Monday, May 11, 2015

[Call of Cthulhu] "The Auction" One-Shot

The GPC is on hold this week due to Mother's Day festivities. This special "Los Angeles chapter" incarnation of the Esoteric Order of Roleplayers, recorded about a month ago, is a Call of Cthulhu (7e) adventure run for Tim and Alex, your humble Keeper's oldest friends and gaming companions, on the eve of Alex's wedding weekend. Will the auspicious circumstances of our reunion augur well for the PCs?

(Apologies if the volume level is a little dodgy; I was obliged to record directly off my iPhone, precariously perched on a Coke can.)



Featuring:

Tim
Alex

7 comments:

  1. Wow. It's always a little depressIng listening to these Call of Cthulhu one-shots. But I think you missed the most important part: What happened to Albert!?

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    1. Albert also raises the question, what happens if your parrot says 'Hastur! Hastur! Hastur!' ?

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  2. Good news, you fall unconscious so that your character does not experience the pain of having their flesh torn apart! That's a win for Call of Cthulhu!

    So did one of your players (I can't distinguish voices well) really banish his 10s die and just roll one d10 twice whenever he needed a percentage roll?

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  3. I was inspired by the reposted Veil of Isis and am going through all the one shot cthulhu episodes. I just had to come and say: How did the guys not interview their most prominent clue, the 3 buyers, within the first week of investigation? A whole week driving trains across europe to fetch books to try and force answers. A 500 year old book cannot name a suspect. :P

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    1. I think this session stands as a good example of how players are often best at getting in their own way during an investigation. It's also tricky when you've only got two players, since that's fewer brains working on the case. I dimly recall asking myself your very question during the session, but I'm a big believer in letting players lead the way in terms of pursuing clues. That's one of the reasons I'm still a bit iffy about the Gumshoe system--I think sometimes investigations should just be allowed to...fail.

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    2. Oh yes, I believe in giving my players as much rope as they want too. But sometimes it's hard. In my mind I'm goin; Can't you see from my anguished face I've been making this shit up for the past 4 hours? Can't you just go back to the clues that were provided in the beginning?

      I haven't ran a Gumshoe game yet, but listened to quite a few. I think the beauty is in that it doesn't often get stuck in the middle on "players error". It might stall if no one has the correct skills, but there's usually more than one way around an obstacle. You'll most often get a complete story in just a couple hours and one or two characters might even be alive/sane-ish at the end.

      CoC at it's best, runs like a classic suspense/horror novel. At worst, like rubbish no one would want to read. Gumshoe runs like a B-movie. They'll always make B-movies, but sometimes you want a classic.

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    3. That's a really apt analogy! I like that.

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