Applied Mechanics: "Dead Light" and the CoC 7th ed. Chase Rules

In my last post, the After-Action Report from running the Call of Cthulhu scenario "Dead Light," I mentioned that I probably should have used a chase sequence during the game. 

I was kind of intimidated by the Chase Rules, but I'm starting to understand them now, and I will pass this (new, terrible, arcane!) knowledge on to you. This video by Paul Fricker was of great help in understanding how to do a chase.  This one by Seth Skorkowsky is also quite good - and in fact Seth uses Dead Light for his chase example.

As written, the "Dead Light" of the scenario is the sort of "Implacable Man" enemy that lends itself well to nightmares, but somewhat poorly to chases. Per its official stats, its "Move" stat is 6, or 30 meters per round - a pretty good clip by foot, but not by vehicle.

The problem that we're faced with is that Dead Light almost guarantees the Investigators have a car! The standard speed (I am told, but I haven't verified this) for a 1920's auto is Move 13. So if we left it there, the chase would be over before it began - the Investigators peel out in their shiny machine, and the Dead Light lopes along behind them at an increasing distance: hungry, determined, but slow. 

But we are not content with this! We want to make an exciting and dangerous chase possible! I think this is possible, even with a slow antagonist. You can leave the Dead Light speed where it is, but we'll screw around with the car's practical Move, and make slight adjustments to the Chase rules! Remember - in the Dead Light scenario, there's a terrible storm, and driving conditions are awful!

So - in the rules as written, you start a chase by rolling speed. The major downside to this is that if one character rolls quite well, and the other quite poorly, that can end the chase right there - they just escape! But that is narratively unsatisfying for us - we want a big set-piece chase scene! So we're going to modify it like this:

1) At the start of the chase, instead of rolling for "Speed," tell the Player who's driving that his car's movement would be 13 in GOOD conditions. Now ask the driver what his intended speed is in THESE conditions. This will be his "SPEED ROLL" to start the chase:

• If it's 10 - 13, the driver must make an EXTREME Drive Auto roll or else they fishtail right at the start and the Dead Light attacks the car for 1 or more Round. 
• If it's 7-9, the driver must make a HARD Drive Auto roll, or else consequences as above.
• If it's 6, a regular Drive Auto roll, or else as above.

If they make the chosen roll, they get as many as 7 Movement Points to use during the chase (the difference between a max car Move of 13 and a steady Dead Light move of 6.) This provides an incentive to go for the big payoff- with that many extra points, they are probably going to be able to escape pretty easily... depending on how they handle the Hazards and Barriers, about which see more below.

For these rolls, if they are driving an all-wheel-drive vehicle you can give them a bonus die. My Players got hold of a 1918 Renault AWD Truck from military surplus in Paris, so that would have worked out well for them here.

Note: this is not exactly the same as saying "Roll Drive Auto - if you get Extreme you can go fast, Hard you go middling, Regular you go slow." This is because I feel we want to simulate the attempt at accelerating quickly in a storm, and choosing the reckless thing over the cautious thing.

2) Then we set up 3-4 locations for the Chase.

I'm thinking 4 locations on the road between the Diner and Cottage (or whatever the endpoints are). Can keep it pretty boring: something like: 1) Driveway/Parking lot (or whatever your origin point), 2) .5km marker, 3) 2km marker, 4) Diner/cottage (or whatever your destination is).

You can start the Investigators' car one spot ahead of the Dead Light - say, they're getting to the 1st half-klick while the Dead Light is still meandering down past the parking lot.

Then we set up 3 hazards/barriers along the road

I'm thinking something like: "lightning-felled tree", "flooded section," and "sharp turn with debris". You can make them all require Drive Auto rolls, or if you set up the Tree as a barrier you might require a group Strength roll to move it out of the way. Failure in a Hazard causes the car to skid out or flip over - this is where having a faster initial speed pays off, if you can get it.

Failure at a barrier delays the Investigators for a round while the Dead Light catches up. NOTE that the Dead Light is not impeded by any of these barriers/hazards, as it can float above or around them!

And then, if the Dead Light ever winds up in the same Location, you hit every Investigator with the POW roll against being mesmerized, and then the Dead Light occasionally zaps them with its tentacle-y attack.

And then, they reach the relative "safety" of their destination! And then, of course, a few minutes later the Dead Light strolls up looking for another snack, and starts burning its way in...

In the next post: adapting popular scenario  "Edge of Darkness" into the "Zone Rouge"  prelude!

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Want more of what I do? I have a number of best-selling Adventures and GM guides for the 7th Sea system available via DriveThruRPG! They are reasonably popular and shockingly inexpensive, so check them out!

I'll soon be working on writing my first-ever CoC scenario for publication, giving it the same "behind-the-scenes development" treatment you've seen so far - so watch this space for future posts on that topic!

After-Action Report #1: "Dead Light"

In which I take a break from world-building and campaign construction to talk about my experience actually running the blasted thing...

It occurs to me that in my first 6 posts on this blog, I haven't given any kind of CV for myself. I just started typing! By way of context, then, let me say this: 

• I am a fairly new GM in general. Across several systems, I've probably GM'd 30 sessions in the last 10 years. (I took a long break from the hobby). 
• I am new to Call of Cthulhu 7th ed. I played 5th edition maybe 8 or 9 years ago, and ran a few sessions of Cthulhu Invictus during that time. 
• I am much more comfortable as a writer than as a "live" GM. Storytelling via written materials comes pretty naturally to me. I've written 3 best-selling Adventures for the 7th Sea system (and a bunch of other supplemental materials for that setting, 5 best-sellers in all - check them out here, if you like!).
• I've also created a bunch of handouts and supplementary materials, as you've seen in the earlier posts on this blog.

So one thing I want to do on this blog is document my attempts to become a better "live GM," working on my in-the-moment skills to supplement the preparation/story planning work I already do.

One thing that I've learned recently is that when I run a scenario that I've written, I do pretty well. When I run one written by someone else, I sometimes struggle to keep things moving smoothly. 

I think this is a function, primarily, of organizing the information. The truth is, I find that most pre-written scenarios don't play that well for meat the table, as written. Most are written in long prose, with occasional bolding of key concepts. What works a little better for me is more of an outline, where I can get key information about locations, NPCs and monsters at-a-glance without hunting through paragraphs. 

All of that, I think, was in evidence at my first CoC 7th ed. session, which I ran last night. I introduced the Investigators of the Vienna Club to their first scenario, "Dead Light." I think I did a pretty good job setting up the overall setting, and embodying the NPCs with believable characteristics and motivations. 

Where I think I could have done a little better was: 

• Describing details of the scene. Improving in this will help with immersion, and will help the players figure out where their Investigators are in relation to everything else, since I don't really use minis or battle maps very much. Some things I could have done specifically here: 
• Describe the details of each room and building the Investigators walked into. More sense-descriptions are good, as would be naming more "things" in each place, even if they aren't plot-relevant. 
• Describe distances and relative position better: how far away is the Dead Light? How fast does it move? How close is the drunken bar patron to them? How big is the house?
• Be willing to threaten the Investigators. I have a tendency to back off a threat when it might really harm the Investigators, partly I think because I want to see them make it through to the end of the story. I need to be willing to step up potential harm in a believable way. In the Dead Light scenario, I could have done things like: 
• Used an actual Chase sequence when the Dead Light pursued them out of the house towards the diner. 7th ed. has a pretty good, if somewhat complicated, mechanic for this, but I am leery of trying it out until I'm more comfortable with basic mechanics. 
• Called for 1 or 2 more Hard rolls for Drive Auto in the storm, to force them to get out of the car when they knew what was out there. 

The Session also ended pretty quickly, about 2 and a half hours. I'm not sure that was a problem - the Investigators figured out pretty quickly that electricity is a weakness of the Dead Light, and one of them was an Electrical Engineer, so they came up with a workable plan pretty quickly. 

They didn't seem to want to get too involved with the NPCs' interpersonal dramas, instead being focused on getting Emilia (the Living Plot Hook!) to safety and getting back on the road to Verdun. If I were running it again, I would have set up a much more tense tableau when they got back to the diner. Marie would have pulled a gun and be aiming it at Jacques, with her wanting to go out in the storm and him both being protective of her and ashamed that she was willing to go out when he wasn't. With the Dead Light in pursuit behind them and a powder keg inside the "safety" of the building, this would have been an awesome climax. Oh well. Next time!

Stats from this session: 

• Investigators killed: 0 (in fact, no wounds! I need to try harder ;-) )
• Investigators insane: 1! Poor Mr. Caine the Egyptologist was given a nasty shock by the sight of the half-charred corpse of Claude. He later volunteered to read the Doctor's Journal, and the disturbing content there pushed him over the edge into a temporary bout of paranoia. 
• Plot hooks for future payoffs planted: 2! The medal went over well, but the propaganda pamphlet (which is the first reference to "En Kalif") went mostly ignored. 
• Fun had: By all!

'Til next time!



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Want more of what I do? I have a number of best-selling Adventures and GM guides for the 7th Sea system available via DriveThruRPG! They are reasonably popular and shockingly inexpensive, so check them out!

I'll soon be working on writing my first-ever CoC scenario for publication, giving it the same "behind-the-scenes development" treatment you've seen so far - so watch this space for future posts on that topic!

Zone Rouge - Scenario 1: Lumière Morte! (Dead Light)

In the last few posts I set up the broader narrative meta-structure and framework that I'll use for my group's run-through of "Horror on the Orient Express." This includes the use of several popular "beginner" scenarios strung together into a short prelude campaign I'm calling "Zone Rouge." Set in France between late 1920 and January 1923, the four scenarios to be used here are:

1. Dead Light: the Voie Sacree, a few miles south of Verdun, France - November, 1920
2. Edge of Darkness: Verdun, France and countryside - November, 1920
3. Dead Man Stomp: Paris, France - August, 1922
4. The Auction (heavily modified!) - January, 1923, leading directly in to the first scenario of Horror on the Orient Express

In this spoiler-heavy post (in fact, all posts from here on out are likely to be absolutely stuffed with spoilers, so BEWARE!), I'll talk about the adaptations I made to Dead Light in order to bring it into the time, place, and themes that make up the "Zone Rouge" prelude.

Adapting Dead Light

“Something was wrong. They put on civilian clothes again and looked to their mothers and wives very much like the young men who had gone to business in the peaceful days before August 1914. But they had not come back the same men. Something had altered in them. They were subject to sudden moods, and queer tempers, fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure. Many were easily moved to passion where they lost control of themselves, many were bitter in their speech, violent in opinion, frightening” - Philip Gibbs, war correspondent, on veterans of the Great War.

I chose Dead Light to be the opening scenario of the "Zone Rouge" mini-campaign. It has a lot to recommend it for this role:

• It's self-contained in time and place, a chance encounter on a rural road, BUT
• It has a number of elements that can be teased out and connected with broader themes and a bigger campaign.
• It is not very strongly connected to any given setting. The original scenario was written to take place just north of Arkham, but there's no strong sense of New England here.
• It's a fairly straightforward scenario to run. 3 locations, a handful of NPCs, and one monster to keep track of - that's it. 
• It's not The Haunting, which almost everyone with any CoC experience has played. 

Changes to Time and Place

The first change I made was to set it in November of 1920, on the road just outside Verdun, France. I spent some time looking for period-appropriate maps, and ultimately decided this scenario takes place more or less here - you may have to zoom, and then squint: 

The road that it's on there is the "Voie Sacree." During the Great War, the town of Verdun was the "high water mark" of German incursion into that part of France. The Kaiser's army got just to the outskirts of the city, and then stalled out for 9 horrible months in 1916 (the Battle of Verdun), until things heated up again during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918 that lasted right up until the Armistice of November 11th. 

The Voie Sacree was a small road that became the lifeline to Verdun, allowing files of trucks to pass up to and back from the city, bringing supplies and fresh troops, and evacuating casualties. To this day, it's marked as route D1916 in honor of the year of the battle. 

The "A4" that's there now was built in the 1970s, but I'm assuming there was some kind of east-west route from the general direction of Paris. That's not really important to the scenario anyway. 

The time - November 1920 - puts us almost 2 years to the day after the signing of the Armistice. That means the scars of the war are very fresh, and there's a lot of upheaval in French society. Things like relatively high unemployment, veterans having difficulties re-integrating into society (see the quote above), and an increase in political agitation both from the left-wing (anarchism, socialism) and right-wing (nationalism, fascism). All of those things will be represented by NPCs and descriptions in this scenario.

And physically, the area still bears many scars from the war. One thing that we in the modern era fail to appreciate is just how BIG a crater is left behind when a WWI-era shell explodes. To paraphrase Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" podcast: during the war, those shell craters were often filled with mud, water, and toxic oils from gas attacks - and they were deep enough to drown in if you weren't careful.

In the immediate post-war years, the Zone Rouge - the area around Verdun  and stretching northwest, that had seen some of the heaviest fighting in the War - was also home to something called the "iron harvest." Farmers and other homeowners in this area became accustomed to finding unexploded ordnance and spent shell casings on their land. When they found something, they'd collect it and leave it at the roadside for a government agent to pick up. Today, we put out recycling - in the Zone Rouge, they put out bullets and live artillery shells.

The Investigators will encounter both of these phenomena over the next few scenarios.

Changes to NPCs and Motivations

The scenario as written is kind of a "bottle episode" compared to the standard Call of Cthulhu adventure. There are a fairly limited number of PCs and locations available to interact with, and the setup is such that it's not really possible for the Investigators to go elsewhere. I tweaked them in the following way:

Doctor Godfrey Webb, owner of the Green Apple Cottage, inherited the "Dead Light" and used it to "take care of" infants that were born wrong (whether through bastardy or birth defects).

• becomes Doctor Guillaume Veniard, owner of the Pomme Verte cottage. He inherited something his father called "l'ange de la misericorde," the Angel of Mercy. He used it in the War to bring "mercy" to soldiers diagnosed with various forms of shell-shock; if they lived, the French Army and government would have had to provide for their ongoing care via pensions. The Army asked him to intervene to save them these costs.
• All of this is revealed (more or less) by his journal (a handout I created - see below), and by Amelie's hazy recollections. The Doctor has died minutes before the start of this scenario.

Emilia Webb, granddaughter of the Doctor, key clue-giver to the Investigators

• becomes Amélie Webb; all other facts basically unchanged (except things like changing references to "Boston" to "Paris" and similar.)

Jake Burns, pig farmer, eager brawler

• becomes Jacques Brochard - same profession, but also a likely deserter from his French Army unit early in the war. The circumstances under which he left the fighting are unclear, and he is easily provoked to aggression and anger by talk of the War, or by seeing others lauded for their bravery.

Mary Laker, "conspirator and proto-femme fatale"

• becomes Marie Lacroix, and is the most direct link between this scenario and the broader meta-plot of Zone Rouge. 
• In the scenario as written, she is motivated by jealousy of Emilia to get her boyfriend Clem and their associate Billy to rob the old Doctor's place. In this version, she is partly motivated by jealousy, but that jealousy has been weaponized by interactions with von Sebottendorf (in his Erwin Torre guise) who is promoting a blend of anarcho-socialist political philosophy and Eastern occult secrets. Marie is very impressed by this, and she encourages the robbery of Doctor Veniard as a kind of "direct action" wealth redistribution from the wealthy Doctor to the less-fortunate. In this case, the less-fortunate are Marie and her cronies.
• She carries a pamphlet called 'Silentium Post Clamores," which is a handout I created - more on that later.

The other NPCs basically just had name changes to something more appropriate to France/Alsace. Marie's co-conspirator Claude also has a copy of the pamphlet on him, though it is slightly burned by his method of demise.

Handouts and Connections to the Meta-Plot

The original scenario is largely self-contained, and so I more or less preserved that for this version. I did create a few handouts and "feelies," and seed in a couple of things that connect to the Zone Rouge plot, and one thing that plays into one of my Investigators' backstories.

1. Journal du Doctor Veniard

The journal is alluded to in the scenario but not provided as a handout. I made one that suits the purpose, though others have done nicer jobs than I with this. The purpose of the journal is to fill in the backstory, and also to give a means of using the Dead Light (here called the "Angel of Mercy") on purpose.

The second page (not shown here) is a list of dates from the beginning of the Battle of Verdun, initials, and abbreviations for medical conditions: "cranial injury," "muteness," "fugue," etc. An IDEA roll will reveal these were victims of the angel.

2. Silentium Post Clamores

The title of this pamphlet was originally used for a foundational work of esoteric Rosicrucianism - I feel confident that von Sebottendorf would have been familiar with it. The prop I made is pretty crude - my Photoshop/Gimp skills are minor at best.

A couple of things to note in here:

First, it accentuates the theme of disaffected youth searching for meaning and to recapture the spirit of optimism that the War took from them. This is a feeling that will drive the 1920s globally.

Secondly, it introduces the name "En Kalif." During the Zone Rouge campaign, En Kalif is a barely-relevant figure operating in the background, providing inspiration and funding to von Sebottendorf. He may appear (briefly, hooded, at a distance) during parts of the third scenario, Dead Man's Stomp.

If you have a talent for anagrams and a familiarity with Horror on the Orient Express, you will recognize this figure as none other than the vampire Fenalik, a major driver of HotOE.

At this stage (in my version of the HotOE campaign) he is newly arisen from his long imprisonment in Poissy, but has his wits enough about him to start looking for that which he lost centuries ago. He is using von Sebottendorf to spread political turmoil in France, which will keep local authorities distracted. In the ensuing turbulence, Fenalik hopes to be able to continue his searching unseen by the authorities, and gain access to people and places that in a more orderly time would be beyond his withered grasp. He is not particularly interested in the Investigators themselves here, as they have as yet no connection to what he seeks, and his plans are all set in motion before they interfere.

Fenalik will be a minor, distant part of Zone Rouge - but there may come a day when the Investigators realize their implacable vampire enemy has interacted with them before. And I, as a Keeper, will enjoy that moment immensely.

3. Amelie's Medallion
In the scenario, Emilia Webb has a pendant or medal, with some untranslateable Aklo Script on the back. It has no bearing on the scenario, but is meant to be a link to other plots if the Keeper wishes it. I do wish it! And so, in this case, it's one of a set of medals given to a particular company of troops during the war, a joint American-French group. One member ended up as an unfortunate patient of Dr. Veniard. Another soldier mailed his medal home to his kid brother before he vanished into the mists of war... and that kid brother is one of our Investigators.

I am hoping to sow that particular seed as something that will eventually pay off in the "Dreamlands Express" segment of Horror on the Orient Express, though only if the Investigator in question survives that long!

4. Prop: The Dead Light's box!
The Dead Light is kept in a particular metal box by the Doctor, and it's described as being sealed with a "strange-smelling wax." I bought a suitable small (~3-inch) box from Amazon, applied some sealing wax (one of my wife's hobbies!), et voila! Le box! Whichever Investigator comes closest to madness or death during the play through will get to take her home.

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Next post: Edge of Darkness, and the "Alsatian Circle," a brotherhood of middle-aged esotericists that happens to include one Rupert Merriweather, who is dying and who is feeling very, very sorry for what he's done.

Zone Rouge - "Personal and Secret": Intel Briefings as player handouts

One of the narrative advantages to using the SIS framework is that scenario hooks can be given to players between sessions in the form of orders and briefing packets from London.

Under this kind of cover, I can pass along key plot hooks, NPC information, and setting details, without having to go over it in detail at the table. Like other CoC Keepers I have a weird obsession with approximate historical accuracy, so I wanted these to look as close as possible to real British SIS briefings from the time.

Fortunately, some examples of those are available! The British Archives has some that you can purchase! I used several of their real-life documents as templates for what I did here.

Examples!

1) A cover letter from "Quex" to one of the Investigators (who goes by "Sinjin"), setting the general parameters of the prelude, and alluding to some of the connections that will be uncovered further along in play.

2) A dossier on Rudolf von Sebottendorf, which recaps some of the relevant information from Wikipedia, and gives a little more connection to other soon-to-be-relevant plot points. Note the reference to a distribution network for Sebottendorf's agitprop pamphlets? That's going to come up. 

I also am using these documents to establish a broader network of potential adversaries that have some connection to the Ottoman Empire and Istanbul.

Those with experience running or playing Horror on the Orient Express will recognize a few connections here to that plot:

[SPOILERS AGAIN!]

• Sedefkar (who named and documented properties of the Simulacrum) was based in Constantinople
• The vampire who would become Fenalik spent centuries in Constantinople before departing for France, and (in my version of the game) likely has some contacts still among Eastern occultists, mystics and possibly monsters!
• The Brothers of the Skin are based out of the Shunned Mosque in Istanbul

And so all of that sets us up nicely to start diving into the Prelude scenarios themselves! In the next post, I'll start talking about the adaptations I'm making for the first scenario, "Dead Light!"

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Want more of what I do? I have a number of best-selling Adventures and GM guides for the 7th Sea system available via DriveThruRPG! They are reasonably popular and shockingly inexpensive, so check them out!

I'll soon be working on writing my first-ever CoC scenario for publication, giving it the same "behind-the-scenes development" treatment you've seen so far - so watch this space for future posts on that topic!

Zone Rouge - Intelligence and the Mythos: Agencies nobody wants, doing work nobody understands.

The British Secret Intelligence Service is a real thing - now popularly known as MI6 - and it was a real thing in 1920's Europe, the setting of my "Zone Rouge" prelude to Horror on the Orient Express. Unlike modern day MI6, however, the most you could say about the organization in the early 20's is that it managed not to be completely de-funded.

After the Great War, there was less of an apparent need for the various intelligence services floating around in the UK, and the SIS was no exception. Funding was drastically reduced, and the remaining resources were large devoted to attempting to keep tabs on communist activities. In the real world, this obsession with communism led the SIS to engage in an information-sharing partnership with the up-and-coming Nazi government in Germany. In my game, the communist mania will conceal a blindness towards a different enemy: the sorcerers, cultists and monsters of the world of Call of Cthulhu.

SIS Leadership and the Occult

Of course, not everyone in the organization is ignorant of the esoteric and occult. In the interest of providing a framework for the prelude and campaign, I wanted to have a couple of regular contacts in the high levels of the SIS that my group would interact with, and be variously supported or stymied by. Here I begin to make liberal use of historical figures in ways that, I'm sure, would displease them to no end.

The historical head of the group is Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming, who will be referenced by the code name "C." In my version of history, he is the source of the focus on communism, and is completely, violently disinterested in any theories regarding the paranormal or supernatural. He holds the purse strings of SIS, and will only release funds for projects that serve his own ends. In real history, "C" died unexpectedly in his home in 1923, to be replaced by Hugh Sinclair (more on him in a moment). In my history, I've reserved this fate for Sinclair.

Sir Hugh "Quex" Sinclair is 2nd-in-command in 1920, and is the figure the Vienna Club's Investigators will hear from most often in the Prelude. Before we go on, let's acknowledge that 1) "Quex" is an awesome nickname, and 2) If we follow the "initial-as-code name" precedent, he would be known as "Q". Q, of MI6.

In the framework of the Zone Rouge prelude scenarios, Quex is an intelligent, driven man with a hobbyist's passion for the occult. He is well read on both ancient and modern occultist and alchemical writings, and within the SIS his function is to point the Vienna Club towards scenarios with briefing packets that obliquely allude to strange goings-on. He is loyal to the organization, and does want to support the broader mission, but in the grand tradition of right-hand-men throughout history he's not afraid to to bend the rules to support a vision of the greater good that doesn't quite align with his boss' vision.

And, importantly for the Horror on the Orient Express campaign, Quex also fills the role of Professor Smith as the older acquaintance with deep ties to the occult community. Of course, in the campaign...

{SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST HotOE SCENARIO}

...he is ultimately killed and replaced by Makryat, would-be leader of the Brothers of the Skin. I really like the additional layers of intrigue this offers for the narrative: with a Cultist potentially able to pose as the Number 2 in the SIS, all kinds of interesting misinformation and back-channel intrigue is possible. Should the Investigators survive all the way to make it back to London, they may find conditions in the UK have changed dramatically due to this infiltration.

Finally, Quex's own assistant is one Claude Dansey (code name "Z"), who really became more famous in WWII when he created and activated his own network to replace the "official" SIS apparatus in Europe which had been compromised by German agents.

In the next post, I'll talk about some handouts I use,  in the form of Intelligence Briefings delivered to the Investigators, to help provide important information between sessions and keep things moving along.


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Want more of what I do? I have a number of best-selling Adventures and GM guides for the 7th Sea system available via DriveThruRPG! They are reasonably popular and shockingly inexpensive, so check them out!

I'll soon be working on writing my first-ever CoC scenario for publication, giving it the same "behind-the-scenes development" treatment you've seen so far - so watch this space for future posts on that topic!

Zone Rouge: The Best Lovecraftian Villain was a Real-Life Person

Look. I know you think modern times are crazy - and they are! But compared to the 1920's, man...

Look. Here is a person, an actual person, who existed then, and possibly could ONLY have existed then. I'm going to quote 3 lightly edited sentences of biographical summary from Wikipedia, and then talk about all the amazing ways that this person fits into Call of Cthulhu, Zone Rouge, and the themes of the campaign I'll be running here. Emphasis is mine, provided via bold exclamation points.

Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer (9 November 1875 – 8 May 1945?[!]), better known under his pseudo-aristocratic alias Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff [!!]...was a German occultist [!!!], writer, intelligence agent [!!!!] and political activist [!!!!!]. He was the founder of the Thule Society [!!!!!!], a post-World War I German occultist organization where he played a key role, and that influenced many members of the Nazi Party. He was a Freemason,^[1] a Sufi of the Bektashi order - after his conversion to Islam^[2] - and a practitioner of meditation, astrology, numerology, and alchemy[!!!!11!!!].

LOOK AT THIS GUY! Holy crap! If he didn't exist, I would have had to invent him.

Let's go through some key points here:

1. We don't know exactly when he died! This is technically because his body was fished out of a large body of water some time after his death, but I don't care, I say it's because we don't know if he ever died at all.
2. He picked himself an aristocratic alias!
3. He's a German occultist, interested in Sufism, Freemasonry, and a number of other esoteric philosophies including the Rosicrucians. This puts him in the philosophical company of people such as Johannes Kepler and Goethe, and means he traveled in some of the same circles as people like Guido von List, who kick-started a lot of modern German neo-Paganism, and was hideously anti-Semitic to boot.
4. He's an intelligence agent! In the last few years of the second World War, he was a double agent for both the Germans and the British, operating in Istanbul! (Istanbul has special significance for the Horror on the Orient Express campaign, being the final stop on the outbound journey.)
5. It's not mentioned above, but he also did a jail term for fraud and forgery. He knows how to forge documents! 
6. He founded the Thule Society! To the extent that it's famous at all, it's famous for 2 things: 
1. being an organization of occultists, archaeologists, and German nationalists who traveled the globe looking for mystical objects and occult evidence, and
2. Being taken over by people like Anton Drexler, Karl Harrer, and by 1919, an Austrian-born fellow named Adolf something-or-other, who ultimately turned this group into a right-wing prototype of the eventual Nazi party. Fortunately, von Sebottendorff basically gave up on the Thule Society at this point and bailed when they shifted their attention from occultism to real-life historical villainy. Even more fortunately, this frees him up to be whatever we need him to be from 1920 onwards.
7. He was involved in basically every kind of interesting occultism that existed on the continent in that decade: Freemasonry, neo-paganism, Rosicrucianism, and Sufi mysticism via contacts in the former Ottoman Empire. He picked up Sufism while living in Istanbul in the early 1910's. This last piece - the Turkey connection - is very useful as a bridge to certain persons in Horror on the Orient Express who will remain nameless for now.

All by himself, Rudolf von Sebottendorff embodies virtually every theme I wanted to introduce in Zone Rouge and play up throughout the campaign. He has scars from the War. He has pretensions to a better (fancier) life and is willing to lie, cheat and steal to get there. He has one foot firmly in the occult. He's a dab hand at political agitation and intelligence. He is PERFECT.

And in the greater scheme of this campaign's villainy, he's small potatoes. 

In future posts, I'll describe how I plan to use him as the proximate mover for the events of the three scenarios in Zone Rouge, but also how he himself is being manipulated by forces he doesn't understand. If the Investigators happen to catch him and shut him down before 1923? Well, it was nice knowing him. 

Now that we know what the Investigators and the SIS were up against, in the next post we'll spend some time reviewing the state of the SIS in 1920, and fleshing out the Intelligence environment that the Investigators will find themselves operating in.


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Want more of what I do? I have a number of best-selling Adventures and GM guides for the 7th Sea system available via DriveThruRPG! They are reasonably popular and shockingly inexpensive, so check them out!

I'll soon be working on writing my first-ever CoC scenario for publication, giving it the same "behind-the-scenes development" treatment you've seen so far - so watch this space for future posts on that topic!

Zone Rouge - "The Vienna Club," Meta-stories, and High Casualty Rates

I have to give a lot of credit to the writers (and editors, and revisers) of the Horror on the Orient Express campaign for 7th ed. Call of Cthulhu. They put a lot of thought into their campaign, they obviously play-tested it quite a bit, and they've anticipated many of the issues that are likely to come up during a play-through.

Such as, for example, how you keep a gaming group going when the campaign might have a 70% casualty rate.

10 years after the war, the landscape in the Zone Rouge was still blasted and desolate. This is a setting that begs for a high-casualty-rate campaign. 

(Photo credit: National Geographic).

In playtesting, the writers note, they found that 7 out of 10 Investigator characters either died or went mad over the course of the not-quite-20 scenarios that make up this campaign. On the plus side, this is another nice thematic element that blends well with the "Zone Rouge" prelude concept. As I mentioned, the Great War had a horribly high casualty rate in France, and even those soldiers and civilians who survived were often irreversibly scarred by the experience. So even in the go-go years of the Roaring 20's, a high casualty rate seems to be a fine echo of the hell from which the Continent only recently emerged.

However, it does present a problem: what do you do with the players of all those dead or insane Investigators? How do you keep them engaged in the campaign, rather than having them sit out the rest of the fun because of some unfortunate decisions or dice rolls? The suggested answer that really stuck with me was: "Plan for succession." Have some meta-story structure in your game fiction that allows characters who've gone through the grinder to be replaced by fresh meat.

And that's where "The Vienna Club" comes in. The "V" in Vienna Club (a designation I invented for this game) stands for the very real historical "Section V" of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS - which in later years would be known by the moniker "Mi6."

I am giving my players great latitude in the kinds of Investigators they create, but I have asked them all to include, in their background, some way that they are connected to British Intelligence. Perhaps they actively work for them, or perhaps they merely did a favor for an agent during The War. In any case, regardless of their occupations, age, or national origins, the initial set of Investigators here are all known to British intel, and in some sense available to be used as assets for SIS.

This gives us a hook for getting them involved in  Zone Rouge, and then in the subsequent Orient Express campaign. In fact, this approach makes it much easier to solve the "how did you all get to the current scenario location" question: through orders, bribery, favors or promises, SIS top brass managed to get the Investigators onto the Continent, putting the game pieces in the right places on the board.

Regarding the problem at the beginning of this post, the connection to SIS offers a convenient way of replacing casualties: A new face shows up, explains that they've received orders from London to show up at a given city and take direction from the other agents, and away we go! Or, at one remove: a mad or deceased Investigator's family suspected they were connected with espionage, followed some breadcrumbs, and here they are - you can either take them aboard the mission, or risk exposure.

The SIS angle also explains some potentially problematic real-life intrusions into our narrative that we might otherwise struggle to hand-wave away, such as Investigator absences due to a player missing a session. "Hey, Jim, where were you in Milan?" "Sorry mate, word came down from London. I had to see about another matter, then catch you up again here."

In terms of the broader narrative themes, the Vienna Club intelligence structure also gives me some room to introduce many of the themes that were important on the Continent in the early 20's. I'm weaving these themes into the pre-session world-building materials I'm creating, and will continue to come back to them as we play through the Zone Rouge prelude and the Orient Express itself. These are themes like:

• fallout and trauma from the Great War, 
• intelligence and counter-intelligence, 
• social movements such as European anarchist and socialist agitation, and 
• (non-supernatural) occult figures such as the members of the Thule Society.

In the next post, we'll take a look at the Thule Society, and at one historical figure in particular, who will serve as a low-level "big bad" in the 1920-1921 Zone Rouge prelude setting, and give the Investigators their first foreshadowing of the forces who will be arrayed against them on the Orient Express in 1923.



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Want more of what I do? I have a number of best-selling Adventures and GM guides for the 7th Sea system available via DriveThruRPG! They are reasonably popular and shockingly inexpensive, so check them out!

I'll soon be working on writing my first-ever CoC scenario for publication, giving it the same "behind-the-scenes development" treatment you've seen so far - so watch this space for future posts on that topic!

Zone Rouge - A Prelude to Call of Cthulhu's "Horror on the Orient Express" Campaign

Well... if you're gonna tell a story, might as well tell a big one, right?

"Horror on the Orient Express" is a huge, 19-scenario, continent-spanning campaign for the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Usually set in early 1923, it takes the player characters ("Investigators") from London to Constantinople, via one of the historical routes of the real-life Paris-Simplon Orient Express trains. Of course, not every Investigator will make it that far...

I don't just want to dive right in, though. We're starting up a new group for this game, and the majority of the players are either new to CoC or haven't played in years. None of us have run or played 7th Edition yet, so we may have some rust to knock off before we get to the serious business of insanity and death.

There are a number of good starter scenarios for the game, some of which ship with the Keeper book or the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set (which is an astonishingly good buy, by the way!) My plan is to weave three of these starter scenarios into a "mini-campaign," a Prelude to the main Horror on the Orient Express Campaign, to give the players and their Investigators a chance to gel as a group.

I call this prelude "Zone Rouge," after the "red zone" of bombed out, uninhabitable land in France following World War 1. It was described as:

"Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible" (MessyNessyChic.com, May 26, 2015).

Sounds cheerful, yes? So - why France? Why the zone rouge? Because it is much more horrific to me than the Lovecraft country of Boston, Arkham and backwoods New England.

I grant you, one of Call of Cthulhu's main selling points it its "classic" setting: the Roaring 20's, Prohibition, private eyes and flappers and academics mixing it up with extra-dimensional horrors and ancient undead sorcerers. And for many scenarios, and many campaigns, this is fine! But I want to ratchet up the horror before my players ever set foot on the Orient Express, and if you want "horror" and "Europe" in the same sentence, you're talking the post-war Continent.

The physical, emotional and spiritual trauma France suffered in the Great War is unreal: over a hundred thousand serving men came home as amputees, over forty thousand came home blind, many from gas attacks. Untold thousands were permanently psychologically scarred by PTSD, then known as shell shock. More than half a million women were widowed, and the war made orphans of three quarters of a million children. And that's all before the Spanish Flu, which swept across the country and killed tens of thousands more - many of them young, healthy survivors of the war, looking to finally live the life the Great War denied them.

In late 1920 - when "Zone Rouge" begins - the Influenza ended just the year before, and the country is finally ready to enter the 20's, the annees folles. But the scars of the recent past remain, and as the curtains go up, our Investigators step into this shell-shocked world of the lost generation.

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In the next post I'll describe "The Vienna Club," the meta-fictional conceit that unites the Investigators and allows for easy swapping-in of new characters to cover for missing players and replace casualties among Investigators.

Want more of what I do? I have a number of best-selling Adventures and GM guides for the 7th Sea system available via DriveThruRPG! They are reasonably popular and shockingly inexpensive, so check them out!

I'll soon be working on writing my first-ever CoC scenario for publication, giving it the same "behind-the-scenes development" treatment you've seen so far - so watch this space for future posts on that topic!