Tales from a First Time Keeper!

[Aaron]

Hey everyone! So I had emailed MU a few weeks ago to thank them for the awesome podcast and talk about how helpful it has been to me as a first time Keeper. I had never DM’d any RPG before, and decided to start a 1920’s CoC table with a couple of my best gaming friends. Before running it, I listened to several of the live plays to get an idea for the flow of the game, calling for skill checks, moments ripe for descriptive explanations, etc.

I also mentioned about how I ended up choosing The Haunting for my first scenario (of course), but because I was worried about my friends completely ignoring investigation since we were all DnD’ers and fairly combat oriented, I wove a second scenario into it. Needless to say, my friends jumped head first into role play and investigation, and we played for 13 hours before finishing my combined uber-scenario! Dan responded quite kindly to my email and said that some might find it interesting to hear about how I integrated them, so here ya go, a Tale From a First Time Keeper!

Basically, what I did was take the short scenario Murder in the Footlights and made it part of an almost necessary side quest for completing The Haunting. Murder in the Footlights is a scenario I found in the free downloads on the Chaosium website. It was supposed to be in a publication that never materialized, I believe. After reading it and The Haunting, I thought they would be pretty easy to mash together. What I did was change The Haunting to where the only way the Investigators could get access to the information in the Boston city records that deals with the Chapel, etc, and made them have to get the Mayors explicit permission to access them. A successful Credit Rating, Law, Persuade, or Fast Talk would get them immediate access with the Mayor, who seemed disheveled and distracted. He eventually discloses that his daughter was missing, and that if the Investigators would find her and bring her back, he would give them access to whatever records they wanted. The daughter of the Mayor was then the woman being held by The Great Raspini in Murder in the Footlights, and we then moved to that scenario. If the Investigators are able to actually save the girl, they not only got the access to the records, they also got a financial reward and a +15 to their Credit Rating in Boston as long as it is the same Mayor. If the girl didn’t survive but some Investigators did, then the Mayor was grateful for knowing the truth and gave them access, but nothing else. Then they got the leads for the Chapel and anything else relevant to the city of Boston.

Like I said, we ended up playing for 13 hours, and it was great. They seemed to like the side quest when I told them about how I added it. If a table has already played The Haunting, which I am assuming is most every table, then I think Murder in the Footlights is a cool little scenario that can be tweaked and added into an campaign or scenario for much the same purpose as I used it. Plus, the idea of allowing The Great Raspini to become a permanent comedic enemy to Investigators is pretty appealing. I might have him start haunting future sessions, leaving crucified rubber chickens and playing eldritch card tricks on them.

Here is the link to the Murder in the Footlights page on Chaosiums website. Would love any feedback overall! We just ran our second session a week ago, and my friends are pretty hooked now, so if someone has another scenario that would be good for a group with one Keeper and two Investigators, let me know. I let them play multiple characters at the moment until we feel more comfortable with the game system and rules, then we’ll add a couple more.

Keeper Aaron

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[Dr. Gerard]

Nice work! One thing that can be tricky with running multiple scenarios at the same time, or nesting them like Russian dolls, is that sanity losses stack up before players get anything back for resolving things...however, it seems you totally avoided this pitfall. Nice one!

To introduce lots of Arkham NPCs all in one scene, I recommend running Reeling Midnight from New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley. It starts out with a party thrown by two suspicious and eccentric socialites, and you could add any NPCs you want from other scenarios just to introduce them into the story early. It's a great device to use for launching a campaign.

[Aaron]

Thanks, Dr. Gerard! I'll look into that one for sure!