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!