CoC20 - Paradise adventure woes

[Tsyr]

Possibily spoiler warnings, if you are a player in this adventure don't read further.

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I ran my players through the paradise theater adventure in the CoC book to get a feel for the new D20 version last night.

Most of my players are actualy pretty decent CoC players, all but one was a veteran of mine.

They found every clue (Except the hidden hatch above the scaffolding). Even found one I threw in to make up for that (I was in a nice mood). They found the secret room in the basement and the Book of Sound and Light, they went and visted Mary Green, Richard Jacobs and Frank Long, they guessed Jacobs was holding something back, about him never being member of the Sound and Light club, and figured out (From the human skulls to the suspected kidnapping of that one lady to the suspected cover-up of said incident) that the Sound and Light club was more than just a normal club...

But for some reason, they weren't able to make a mental leap from those facts to suspecting Jacobs of being a cultist trying to summon Yog, and that it would happen on the theater reopening (In fairness, they didn't catch the importance of the stars ahead... to be honest, I didn't like that particular clue, it seemed a bit too obscure. I've seen buildings with a star-motif cealing before, it's actualy not THAT unusual), nor (When I sorta hit them over the head with clues about it when we were running out of time) did they figure out a good way of stopping it short of murdring Jacobs in cold blood in public. Sara wouldn't stop it when requested, and fakeing a fire hazard was sorta a left-field idea, IMO.

Did I miss something imporant when running it? I granted I didn't have time to read it more than quickly before the adventure, and I had to flip back and forth several times (Something that short I could have done from my head and a page of DC checks if I had had a little more time), but it seemed to me like there should have been something more linking there. Has anyone else ran this one and had any thoughts about it?

For the record, our party consisted of a English Proffessor, his now-graduated student (A journalist), the journalists brother (Who is also a journalist), and an art student who tagged along with one of the journalists as an excuse to get a look inside the place before it opened. Had a lot of great roleplaying, but...

 

[kengar]

I only got my CoC d20 book the other day & have only skimmed the adventure, but I don't think you missed anything. I'm probably not the best person to ask though (don't have book in front of me).

This touches on one of the larger issues in GM-ing, esp. in mystery/horror, it seems. In order to keep things suspenseful or mysterious, the clues can't be lying out to trip over. If the characters miss one, though, it can really screw things up. In my own adventures (even in D&D campaigns) I try to leave multiple clues pointing in the same direction (no more than 2-3, though) and space them apart so the party doesn't feel like they're getting hit over the head with it. The simple fact is, an adventure is NOT a story like in a book. Characters in adventures do things the GM doesn't expect and things go off on tangents (like this thread! ). Keeping flexible to a degree as GM helps, but sometimes, the party just loses. If the risk wasn't there, it wouldn't be exciting.

Just my $0.02

 

[Tsyr]

The problem as I see it isn't that there aren't the number of clues needed, but there aren't the RIGHT clues. Plenty of clues to show something funky went on in the Sound and Light club, and clues that Jacobs was involved in the Sound and Light club in some fashion, but nothing to tie jacobs to a Yog summoning, except a VERY weak link that lies in the stars painted in the secret basement room, which was both a weak link at best (I can think of three or four ways that everything would have worked out that way and not seemed like a clue even if they found everything out about the stars), and VERY obscure at that.

As a player later confessed to me after the game, he knew from about half way through more or less what was going on, but without using meta-game knowledge (IE, he's a long-time veteran of CoC) he wouldn't have known, and he couldn't act on the knowledge because he didn't feel his character would know it.

 

[Henry]

Tsyr, you'll be interested to know that John Tynes wrote that adventure.

http://trio.rpg.net/rf08/read.php?f=289&i=1&t=1

He could have run into some problems, or have been distracted by the new system, though it doesn't sound like the problems you encountered were rules-related. However, he also wrote the Cthulhu Mythos and the Setting chapters, which are quite good. SHRUG