Sometimes we play on Long Island, sometimes we play in Connecticut. Since I travel frequently to Long Island at least once a month to visit my parents for a family obligation, it’s rare my friends come up north. This time it was Matt’s turn to host, and he lives in Connecticut too. My son was still an infant and space was tight, so Matt’s bachelor pad was perfect. Our first gaming session would consist of two introductory scenarios: The End of Paradise from D20 Call of Cthulhu and Lethal Legacy from the Cthulhu Now supplement, Secrets. The guys all drove up, except Bill, who was working that weekend.
The first scenario involves a haunted movie theater. It is, unfortunately, a haunted house scenario. And haunted house scenarios suck.
Haunted houses can’t move. In a movie, the protagonists are captive to the author’s whim. They can’t leave because he says they can’t leave. Good scriptwriters will provide emotional and psychological reasons for why characters won’t leave. None of these are easy to put into an ongoing campaign; the old lady who lived at the house forever, the disabled kid who can’t get away, the crazy cousin who’s been locked in the basement the whole time – these are all people that most players typically don’t choose to play. In an action horror campaign, you can forget it.
So when things got crazy, I had to play with time and space a bit. Smart players will start planning 1) how to get out, and 2) how to blow up the house. When you start breaking down the laws of physics, the house does in a sense become mobile, by shifting the players around. I pushed the PCs as much as I could, creeping them out with weird movie ghosts and such. When they finally had enough and were about to evacuate the place and burn it to the ground, I sped up time and skipped ahead to the climactic scene. Fortunately, this scenario involved Yog-Sothoth, so I felt justified in playing fast and loose with reality.
My players weren’t so thrilled about the set up. They had already played the introductory “Doom Room” scenario and felt this was something of a letdown because it was much more slow and measured. They were right, haunted houses don’t easily lend themselves to action horror. It’s something I plan to improve on. Because there’s a lot of horror scenarios out there yet to be played.
The second scenario knocked their socks off. It involved a dimensional shambler stalking an author who is writing a tell-all book. Remember, my players don’t know much about Call of Cthulhu other than that “everyone goes nuts and dies.” They don’t know what a dimensional shambler is. I bet half of them couldn’t even identify Cthulhu in a lineup. So they’re genuinely as ignorant as their characters are of the Mythos – an incredible gift that I’m really enjoying.
I don’t reference monsters by name. I call them things and beasts and squaminous presences. I gave the dimensional shambler psychic powers, including molecular agitation so that the thing could set them on fire from afar. At one point, at the height of tension, the dimensional shambler loomed over Guppy while he was reading a book, staring at him through a window. I showed a picture from the scenario of precisely this event, and there was a collective gasp from the players. They loved it!
This is what I had planned for! This is what action horror was all about! They were finally getting into it—
There was a knock at the door.
Matt looked a little nervous. In came his buddy Tony.
“Oh yeah,” said Matt sheepishly. “Tony and I are going out after this.”
But Tony had come early. Like an hour and a half early. Matt’s place is a studio. There’s no place to go that somebody isn’t standing in. We were using all the chairs.
“I’ll just play World of Warcraft until you’re ready,” said Tony. And he was cool with it.
The air was let out of the room. The tension was gone. It was replaced by an awkward stillness. As you may recall, the characters are pretty much the United Nations. One character speaks with an Indian accent, the other with a British accent. And I speak with a dizzying variety of terrible accents when the mood strikes me and it fits a particular NPC. In other words, we pretty much act like idiots.
And this guy is in the room, playing World of Warcraft, obviously listening to us.
The cat-and-mouse game between the PCs and the dimensional shambler was supposed to go on for awhile. But I had lost the moment. I was ratcheting up the terror and now we all felt vaguely silly about it.
So I went on the offensive. The dimensional shambler decided he had enough and took the easy way in. He collapsed a tree through a window and went straight for his target.
Thanks to the PCs, they were able to defeat it. Barely.
I was frustrated. I knew Tony was visiting. I just didn’t understand why.
“Oh yeah,” said Matt. “Remember that job I was talking about?”
“Yeah?” I asked as I ushered the other guys out the door (some of them still muttering that they thought we were playing later than I had originally said).
“I got it. We’re going out celebrating tonight.”
“That’s great!” I said.
“I’ll miss gaming...”
“What do you mean?”
Matt looked a little sad. “I’m leaving for Australia in two months.”
Lesson Learned: When it comes to horror, atmosphere is everything.
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