10/05/2023 - The Haunting - Tabletop Game Club

 *spoilers below… all my posts are spoiler based*

art from the quickstart

I’ve run The Haunting before (as noted on this blog).  It is a great introduction to Call of Cthulhu.  So for Spooky Month, I brought it prepped for the tabletop game club I run at school.  The club has about 8-12 members (depending on the day), half of which are in a stars without number campaign run by a student (!).  So I took the remaining three players and played through the scenario.  None of them had played Call of Cthulhu before.

The first time I ran this scenario, I developed a set of 6 pregens, along with 3 backup characters (in case of lethality early in the session).  I also purchased the excellent “The Haunting Handout Pack”.  Armed with my notes, the pregens/backups, several NPC portraits I generated, and the handouts, I was able to get the game going quickly.

They chose some pregens, and I did a brief overview of the game. We moved quickly into the scenario.  The Haunting has a lot of notes on different places in Boston to go to do the investigation/legwork.  The players really enjoyed this aspect - visiting the library, the hall of records, the police department, etc., all to gather clues, handouts, and even rumors.  At each place I had created an NPC, or fleshed out an existing one, for them to interact with.  This NPC was useful to me for judging how they interacted with any given institution, without having to handwave it.  They also gave me a convenient way to deal with failed pushed rolls.  The NPC would be the ones kicking them out, locking them in, or tipping off journalists, etc.

They did a great job investigating, and really leaned into the fiction of failure and pushed rolls.  One player lost a little bit of SAN during this investigation process (at the Chapel of Contemplation).  They all seemed to grasp the game rules quickly (again, the game is nice and simple).

One of the players had to leave early, so only two investigators ended up visiting the house.  They were fooled by the sound upstairs, were separated, and one investigator was flung out the window by the bed (6 damage!  Just barely avoided a major wound).  After dusting themselves off they returned inside and met their comrade.  After being flung from the window though, they refused to go into the basement!  The other investigator went downstairs alone, rummaged through the trash for a garbage can lid, and was stabbed twice by the spectral knife (4 HP, then 6 HP, out of their total 10 HP).  Their death scared the other investigator who fled and called Mr. Knott informing him that he should burn the house down.  It was a very decisive and frankly violent ending to the scenario, which I feel strongly delivered on the promise of Call of Cthulhu.

Thoughts:

It was incredibly easy to run this time, compared to the first few times I’ve played CoC.  I have so much more experience, and it felt like a breeze making rulings, and really leveraging the perception skills, pushed rolls, luck, and sanity rolls to make the session feel just right.  I was also really glad to have done the work putting together pre-gens and saving all my prep notes from the first time I played through the scenario.

The students (and 1 teacher!) who played in the scenario had a great time, and asked if we could play Call of Cthulhu going forward instead of Dungeons & Dragons!  I’ve been running a very bog-standard “The Black Hack” campaign for them, which has been going well, but I feel like The Haunting was special. The club was starting to feel like a burden: I had to run D&D, because I guess we all just assume D&D is the best thing for the club. But that's not the case!

For the rest of Spooky Month I am planning on running some other horror RPGs for the students, but afterwards I think I will try to run a Call of Cthulhu campaign with the club.

P.S.
That’s not all for The Haunting though… My regular gaming group (currently playing through the Pendragon Starter Set) will gather around Halloween for a special Call of Cthulhu one shot. They've only played through the Call of Cthulhu Starter set, so why not use The Haunting with them as well?  There are some benefits to moving halfway across the country and starting fresh with new in person groups… I get to use these scenarios multiple times!