Call of Cthulhu: Tips and Techniques?

[Old Fezziwig]

1) Puritan witchhunting party showing up at the village. Some may be hidden cultists? And some hard-core fanatics...

I like this one. Particularly since one of my players has already mentioned that he'd like to play a hard-core Puritan minister. Has some neat potential.

2) Native American (Indian tribe) raiders. Maybe a little combat (ambush) on the party enroute to the village, or maybe the party finds some victems of an indian raid (butchered colonists - good for a few sanity points for the horror). Indian may be fighting the cultists, although with "blood magic" and brutal and indescriminent means (not unlike the witch-hunters).

Given the nature of KP's War, this is a given if I want to keep the historical flavor. I like the last couple comments in there.

I'm pretty excited about the idea, so I sounds like fun, too. Should be a blast if it works out. I liked all your ideas. I'll have to toss them around in my head for a bit to see what I can use. If everything works out as planned, I intend to run the game for two sessions of about 4-5 hours each, so the only catch is trying to make sure that I come in under that time limit. What I may do, as you've suggested being flexible, is write all of these up and use them as needed.

thanks,
Nick

 

[Old Fezziwig]

"Less is more" is certainly a good mantra which I agree wholeheartedly with...I just make sure I that "less" comes as an overpowering hammer blow to the senses.

Good point. Noted and appreciated. As for the vegan health-store/meatgrinder image... I'll save that for a modern game if I ever run it. Maybe. *shudders*

Plus, serve Calamari!

Given the amount of tentacles in our D&D game, that'd probably work any time we get together to play (loads of pseudonatural mummies in there; the players already cringe at the mention of tentacles).

That would sure startle the bejeezus out of me...

Me, too. And it'd probably end up scaring me more than the players.

If you can find a movie called 'Eyes of Fire', check it out. It's one of the few horror movies I can remember set in colonial times, and it might give you some atmospherics, if nothing else. I can't remember many details, but I just remember that it was an excellent film.

Sweet. I'm always looking for a movie to watch. I'll have to check it out. On a side note, I'm kind of looking forward to M. Night Shyamalan's new film, The Village, even though it's set in 1897, I had thought it was set in colonial America (which I just found out looking at it's Yahoo! Movies site).

2) Build tension, then release it, only to build it up to a greater height again, then release it. This does wonders for creeping out people. Have something creepy happen, then break the tension by having something funny happen. For example, in the example I gave above, maybe have one of the invesitgators slip in a pool of the blood, and land on his butt in it wearing his nice beige trousers. As he gets up, show the psychologist in the group a prop that looks like a rather ridiculous/dirty Rorschach ink blot and tell him that is the pattern he sees on his buddy's pants. Let the other members of the group see the blot, make some funny statements about it, and help clean their buddy off. Then when they move back to the corpse and start to examine it, have the corpse start to twitch violently. Build tension slowly, but let them release the tension occasionally with something humorous- it makes the scary parts that much scarier.

Nice. That's great (all the suggestions were, I just wanted to respond to this one). Particularly the pacing suggestion. In other words, you seem to be suggesting (or your suggestion led me to this idea) that I pace the film like a movie, which is fantastic advice that I hadn't thought of.

thanks,
Nick