The conclusion of the first flashback adventure finds trouble coming on board in Vienna and trouble awaiting in Constantinople. And with each passing mile, the investigators wonder more and more: who can we trust?
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Featuring:
Des
Jen
Renae
Prequel sessions are interesting since they always require that little bit of knowledge that those characters probably aren't going to show up in the present-day setting, so you have to expect that they're going to die. I ran a Deadlands one-shot with some friends of mine using the Tombstone Seven which is set aroudn "Stone and a Hard Place". I'm now running a different group of people through The Flood (I forget where I was inspired to do this). At the Battle of Lost Angels I had the character from the future session appear and hang around for a bit before heading off to battle, which ended as delightfully as I'd hoped.
ReplyDeleteCall of Cthulhu is maddening because you're meant to implicitly some trust people even though you know they're going to betray you. In the same way you're supposed to investigate even though you and the world might be safer if you just stay in that evening.
"Call of Cthulhu is maddening because you're meant to implicitly some trust people even though you know they're going to betray you. In the same way you're supposed to investigate even though you and the world might be safer if you just stay in that evening."
DeleteIndeed. I certainly sympathized with the group's paranoia by the end there. But that's why I had everyone killed off in the epilogue. You've got to make it so that staying home is NEVER the right choice, even when it seems like it.
"You don't have to have a fez to be in the cult." You don't know that! Sure, there was that guy who tried to hypnotize Renae's character, but who knows what can say what reasons he had for not wanting Amelia to see his /whole body/?
ReplyDeleteTry as I might, I just can't bring myself to see fezzes as the stuff of horror.
ReplyDeleteImaging a fez at the end of a Lovecraft story: "And, at the door, the thing that used to be Charles Dickinson Verywaspname was wearing a fez..."
No, not feeling it.
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DeleteI dunno, I find that things that are otherwise ordinary can be more effective as something horrifying in a game because it's something you can visualize, which makes it worse when it turns out to be horrible.
DeleteYes, you can play the idea of an evil fez as hilarious, but it can also be horrifying to have that single moment of something lowered on your head, and then you cease to have control over your character anymore. The horror wouldn't be from looking at Verywaspname wearing a fez, but the feeling of the fez being lowered on your own, and then nothing else.
Well, but there's nothing particularly horrific about that thing being a fez in particular.
DeleteI'm definitely sold on the horror in the ordinary thing, (My pseudonym is after all drawn from Doctor Who.) But fezzes aren't everyday objects. In fact, there's something more than a little off-putting about the story's fixation of horror upon an "exotic" garment associated with the Middle East.
I can certainly see both sides, but it was tough for me to sell fezzes as horrifying (with the exception of when the fez "gave birth" to another fez...)
DeleteI felt that there was more than a bit of fan service going on with this scenario as well. Fezzes are kind of "geek chic" these days (there are Cthulhu fezzes, after all), and I couldn't shake the feeling that that was the reason this scenario was written. The fact that it name checks a prominent member of the CoC fan community only added to this feeling, which made it difficult for me to really sell it.
Not a great scenario, though it might be interesting to run it again as a one-shot over 3-4 sessions, see how that affects things.
Ah well. The Paris chapter is up next, and that's one of my favorites.
The "geek chic" thing is interesting. Because it wasn't set in the present day, I hadn't made that connection. I wonder if sinister fezzes in 2016 would be the way to go.
DeleteOooh, that's a great idea! Set it at a game convention, maybe, and it's Day of the Fez-Triffids! (Another option would be to replace the fezzes with utili-kilts...)
Delete