We played a game I ran in November at our first Loki-con up in the north mountains. I called it Dread Cthulhu mixing the Dread rules with the best of CoC rules: group pulls for sanity, a "rock" to determine who went first for those, and picks from a shuffled tarot deck to divvy out insanities. Insanities were tied to a sheet, but I also paired them to the consequences at the time. Sanity loss happened either from a failed pull attempt or from learning mythos knowledge (MK) in game. MK earned folks special supernatural powers, but as I said also earned you a certain amount of crazy to go with them. The learning of "things man was not meant to know".
The setting was the fall of 1943 in German-occupied Paris. The players each came from one of the Allied powers and if they weren't part of the French resistance they parachuted in at the beginning of the game. Their "you will not see me again" contact led the group to an apartment safe house which was entered through a young woman and her children's refrigerator. The room had no other exits. Besides some barred windows, a bathroom, and some other furniture, clothes, necessities, etc., they were fed by the young woman through the back of the refrigerator. (They had to take out the shelves and food whenever they wanted to leave)
It was a good set up, but in retrospect I did make some mistakes. I had 4 areas set up to explore via a handy "This is your mission" enveloped message I left in the room's footlocker, not to mention a few weapons. The problem was: 4 was really too many to get through as we started late, I hadn't counted on the safe room being an area too, nor on the Nazi HQs in Hotel Meurice.
The other difficulty was creating characters. It took a couple of hours and pushed our starting time back pretty late. Fortunately the guys really filled out their questionnaires with awesome material. And they came ready to play too. Each had their own accent to try out (I was amazed at how good they were) and lots of "sit back and watch 'em play" happened for the next couple of hours of the session. All of it in the safe room which they
thought they explored fully. Heck, they didn't trust a single one of each other until everyone's story was told and questioned for truth.
The rest of the session was when the tension turned up. Nothing like making your way as spies through a city where death lies around every corner... oh yeah, and cthulhu monsters. I think setting really cranked up the mood, but I couldn't have done it without the tower. It really helped put risk into every action they took.
It would take too long to really list all the details and it's been a few months. For a taste though, Project Ancestor did include: exploring Notre Dame de Paris, the catacombs of Paris, La Sorbonne, and the Musee de Louvre; three wild men in the Ahnenerbe & Institute for occult warfare to be stopped: Karl Wilgut, Otto Rahn, & Ludwig Straniak; the Bayeux Tapestry, the Curies' radiation machine, a green glowing ghost, the Rune of Man, doors that weren't there a second ago, an occult ritual, an ancient army, a glowing red gem, Himmler's wooden "throne", a shadowless world, and a second threat against invading Britain.
It was all very David Lynch in style.
