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Play Reports: Learn-to-Play

Rotten Criminals

This was a Call of Cthulhu learn-to-play with three players, using the scenario "Missed Dues", by Mike Mason. This scenario can be found in the Call of Cthulhu Keeper's Screen Pack. This scenario was run as-written, with little to no deviation. We completed the scenario in 2 2.5-hour sessions. Our party consisted of a police officer, a pharmacist, and a burglar. They were all criminals, rotten ones, as in, not great at being criminals. They were all in deep water with The Hammer. At the beginning of the game, we held a session 0 to walk players through character creation. At that time, we also assigned each character a randomly-determined phobia and mania. These were later used to help determine a few extra rooms within the apartment, in addition to the suggested scenes outlined in the scenario. The Hammer summoned all of them to his office and told them that in order to redeem themselves in the gang's standing, they would have to go find Sticky Jack and extract the payment he owed to The Hammer. With this information, the party began pounding the pavement and questioning potential witnesses and people of interest to find Sticky Jack. Through her connections at the police department, the police officer was also able to glean information about a series of robberies that on the surface seemed unrelated, but after some digging were seemingly the robberies carried out by Sticky Jack, and the robberies that Sticky Jack owed The Hammer a cut for. Ultimately, their investigation led them to Jack's apartment where, in the climax of the encounter, all three lost Sanity at the sight of Azathoth. Notes: - The party bypassed entirely the plot points relating to The Temple of Hope, and thus never witnessed the ritual taking place there. - Between sessions, we held an investigator improvement phase in order to give the players the experience of improving their characters. - The players chased Greasy Spoon after he pick-pocketed one of them, allowing us to explore the Chase mechanics. - The party fought Marg, using both force and chloroform to subdue her. Ultimately, the chloroform was applied. The party did not discover Marg's dead husband in the cellar. - the police officer died in the combat with Marg, but was allowed to rise again the next round and complete the scenario as a walking corpse, collapsing in a lifeless heap upon exiting the apartment at the very end.

Scourge of the Wastes

Game in progress.

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