke, and realised the house was on fire. Running out what seemed to be the safest way, he found himself in Livingstone's first-floor study where Sir Ronald was slumped dead at his desk. A quick look at the books and papers revealed some financial information and what seemed to be a detailed hand-drawn topographic map: he took the latter and jumped out the window (breaking his leg in the process, due to a poor roll, and so he was in a plaster cast and dependant on crutches or a wheelchair for the rest of the session).
At Smythe's apartments, the butler Percy Granville - a friend of Appleby's - had been showing him a novel device for obtaining ultra-clean silverware, involving a combination of galvinism and chemistry. (And later on it came out that this process did generate wear on the silverware, but - said Granville - that was worth it for the quality of the polish.) Granville had explained how important it was to preserve the cleaning solution after use - it was stored in cannisters - and when a fire broke out next door (ie as per the previous paragraph) Appleby helped him carry the cannisters to safety in the rear courtyard - where Appleby first spilled a small amount of fluid down a grate (mediocre roll) and then, seeing Randal and the apparently dead Livingstone through the window before Randal then jumped out, failing the fist SAN check for the session and spilling the rest of that particular lot of fluid onto Randal.
As Appleby was screaming out "Thief! Murderer!" in shock at what he'd seen, and as Randal was lying on the ground in pain, Granville took charge and bundled them all onto a cart to get taken to the clinic of Dr Armand, who also - it turned out - had a useful storage room in the basement of his clinic with a gate directly onto the Thames. Armand operated on Randal, who had a strange dream while under the effect of the ether - of animal howling and something biting on his leg - which triggered that player's first SAN check.
From there, matters unfolded on increasingly intertwined paths. The cannisters were taken to a Baltic-registered vessel - The Pride of Bohemia - due to steam through Gibraltar and the Canal to Mombasa. But Randal's clothes, including the coat in which he had hidden the map, were also bundled up with them - Appleby was puzzled by this obsessive desire to preserve the spilled fluid; Randal just wanted his map. The two PCs crossed paths several times: both ended up on The Pride dealing with Smythe (Randal about his coat; Appleby about the power of attorney); and ultimately back at Armand's clinic, where it turned out that the Earl had been taken when it was decided that the basement of Smythe's apartment was no longer a suitable place for him - something had dripped down into the basement and burned his face.
On the way through all this, it became clear that the Earl (similarly to Livingstone) had business assets in Bohemia and East Africa as well as Britain; that Smythe's files for managing the Earl's estate also included a copy of the map taken from Livingstone's study; and that the "map" was actually not a map at all, but rather a very detailed phrenological study of the skull of a hyena. And a phrenological study of the Earl, in Armand's files and inspected by Randal, showed very much the same patterns (trigger SAN check!).
Appleby's player kept including his sanity die in his action resolution checks, which was producing successes but was also causing him to lose sanity as his nerves became more and more frayed (and in a sub-plot he became increasingly addicted to a laudunum-based "nerve tonic) - by the repeated encounters with "the thief" Randal Stone; by dreams of his master screaming, and ultimately by finding the Earl in a straitjacket in the basement of Armand's clinic. His last failed SAN check took him to 6 on his sanity die, incurable insanity - and as an orderly and Armand subdued him and injected him with morphine to sedate him, the Earl escaped by jumping into the river.
Appleby's player took over Armand at this point, as things were coming to a head and the session was reaching its end. In the next morning's papers Randal read that a fire had burned down Smythe's apartments also, killing an NPC clerk with whom the PCs had dealt on board The Pride; and that two dead bodies had been found on the south side of the river, their throats torn out. This was the last failed SAN check for this character, who therefore finished with a 4 on the insanity die. Armand succeeded in finding the Earl around dawn, exhausted and sleeping in a stable near the docks. He took him back to the clinic - and when Smythe told him that the Earl was the killer, he contrived to call the police rather than help Smythe smuggle the Earl onto The Pride, and to persuade the crew members of The Pride who had come to collect him that they didn't want him on board.
In the end, as these checks succeeded and so Smythe's plans seemed to be foiled, I narrated his own nervous collapse, and so in the end three persons were taken to a sanitorium in the south of France operated by a colleague of Armand's: Appleby, Smythe and the Earl. The story going round was that the Earl had brought a tropical disease with him from Africa, which had also infected his loyal manservant and his trustee Smythe. And Randal got to write up his story about the collapse of, and the dangers of, this particular colonial venture.
**************************
There were details in the events that I've skipped over - interactions with the police (and the resulting bad relationship between Randal Stone and Inspector LeStrange); the carriage house The Forlorn Trap which was a repeated focus for happenings south of the river; and Appleby's fears of unemployment should his master's estate go broke - but the above has set out the basics.
Randal's player had picked were-hyenas as the crux of the plot maybe an hour or so out from the finish, and had drawn the link to Central European werewolves. This was probably an hour or so after I had settled on were-hyenas as the central element of the mystery. At the start I had been hoping that things might move north to the moors around the Earl's estate so I could deploy some ideas and imagery from The Woman in Black, but it didn't play out that way. And ideas about deep ones in the sewers or the river didn't get used either, in the end. The one thing the players didn't pick up on until I pointed it out was the connection between the galvanic cleaning process and were-creatures, namely, that it dissolved highly civilised silver into the fluid, making it sovereign against such creatures. So whereas the players - especially Randal's - were envisaging the conspiracy as being to create were-creatures, I was envisaging it as a conspiracy to tame them.
What never got established was what caused the fires - the papers reported that the gas infrastructure was suspected and being investgiated - and what killed Livingstone. I put thss down to being the sort of loose end that can be left dangling when the mystery and its solution is generated during the course of play.
Cthulhu Dark is the "litest" system my group has played - the next-litest is Prince Valiant. As we've deployed it, it generates enough decision points with unpredictable outcomes to generate a relatively satisfying horror mystery over the course of three-and-a-half hour's play (or thereabouts). And on this occasion the heroes won, although one was permanently insane and neither Armand nor Randal Stone was sleeping all that easily, the former suspecting and the latter knowing the truth about the Earl's "psychiatric" condition.
