After-Action Report #2: Edge of Darkness

The Infamous Hobo with a Table Leg

A second-hand in-joke about "Edge of Darkness" was my first real introduction to an iconic Call of Cthulhu experience. About 10 years ago, I joined an established CoC group. I believe the first scenario I played with them was "The Haunting," like so many other players - but this group had already been through Edge of Darkness.

Our Investigators were starting to poke around Corbitt's house, prying into dark and unsettling corners, when one of the players joked: "Watch out for the hobo with a table leg."

"The what?" I asked.

"Last time, we walked into a basement without checking first, and a hobo with a table leg knocked our whole party unconscious."

(Image credit: Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu Starter Set, book 2, page 37. Note: the hobo in the Starter Set version of Edge of Darkness is not likely to be able to knock out a party. Maybe a previous version of the scenario was different... or maybe our Keeper just liked messing people up with hobos.) 

"A hobo...?"

"With a table leg," they solemnly confirmed. The need to check every dark room for furniture-wielding vagrants has stuck with me ever since.

Which is why I guess I was so disappointed in myself for letting my Investigators talk him down from his frenzy when I ran this scenario last week.

What went well this week...

My disappointment aside, this session really hummed. We got halfway through the scenario, and will finish up in early April. I'm going to detail my plan for that part at the end of this post, and if it merits a separate after-action post I'll put up a "#2a".

The first thing that went well was that I had a very clear idea of the details. I had a much easier time remembering how to describe each of the areas and NPCs the players interacted with. I realized that when I ran Dead Light I wasn't providing enough detail, and one of the challenges I had was in keeping track of the scenario information available to me as Keeper.

Most (all?) scenarios I've seen are written in a very narrative way. They will be organized with headings, but the paragraphs are often quite long. In the more thoughtfully-written scenarios, important terms are in bold, and there is some way to set apart likely [Skill Rolls] - often by using brackets. But I still found myself a little lost using the scenario-as-written "live" at the table.

So, for this week, I re-wrote Edge of Darkness into an outline format. The major headings were locations - it makes sense to me to organize people and plot points by the place where they can be found. Then, each type of encounter - NPC, bundle of clues, monster, set-piece, etc - had its own set of bullet points with things like:

• Sense descriptions
• Mannerisms (for NPCs)
• Likely [Skill Rolls] and their results
• Important clues that the Investigators would need to be nudged into finding if they missed all available versions of that clue
• Name of handouts (and I also used symbols for the kind of handout: letter, physical object, song on my phone, etc)
• I laid out details for the "Banishing Ritual" set-piece in a table format, with times noted next to the particular thing I wanted the Lurker to do to the party. I will use this at the next session, when the players get to that part of the scenario.

This system worked SPLENDIDLY for me, and my next post will be a cleaned-up version that others can feel free to use.

The other thing that worked well was pacing. Partly thanks to my bullet-list version of the scenario, I was feeling very comfortable with Edge of Darkness - I felt I had mastery of the story and the important points. Therefore, I also felt comfortable letting the players take more agency in driving the plot forward. I gave them plenty of time to discuss plans with each other, carry out those plans in-game, and decide how they wanted to approach things.

Because I knew the critical details and descriptors for each location and encounter, I was also able to give a structure to each new experience. I could provide an initial description and then react to what they did, rather than worrying about whether they were going to have the "important" parts of the encounters as written. This made for a game that flowed a lot better. It allowed for player-to-player interaction without a great loss in tension and atmosphere, and therefore it also helped the players to further develop their Investigators as (doomed) people.

Finally, we added a new player to the group this week, and he really nailed his character. His character is the closest to a "James Bond" type we have - he's the group's wetboy (assassin - "black bag" man).

John Malkovich from "In the Line of Fire" knows what's up.

There's the danger that this kind of character can derail a CoC game, because of the mystique that tends to accrue around assassins, and their image of being this cool, unflappable killing machine.

Of course, one of the major themes that I've been building in the "Zone Rouge" mini-campaign is that spies, occultists, and similar inhabitants of the shadowy world are doomed figures destined to end up alone, mad, and ultimately dead in some awful way. So, before he joined the group, we talked about how an assassin might work in Lovecraftian fiction, and I emphasized the lethality of combat in this system.

Ultimately, I gave 3 guidelines, and the player nailed them perfectly:

• The character has to play well with the group
• The character is more likely to be a half-broken man skating on the surface of despair than he is a heroic action-hero. He is James Bond in Skyfall, not James Bond in Goldfinger.
• If combat is his go-to solution he's likely to come to a bad end, quickly - and this is totally fine and in-character.

This character also provided my first opportunity to try improvising a scene that wasn't included in the Scenario. The night before the group was scheduled to meet Merriweather in the hospital, this character wanted to gain access to the hospital and get the lay of the land. So I put the spotlight on him for a little while and let him wander around a dark, depressing, low-budget charity hospital. He did eventually come across Merriweather, and contemplated doing him in right then - but he stuck to the mission, which meant extracting information from Merriweather first. 

It was a cool, creepy, tense scene. It only took about 10 minutes, but it did a lot of worldbuilding and character building for us.

What Didn't Go So Well

As I mentioned above and in my previous post  about killing player characters (note: the most popular post on this blog so far, by a huge margin! I guess people really like killing player characters!), I wasn't quite comfortable turning up the "deadliness" dial in this session. As a result, the players didn't totally feel a sense of the stakes. The Investigators know the Lurker exists, they know it's killed people and animals, but the Players don't yet have a sense that this can happen to THEIR characters. 

I'm not sure I'm quite ready to try to kill them yet, but I am going to step on the gas a little bit in part two of the scenario, and see if I can at least cause a major wound or (more likely) some serious sanity effects.

In that spirit, I present my plan for the ritual! If you're familiar with Edge of Darkness, you may wonder why I'm not expecting it to go for 2 hours. Even though the ritual is usually described as lasting 2 hours starting at midnight, the mechanical explanation is that it takes 8 total Magic Points to dispel the creature, and each Investigator who is chanting (uninterrupted) contributes 2 Magic Points every half hour. 

My group has 5 Investigators in it. Assuming they have 4 dedicated to chanting, they could theoretically finish this off in 30 minutes. So if they use 4 in the first half-hour, I'm going to require 10 MPs to succeed; if they use 3, I'll leave it at 8 MPs. Regardless, the ritual should take them about an hour... assuming none of them are interrupted... 

My goal is to interrupt as many of them as I can, as often as I can, without defeating the ritual altogether. I do want them to succeed on the first try, because frankly having them wait a day and go back for a second attempt will rob the ritual of a lot of its tension. So the cost in Sanity (and perhaps physical wounds) may be high, but they will succeed unless they make some foolish mistake or choose to give up.

The following table shows the approximate point in the ritual where each thing will happen, and what [rolls] if any are needed for an Investigator to maintain concentration.

Note that I am leaning heavily on the odors and sounds the Lurker can produce! I really like the idea of unsettling and threatening the Investigators without presenting an apparent physical threat. 

In fact, when you see a sound called [Character's] Voice, it's because I'm writing out the phrase, handing it to a player, and asking them to say it to a targeted other player - even though their Investigator is not actually saying it. It is, in fact, the Lurker trying to trick the Investigators into interrupting their ritual to argue with each other, run outside, etc.

This is going to be a good time.

Finally, I ran the numbers on potential SAN loss. The big drivers are the 2 Zombies and the Lurker itself, with other events taking d2 and d3 here and there, potentially. 

As a quick check on how this might hit the players, the most vulnerable Investigator in the party has a starting SAN of 41. For this Investigator, if exposed to every SAN check in the ritual, they will (on average) lose 9.15 points of Sanity over the course of the adventure. So if I really stomp on the gas, they could

• Get a temporary insanity from losing 5 or 6 points in a single roll, or
• Lose more than 20% of their starting SAN (8 points), and gain an Indefinite Insanity

And this is fine! This is a good risk to bring to bear. And indefinite insanity has real in-game consequences, without necessarily sidelining that Investigator from the next adventure, which is scheduled to take place at least a year in the future after this one. I can always step on the brakes a bit with physical damage if they start shooting each other, let the Lurker out, etc. I don't plan to kill anyone in this scenario - but serious injury and serious insanity are definitely ON the table. 

So anyway - this is great, and I am excited. The ritual is going to be a peach. 

Meanwhile, a discussion topic! Do you re-write scenarios during your prep for a session? What kind of notes do you put together? And would you appreciate it if scenario writers included a "session-prep" version at the back of their scenario write-ups?

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Next Post: Possibly a discussion of session prep tools! 

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!

Applied Mechanics: When, and Why, to Kill Player Characters (CoC 7th ed.)

In which I come face-to-face with my killer instinct...

I have a confession to make. 

I've never killed anyone. 

Well... that's not totally true. As a Keeper (and GM in other systems) I have decreed dozens of unpleasant demises for a host of NPCs, often for no greater reason than to help add some atmosphere to a session.

But, in the couple of years that I've been regularly running RPGs, I have never killed off a player character. I have never, in fact, even "attempted" to, to the fullest extent that the rules permit. Certainly I have written RPG scenarios and adventures that offer the option of a high lethality rate, but when I'm actually sitting at the table I have never been able to pull the trigger.

I can offer a variety of excuses, we can probably get real Freudian about this, but the salient point is that when I run an ongoing game, I come to like the characters, and I want to see them survive the adventure and move on to the next one. I don't want to kill a character off.

But you've got to be cruel to be kind, right?

Nick Lowe knows what's up. 

(The cover art copyright is believed to belong to the label, Radar Records, or the graphic artist(s).)

This is, I think, especially true in Call of Cthulhu. The one thing that everyone knows about this game, if they know anything about it, is "Everybody goes insane and dies, not always in that order." This is not actually an accurate statement, and in fact this is not even really the goal of most modern-day Call of Cthulhu experiences. However, it is so baked in to the existential being of the game that to run a game without at least the realistic threat of death and insanity is, in many minds, to fail to deliver the "authentic" CoC experience.

In talking to my players, listening to great authorities like the Good Friends of Jackson Elias, and reading some scenarios I'm fond of, I have come to accept that the nearness of death and madness are needed to create the right kind of stakes in this game. The underlying stakes in a CoC session are usually very clear: You will try to find out what is going on, and if you make a foolish mistake, you will die. If you make no foolish mistakes, you will probably lose your grip on reality. There is no way to win, in the long term.

(This, by the way, is a good fit for the "stale beer" genre of spy fiction I was talking about in the previous post. The best you can do is to do your job, until you learn something that winds up killing you.)

However, I don't want to dish out death all willy-nilly. Part of what has kept me from turning on the mortal danger in a session is that I didn't want the players' characters to die in an unsatisfying way - by accident, say, or at a time when there was no particular danger. On the other hand, I didn't always feel I had a great way to know, mechanically, the level of danger that the PCs were walking into.

In the rest of this post, I'll be talking about the philosophy and mechanics of when, why - and how - to kill or indefinitely disable player characters. As part of this discussion, I give an example from the popular scenario "Edge of Darkness", and assess each of 3 major encounters in it regarding their likely lethality and how well that fits into the narrative structure.

Game Philosophy: Lethality Helps Raise Tension and Reinforce the Game's Feel

I've been giving some thought to the theory and mechanics of when, and how, I might go about killing off my players' Investigators. Or driving them mad. The net result of death or indefinite madness is basically the same - a Player has to roll up a new Investigator.

Your approach to this question as a Keeper (or DM, or GM, or Storyteller...) is going to do a lot of work for you in terms of helping build the world you want your group to play in. If death is too hard or too easy to achieve, it creates a different kind of experience than what Classic Call of Cthulhu is going for. Not necessarily worse, but different.

As I reconcile myself to the idea of bringing Investigator deaths into my game, here are my two guiding principles:

1. I want player character deaths to be meaningful. 
This is really a specific application of a broader rule that I'll talk about another time, and which I think everyone agrees to in theory if not in practice, which is that all risks should be meaningful. Call of Cthulhu is pretty good about avoiding "stupid" deaths, such as a fumble on an otherwise low-risk roll that somehow snowballs into a character's death. In real life, people die for stupid reasons all the time, but real life isn't an inherently narrative experience (unless you subscribe to the Tao of Pratchett).

In practice, the golden rule I'm following is this: I don't want to call for a roll with potentially fatal consequences unless the action is at a moment of high tension. 

2. I want players to choose to engage with potentially lethal situations.
Sandy Petersen (and others, of course) makes an excellent point in his recent talk about building horror scenarios: You really don't want your Investigator to open an otherwise innocuous door only to have a shoggoth jump out and devour him. It's cheap, and ultimately it sends the wrong kind of signal about the world you're playing in. (Again, we'll talk more about these ideas in a later post).

He recommends - and I agree - that before you spring a potentially lethal trap on your Investigators, they should be given ample warning. A smear of blood or gobbet of flesh on the threshold of a cave; the quavering, half-intelligible testimony of a frightened local rustic; a worm-gnawed tome of ancient wisdom that gives tantalizingly vague descriptions of an ancient evil. These are signposts that you use, as a keeper, to say to the players: "Hey - this is going to be potentially painful for your Investigators. If you proceed, you're signing a waiver, and things will get real around here."

If the Investigators press on, their players are tacitly accepting your bargain - and knowing they're entering a lethal situation increases the scenario's tension. This is one of the main issues I have with the caricature of CoC as an "all-death-and-madness-all-the-time" game: such a game would have a real problem building tension. If you can never succeed or survive, then in the best case you risk slipping out of the Lovecraftian horror genre and into something like Paranoia-style nihilist comedy. In the worst case, of course, you risk having a boring game.

So allowing players to choose to enter a lethal or maddening situation is a big part of what adds tension and risk to our game.

And in order for a player to choose, they must understand what's on offer (via the signposts you, as a Keeper, give them), and they must be willing to risk their Investigator - meaning, in fact, that the encounter must have at least the slim possibility of survival. A sliver of hope - of false hope, sometimes - is often all that's needed to get an Investigator to go into a situation that promises almost certain death. Almost certain death or madness is quite a far distance from certain death, after all.

From the Keeper's perspective, then, you need to be able to tell how deadly a given encounter is going to be for your Investigators, so you can provide the right message to your players, so they can make an informed choice. If it's a low-risk encounter, you can spring it on them with minimal warning. If it's a potential or likely total-party-kill, you'll want to put down the narrative equivalent of a big flashing neon sign saying "CERTAIN DEATH ----> THIS WAY!"

The next section provides a quick-and-dirty way of assessing the threat. It's something I plan to incorporate into the scenarios I write in the future, and something I'll use in my own game prep going forward. More on that in the upcoming After-Action Report for "Edge of Darkness."

Game Mechanics: How easy is it to die or go insane in this game, anyway?

Working through game math is one of life's little pleasures, isn't it? If you'd like to see my very back-of-the-napkin calculations for the likelihood that an average Investigator (with a maximum of 11 HPs) survives an encounter with a variety of weapons and monsters, scroll down to the bottom. Do not fear: the math will be clearly marked as such.

At some point in the near future I'm going to try to create a "Lethality/Insanity Estimator" spreadsheet for use in Call of Cthulhu 7e. I will post about it later, when it's ready, or when I throw my hands up in bafflement and failure.

Why do we want to know how potentially lethal a situation is? A couple of reasons:

• At a global level, to get an idea of how lethal and madness-inducing CoC is as a game
• When designing or reviewing a scenario, to predict roughly how dangerous the monsters, Mythos entities, and other challenges will be to the typical Investigator.
• When running a scenario for your own table, to be able to adjust dice rolls on the fly in response to the number of Investigators at your table, and their condition going in to the encounter. This can help you maintain the narrative flow, tension, and payoff you're looking for.

Let's do an example of how lethality works, or doesn't work, at various places in the scenario. We'll use some of the Investigators at my table, and the scenario they're engaging with, "Edge of Darkness."

There are really only 3 or 4  times when an Investigator could conceivably die in Edge of Darkness, and the first one is very unlikely:

• Encountering Red Jake, everyone's favorite table-leg-wielding hobo
• Sticking one's head up into the attic, like an idiot
• Fighting a zombie (zombie Maggie, zombie Jake, or a zombie bear)
• Being attacked directly by the djinn/Lurker if someone is stupid enough to break the pentagram on the floor, or cross into the circle

When I ran the scenario (more on this in the After-Action post), I didn't want the Investigators killed by a hobo with a table leg, so I gave my Investigators a lot of chances to decide to talk him down (which they did). As it turns out, I didn't need to worry so much about it.

Red Jake: Low Lethality

If an Investigator wanders into the basement without checking his corners, Red Jake will assault him with the aforementioned table leg, and will get a bonus dice for a surprise attack.

However, even with a bonus die for surprise, his table leg only hits for 1d4 - not a great feeling, if you get your face beaten in, but not lethal, especially with allies nearby to bail you out. An unlucky Investigator might get knocked unconscious (be reduced to 0 HP) in 3 combat rounds, if Jake gets max damage each time, and the Investigator fails to dodge or fight back each time, but it's unlikely. However, it definitely could sting.

Assessment: Red Jake is a pretty good jump scare, and a good reminder of the dangers of poking around a creepy old house without checking your corners. 4 HP or so is a reasonable price to pay to learn that lesson. This is a little bump in tension, without derailing your scenario with a character death. It fits well here in almost all circumstances.

Poking a Head Through the Trap Door: High Lethality

If an Investigator sticks their head through the trap door into the attic, the Lurker will attempt to claw them to death and/or rip their heart out.

The Investigator can make a Dodge roll and just fall to the floor, losing (on average) 2 HP - not so bad.

If they miss that roll, though, they take 1d8 + 1d6 damage (on average 8 HP), plus another average of 2 for the fall - so that's 10 HP, on average. In fact, we would expect this attack to outright kill the Investigator (by taking all of their HPs at once) almost two thirds about half of the time (edited for math error)!  If they survive, they will almost certainly have a major wound, and perhaps be too injured to contribute in any meaningful way for the remainder of the scenario.

So now we need to ask ourselves: is this an appropriate time in the scenario to kill an Investigator? I don't think so, but others may disagree. There have been signposts in the adventure - Merriweather's journal, and (if they've found it) Marion Allen's letter both mention that the monster is in the attic. So it is a foolish move to go poking around up there, and I could understand if another Keeper decided to leave it as-is as a way to show what happens to foolish Investigators.

BUT - the real climax of the scenario is in the ritual at the end, which is a fun, participatory experience for all of the players. To kill someone off during the Investigation phase of the scenario seems sub-optimal - though the writer of the scenario anticipates this, and talks about ways you could bring in a replacement before starting the ritual.

Assessment: A dangerous encounter, properly signposted - but I think it comes at the wrong place in the narrative flow. In my game, I kept the encounter available (though no one opted to stick their head through the door) but I "nerfed" the damage - I would roll 1d8 + 1d3 (for falling). Outright death is now unlikely (though not impossible - it's a 4% chance), but a major wound is going to happen about 65% of the time. Good enough to punish a foolish Investigator and set the tone for the Scenario, but not so disruptive. 

Fighting a Zombie: Moderate Lethality; Low against well-prepared Investigators
Realistically, the Investigators may face 2 or 3 zombies of any real threat during the climactic ritual. These zombies don't have a very high skill, so a hit is not super-likely, and when they hit they do between 2 or 3 HP (on the low end, for Zombie Maggie), and an average of 7 HP (for Zombie Bear) per round.

Assessment: They should be taken seriously, but if there is an Investigator on watch with a decently powerful firearm - and if the Investigators know their business, there will be - there's no reason these zombies should spell death for our PCs. They make a good threat and tension-builder, and are placed correctly in the climax of the scenario.

Being Attacked by the Lurker At the Climax: High Lethality
When freed to roam, or if an Investigator encounters it outside the warded area, the Lurker does 1d8 + 1d6 damage each time it hits, as in the trapdoor example above.

Assessment: The Investigators have to do something foolish to wind up facing this thing directly - go outside, or break the pentagram, or let the zombies tear the wards off the windows - and frankly, once you hit the climax, any such foolishness can certainly be punished with lethal force.

SAN Loss - Easy to calculate, but the effects are hard to predict

When Investigators experience something that goes beyond what their mind and worldview can handle, their sanity takes a beating. When they have a bout of temporary, or even indefinite, insanity, this can have two effects:

• Throw a big bunch of chaos into the scene, with the now-insane Investigator doing dangerous things to himself or his companions
• Take that Investigator out of action for the remainder of the scenario (or forever), similar to a death. 

There are a couple of opportunities to lose significant chunks of sanity in this scenario. We can do some quick math to see, on average, what we're dealing with:

• Each of up to 3 Zombies cause 1/1d6 SAN loss to see
• On average, each one will cause ~2-3 SAN loss, so this is (on average) 6-9 in one game-day if you use all 3 zombies during the scenario; if things go very wrong, you could be looking at 10-18.
• The Lurker causes 1/1d8 SAN loss to see (in various ways, not each time)
• On average, this will cause ~4 SAN loss in one game-day
• Finding Maggie's corpse causes 1/1d4, or ~ 2 SAN loss in a game-day
• Witnessing the horrible death of an Investigator at the hands of the Lurker causes 1/1d6 SAN loss, so about ~3 SAN in a game-day. When combined with the 1d8 for seeing the Lurker, this can contribute to a potential TPK situation (see below, "Complications"). 
• Assorted other nickel-and-dime SAN losses, like reading Merriweather's journal, can take off 1d2 or 1d3 SAN here and there.

So if we focus on just the ritual itself, Investigators who roll poorly can easily lose 10+ SAN in a game day. What happens then? If the Investigators are relatively fresh and have high starting Sanity, they are unlikely to be indefinitely insane. However, a temporary bout of madness (with a phobia or mania) results from losing 5 or more SAN in one roll - and this is quite possible.

If an Investigator loses 20% or more of their total remaining SAN in one game day, they will go indefinitely insane - this is akin to death, for our purposes. For the Investigators at my table, this could well be an issue - their SAN levels range from 41 to 69. If they were to roll poorly and lose 10+ SAN points, we could be looking at 1 or 2 indefinitely insane Investigators. 

So - what do I do about that? I think I'd leave it as-is, but I would keep an eye on cumulative SAN loss within each game day. If it's starting to creep up, especially for the lower-SAN Investigators, I might ask them if they want to "call it a day" and return rested the next day. I could either do this out-of-character, or I could do it within the narrative, by describing the increasing effects of the mental trauma they've sustained, and describing a growing urge to rest and retreat. 

Then, if they decide to press on anyway, they've made an informed choice. Any indefinite insanity, then, is on their heads.

Complications: Mixing SAN loss and HP Loss

The above examples treat each encounter as a discrete event: you fight Red Jake, then you fight some zombies, then you (maybe) fight a Lurker. Or - you discover a mutilated corpse, then you see the  Lurker out of the corner of your eye, then you see Zombie Jake, then you see the Lurker's true form.

In practice, though, the Scenario gets messy. If an Investigator happens to see the Lurker's true form during the ritual, then goes mad and starts blasting his friends with his .45 due to acute paranoia (this actually happened in an actual play I listened to), that introduces a level of lethality we didn't account for. 

There's no easy way to calculate these interactions, but it's important to be aware of. As a Keeper, you should be ready and willing to throw a symphony of terrifying stuff at your players - but keep one foot on the brake and the other on the gas, so you can keep the experience within the general bandwidth you're aiming for. 

If an insane Investigator starts firing at his comrades, she is doing some of your lethality work for you! You can feel free to quietly ditch the Zombie Bear you had waiting in the wings.

Conversely, if those pesky Investigators are holding it together pretty well and passing all their SAN rolls, it might be time to step on the gas and let them feast their eyes on a cadre of walking corpses.

SO! Do you struggle with knowing when and how to kill? What have you found works really well for you? Share your stories and tips in the comments, if you would?

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Next Post: An After-Action report on the first half of Edge of Darkness (for real this time!)

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!

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MATH-Y PORTIONS TO FOLLOW, IF YOU'RE INTERESTED
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Without doing a full analysis of every possible situation in which an Investigator rolls when death is on the line, we can pick a few representative cases and get an idea of how hard a Keeper has to work to kill an Investigator - or, conversely, how easy it is for an Investigator to off themselves or descend into madness.

Here we go. Combat death is a more complicated discussion than Sanity.

Hit Points, Injury, and Death

Investigators need Hit Points (HP) to live. These are derived by adding Size and Constitution and dividing by 10 (round down). The average Investigator, let's say, has a total SIZ+CON of around 110, and so starts a game with 11 HP (on average, assuming they aren't nursing any horrible injuries from a previous game session).

There are a lot of ways to lose HPs in this game, but ultimately the results are funneled into one of [X] effects:

• Regular injury - just deduct some HPs, and fret a little bit
• Lose half or more of their max HPs in one shot- major wound, make CON roll
• If failed, fall unconscious
• If char with major wound hits 0 HPs, they are dying
• Make successful CON roll at end of reach round, or die
• If they get to 0 HP without a major wound (like after a bunch of minor wounds), they don't die, just fall unconscious

Assuming they live, a wounded character needs days to weeks to heal back to where they started.

So how might an Investigator get injured? Let's look at a couple of examples of weapons, both man-made and beastly. Keep in mind an Investigator with a max HP of 11 would need to take 6 or more damage in one shot to receive a major wound.

Human Weapons

• Getting punched by a mook: 1d3 + damage bonus (usually none, but can be 1d4 or 1d6 for truly large people)
• Average damage is 2 HP per combat round (w/o bonus); max is 9 (w/ 1d6 bonus).
• The Investigator could survive 6 rounds of combat (w/o) bonus on average if they take an unanswered hit each round (in practice, the Investigator will probably dodge or fight back some rounds, so it's likely to be less lethal than this)
• Can only take a major wound from an opponent with damage bonus. 
• With a 1d4 or 1d6 damage bonus, the chance of rolling a major wound is about 1 in 5. The odds of the attacker scoring a major wound in the first 6 rounds of combat are roughly 74%. 
• So: against a regular-sized mook, a pretty boring fight. Against a big thug, a real likelihood of major wounds and death.

• Stabbed with a small knife: 1d4 + damage bonus
• Very similar to punching; an 11-HP Investigator can expect to go 5-6 rounds of combat, at least, before falling unconscious. A major wound is a concern (~20-25% chance), but not top of mind.
• Knives and other blades can also impale, so somewhat rarely the attacker will roll well enough to do this. In that case, the minimum damage done by a small knife 4 + 1d4 + damage bonus, which makes a major wound - and thus death - a very real possibility.
• Hit with a baseball bat: 1d8 + damage bonus
• Even without a damage bonus, more than a third of the time this is going to cause a major wound right off the bat (pun intended). A one-hit knock-out, or unconsciousness in 2 rounds, is a real concern for the 11-HP Investigator.
• Handgun: 1d10 (impaling with extreme success for 10 + 1d10)
• Major wound 40% of the time for the 11-HP Investigator; unconsciousness likely in 2-3 rounds.
• Impaling means just about instant death, or close enough.
• Shotgun at close range: 4d6 - goodbye, face.  (Average is 14 HP lost per hit).

Beast/Monster Weapons

Animals, ghouls, creepy-crawlies, Mythos monsters - they all have a variety of ways to inflict physical harm. Many of them ALSO have ways to inflict harm on sanity and other awful things, but I'm going to skip over them for now. So in the simple case, let's just say you're fighting a...:

• Byakhee: 1d6 + dmg bonus (1d6) - average 6 HP per round, but it can attack twice, and it can also latch onto you and drink your blood and kill you that way...
• Dark Young: speaking generally, 4d6 per turn like a close range shotgun, but in practice much nastier...
• Deep One Hybrid (not using a weapon): hits like a human! Hey, that's good news! Then again, they can also hit you with a particularly gnarly spell...
• Shoggoths: 8d6, plus an assortment of other nastiness, and they can hit multiple Investigators at once or engulf them and tear them apart in a nightmare of squishy gelatinous awfulness with the tearing and the rupturing and the... you know what? Don't fight a shoggoth.

Combat death summary: Any enemy more menacing than a medium-sized fistfighter is going to present an increasingly serious threat of major wounds and death if the Investigators just stand straight and slug it out. In practice, combats may be more or less lethal depending on what tactics the Investigators use, and how everyone rolls.

As a Keeper, you can regulate the lethality of your encounters to some extent, but it seems better to do it by adjusting the situation (type of enemy, which attacks they'll use, what kind of cover or escape options the Investigators have) rather than fiddling with the damage numbers.

Indefinite Insanity

Sanity Points (SAN) start out equal to Power (POW). Savvy Players often prioritize things like Power and Intelligence over size, so let's say the average POW is up around 70, and thus the average starting SAN is around 70 as well. Again - this is a broadly applicable average, not a precise estimate.

Losing Sanity

- Basic SAN roll: lose X/YdZ

• 5 or more SAN points from a single roll:
• Major emotional trauma - make an INT check
• If succeeds, (likely will succeed slightly more often than not), temporary insanity (1d10 hours); can add phobia/mania, or corrupt a backstory, or have delusions
• If fails, remain sane for now
• Bout of madness, for a certain number of rounds
• Lost 20% or more of your total sanity in one game day, indefinite insanity (weeks, months, forever). I'm not sure if you have to roll for this or if it's automatic.
• So for a fresh-faced investigator with 70 SAN, this is 14 SAN points in a day. That's hard to do - you'd have to fail several mild SAN rolls, or two big ones. But as your Investigator presses on, and max SAN falls due to the mythos, or you don't recover it all between days... the likelihood goes up. 
• When you get to about 50 SAN, the odds of indefinite insanity in any one scenario are comparatively high. When you get to 40 or 30, you start to worry about going 'round the bend in one bad roll.

[Well-constructed scenario will tend to place the riskiest rolls - highest SAN loss, highest HP loss - towards the climax, or at least at a peak in the narrative tension.]

Stale Beer in the Sacred Chalice : Using More Realistic Themes of Spycraft and the Occult In Your Game

"Since They [the supernatural "Secret Chiefs" who provide the basic teachings of occult philosophies] are "invisible" and "inaccessible," may They not merely be figments invented by a selfstyled "Master," not quite sure of himself, to prop his tottering Authority?

Well, the "invisible" and "inaccessible" criticism may equally be levelled at Captain A. and Admiral B. of the Naval Intelligence Department. These "Secret Chiefs" keep in the dark for precisely the same reasons; and these qualities disappear instantaneously the moment They want to get hold of you." - Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears. 

I've written in previous posts about using the post-Great-War British Secret Intelligence Service as a meta-narrative plot device for 1920s-era Call of Cthulhu. In the game I'm currently running, I'm using it to help with world-building, and to provide a convenient source of fresh meat as the "Horror on the Orient Express" campaign ramps up in lethality and insanity.

By asking the Investigators to link themselves to the worlds of both real-world Intelligence and the Occult, I thought I was merely engaging in a clever bit of stagecraft, setting things up so I could easily deal with sudden character deaths and incurable madness down the line. I don't think I quite expected how thematically deep this rabbit-hole goes.

Spycraft Stories and Occult Fiction Share a Lot of Tropes

Without crafting an entire essay on the topic - for that, see some of the articles linked below! - it's worth exploring the ways in which Intelligence Agents and pursuers of the Occult both lend themselves to some of the same story tropes. My intention is to identify what they have in common, and talk about ways you can use that in your own games via NPCs, Investigators, and adding some flourishes to your scenarios.

By the way: I am thinking here of the "trench coat and stale beer" version of spy fiction as opposed to the "tuxedo and martini" kind. In the more grounded and "grittier" version of spycraft, the work is sometimes more dangerous and often more tedious than the action-movie version. For sure it's less glamorous and cartoonish, more John Le Carre' than latter-day James Bond movies.

Here are some traits and experiences that are common to both spy fiction and occult fiction characters.

• Pursuit of secret, dangerous knowledge
• Willingness to spend long, tedious hours on work that may not provide clear results
• Constant paranoia; many in the community exhibit signs of trauma and other emotional scarring
• Feelings of isolation from "regular" people, and difficulty forming close relationships outside the intel/occult communities
• Constant need to keep secrets, even when it harms their wider goals
• Habitual use of secret codes and euphemistic language
• Fatalistic outlook (though some Occult communities are much more upbeat and positive about the future state of humanity, even if they think current humanity is a mess)
• A tendency to live in the now, for immediate pleasures - food, drink, sex, drugs, expensive clothes.
• Belief that coincidences are meaningful, and sensitivity to patterns or "secret messages" that others may not perceive (or may not be real!)
• Belief (sometimes correct!) that the world is controlled by powerful, hidden forces

The two kinds of fictional characters and genres have so much in common that you might not know, at first, whether you're looking at a spy or an adept of the occult. When I was prepping the Zone Rouge version of "Edge of Darkness," I saw an opportunity to bring these themes out in the person of Rupert Merriweather.

Instead of the kindly old friend of the Investigators that he was written to be, I set him up to be a pathetic character, a warning to the Investigators not to expect glamour or success out of their lives. Washed up, desperate, and cut loose by his former masters in SIS, Merriweather is wrestling with the knowledge that he has failed at basically everything he set out to do. He is the last survivor of his circle of his friends, he's sick, he's alienated the British government, and managed to get his wife and son stranded in France as well. He was led deeper and deeper into desperation and mistakes, and all he did at the beginning was try to serve his country in the Army. It was, perhaps, a sobering moment for the Investigators - they reacted with exactly the mix of sympathy and contempt I was hoping to elicit.

So let's lean into these themes and see how they can be used in games like Call of Cthulhu, where the player characters are much more grounded and realistic than in some other games.

One Option: Investigators as Intelligence Agents Looking into Occult Activities

First, you can go the route that I've chosen in the "Zone Rouge" mini-campaign, and explicitly use Intelligence agencies as your organizing principle. In this case, the Investigators all have some connection to the pre-MI6 British Secret Intelligence Service. Since the second-in-command of SIS at that time had an interest in the occult, he naturally feels free to send his field teams haring after occult actors who may pose some threat to Britannia's goals.

There are a lot of ways to go with this, and I'll use some characters from my own table as illustrations:

• An experienced "Double-0" agent, former Sergeant in the Royal Marines, a "wetwork" specialist who uses discreet and tactical violence to remove roadblocks on the orders of his bosses in SIS. As a result of experiences in war and past brushes with the mythos, his paranoia is ramped up, and he seems perpetually on the edge of self-destructive behavior. This is, in some sense, James Bond without the glamour.
• An explorer and adventurer, and semi-retired Army officer, born into a high-social-class family. His connections to SIS leadership are as much social and class-based as anything else, but he did do some "jobs" on behalf of SIS brass during the war. Has a more sanguine view of what's out there, but on the other hand he's experienced less trauma.
• An Egyptologist, brought in to work with this specific team (the Vienna Club) because of his subject matter expertise and proximity to the same social circles that their target (political agitator and occultist Rudolf von Sebottendorf) moves in.
• A street magician who was basically swept up into the group because his sleight-of-hand and a few other skills might be useful. This is his first direct exposure to the dual worlds of intelligence and the occult.

When your players see their characters as spies or other members of the demi-monde, they will tend to incorporate that into their approach. We had a particularly great example of that during the play through of "Edge of Darkness," where the experienced assassin asked if he could check out Rupert Merriweather's hospital the night before their official meeting. 

I said yes (like a champ!) and we parlayed it into a tense, creepy scene, where he wandered alone through a dark and depressing hospital, contemplating the idea of simply snuffing Merriweather out right now, and held back only by his mission directive which required letting the man talk and reveal his secrets. I'll write more about that in the After-Action report, which will be posted next.

Another Option: Make the Occult Investigation Feel Like Spy Work

If you don't want to use Intelligence directly in your game, you can still accentuate the parts of a typical Call of Cthulhu investigation that align with that genre.

• NPCs should seem unreliable or like they have a hidden agenda, even if they're only there to give information. 
• Work in creepy coincidences that may or may not have any bearing on the mystery. Don't drown your players in red herrings, but a judicious use of misleading synchronicity may be warranted.
• Imply the existence of a "bigger bad". Cult leaders always seem to be reporting to someone else. A key contact mysteriously turns up dead just after talking to the Investigators. Call for "Spot Hidden" checks to notice someone in the crowd, who may or may not be watching the party. 
• Encourage the players to watch how their Investigators talk in public. If they're throwing occult or Mythos terms around  in casual conversation, have it catch the attention of a nearby NPC. Why is that NPC suddenly paying attention them...?
• Encourage the players to make a "conspiracy" board or try to draw a Night's Black Agents-style "conspyramid." Over the course of a few sessions, get them in the mindset that everything is connected, and everyone is hostile to them.
• Note: This can tend to slow down play and make the players overly cautious, so you should also use some GM tricks (like giving bland details, or letting the players name or describe an NPC or object) to signal when something is truly not worth worrying about.
• In conversations with "normal" NPCs, heighten the ways that the Investigators' experience is different. Point out a variety of details that set off the Investigator's paranoia, but point out that the NPC is totally calm and oblivious. As things get bleaker and more out of control for the Investigators, NPCs they talk to are increasingly cheerful, going about their daily lives unconcerned.
• If the Investigators have a dramatic sit-down with a cultist or other enemy, try to highlight the growing similarities in personality and worldview. Help the players understand how much more similar their Investigators are to other residents of this twilight world, compared to those who live in the sunshine.

I hope this is useful and interesting to you! Do you have any spies at your table? Have you introduced any of these themes to the occult side of your game? Let's talk about it in the comments!

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Further reading: (some of these are from a slightly disreputable source, so a grain of salt is warranted!)

• The Magus Was A Spy: Aleister Crowley and the Curious Connections Between Intelligence and the Occult
• The British Occult Secret Service, The Untold Story
• Everard Fielding
• Helen Duncan (especially regarding her leaking of then-classified Naval intelligence during a seance)

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Next Post: An After-Action report on the first half of Edge of Darkness (we're scheduled to play it this Wednesday!)

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 2: Edge of Darkness!

My Call of Cthulhu group is moving along! They are the "Vienna Club", so-named to hint at their affiliation with the world of covert intelligence, where the V in Vienna stands for Section V of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6.

The Orient Express waits for them down the line, but right now they're playing through "Zone Rouge," a sort of prelude mini-campaign I've assembled, set in France between 1920 and 1922. The four scenarios in this prelude 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 post I'll go through the process of adapting Edge of Darkness to fit the "Zone Rouge" setting. "Edge of Darkness" is available in the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Starter Set, but much of the material in this blog are things I've created for the purpose. If you're interested in any of the materials or using this prelude setting in your own game, leave me a comment! 

Adapting Edge of Darkness

"'Cause out on the edge of darkness,

There rides a Peace Train horrible Mythos monster

Oh Peace Train Mythos Monster take this farmhouse, 

Come take my sanity again" - Cat Stevens, "Peace Train," loosely paraphrased 

Edge of Darkness is the scenario the Vienna Club thought they were heading for when the Dead Light rudely intercepted them during a gnarly late-Autumn storm on the road outside Verdun. However, the night is done, the storm has passed, and the weary and battered Investigators stumble at last into war-blasted Verdun (which was Arkham in the original scenario).

Gathering and Motivating the Investigators

In the original scenario, the Investigators are all somehow friends of one Rupert Merriweather, an aged and now dying patient at St. Mary's teaching hospital in Arkham. He asks them to meet him, and his time is presumably short. 

For my game, I wanted to spice things up a little bit, as well as connect Merriweather to the larger campaign. By making him more of a pathetic, slightly contemptible character, I could use him as a sort of cautionary tale, highlighting some of the themes and dangers confronting our group as they walk a difficult path: going deeper into Intelligence work, and deeper into the Mythos.

Before starting this Scenario, one of the Investigators received a file from "Q", or Hugh "Quex" Sinclair, the head of their division in British SIS. This file contained a dossier on the over-arching villain of the mini-campaign, one Rudolf von Sebottendorf, but it also contained a good deal of information about our version of Rupert Merriweather. 

To save you having to read the whole dossier, highlights of Zone Rouge's Merriweather are:

• An informer for SIS, but also in pay of multiple intelligence services,
• Involvement with Marion Alard (Marion Allen in original scenario) is both political and occult in nature, and is supported by von Sebottendorf under the alias "Erwin Torre"
• Gassed in ’16 at Verdun; he is dying of something related to this.
• Denied a pension by the Army, he was desperate for money and sold himself out to multiple Intelligence services.

Realizing he's dying, and wanting to atone for his various sins (including the summoning of the Lurker in the Attic at the farmhouse), he sent a telegram to "Q" begging forgiveness, and arrangements were made for the Investigators to come meet him.

And so Q's special instructions to the Investigators give them their hook, and the crux of their mission: 

I made a few other cosmetic changes as well. Because I want Merriweather's story tied up in the war, I made him much younger - about 40 years old. Consequently his poor wife Agnes is now about 35, and his obnoxious shit of a son Bertrand is 17 (nearly 18, he insists!). His adventures with Marion Alard in the farmhouse now were not 40 years ago, but only 3 - the events of the summoning took place in 1917. 

I don't think this hurts the integrity of the setting much, and it makes it even more clear how quickly one's life can fall apart in the Investigators' line of work. Because really, Merriweather is not much different than they are - an Intelligence man, an occultist, someone working in the field for forces much too big to comprehend, someone whose value is only what they can provide to their bosses. And those bosses are only too happy to be rid of them when convenient. (This was a theme well explored in the James Bond film Skyfall - I had that film much on my mind when adapting the scenario).

Changes to Other Characters and Hooks (or: Making Shrewd Use of a Sarcophagus)

The other character to receive significant work is Marion Alard (nee Allen), whose life and death takes place entirely off-screen. In the original scenario he was the leader of the "Dark Brotherhood" occult group and drove a lot of that action, only to be murdered in New Orleans when he shot his mouth off to the wrong person. He had some open-ended plot hooks relating to a malevolent Uncle in Boston, and to the golden sarcophagus-shaped box that held the amber bead that held the monster of this scenario. 

In "Zone Rouge," he's doing a good deal of meta-plot work for us. 

• Alard is our first direct connection to "Erwin Torre" (e.g. von Sebottendorf), and has the most knowledge of anyone now living about Torre's mysterious muse and patron, "En Kalif."
• Though the players may never piece it together, and certainly won't for months of real-time play at least, I have set up Alard's murderer to be none other than Mehmet Makryat. 

As we use him here, Alard has been in touch with Erwin Torre for some time, receiving guidance and tutelage towards two goals: Alsatian independence, and personal growth in occult knowledge and power. Alard reached out and identified some collaborators, including two men whose only role in the story is to die, and one Rupert Merriweather, a disaffected British Army vet stranded in the environs of Verdun.

Together, the four of them - calling themselves the "Alsatian Circle" - spent the better part of a year publishing inflammatory political pamphlets such as the one found as a clue in Dead Light. During this time, they also got up to a variety of occult experiments.

However, Alard became dissatisfied with what Torre was willing or able to teach him. He asked to be introduced to Torre's vaunted guide, known only as "En Kalif", but was rebuffed. Not one to take rejection easily, he hopped over to Paris, asked around for the equivalent of the Black Market in occult knowledge... and came up with the Golden Sarcophagus-shaped box, in which he found the Djinn (or the Lurker in the Attic, if you like).

In the scenario as written, this has hieroglyphs on the outside which reference Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep - which is great, as it will provide a little meta-game thrill to my players. It also ties into some more Nyarlathotep shenanigans to come, namely:

• [Dead Man Stomp spoiler!] Being the ultimate source of the horn used to raise the dead, and 
• [Horror on the Orient Express spoiler!] Being the "Skinless One" at the heart of the origin of the Brothers of the Skin cult.

Inside, originally, was some cryptic language that relates to the fabled lost island civilization of Mu. This doesn't really spark any fires for me though, as our game is not likely to intersect with that. So instead, a regular Language: Turkish or hard Occult roll will identify the characters as related to an early Turkic script (say, around 9th or 10th-century, neighborhood of Byzantium) that, in other objects from the period, was used for wardings and curses. However, this particular example is not exactly that script, and cannot be translated by anyone. 

What it does, however, is put this box in or near Byzantium at around the same time that [again, HotOE spoilers... again, just assume this blog is riddled with them] Sedefkar was active with the Simulacrum. Which means this box is on the radar of the Brothers of the Skin. Which means that, by obtaining it, Marion Alard gets on their radar too... and when he happens to show up alone in Paris, distraught and looking for answers, he's an easy mark for Mehmet. 

In the original scenario, Marion Allen dies with injuries similar to those inflicted by the Lurker, and has the Bloody Tongue mark carved on his head - I suppose, as a link to Masks of Nyarlathotep or other scenarios like Crack'd and Crooked Manse. In this version, it's just a clean stab to the heart - the same method later used to kill the 3 look-alike Mehmets in London! Whether the Investigators make that connection later on, who knows? But at least it's there.

If the Investigators are still in possession of the Box when we get to our version of The Auction (and I am sure they will be, in some sense), it could be an attractive target for the Brothers, or at least Mehmet's little band of them, prior to his cleaning house in "Dancers in an Evening Fog". 

Using Real-life Occult Texts in the Game

As a result of his involvement with the Alsatian Circle, Merriweather obtained second-hand a number of volumes of occult lore in French and German, which he asks the Investigators to bring back to Q as a sort of peace offering, or to purchase indulgences for his sins. Each book takes a week in game-time to read, and offers the Investigators the chance to make an Occult skill-check as though they had succeeded in an occult roll. I like this approach more than having these volumes automatically give a certain increase in Occult. I'm honestly not sure where I saw it, but it's not my idea, but it works well because these volumes are kind of just falling into the Investigators' lap. Since they didn't have to work for them, they shouldn't get too high a reward for reading them.

I found these books mostly via Archive.org's collection of public domain books. By searching for keywords like "occult" and "magic," and limiting my search to things published pre-1930 in French or German, it was pretty easy to come up with some good candidates. The handouts I prepared from them are 8-10 pages of various sheets from each book, focusing on pages that have diagrams and interesting language. I don't expect the players to read this at the table (or ever), but if they want to do so in between sessions, so much the better.

These are just some examples of what was available to interested occultists at the time. When they finally meet Q in London prior to The Auction, his study will have a great number of such books in English as well, which they may borrow and read (if they ever get the time!).

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Next Post: I'm not sure yet! Either an After-Action report on Edge of Darkness (we're scheduled to play it this Wednesday!), or a longer piece on the relationship between Intelligence work and the Occult, as embodied in the doomed, pathetic character of Rupert Merriweather.

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!