A Long, Dark Day

Six of us sat down on Saturday afternoon to play the modern day Call of Cthulhu scenario, Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home.

The scenario comes from The Things We Leave Behind, a collection of modern day scenarios from Stygian Fox.  It's written for Call of Cthulhu, but we played it with Cthulhu Dark - or rather with the GM's own slight variation on Cthulhu Dark.  For a one-shot pick-up game that was a good choice - character creation takes minimum time and effort so the GM didn't have to go to the effort of making pre-gens or worry about exactly how many of us there were.

This scenario has the PCs playing the members of a child abduction response team.  We assembled a police pursuit driver, a forensic IT specialist, an FBI field agent, an FBI profiler and an ex-military paramedic.

(Apparently FBI agent is my default character in investigation games in the same way that ranger used to be my default class in fantasy games.)

The story involves searching for an abducted child, although it rapidly becomes apparent there is a lot more going on.  The scenario is very well put together, and comes with a bunch of handouts, plus one particularly interesting thing.  One organisation the PCs end up looking into has a website, and said website actually exists.  Being able to browse the site on a phone made it feel a lot more real than just reading it off paper.

There's also a bunch of material for the GM, including a chart with key clues in boxes, which the GM was marking off as we found each one.  (I would recommend using a screen when running this adventure, as I had to make an effort not to let myself read anything when he was using this chart.)  What it apparently doesn't include is a timeline of events up until the present, as the GM had to write his own.

One oddity of this scenario is that as a fairly genre savvy person I'd figured out pretty early on that certain actions would be at best very unwise and at worst disastrous.  The characters don't know they're in a horror story though, and so we were having them act accordingly.  Trying to find the right balance between having the character act like a real person and my own reactions to all the weird things going on was quite a challenge.

Ultimately we failed to avert disaster, ironically by being compentent at our jobs and still clinging onto sanity.  Had we taken longer (in game) to complete our goals, things might have gone differently, and had my character failed that last sanity check it would have pushed her over the edge to the point where she might have done the thing that needed doing.  But we all kept it together until the end.  And it really was the end.

This scenario is one of a set of six, and apparently there is an overarching campaign thread that can be used to tie them all together.  Unless this is the last scenario in that campaign, I can only assume that it expects the investigators not to fail the way we did.

Despite our absolute failure I liked the adventure, and it worked very well with the Cthulhu Dark rules.  It did take a very long time to play.  We started some time after lunch, took a break for dinner, and finished in the late evening.  I hope I can find an opportunity to play the other five scenarios, but we're going to need to allow a substantial amount of play time if they're anything like that one.

While not the best Cthulhu adventure I've played, this one is well worth a look, and I feel like I could run it myself with reasonable competence despite not having done much horror GMing.  And while the Cthulhu Dark rules are a little on the light side for my tastes, they work well, and for this type of game I can't fault them.