the haunting pt. 2

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Session Notes (1/7/2022)


Game: Call of Cthulhu

Scenario: the haunting

Players: 5


Recap: In the first session, the players chose pregens that I made and did most of the investigating legwork before getting to the haunted house.  Notably the police told them to “drop the inquiries” and there were many redacted lines in the police report.  Additionally, the bizarre symbol from the burned church left them puzzled.  These could be tied into a future scenario to build a larger cult or story, if we choose to continue playing with these characters.


Notes: In this session, they went into the haunted house.  The bed on the second floor tossed two of them out the window, breaking some bones, and the knife nearly killed them.  When confronting the undead horror himself, Walter Corbitt managed to compel one player to attack the others, and one player went into a bout of madness at the sight of him.  They ultimately succeeded, with no deaths and only one mania gained for the character that suffered the bout of madness.


Best Parts: the mania (musomania) gave everyone some delight as the player roleplayed her hunt for a pet rat to keep her calm.  The other players all seemed to enjoy the idea that the horror could remove players from the situation, in a way that doesn’t kill them.  They enjoyed the haunted house, and the game mechanics did a good job of engaging them when necessary and keeping things moving.  They particularly like the pushed roll mechanic.  It is simple enough to do and gives that little bit of risk that added much tension to the rolls they used.  Additionally, the player whose character was a doctor noted at the end that if she hadn’t successfully set those broken bones (with a successful medicine roll), each of those characters would have been killed later by the mind controlled character, which was a satisfying accomplishment for her.


Improvements: After the climactic scene, RAW had me handing out a delusion to the player with the bout of madness... but it wasn't a good time for it, didn't make sense, and in retrospect it would have been better to not use it (or use a different delusion). This was a small mistake, which will be easy to avoid in the future.


Final Thoughts: this was the third session of CoC I've ever run. I'm feeling much more confident about the types of rulings I need to make in play, and how to prep a scenario from it. I'm not sure if I am ready to make my own scenarios yet, and since I have so many published ones available I think I'll run a few more published ones to see how it goes.

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