Adventures where you've already lost

[Psychotic Jim]

Okay, so if I'm correctly getting this adventure outline/structure right, it would flow something like this:

Part 1:
The characters learn of some vague plot by those wacky cultists. The party spends some time investigating their plot and learning just how far the cultists have got. Fear and anxiety begins to build as they receive cryptic findings hinting at they may be too late. How will the party decide to investigate this mystery? How will they use the information as they learn it?

Part 2:
Pandora's Box has already been opened. The stars are right, and it's an unimaginable (if watery) hell on earth, at least locally in Chicago. The fear now is different from the creeping anxiety of what is behind the curtain. No, it's Apocalypse WOW- the group is fighting for their lives (and maybe those of the innocents) in the thick of things. People need to be brought to safety. And of course, there are all sorts of lingering, unfathomable... creatures from beyond running around here at ground zero. These will need to be contained or put down as much as possible. How will (if they decide to) the PCs react to this, all the while fighting the despair that comes from knowing this great sense of loss has already come?

Part 3:
Once the most immediate disaster has struck, now comes a point of dealing with the loss and picking up the pieces. Now that they have some more time to think about things, how will the party respond in the long term? Will they seek revenge on the Deep Ones and the cultists? Will they try to find a way to bring back Chicago? Will they help the populace resettle in the long term? Will they try forbidden time travel spells to go back and change the past? Will they just shrug their shoulders and move to a new home city? Will they try to prevent it from happening again? Although all the demons of Pandora’s Box have been let loose: there is still one thing left- hope. The hope of whatever the PCs eek to accomplish.

***

So here, it seems like you’ve got a lot of events bigger than the characters going on, but you want to leave it open to the players to choose how they react and what they do. As it looks, you’ve got kind of a situation of rising urgency and dread, starting with the smaller investigation and ending with the threat of the disaster spreading. But as the level of disaster rises, so does the ability of the players to make a difference.

In each part of the adventure, you’ve got questions of how the party responds. As this adventure starts, the players’ roles in this are fairly limited=- mostly reactive in following the steps of the Deeps Ones and their cult. In Part 2, it’s still mostly reactive, but now what they do really matters. It’s up to them to save lives and contain the madness as much as they can. In Part 3, here’s where they really get to be proactive. Now that the worst has happened, it will be up to them to decide how to handle the situation going forward.

In summation from what I’m gathered from this thread, the key here is that you want to give the players the ability to meaningfully respond to the situation despite the layers of cosmic futility and horror. What you don’t want is total despair- that leads to a disconnect or frustration that often results from railroading. So giving them some options of making the best of a bad situation is important here. The paradox is that horror ultimately requires hope. That’s the hope that how their actions, their decisions will have a meaningful impact on the world. At least, within the context of the situation.

 

[Stormonu]

Plenty of good ideas here. One thing I'd like to throw in is some ideas from a game I played on the PS2 called Disaster Report. In the game, you play a person who is coming to a New York / Chicago-like city just as the unthinkable happens - a mighty earthquake strikes and the city begins to sink into the sea.

The game takes you through some breath-taking adventures through a dying city; there's collapsing buildings to explore, high-rise expressways collapsing and blocking off avenues of escape, rushing rivers of waters to cross and sinking areas to escape. All while the rest of humanity is revealing its true nature in its attempt to escape or capitalize on the disaster.

Of course, tie this in on a Call of Cthulu game, and it could be that the characters have to find a way into the sinking city to find the lair of the deep ones - not to stop them; it's too late for that - but to discover how to prevent them from doing the same to another city (or what their next target is and head the deep ones off). And getting out alive before the city falls in on itself or they get taken out by looters and rioters.

There's a lot of YouTube videos that show off the game, if your interested in checking it out. For example, three of the things I remember from the game were

1) Just having reached the shore of the city from a suspended superhighway to watch the whole thing tip and collapse, just barely missing you

2) Climbing a skyscraper as it's sinking into the water with cops chasing you up the floors as you try to recover evidence of what caused the disaster (them thinking you're a looter).

3) Climbing into a half-collapsed skyscraper via fire truck ladder to help civilians escape to safety, while maneuvering through collapsed (and on fire) sections to get to the folks (only to find that one of the group you're to rescue is confined to a wheelchair...).

Here's one video I found

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOCJUbvpOUc&feature=related]YouTube - Disaster Report (PS2) - Gameplay Sample[/ame]

 

[Coldwyn]

If I as a player would be presented with such a situation in CoC, I´d react according to the HPL novels: Lose my sanity, babbel incoherent things and cthulhuish truths and declare that what happended in play was the content of a letter found near my corpse after I commited suicide/a protocol from my ramblings during a session in Arkham Asylum.

 

[Starfox]

If I go back to the original post, I must say that creating hopelessness is not good. It alienates players. However, the sinking of Chicago need not be played for hopelessness - it can be played for shock effect, to set the stage for a New World order, to cement the PCs determination to fight the alien menace etc.

But in a campaign that was truly hopeless, and seemed likely to remain, so, I would probably quit the game.

 

[Coldwyn]

If I go back to the original post, I must say that creating hopelessness is not good. It alienates players. However, the sinking of Chicago need not be played for hopelessness - it can be played for shock effect, to set the stage for a New World order, to cement the PCs determination to fight the alien menace etc.

But in a campaign that was truly hopeless, and seemed likely to remain, so, I would probably quit the game.

I can´t really understand that.
In the original stories, most protagonists go mad because they realise how utterly hopeless it all is.
Compared to that, in the game, players win. There´always hope that the plot can be solved, the characters survive more or less intact and ready for the next adventure, and so on.

 

[Mesh Hong]

As a player - keeping in mind that this is Call of Cthulhu - how would you react to a revelation like this?

As a player (bearing in mind it was CoC) I would absolutely love it.

From the description of the pacing of your plot it sounds like there will be a good mix of action and investigation. It also sounds like there will be the possibility of small successes (which at the time will feel like big successes), but all the PCs efforts will lead them to the absolute knowledge that they are too late.

Finding out and understanding that they are too late is a victory for the PCs as it means they might have a short window of opportunity to save some lives or (god forbid) inform the authorities. Failure for the PCs means that they never see it coming and are literally swept away by churning currents as their beloved city sinks forever beneath the waves....

Great story either way.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I ran my players through the Dungeon magazine adventure series shackled city, and the (unstoppable) destruction and evacuation of the main campaign city is actually one part of the series. The players had a ball flitting around the city trying to get people out safely and then trying to rebuild afterwards.

So the scenario does work, and does work in a real game, even one so "stop the bad guys" centred as D&D.

 

[Haltherrion]

As a player - keeping in mind that this is Call of Cthulhu - how would you react to a revelation like this?

-O

Seems workable for the setting. The thing to avoid is a feeling of futility, either at the time or after the fact. That can be quite annoying in the railroading sense.

I would making it very clear (through in-game actions and NPCs) that success is very difficult and may be impossible and maybe even allow success if they think of something really, really clever.

Then from a game point of view, find ways to allow some partially successes even if the overall success eludes them

Destroying Chicago seems perfectly reasonable. Campaigns don't last for ever and you might as well use the big punches all the way through and not save them for a later time that may never happen.

As a player, I think this could be perfect for the Cthulu mood as long as I didn't feel that good ideas were being ignored by the ref simply because he had already decided there was no chance of success. The positive way to do this would be to provide in-game ways to reveal the desparation of the situation, gloomy NPCs prognosticating gloom, revealed information that foreshadows the destruction of Chicago (maybe references to prior similar occurences), some bruising encounters with the opposition forces that make the players realize they may not be able to handle everything. Finally, some possibility of some small success in the big calamity- being able to rescue someone or something they care about, extracting some usefull lore than will help in the next battle, etc.

Sounds fun.

 

[Beginning of the End]

Why are you RUNNING the scenario?

If you want to creep out your players and force them outside their comfort zone, and you don't want them to be able to do anything, don't waste their time on a railroad to nowhere. You're the GM. Sink Chicago. Use whatever creepy flavor text in a cut-scene, then ask the heroes 'what do you do next?'

I think describing this as a "railroad" is necessarily accurate.

The best analogy would be a mystery scenario in which the PCs are trying to locate a kidnapped girl. If it turns out the girl was already dead by the time their investigation started, that seems fundamentally different from a truly railroaded adventure with a pre-scripted sequence where the girl dies and the players can't do anything about it.

Similarly, if you were trying to recreate "I did it 35 minutes ago" then you would probably be looking at a railroad. (Since you would have to arrange things so that the PCs can never arrive 35 minutes earlier and stop him.) But in this case it sounds like the ritual was completed before the PCs ever arrived on the scene.

I think I agree with others that a key question to ask is: What are the PCs doing?

I'm not convinced that the answer to that question needs to be "they're heroes who save as much as they can" or "they're heroes who stop an even larger catastrophe" or "they're heroes who get revenge on the Deep Ones for doing this". Basically, I don't think it necessarily needs to be a campaign about heroism. But you still need to figure out what the playable action is.