VTT used was Roll20
Players: Foxkitty / Hedge / Orf / Cosmic
This review contains SPOILERS!
The scenario appears in TGFoJE fanzine – The Blasphemous Tome. It appeared in Tome 4.5 back in 2019. I have been working my way through the
scenarios appearing in the Tome and have so far ran Murdershack, The Blue and
Of This Men Shall Know Nothing.
My initial reading of Fall Out (set in the modern day) was
that it was going to be a real hoot to run and play. The premise is that a cult leader in 1970
managed to escape a police raid on their HQ by escaping into the future. The day of the future has arrived, and the
house is having some issues with the time changing rifts that are occurring in
advance of the cult leader reappearing 49 years later.
The scenario has two neat ideas that are used during
play. The first is a description of several
events that occur after the investigators enter the house. These can occur randomly via dice rolls, or
you can pick and choose depending on the state of play. Most of the events are glimpses of events
that happened during the Police raid in 1970, and include amputated legs, a
policeman from the 1970s appearing, and the worst horror of all – the
appearance of 1970s style wallpaper! Some of the events are from the modern
day, including an earth mother type group of believers that arrive with the
dreaded tambourines and bongos and start singing and basically being a nuisance.
The other fun idea is that an investigator can get possessed
by the leader of the cult via a POW roll.
Being possessed means giving the player a handout with a description of
a mission which involves ensuring the altar located in the house is ready for
use, mainly by removing the life size golden statue of Elvis that is on top of
it. The possessed investigator is ‘all
shook up’ and probably has a ‘suspicious mind(s)’ but I digress. I thought this dynamic was interesting and a
very good way to get some interesting scenes with the investigators into the
scenario.
Preparation
The scenario is a relatively simple premise designed for one
shot play. So, on the face of it there
didn’t appear to be too much to prepare.
However, depending on how much you want to set up in the game you can
spend a few hours getting things ready.
For example, I played this via Roll20 so had to transfer various items
into the VTT. This also gives the
opportunity to provide some visuals for some of the items and locations. Imagine my delight when I found out there was
an actual life-sized
golden Elvis statue for sale and with an associated suitable pic I could
use (if anyone is interested it is on offer at the moment for $768.90, I mean
that’s probably less than I spent on KS over the last year….). Handily the map of the house is provided in
the pdf of the scenario so it can be quite easily added to Roll20. I kept all three floors on one page to avoid
the hassle of moving ‘players’ between pages on Roll20 when they inevitably split
up, I just used fog of war as best as possible to try and provide some mystery
of the house and the various floors as the players went through it.
I devised a timeline for the scenario as there isn’t one
explicitly written in the scenario, although it is easy enough to pull one
together from the info given:
Timeline
The scenario suggests two approaches for the investigators, either a team of Police / law enforcement or a criminal gang. Having passed on the option of playing Blackwater Creek with a bootleg gang, I thought it would be interesting to offer pregens who are in a criminal gang. I prepared four pregens using The Dholes House, then added them to the relevant Cthulhu character sheet on Roll20. To add some flavour to the pregens (and later all the NPCs) all the portraits were pics of famous actors.
Petra Stevens – a lawyer working for a crime gang
Luther Dailly – a computer expert and hacker type
Sammy Lawrence – counterfeiter
Larry ‘the dog’ Davison – the muscle with a chainsaw……(I mean why not right?)
The main challenge for the handouts was the house – the map in the scenario is a large three-story house, but as you’d expect little written info is given on the details of the individual rooms in the house. In the end rather than having detailed descriptions of individual rooms I focused on a few key areas that had some importance in the house, including the external area of the house, locations of the hostages, the Elvis statue, the main protagonist’s office (the library), the kitchen and the stairwell and atrium.
The selling point for asking players to sign up to play was
as follows:
Premise: Your gang is on the verge of making some deals that could propel you from the small time to the big-time baby! One small issue - the big boss who can give you access to the big leagues has asked that you do him a ‘favour’ to prove yourself. Someone has taken it upon themselves to kidnap one of his call girls and is holding her in a house in Massachusetts. The big boss has asked your gang to go and rescue his girl and take the necessary action against the fool who has done this. It goes without saying that he doesn’t want the local police or feds involved…………….
The session
As the Keeper there were quite a few things to keep an eye
on while trying to ensure the story progressed at a reasonable pace and with
the correct amount of tension and scary ‘bits’.
This was far more of a challenge than I anticipated and I suspect I didn’t
quite get the flow of the game right. As
a keeper it is good to reflect on the not so good as well as the good stuff to improve
for future games!
At the start the players are figuring out how to get into
the house. They manged to find out info on the house and one of the background
NPCs. These handouts, which I reused
from the scenario description, let the investigators know what was going on,
maybe a bit too early in my opinion.
They mention a raid 49 years ago and the second handout mentions how the
cult leader will become one with the goddess and reappear 49 years later. In hindsight, I would have let them have one
of the handouts rather before entering rather than both, as the core of the
scenario seed is given away if those two handouts are given at the beginning of
play.
While two of the investigators watched the house, Petra and
Larry had a look around, to make this a meaningful exercise for the players I
had them make spot hidden rolls to find evidence of a large object being moved
from the forest towards the house (this was the stone altar slab mentioned in
the scenario that now has the Elvis statue on it and is in the lobby of the
house). Then we had the tracking rolls
to go back into the forest and find the clearing where the altar was placed
originally back in 1970. Both investigators
had the standard 10%, of course one of them made it! Good old Roll20. I hadn’t planned anything further than they
may find the clearing, but I wanted to make the check around the house to have
some meaning to it, and I would deffo recommend including this if anyone else
runs the scenario. You could even add a
bit more flavour to the scene by adding some more details – maybe some strange
symbols, a skull or bones etc.
After the investigators entered the house the scenario indicates
the strange events start – in the end I included the horrific wallpaper, a policeman
from the original radi in 1970 (TJ Hooker portrait pic!), the new age hippies
arrived with their damned tambourines and bongos, a floating body in mid air
and the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath arrives on the 3rd floor. There were also some hints of conversation
between the cult leader and her second in command from 1970 about escaping by
time travelling to the future. I didn’t include
a range of other events as I felt the scenario needed to progress quickly. The session felt like it would get slowed
down quite significantly if all the events were used and play wouldn’t be
coherent with all the interruptions.
I added two items to the scenes in the house, one as a bit
of an ‘in joke’ and the other to try and describe how Jonathan W. had botched
the first sacrifice. Luther went into
the library, which I stated was Jonathan’s office to try and find any
information and locate the main electronic security systems for the house. He noticed the horrific wal’ paper taking
over parts of the wall as the house was pulled between 1970 and the present
day. I described the area as being
turned over and computer smashed etc. In
the scenario description Jonathan is said to be an employee of the American
Dept. of Defence, so amongst the debris of the office there were some ‘Top
secret’ marked files which included a brief summary of a ultra-secret agency
called ‘Delta Green’. I thought that was a nice cross over touch
for the players.
The scenario has one of the hostages dead stabbed by a knife
in the chest on the kitchen table. It
seemed possible to me that Jonathan had killed the first hostage and collected
the blood in a saucepan. He then went to
the slab of rock he had placed the Elvis statue on (which he had manoeuvred into
the house from the forest clearing) and tried to pour the blood onto the altar
to give the altar the energy it needed. Of
course, the God speaking to Jonathan through the altar wants the body
sacrificed on the altar with the blood freshly draining into the grooves of the
strange carvings on the surface of the stone.
But at this point Jonathan doesn’t want to move his beloved Elvis
statue, so in effect he has messed up the first sacrifice but intends to get it
right with the next one. So, when the
players enter they see the statue and the stone slab it is on, and what looks
like red paint splashed on the feet of Elvis as well as it running into the
symbols etched into the stone altar surface.
There are also red paint footprints gong back towards the Kitchen, where
the players then make the discovery of the dead body.
Petra found Jonathan upstairs and managed to persuade him to
take her to the hostage she wanted to rescue for the Big Boss on the 3rd
floor of the house. A bit of a melee
ensued before the Dark Young then turned up on the 3rd floor. From their description the Dark Young can be
20 – 25 feet tall and basically large stomping trees, which weigh a lot. When one of these arrives in the house it must
have a pretty dramatic impact on the structure of the house right? In the ensuing chaos Jonathan gets grabbed by
the Dark Young, the hostage Petra is trying to rescue also gets grabbed and the
Dark Young pretty much smashes through to the second level of the house taking out
the walls and ceiling as it smashes its way around. Petra shoots ineffectively at the tentacle
holding the hostage but after a few rounds the Dark Young blinks back to 1970
and leaves the house and the hostage behind.
Meanwhile Larry had a bit of a shootout with TJ Hooker (1970s cop – I know
it was the 80s but I wanted to use The Shats portrait for the cop!), and ended
up getting handcuffed. The Dark Young
then took the cop leaving Larry, Petra and the hostage to get down the stairs.
Downstairs Luther had been possessed as per the scenario handout. As Larry came down the stairs he decided a good way to fulfil his objective was to push Larry up against the statue and then use the chainsaw to eviscerate Larry and spill his blood on the altar while also chopping down the statue from the sacred altar. Unfortunately, the roll was not a success and he didn’t manage to direct the chainsaw towards Larry who managed to get off of the altar.
The end of the scenario was approaching so Clarissa the cult
leader (Sissy Spacek) then appeared at the top of the stairwell, floating in mid air and
turning this way and that in ecstasy. At
this point the possession of Luther ends (as per the scenario
description). The floor boards around
the altar catch fire as Clarissa comes to the modern world. The Elvis statue melts and the investigators
make their getaway. Larry gets out,
Petra gets out because Luther pushes her through the open door. Meanwhile the interior of the house is going
back in time and Sammy and Luther are trapped and end up back in the forest
near the clearing in 1970. Luther gets
caught by a large tentacle and lifted into oblivion, while Sammy makes it out
and eventually has to live his life from 1970 onwards.
The players with PCs left alive then had some nice montages about what happened to their characters and that was the end. Probably just over 2hours in total, so quite quick and pacy.
I like this scenario and recommend others to run it and see
how they find it. It is quite fast paced
compared to most Cthulhu scenarios, with lots going on as soon as the players
enter the house. I would expect it to be
a popular convention scenario for a keeper to run. I did find it difficult to keep the pace going
and I think there is a bit of an art to introducing the ‘events’ so they have
maximum impact without it just being ‘oh look another 70s reference’. Also, although the story leant itself to
having the new age hippies turn up with their damned tambourines and bongos and
singing it was hard to have them involved with the gameplay in a way that made
sense in terms of the game. I probably
introduced these too early in the scenario, so if you do these as suggested in
the scenario, I’d leave them till you feel you have the right moment or omit
them completely.
Anyway that’s it for this instalment, TTFN and remember Parrying is for wimps!
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