Subscribe to Talien's Tower on Facebook, Twitter, email or via the Site Feed

Wednesday, April 9

Chapter 6: Love’s Lonely Children - Introduction

This scenario, “Loves Lonely Children,” is from the Cthulhu Now supplement “The Stars Are Right” by Richard Watts. You can read more about Delta Green at http://www.delta-green.com. Please note: This story hour contains spoilers!

Our cast of characters includes:

• Game Master: Michael Tresca (http://michael.tresca.net)
• Hank “Guppy” Gupta (Smart Hero) played by Joseph Tresca (http://www.creepyportfolio.com)
• Jake “Blade” Iron Shirt (Strong Hero) played by Matt Hammer
• Joseph “Archive” Fontaine (Dedicated Hero) played by Joe Lalumia
• Kurtis “Hammer” Grange (Fast Hero) played by George Webster

This is probably the nastiest scenario we played to date.

Love’s Lonely Children primarily takes place in a two-story hovel. But of course, that’s not how things go down. Once again, the PCs provided me a gift in splitting up (they seem to enjoy splitting up), creating a cinematic effect where Hammer investigates what happened at the house while the other three agents tracked the bad guys down.

I was surprised that the action moved beyond the house and that the agents didn’t move earlier. But in the end, it was even spookier. I used the scene from Fargo as my inspiration for the chase. For the huge Edith, I pictured Bonnie Grape (played by Darlene Cates) from What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

There’s one problem with this scenario, and that’s the bad guy. Put plainly, unless the agents do something boring like calling the police without investigating the place themselves, or something totally psychotic like attacking presumably innocent people with no evidence, when the bad guy does finally show up the agents are dead meat. There’s one “out” that the scenario provides that I used as a last resort when it became clear that the villain was going to eat the entire party. I also used the round by round growth chart from Worlds of Cthulhu to deal with the mechanics of turning into…well, you’ll see.

We used the “Tower of Sanity” to good effect this game. At the end, Guppy’s player had to pull twelve times from the Tower—a very tense moment. It also proved my point about having sanity loss be more in the PC’s hands. If Guppy had failed his sanity check, all the agents would have been massacred.

Defining Moment: Hammer, without my prompting, split from the rest of the team to search out the cultist house. I went back and forth between the two scenes so that Hammer discovered the true nature of the thing in a picture just as the agents encountered it face-to-face. [MORE]

Labels: d20 modern

posted by Mike Tresca at 6:23 AM

Want more? Please consider contributing to my Patreon; Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and the web; buy my books: The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games, The Well of Stars, and Awfully Familiar.

---