Games Expo 2023 - fun was had by all...except when the Hilton bar ran out of ale!

 Murder Shack – A Keepers perspective 

(SPOILERS SPOILERS AND MORE SPOILERS!)

It has been a long time since my last post.  Various reasons all of them mundane and boring.  However, I have managed to play a lot of games and ‘Handled’ my first Delta Green scenario, ‘Last Things Last’.  I also missed the deadline on the ‘writing your first scenario’ course, but it will get done eventually.   

So back to the point of this post – i had played The Murder Shack (see previous blog post) but wanted to also run it as Keeper as well.  So below is how that went and some feedback to consider for future Keepers.

• System: Call of Cthulhu 7th ed
• Scenario: The Murder Shack
• Played on: RPG Nook Discord server and Roll20
• Keeper: Me!

Players:

• Scrooge - Aaron Napper (The Carpenter)
• Verben - Joanne Cherfas (The Nurse)
• Fat Earther - Don Speerlake (The Journalist)
• Seraf/Attila - Christine Kerpas (The Film Maker)

The Murder Shack is a pretty straight forward scenario written by Scott Dorward from the Good Friends of Jackson Elias.  It is included in the Blasphemous Tome they produce for patreon members (highly recommended!).  It revolves around a being that takes the form of a Shack and feeds off the fear who enter it.  This fear it generates by having them go insane in response to visions of loved ones they know that were previously murdered in the shack, usually with a rusty old sickle.  The more brutal the murder the more fear is generated and the better the high for the monstrosity feeding from the fear.

I reused the basic pregens from the scenario I played in – this included a Carpenter, Film maker, Nurse and Journalist but added some more detail in terms of their traits, and a profile pic.  It was a minimalist approach with things like credit rating and possessions left blank.  As one of the players pointed out before the game – ‘The first clues that your Keeper does not intend for the character (Aaron) to make it out alive’:

Which I thought was pretty funny, and totally accurate.  

In terms of preparation – the original scenario is set in America, but I wanted to try out playing this here in England so moved the premise to the North West of England – the Investigators would start in Preston with the shack being located in the Lake District at a place called Troutbeck.  Basically, the shack had been going from national park to national park in England rather than in America causing these murders and feeding on English fear instead of American fear.    

The Roll 20 prep was easy and consisted of three main locations, the Survivors meeting, the shack image and the internal map of the shack.  If I was breaking this down a bit further (and with a nod to RPG Nook for this approach) you could summarise it like this:

Scene: Survivors group meeting

• NPCs in the scene: Pastor and Annie
• Main objective of scene: Introduce PCs / Get PCs to Murder Shack
• What drives it: Annie and the mobile phone
• Obstacle to overcome: Investigators own feelings

Scene: Arriving at the Shack

• NPCs in scene: Annie
• Main objective in scene: increase paranoia / get PCs into the Shack
• What drives it: hearing the voices of their murdered loved ones 
• Obstacle to overcome: Darkness and lack of light

Scene: Locked in the Shack

• NPCs in scene: Murdered loved ones / Annie
• Main objective: Free murdered love one from the shack
• What drives it: cumulative SAN loss of investigators / murder of each other
• Obstacle to overcome: Each other and getting out of the shack

The scenario starts with the players at a ‘Survivors group’ for those that have lost loved ones.  I wanted to encourage the players to lean into this scene to set up the premise as much as possible.  So at the start of the scenario I gave a brief introduction and asked the players to identify the name of the loved one they knew that was murdered in the shack the previous year and their relationship.  We ended up with a brother, husband, girlfriend (fiancé) and a daughter.  This is also the point at which they come across Annie Pruitt, who is the main reason the players start off on their journey to the Shack.

The scenario mentions spending as much time on this as the Keeper sees fit, but I would certainly encourage this scene to be more than just ‘we meet Annie Pruitt and can start’.  Having each of the players give a bit of dialogue and talk about what feelings their characters have and how they have been coping since the murders really helps to set the scene and allows some links between the PCs to be made that can be riffed on later through the scenario. I think it also permits the players to make that leap of outrage later after talking to Annie to just head off straight for the Shack, rather than maybe the more logical approach that would involve the Police and maybe taking Annie to social services and probably a different ending to the scenario than was intended!

Important change I made to the scenario to make it more ‘British’, instead of coffee for refreshments at the meeting I had a tea urn, although I think the significance of this for the setting was lost on the players as they all said they went and got a cup of coffee.  

The PCs then had the encounter with Annie, this is a nice scene and the Keeper can drop a few clues here about the mobile being the same one as the one originally owned by one of the relatives that were murdered, the location of the shack at the moment (its not the same place as where the murders originally happened) and GPS data and photo data on the phone to confirm her story.  The journalist in this case did send a pic of Annie to a contact but as it is late at night, without a hard or extreme luck roll I wasn’t going to give much info away until the morning.  

And here I guess is where the investigation bit of the scenario has basically finished.  Once the players are on their way to the shack there is little in the way that the players can do to find out about the shacks background.  The players and I had a discussion about this after the scenario finished.  I would advise a Keeper to maybe provide some of the background information to the players once they are locked within the shack – perhaps the shack taunts them with newspaper clippings of previous murders in the shack going back decades to increase their fear and its anticipation of the feast to come, or one of the PCs loved ones tells them some gory details about how the shack started in the 18th century.  Maybe one of the loved ones (who are all avatars made by the shack from the memories of the killed relative) manages to force a memory through to the PC telling them the shack is vulnerable if they go through the trapdoor.  On reflection I think this would be a good way of giving some of the background to the players, ramping up the paranoia and potentially offering them the hope of a way out if they can keep it together (which will of course be crushed 😁).  As one of the players said, it seems a shame for the Keeper to have the background and the info but not be able to impart it to the players in some way until everything is over.

Here was where I made my mistake as the Keeper considering the location – I think it is because I just missed it between the talking on Roll20 and didn’t really pay it too much thought.  The carpenter mentioned he had a hunting license so would have a gun locked up in his car in a gun safe or similar.  As we all know in the UK owning just about anything to defend yourself is against the law (pepper spray is classified as a fire arm in the UK!).  So, although having a license for shooting etc is possible it is not that common.  But ok, in this instance a shot gun would probably have been fine.  In the next scene at the shack the player then produced a SKS Carbine!  

In this instance the players chose not to go to the original shack location where the murders had originally taken place as they knew from the GPS coordinates on the phone that Annie had that she had seen their relative in Troutbeck.

So…at the shack – the players arrive and then start having a look around, once they are on their own they start hearing the voice of their loved one who was murdered last year.  The paranoia starts to mount, Annie runs off, the shack is quiet with no signs of any massacre the previous year.  The film maker decided she’d have a tazer, again an item that is not legal in the UK.  As Keeper I said the PC could have one if they made a LUCK roll – it was a fumble, so instead of saying no you don’t have it, I said you have it.  My plan was that at the critical moment when the film maker went to use it she’d realise it was a fake.

The Keeper gets to start mounting the SAN rolls, chipping away at the total to get to the breaking point at some point.  I didn’t keep Annie in the scenario after all the PCs had entered and been locked into the shack, in hindsight it may have been a good way to induce a SAN roll had the PCs seen Annie ‘reabsorb’ into the shack from whence she came and ratchet up the ‘what the fuck is going on’ vibe.

The end game is all about the players and how they deal with the ongoing madness.  In the scenario the shack likes people to use an old rusty sickle to complete the murders.  So, these appear at opportune moments for the PCs to use on each other.  Feedback from the players at the end was that this became a bit of a tired trope after a while and seemed a bit unnecessary for the scenario.  If you run this scenario, make your own mind up.  If I run this again I will try it with the shack having a broader view of its murder weapons and try something different from time to time.

As the Keeper you can certainly add to the paranoia by making various comments as the opportunity arises, for example the journalist was trying to open the trap door and the nurse had the axe and was standing over him.  Even though the nurse hadn’t had a bout of madness yet, I still mentioned that as the journalist was bent down, the back of his neck was exposed and it would be quite easy to use the axe from this position……

In the scenario the Keeper uses the voices and physical manifestations of the loved ones that were murdered to get the player making their SAN checks and eventually get them to turn on each other.  In the scenario all the players can hear the words spoken by the loved ones as they converse, and what they hear is ‘you need to kill one of the other PCs in exchange for me to be released’.  I am not sure if this is better than keeping it to the loved one being told or not.  It might be fun to play it this way, but the other players would have to ignore the meta when the Keeper is saying what the PC is being told.  Hard to tell, so next time i run Murder Shack maybe I’ll give that a try.

So, the PCs see the loved ones and talk with them in the shack, then eventually the film maker cracks and the bout of madness starts.  Luckily they get violent aggression and they try to slit the throat of the Nurse with a sickle handily located nearby.  The fighting and failed SAN rolls start although to be fair I believe the nurse didn’t actually go insane.  This is where the gun came in to play – the carpenter then blew away the nurse with an extreme shot doing 21 points of damage.  After a struggle he then shot the journalist.  The carpenter was paranoid at this point, the nurse tried to grab the gun failed, carpenter decided to try and shoot the nurses loved one who had appeared and was telling the nurse to kill the carpenter.  He got the shot ready and fumbled!  In the heat of the moment I played this incorrectly.  The carpenter should have shot himself in the leg or similar but instead I said that the fumble meant the shot hit the nurse in the leg.  This resulted in another player being adversely affected by another players fumble, which probably wasn’t the correct way to play it out.  The players went with it in the heat of the moment and eventually the carpenter shot the nurse and killed her.  He was the last man standing…..his murdered daughter then offered him the noose and rope and we faded to black from there.

The players were great and really helped with the session.  We had a good discussion after wards about the scenario and the main themes to consider if running this again were:

• Getting the background into the scenario as it is quite interesting and a shame if the player don’t get at least some of it before the end.
• Provide a clue about how to get out.  Sometimes having the hope destroyed can be more crushing than the insanity.
• If giving firearms out – limit it to shotguns or similar to reduce the number of shots available, this can increase the tension nicely.
• Some players do not like player vs player situations.  
• This last one is up to you…..add a stick of dynamite and a bag of cocaine……

Anyway back to planning my next game and finishing off writing my scenario! Adios and remember Parrying is for wimps!