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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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!