"Escape From Innsmouth" 6/25/23

Our intrepid team were asked to investigate the disappearance of Brian Burnham, a young man who had taken a job in infamous Innsmouth, MA, but supposedly turned to crime before escaping police and fleeing to parts unknown.  After some questioning of local sources and leads, the group reluctantly made their way to the ill-regarded town, where things turned out to be just as bad as they expected...

This went really well given the players were all quite familiar with Lovecraft's story.  They managed to play ignorant and get themselves into the correct mindset.  I think Innsmouth is well-presented in the sadly out-of-print Escape From Innsmouth supplement, and it gave me a wealth of material to draw from.  Mr. Waite's wife was an especially effective surprise.  

I have to note our group is a very practical one.  There was no truck with rescuing Ruthie ... her boyfriend's protestations were silenced (twice!) with a well-placed punch in the face.  As for the Innsmouth police, although they've always been careful about dusting mere mortals, I guess hybrid deep ones don't count.  To get to the prisoner's cells, they just locked the door to the police station and killed the cop on duty!  Yow!

It ended with a quite literal escape, with a carful of Innsmouthers in pursuit, finally derailed by a good shot from Judge Plamondon.  I downplayed the number of pursuing vehicles, not seeing how enough time would have been available to stir up the whole town, but spiced up the final chase by throwing in a last-minute attack by full-on deep ones (one of whom jumped onto the car and started clawing away before getting dispatched by a pistol shot), and something else which the team was fortunate to escape and not get a good look at.

A lot of fun with this one, and even the endless fish jokes didn't quite take the edge off it.

"Th Mystery of Loch Feinn" 8/27/23

In which our intrepid band of 1890's investigators - twins Emily and Quentin Harwood, espionage agent Mirela Baptista, and occult researcher Thodosia Throckmorton, are engaged to investigate the death of Prof. Gibson in a remote village in rural Scotland.

It seems the good Prof's researches, which centered on what he believed to be a prehistoric survival in the local loch, led him to a bad end.  The local authorities claimed he must have gotten too drunk at the pub one night, accidentally set himself on fire while lighting his pipe, and drowned in the loch.  But his diaries suggest something different - run-ins with an extensive local clan, a mystery involving standing stones around the loch, and the sinister legend of a kelpie, or "water horse" inhabiting the loch.

For those not familiar, "Loch Feinn" goes all the way back to 1983's Cthulhu Companion, and is a very sketchy scenario. containing some effective atmospheric set pieces, but leaving a lot to the keeper to work up.  This especially meant fleshing out the NPCs, generating stats for a shitload of MacAllans (aforementioned local clan), and deciding how to build up atmosphere and mystery and events in the tiny village to direct and misdirect the investigators.  I conceived a creepy dream sequence that I think added a lot of atmosphere.  I also had fun channeling Amybeth McNulty's performance in Anne With An E as a local girl who's gotten herself.  The monster of this scenario, the nature of which I will not give away, is a difficult one but full of spooky potential.

I think if I were to run this again I'd expand the NPC's and the local color a bit further, but this apparently worked well.  It's also our first scenario to take more than one session to play out, so based on that I'd say there was enough material to satisfy.  The investigators took many unexpected turns here and I had to improv quite a bit - all of which I think is good.  Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves a lot.  

Since I found the illustration of the "water horse" from the Companion unappealing, I used an illustration from The Sea Serpents Around Us, a beloved children's book by Lois and Louis Darling: