S2:E13 – Choice Cuts 3 - Miskatonic Repository Special, with Matt 'Doc' Tracey

Welcome to RPG Reanimators, a podcast for GMs where we dissect horror scenarios and offer our experiences and advice to reanimate it at the table. I'm Alex.

I'm Holly.

I'm Nathan.

I'm Lex.

And I'm Doc.

So today we're joined by Matt Doc Tracy, a prominent author on the Miskatonic Repository. Thanks so much for joining us today, Doc.

Hey, happy to be here. Great meeting all of you at Chaosium Con and making this a reality from when we were sitting there eating fried chicken and saying we should all make this happen.

Hell yeah.

We follow through.

I want fried chicken now.

So let's see what's on the slab. Today we're serving up some more choice cuts and discussing some of our favorite scenarios available on the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu. Not all of these would require reanimations, but we'll try to call out any opportunities and ideas for them along the way, and also note how beginner-friendly the scenarios might be for newer GMs to run. in case they'd like to introduce their group to Call of Cthulhu with a scenario other than The Haunting or something in the 1920s. In order, we'll be discussing: The Idol of Thoth, The Hammersmith Haunting, Unremembered, Saturday the 14th, Good Vibes Only, There's Gold in Them Thar Hills, Death Is the Final Escape, The Pipeline, Dockside Dogs, and Omega Kappa Die. And from this point on, there will be spoilers. So if you're interested in playing in any or all of these scenarios, please stop here and check out and share this episode with your GM so they can listen and consider running these for your group. We have also included timestamps for each title in the show notes of this episode in case you want to learn more about a specific scenario and leave the other cuts unspoiled. Now, with that out of the way, let's examine Our first choice cut.

So I'm bringing to the table The Idol of Toth, written by Joe Trier.

But Holly, clearly it's pronounced Idol of Thoth.

Listen, there's no universally agreed-upon way to pronounce Toth. Historians have debated that for centuries. I don't even want to hear it. I've heard Thoth, Thoth, Toth and tote. Where I'm from, there's a Mardi Gras parade every year and it's pronounced toth, so that's how I'm gonna say it. I, I came across this a long time ago, I think around 2018. Um, I was looking for a one-shot to introduce my friends to Call of Cthulhu. I saw Seth's video on it and that really got me looking into it, and I thought it was just— it was really fun. Um, so the synopsis is that players are called to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to investigate the disappearance of an artifact. And it looks like it's going to be a locked door mystery. So it doesn't look like anyone broke into the museum. It looks like maybe it was an inside job. I think this should take probably 1 to 3 sessions. I've always run it as a one-shot because the scenario has this nice built-in clock. And I like to keep the tension up and the momentum going by kind of holding players to that clock and not giving them that kind of downtime to think about their next actions. Like, no, we're just gonna go.

So what's actually happening behind the GM screen?

All right, so behind the GM screen, um, there the Idol of Thoth is actually a vessel for a smaller idol within that doesn't appear in the daylight. It only appears when the moon shines on it. Oh, that's cool. They, um, like the museum curators come into the museum during the day, they see that it's been opened up, and allegedly it was impossible to open anyway. There's always been rumors that it was hiding something within it, um, but they see nothing in it and they're like, oh my gosh, this is like— it's been stolen. It was— it's there the whole time, but you can't see it, and it doesn't really, I guess, manifest until, uh, until nighttime, until the moon shines on it. Um, but the players don't know this, so it leads to a pretty fun sandboxy mystery. There's a lot of different avenues that they can investigate, a lot of different people they can talk to, and it really hits a lot of the classic, uh, Call of Cthulhu locations. They can go to the Miskatonic University, they can go to Arkham Asylum.

Is no one gonna say Egyptian nesting dolls? Idols? Damn it. Egyptian nesting idols.

I've just been trying to workshop a Sam Reich, I've been here the whole time, joke for the little mini idol.

Canopic matrioshka dolls?

I mean, yeah, that's basically what it is. And so, you know, for Beating Heart, it's very much a very classic Call of Cthulhu mystery to me. You know, it's set in the '20s, it's set in the Northeast, a lot of beats of the Arkham universe are there. We have a stolen Egyptian artifact, and it's really about a race against the clock to find answers in a classic, like, save the world at the end of this, you know, 4-hour scenario. So that's kind of a fun, like, snappy, quick scenario. And that's really actually what I like about it, the sandbox, lots of different avenues to investigate. There's a fun twist and like a little reveal at the end. I don't want to spoil anything if anyone is interested in running it, but yeah, there's a good little twist.

Oh no, this is the spoiler section. Let's go.

Okay. Well, the twist is that the, like, The curators are the ones that stole it, and they've actually been driven insane, like witnessing it. There's pretty high, like insanity damage if you see the idol itself. And because they're very, like high intelligence, like they kind of survived the onslaught, but now they're under the spell of the idol itself.

Oh, Holly, are you telling me that museum curators who stock museums with these relics of ancient civilizations are stealing things? Shock!

I know it is the real turn of events here. Go ahead, Doc.

Well, it's like what they say, you know. Do you know why the pyramids are in Egypt?

Because they won't fit in the British Museum of Natural History.

Oh gosh, there it is.

Lex with the layup.

Um, and I think it's so like there's, there's a realization eventually that they're on a clock. They don't know it, um, and from the beginning, right? But then Once the moon shines, the sun sets and the moon shines on the idol, there's supposed to be this very big like gala event. Um, everyone is going to bear witness to the idol and then everyone will be driven insane.

Chaos.

And then you enter into a museum where like all of the patrons have like spears and swords and things like that. And they're like ready to attack your investigators, which is actually a lot of fun. And, and that's kind of where with the improvements, I actually just recommend that keepers play cute with the clock and make it so that the players arrive and everyone's already driven insane and holding like the ancient spear, the giant greatsword or whatever, and like ready to attack the investigators. Because otherwise it's kind of like, oh, okay, well, don't— don't— you've saved the day. You told everyone to look away from the idol and you're— you've lost a fight.

Throw a tarp on it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I throw a tarp on it.

I feel like we should have a discussion at some point about how every clock in a scenario needs to be thought of as this is a narrative progression meter. We are not going to keep track of actual time because that's a great way to just have a— of an ending for a fun horror scenario.

Right, right.

I love the museum antics. You can get to a lot of shenanigans in the museum. I can already imagine like the guests donning gladiator armor. You can get really creative with this or using dinosaur bones to like bludgeon people.

Very Scooby-Doo-y.

Yes. Yes. I've had some really interesting like endgame moments of players like trying to avert their own eyes from the idol and like try to attack people or keep them from seeing it. It's very— it is a little goofy there at the end, but in a very fun way. Um, and it does kind of help that I guess by the book Boston and Arkham are actually not terribly close by the standards of driving in a 1920s car. It should take them like multiple hours to move back and forth between the two cities. So And, you know, you have the great reveal of the half-mad professor who knows the whole secret and he's like, no, you must save everyone. Go, you must return back to Boston. It's been there the whole time. And

that's so campy.

Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's silly. It's fun.

Couldn't write a letter.

Yeah, I know. Right.

So Holly, how would you reanimate this scenario?

It desperately needs handouts. It has no handouts, but it references multiple handouts. Like it gives like the Keeper text. So like, oh, you can read this little blurb, but it really needs handouts. And I made them and we can include them in the show notes as well.

That's right. They'll be in the show notes.

In the show notes. Yeah. So that, and then just the advice to keepers, you know, again, like Lex said, a clock is really just a narrative beat clock, not something to actually hold your players to. It is more fun if they end up in this weird showdown at that Scooby-Doo museum. Just, you know, play with time, make it work. It's not, it's not as exciting if your players save the day and get to everything before the idol reveals itself.

But this still sounds like a really kind of quintessential fun 1920s investigation one-shot scenario to go on. I think as someone who is very much not interested in the '20s, I'm sold just if you told me museum shenanigans. All right, I'm now in.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it fits pretty nicely into like a campaign, especially if you're kind of set in the Arkham area anyway, they can kind like take this job, go look and see what's going on in Boston for the day, that kind of thing. The lethality is actually pretty low. So I think it's a fun like interlude for in between things with players and characters.

How difficult do you think this would be for a GM to run?

I would put this at like pretty low difficulty. If we were on a scale of like, I don't know, 1 to 10, I'd say it's maybe a 2 or 3 just because the time antics can be a little bit, but That's about it. It's not, it's not super difficult.

On a scale of The Necropolis to Masks of Nyarlathotep, where would you put it?

Um, oh gosh. On the scale, I, hmm, Mr. Corbett. We'll just throw it in like the Mr. Corbett range.

All right. I have no idea what that means. All right. Let's move on to our next choice cut.

Wire next choice cut is The Hammersmith Haunting by Kat Clay. I ran into this because Kat has a really good YouTube channel. If you ever are interested in writing or video game reviews, she does it all. But she wrote— I think this might have been her first published scenario out there. I'm getting the nod, getting the nod. Yes. And I think it's like the perfect gaslight intro if your players are into that.

So what's it all about?

So this is based on a real-life event, actually. There is a small town, Hammersmith, that is being haunted by a ghost.

You don't say.

I know, it's shocking. Now, in real life, the ghost was a prankster that got the town so worked up they ended up killing somebody because they maybe freaked out a little too much. And that character is actually—

That's unlucky.

In the scenario. Yeah, it's, it's real rough. But of course, this being Call of Cthulhu, there actually is a ghost this time. So the intro to this is you're all— your guys are all buddies with this clergy member and the small town of Hammersmith. You're supposed to be meeting with him. He doesn't show. What are you gonna do? You're gonna go to Hammersmith, and you find his body there, and people are all like, oh, there's a ghost going around. We're all hunting this ghost. We gots to kill it. And they're ineffectual. You get to go underneath the church, find an old Templar tomb, and you find out that the ghost is a daughter of Nyarlathotep, because that's a thing, I guess.

It is now. Yeah.

Yeah. Her bones were stolen from the crypt and she's cool with that. That's good for her. But you as investigators, you got to put her back and then bind her again and maybe destroy her. But she's pretty, pretty powerful. So, yeah, we'll see.

So what would you say is the beating heart of the scenario?

I think you should go for the, the Gaslight feel, right? Carriages, very low-level technology there. And then the ghost hunting aspect, because it has a lot of fun NPCs, like a 75-year-old grandma that just has a shotgun she just carries around everywhere with her. She's done this forever. So everybody's kind of like, yeah, she, she does that.

As you do.

And your investigators are going to be running around at night. So there's a decent chance they're going to get mistaken for a ghost at some point. So I think the ghost hunting aspect is fun to have, like a town of believers rather than skeptics.

That's fun. Like, I can imagine how fun it would be to be like a gaslight era ghost hunter.

You're just gaslighting everybody to say that there's no ghost. I think that that's it, right?

Of course. And it's like the perfect environment to have foggy streets and shapes in the mist that you can't quite make out. And there's a decent chance if your characters are gun-shy, they're just gonna recreate history and shoot a bricklayer. And then that's a whole nother problem for them to solve is how do we finish this while we're now probably wanted felons?

That's goofy. So Nathan, what did you like about this scenario? And, um, are there any improvements that you can see yourself making?

Yeah, I think The reason I like it is it's very straightforward and it's a— it's well documented within it, right? There's clean maps. There's a clean 3-act structure. The outcomes are pretty well detailed, giving you ideas of what you can do. And the threat isn't really too complex to come up with. So I like this as like a gaslight intro scenario. In terms of reanimating it, I think the key thing I would say is the Daughter of Nyarlathotep. She's, she's in your brain, right? Like, this is the perfect time to have figures in the mist that are from your investigators' backstories, manipulations of that variety. So make sure you know your investigators' backstories or you have players that are ready to bring them up.

Oh, that's good. I love when scenarios encourage the GM to bring out like past traumas from the PCs to make it a little more personal.

Yep. Yeah, the, the mists are like the perfect time to have old Gram-Gram show up and be like, I never thought you'd be an investigator. You should join the dark side instead.

Like all Gram-Grams are wont to do.

Yeah, exactly. And that might clue the players in that maybe not all is what it seems.

You mentioned that this could be a good intro scenario for a Gaslight campaign. How else could you expand this scenario?

I think you'd really have to look for other scenarios that are set in this. I really don't know a lot of Gaslight scenarios out there, but I'd be looking for some Nyarlathotep ones and maybe deal with this whole Templar and Daughters of Nyarlathotep sort of feel to it. I think that's a fun avenue to go on.

The Templar aspect is pretty cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Nathan, here's a question for you then. We're gonna do a pop quiz. If a GM didn't really want to buy the Gaslight book, Chaosium is like summoning a ritual or something to smite me right now. But how would you try to reanimate this into something more fitting of a '20s or another era that someone with the base Call of Cthulhu Keeper and investigator guides would be able to run?

I think the biggest part you're going to run into is one of the NPCs is a rag and bone man. So this is the person that grabbed the daughter's bones and took them out of the crypt. Rag and bones, they kind of like make crafts out of bones. They're— he's a gross little dude. He's very Rennfeld off in his forest, but that's not really a job, I think, that would be in the '20s. So I think you'd have to update that.

Would it be like grave robbers or something?

Maybe. Yeah, that could make sense. He's not exactly on the up and up anyways. So that would be a pretty easy solution.

Grave robbers?

Yeah.

Like my ghoul detector is going off whenever I hear that word.

And really, you could bring this into the current day and just have like, I could see you having a full town that's all into ghost hunting or something. Maybe there's Something fun there.

All right. How would you rate this on a sliding difficulty scale, Nathan, for jamming?

This is very easy. There's not very many NPCs. It's pretty much get to town, do some investigating. There's multiple ways into pretty much any spot. So it's difficult to mess up.

Difficult to mess up. You heard it here, folks.

I mean, I can find a way, but—

We all can. We all can. Um, awesome. I'm gonna— I was trying to think of a witty transition, but we're just gonna go into choice cut number 3, Unremembered by Heinrich D. Moore. So this scenario I first played at Miskatonic Repository Con back in, uh, back in '21. And it was a 4-hour one-shot that was very enjoyable. Uh, the whole synopsis is that it's 1993, uh, in New Orleans. You get this really great setting and high schoolers who have performed this King in Yellow play get whisked into Carcosa and then they go missing, right?

Ain't that just the way.

And all the PCs are police detectives/officers. There's also a social worker, and there's an amazing memory element where the Yellow Sign in this scenario causes people to forget and to be forgotten by the world that I think is very fascinating. It's very surreal. Now, I played this as a one-shot, like I said, but I actually ran it for the Into the Darkness channel as a 3-parter, which took 6 hours total.

I mean, that, that makes sense. The investigation side of that, there's enough there with the missing students and inconsistent memories that people have. I think stretching made sense.

Definitely.

Yeah. And Alex, I'm really intrigued. How did you roleplay this way that the Yellow Sign causes other people to forget the players, particularly as you're playing across multiple sessions, to kind of instill that creeping dread of something wrong?

Yeah, there's definitely aspects that I've added into my own game when I reanimated it. So What I did was I introduced a, like, forgetting element when it came to skills. So skill would go down depending on, like, their actions, on how long they were exposed to this sign. If I were to run this again, I would hand out, like, cherished memories or have cherished memories be written by the players. Hmm. And integrate it into the story and then, like, maybe take that away Um, I think one way I would do it to really hammer in the effectiveness is have the cherished memories have some kind of mechanical benefit that the players could rely on every time and then just take it, take that away.

Maybe even something like the Delta Green projecting bonds or something like that. And so it's just, you're losing that resource for a sanity sponge or something.

Exactly. That is exactly right. So I really— and maybe we're working backwards here, but that's all to reinforce the main themes of like memory, forgetting. Um, and I would say that's part of the beating heart. The beating heart is the memories, is New Orleans, is this cop drama and dealing with emotional trauma.

Yeah, I thought the, the student aspect of it all too, like the missing children, gave it a pretty hard-hitting impact.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and you get some like what the fuck moments too, because some— like you go to the school to investigate the play they put on that kind of failed, and they don't remember it much, but they can— they do give you the information like, oh, someone's face was bitten off, and you're like, what the hell?

Did you feel like the aspect of forgotten memories, does that make the investigation a lot harder if, like, realistically NPCs aren't really able to answer probing questions by the characters?

Well, I— it does introduce an obstacle, but it's not quite a dead end because the player characters, they can use physical evidence like maps or just records in order to find out the truth. Because where, you know, people's memories are valuable, sometimes the, the hard evidence and the detective work of finding out like where things were or are is a lot better.

Something that just occurred to me that I think would be horrifying is this effect is kind of anti-memetic, where we covered There is no anti-memetics division for our book club a couple of months ago. And even the documents will become blurred. And maybe even this is pulling— this is taking a page out of Impossible Landscapes, but like the notes, the nurses' reports or anything from the kid, the text will start converting itself maybe into lines of the play. And it's a case that the PCs really feel like they need to pedal to the metal, solve this because they are actively losing all traces of these kids.

Yeah, that's, that's an awesome moment. Um, also what I liked about this scenario is like you go to Carcosa and you like face off toe-to-toe with the King in Yellow, which I don't think a lot of scenarios do that have the King in Yellow. They just have the yellow sign.

Mm-hmm.

I'd just simply shoot him.

You can, and it doesn't go well.

I simply shoot him harder.

But would you say instead of Face Off Against the King in Yellow, it should be Mask Off Against the King in Yellow, or— Oh,

I was gonna say get your face ripped off.

Oh, that works too. That works too. I'm just aiming to add a boo sound effect in at that stage.

There's a ton of boo sound effects right now. Um, the one thing that I had to actually change up Is the fact that, um, there is a wild slash homicidal NPC like halfway through the scenario, and if you just like shoot him, there's not really a consequence. So, um, when I was running it for Into the Darkness, I had the consequences of a police-involved shooting. So it's like, you know, you get your gun taken away, you get time off. And that led to a really great role-playing moment where the other detective's like concerned about this, um, player character who shot at and killed this guy. So he visits his house and it's like plastered with like a yellow sign and all words of the play.

Nice.

I would definitely focus on— I enjoy the slow burn aspect of this scenario and adding in my own scares of having the supernatural elements, the sign appearing in like in the embers of a barrel fire. For expanding this scenario, You could easily convert this to Delta Green. Otherwise, I would have the player characters, a part of an existing group, get assigned to this case as like private detectives. Or you can just turn it on its head and have the missing high schoolers be friends that were missing. You don't really need the police angle, but it certainly adds the flavor. All right. Well, GM level here, I would say, is Yeah, novice to intermediate. It's a pretty straightforward mystery, you know, once you get all the clues in line. And I think it's, uh, it's challenging because pacing-wise, you, you do want it to be a slow burn. You don't want to rush into things.

Yeah. How do you feel about the difficulty near the end? I remember there was a particular chase with a pretty deadly creature there and you run into, like you said, the king, it's pretty lethal. What do you think about that?

Well, lethality is fine in my opinion, uh, as long as it's like worthwhile, as long as it's meaningful. And it makes it better that the lethal part's towards the end.

Yeah.

This does give me echoes just a little bit of, um, True Detective season one, like missing children, New Orleans. Like, right? Is this a weird cover-up? Is this not a weird cover-up? Like, I don't know. I like that. That sounds that sounds like a good time.

Huh. Well, I guess I forget what I was talking about. So why don't we move on to the next choice cut?

Our next choice cut is Saturday the 14th by Maverick Henze. And I encountered this one in kind of a fun way because Mav had posted about a playtest for a scenario they were writing, and I signed up for it. And if you're familiar with— I know we're in like spoiler territory and all that jazz, but when we were first playing, I said to my wife, oh, I'm playing a game, I can go grocery shopping in 4 hours. About halfway through the scenario, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna get out of here early, I just died. And apparently my face was priceless because if you know the scenario, you know, you don't stay dead for long. And I had to text him, sorry, I'm wrong. I'm actually here for 2 more hours.

I do like that though. I always like a mechanic where like you keep players invested in, in, yeah, that's great.

So it's not exactly a cold open. It's just, uh, it's like a mechanic where you come back every time you die.

It is. So because we're— because we're— we spoiled this, I'll say it is time loops.

Oh,

okay.

And every time you come back, it's either like 1 or 2 years later.

Oh, that's really cool.

There's a— I'll talk about a little bit later in this, but there's one moment running this where a player of mine went, wait a second, you said we're in 1979, that song came out in 1982. And I was like, I, I know the song I said.

Ooh, I love that.

Oh, that's a really great clue. Um, what's the synopsis on the scenario?

So the title took me way too long to get, and in hindsight it's so obvious. What comes after Friday the 13th?

Yeah.

Saturday the 14th.

Saturday the 14th, yeah.

It is a bloody massacre at a summer camp and a bunch of crime scene investigators who are all in their own way A living caricature. You've got the newbie, you've got the all-American, you got all these people that any given day would be a trope of a human being. And it's magical because you just, you go to this camp and it seems like it's a straightforward, maybe the killer's in the camp, and you meet all these great characters. It's— Lenny is one of the NPCs, is one of my favorite. to ever play, because when you play Lenny, you gotta put on a bit of a drawl and talk real slow-like, 'cause Lenny works at the camp. Lenny don't know nothing about no murders.

You do that too well.

Would Lenny say that there's a storm brewing,

or would he eat biscuits

and gravy? Oh, there was a storm the other night coming through camp, you know, that's why the ground's all muddy with the blood and the viscera. You better be careful, you fail that dex roll, you're gonna end up covered in Intestines.

Oh, and speaking of intestines and other organs, what's the beating heart of the scenario?

1980s slasher flicks, full send. Everything about this scenario is a love letter to those types of movies. There's shadowy figures, you've got gore on par with the old Troma films. Everything about this scenario screams Slasher flick, and you're just at the heart of it.

Sweet. So sell it to me. What, what, what else do you like about this scenario?

It is, in my opinion, one of the most cinematic scenarios I've ever had the pleasure to play and run by far, because it starts with a cold open of you are just driving to camp. There's no, how did you get there? First question is, who's driving? Here's what's playing on your radio. And when your characters inevitably die in the first 2 hours, it's inevitable in impossible ways. Like, it's, hey, roll a listen roll. Oh, you failed? Cool. Take 2d10 damage as a machete lops you in the back of the head.

That's wild.

It's amazing. And it just keeps rolling from— okay, you're all dead. And then you go right back to that same cold open. So you're in the car driving to Camp Shady Pines and The radio is playing, but the song is different.

Oh, that's fun. I love that. And I like that a scenario like rewards players for being clever or like making you feel clever. Like, oh, I— that song is from 1982. I know that. You know, that's, that's good. I like that.

That was such a beautiful moment. And it kind of ties into that question that, you know, how would I improve this? I would just put a few more different musical selections depending on the audience you're playing for. Because I always pick Heat of the Moment because it's just so fun to have in there. Or I work in Ebony and Ivory or Upside Down. I take— I pull songs from the Billboard of the year that's playing in. And it's a great— I got to give the shout out to Maddie because she said to me, you made a mistake. And I said, what do you mean? Snare's 1979. This is 1982. I said, no, it's totally fine. And then it was immediately like, wait, we're in 1982, aren't we? I didn't say that. You said it, not me.

Do you have suggestions for keepers if players aren't kind of inclined to that amount of knowledge? Like, I couldn't tell you any of my favorite songs the year they came out, right?

The scenario does a fantastic job of building that in for you.

Okay, good, good.

Movie posters change. And then when you meet Lenny for the second time, he goes, oh, it's the strangest thing, you know, talking about these massacres out here happened 2 years ago.

Okay, no, that's good.

I'm like, wait, why is Lenny saying this happened again? It happened again and again, and just kids keep dying out here.

And Lenny doesn't remember you every time.

Oh, that's— I don't know how spoilery we want to get with this.

Spoil full send. Let's just spoil it.

Come on, let's spoil it.

Lenny's the bad guy.

Oh, damn it.

Lenny is the reason— Lenny is this creature called the Seer that— the way it is, Lenny really likes movies.

Okay.

So Lenny is making your characters live a movie. Like, you show up, you live a slasher flick, you all get brutally murdered. You show up again, a cop is now impaled on a tree that you met. He was a rookie when you first met him. This time around, he's the sheriff, and now he's impaled on a tree. And when you finally realize it's Lenny, it's one of those, son of a bitch, it was the old guy the whole time.

The whole time.

The first person you meet is always the bad guy.

Okay. Um, how would you reanimate the scenario then?

So I have a handout I've been wanting to make for years. I've been running this scenario since it came out. I've been meaning to make like a pamphlet for the camp with a map in it. So you just deliver it to the character like, hey, here's the layout. But it's also, it's such a simple layout. There's a lake, there's cabins, there's bathhouses, there's a staff cabin. It's a very simple layout, but I feel like a little handout like that'd be kind of cool. And I've never had the momentum to actually make it myself.

Hey, one day. And then we can put it in the show notes. Depends on what loop we're in. Um, how do you think you could expand this scenario if it needs it?

Uh, it plays very well as a 4-hour one-shot, but I would say to expand it, there's a note of, you know, oh, after you're all dead, the camp stays dormant until somebody then decides to build on the land again. And it could be expanded like a, like a rebooted horror franchise of sorts. You start with a summer camp and now it's an amusement park, and bad things happen at the amusement park, and Tied like Unland or something.

Or you could also give an homage to, what is it, Jason X? And you're on a space shuttle that is about to dock with this station.

That's crazy.

The SS Shady Pines. It's

just Lenny in a spacesuit slowly emerging with a machete in hand.

Oh my God, that's Jason, but no.

Last question for you here. What would you say would be the GM level of running this?

It is remarkably accessible, and it has a sort of little backdoor into Pulp in a way, because all the characters are playing Call of Cthulhu. Your main antagonist is playing Pulp. His stats are much higher, he does more damage, and it's honestly— it's one of the first scenarios that I learned to run after doing the whole, uh, Doorways to Darkness and the Necropolis and all the beginner stuff. As soon as Mav ran this room, like, I am buying this immediately and running it for all my friends. It's become my introduction for a lot of people to Call of Cthulhu.

That's fun.

Sweet. Well, uh, let's move away from the bad vibes of the slasher camp and move on to our next choice cut.

That was a hell of a segue. I'm going to be talking about Good Vibes Only by Phaedra Fleurot. I came across this scenario because I was searching for something a little different. I never have been very interested in Call of Cthulhu in the '20s and '30s kind of classic era and was just searching around for some good modern era scenarios. And this one, somewhere online, people were recommending it for something that was a little different. It was kind of fun. And it really delivered on that. This has been one of my favorite scenarios to try and pitch if anyone is looking just for a casual one-shot on the weekends.

That's really great. Could you tell us the synopsis and then what's really happening behind the scenes?

For sure. So the scenario has a selection of pre-generated characters that have got some problems and they have either signed up for or Ben signed up for this wellness retreat that is getting a lot of fame and acclaim for being extremely effective. The people who come back from this retreat can't stop raving about how amazing it was and telling everyone else that they really need to go there and shed all of these bad vibes and this depression and anxiety. You know, just stop being sad and come here and, you know, be able to get all of that off. Once the PCs arrive, it really plays up a lot of the hippie wellness influencer tropes. And then as they go through more and more of these bizarre meditation slash big air quote therapy exercises, they'll start realizing that the incense sticks that the camp is actually using are making them feel very strange and euphoric. There's actually mechanics that the players have harder difficulty passing certain rolls in order to act outside of what the counselors are going to be telling them to do. There's an NPC who obviously is going to go in and try to change out the incense and say, no, there's something wrong here, because her partner came back from this camp and was acting like a completely different person. So that's where you get a little bit of an early, something's very wrong here. Then, if that wasn't clear enough of a signal, the players are going to feel a bit unnerved because each of these therapy exercises are going to get more and more uncomfortable to go through. There's one pregen in particular who the exercise is telling you to bury your most treasured possession, and they have a very strong reason to go, absolutely not. if they start objecting and, you know, someone is kind of harshing the vibes around this area, then they may get pulled off to the side and basically gassed with a bunch of these incense fumes. I almost, I almost said incest fumes, but that's something different. Oh, okay. I think that may be more of a Lenny Saturday the 14th thing. Until eventually they are led to the Bismouth. The counselors and everyone around this wellness camp are essentially getting people primed to be fed to this living geode flower thing. And so as they shed all of their negativity and bad vibes by basically kind of drugging them up and then marching them in, they step inside of this flower and are crushed to a pulp and liquefied before it then reconstitutes them as this new exact copy of a being that is incapable of feeling negative emotions and is— all about the good vibes only. So you get that, that fun bit of the, you know, air quotes cultists, the counselors or people there involved actually feel like they're doing something good because the people who come out are people and, you know, they, they don't want to spread any more negativity in the world. And one or two of them might also happen to legit be sorcerers that can set themselves on fire and knock the shit out of your PCs if they are trying to cause a ruckus or escape. But don't worry, if they try to escape, the entire place is surrounded by an impenetrable and invisible bubble. So there's fun claustrophobia and stuff to bring in there too.

Super cool. What are the beating hearts then?

The main gist of this is a discordance of very superficially positive and healthy wellness influencer style vibes and advice that is masking over some very dark things that are actually happening. It can be extremely fun and rewarding to play up Sage's voice. The scenario starts with a terrific opening monologue that I read straight up from the scenario, and it was fantastic. Like, the players were noting that it was so much fun as— My warmest greetings, fellow children of Mother Earth. I am Guru Sage, and I'm so excited to welcome you to our retreat here. At Heartland Hill. It's, it's so much fun.

I love the big inhale. At the hill.

If you want to see Lex in action, he's got a run on Into the Darkness where he runs this scenario.

It was so good. It really was.

And I'll tell you something about that run too. This scenario is extremely solid to run right out of the box. It is a right proper shake and bake. Because I read this that morning and then did that run later that same day. And yeah, players all had a really great time. It's super, super fun.

It also feels very, you know, of the moment right now because, you know, with all the wellness stuff and how that kind of ties

into all of that too.

Yeah.

I could simply poison the flower.

Toxic positivity, all of that. Yeah.

Give the flower seed oils.

I was just thinking so pessimistic that it just withers. There's no root to take hold.

I do remember our big showdown. I don't remember. It's been a couple of years, but I do remember the big showdown and just screaming the most negative, like awful things we could think of.

Yes.

And Sage, like trying to counter that. And it was like a one-upmanship of like bad things, good things. It was very fun.

Yeah. It was so much fun. Yeah. The way that you, you kill the flower is with negativity. So yeah, it's an exercise to like get the players to just say the worst things that they can. And it just so happened Sage was there. So yeah, it was just trying. I think it was, I kept talking about organic produce as a way to try to cancel out their negativity.

Well, that really rewards players for paying attention to each other's backstories then, because they can really take them out at the knee.

That's awesome. So how would you reanimate this scenario then, Lex?

There is not a lot about this scenario that I would honestly change. I've wanted to talk about it to, to, to spread the good vibes on this podcast for some time, but like truly, I don't have a lot of changes. The main things that I would say, this would really benefit from an in-person game, especially if you can have a second table where you can display the cards for what the next therapy exercise is going to be with some actual incense sticks just to really capture that verisimilitude. I don't think any conventions would be very happy with that. So your mileage may vary. But in running it, there's a really interesting speed bump in this scenario that you just kind of have to deal with. I can't think of a great way to resolve it because there is a scripted scene where one of the fellow campers ends up clogging the toilet in a very dramatic and stinky fashion. Oh. And one of the counselors or gurus, has to go in and bring some sulfuric acid to clean out the pipes. This also happens to be the best way to destroy the Biz Mouth. So technically, this is Chekhov's sulfuric acid. The author was very aware that this sounds fucking bizarre, so added this GM callout to say, no, yes, this is actually a thing, because I had to read that to my players during the scenario because they were like, what? No, that's gonna melt the pipes. And I'm like, actually— So it's a bit of a speed bump that might disrupt things somewhat. But like, honestly, if you're just bringing those good vibes, I don't think your players are gonna hold up to it that much.

A solution, have one of the PCs be an experienced plumber with this information already.

Exactly. Yeah.

That does seem like a pretty obvious Chekhov's gun though, right? Where as soon as you're like, we're pouring sulfuric acid here, I feel like your players should be going, I bet we see that later.

Oh yeah. Like the clue trail is very clear and it's just It's a blast to play. It's not very difficult to go through.

Can you imagine yourself either expanding the scenario or adding into a campaign?

You could potentially expand it because like the way that my scenario ended was for, you know, that classic one PC survived and he was blinded from the sulfuric acid. So as he's in the hospital bed, he hears a radio ad for more locations of the Heartland Hills opening up. You get that, no, thing. You can do that if you want, not necessary. I think that this would, however, be a ton of fun to surprise players with by dropping it into, say, like a chain of Delta Green investigations that, yeah, A-Cell decides that that last mission was pretty rough. So we bought you some tickets to Heartland Hills to decompress a little bit. Don't worry about it.

Oh my God, that's a mess. That, that resort is not surviving. It's going to be in flames.

It would be a ton of fun. I honestly, I want to do that now. I can't really drop it into Impossible Landscapes, but next time I think I am going to try dropping it into—

Why don't you just do it?

Heartland Hills in Carcosa. Just come and visit. It's fine.

Last things last. What about the GM difficulty?

As I mentioned, this scenario is very shake and bake, and I think is extremely accessible for new and experienced GMs.

Sweet. Moving right along to our next choice cut.

I've got There's Gold in Them Thar Hills by Jeffrey Groff. I was really looking for something fun and pulpy. Uh, I had run for my home group a scenario that you've written, Alex, that you haven't published yet, and they fell in love with it. The, uh, oh gosh, I can't remember what it's called now, but it's the very fun, like, '80s pulpy, um, scenario.

Oh, oh yes. I, I wrote this, um, the apocalypse sequence.

Yeah, they loved it. And they were like, give us more pulp. We want more pulp. And so I went to look for maybe like kind of Wild West, something kind of fun setting. Uh, I actually kind of don't remember where I got the recommendation for this very specific scenario from, but it might've been like the Call of Cthulhu subreddit. I'm not sure.

So what's, uh, what's the synopsis? And then what's going on underneath? I mean, well, underneath the hills.

Underneath the hills. So this takes place during the Alaskan Gold Rush in 1897. Um, the investigators are hopeful prospectors. They've just arrived into the region and all of these rumors are abounding that there's like a, there's a gang that's robbing prospectors. There's wild animals brutally killing people and other animals and mysterious footprints surrounding the camp. Um, so behind the scenes, it's— well, there actually really is just a gang that's robbing everyone around. That's, that's kind of a fun, like, interspersed in through all of that. Um, but other than that, the Migo have taken over the hills and have created some time portals, accidentally allowing dinosaurs to come into the area. So—

Hell yeah.

Yeah, like I was, I was on board. I was like, there's T-Rexes, there's raptors, there's like an outlaw gang. I was like, okay, this is just fun. I really liked this. And it's, it's really quick, fast-paced. It comes with a bunch of pre-gens that have good motivations and it's a single session. It's real snappy.

Cowboys versus dinosaurs is awesome.

Yes. Yeah. And there's really a lot you can do with it, right? Like they're saying, oh, the Migo have opened up time portals in the hills. Uh, it can— the Time Polters can be anything. It doesn't have to be giant dinosaurs. It could be aliens and spacemen and laser guns. It could be whatever you want it to be. Just like really play it up, something fun.

Yeah. So why else is this a choice cut for you? What else do you like about it?

Um, I— it really met the brief for the group that I was running this for. They're always looking for like crazy pulpy weirdness. Like Call of Cthulhu for them is like They're on the Call of Cthulhu bus because that is my preferred RPG system. But really, they just want anything that's like crazy fast, pulpy, high octane, and I won't run anything like D&D for them. So this is what they get, and they loved it though. And it really does deliver. It's real snappy. Like I said, good pregens, handouts. It's very like a short write-up. It just meets the brief really well. It's easy to plug and play. I would really like to see them add maybe a little bit more. It was almost a little too quick though. Maybe some more encounters or a little bit more investigation. It's very little investigation. It mostly is just kind of like reacting to the crazy things that are happening in the area. And, you know, the big bad is the Migo, which if you're playing with experienced Call of Cthulhu players, yeah, that might be a little bit clichéd. Like my players had never seen the Migo, so they were just eating it up. But so kind of keep that in mind that like it might come across as a little bit clichéd. Yeah.

Yeah. Is there really like a defined outcome that they're expecting the players to hit or is it more of just survive?

No, it's so there is, if they, they can't, they can infiltrate the MIGO facility and they can find all the weird stuff like the brooding area, like the, where they have the breeding and where they have all the experiments on humans and all the weird shit going on. And, um, they can find like the master gate and I think they're expected to either shut it down or blow it up with dynamite. Cause again, they're prospectors and that's fun. They all have dynamite to play with.

So they're just stripping the gold out of the MIGO, like, laboratories out of the walls.

Yeah, there you go. Exactly. And of course there's like the lightning guns too, if you really want to be just absolute silliness.

Oh, that is awesome. So you'd say the, the beating hearts, like the weird west, the pulpiness, gold rush, the crazy gangs.

Yeah.

How would you reanimate this scenario then?

Um, I, I wouldn't change what's written, but I would just add more content, I think. Um, maybe give more opportunity for NPC interactions, a more cinematic showdown with the gang. The mob is kind of, um, they're just a little bit of a footnote. They're like, oh yep, they are in fact robbing people and here's their campout. And it's like really close to the Migos laboratory and you can get into a fight with them and maybe something a little bit more oomph to it, I think.

Oh yeah. Like them having fungi on the mind.

Yeah.

That'd be cool. So how would you expand this scenario? Um, would you fit it into a Down Darker Trails campaign?

I think you could. You know, it's so— I didn't even know this until I went digging. The Alaskan Gold Rush was kind of started on the heels of the California Gold Rush, like right as that was ending. So you could always say like, hey, the gold rush is dried up, people are leaving the area, you know, this town's basically becoming a ghost town at this point, but you hear there's good opportunities up in Alaska, and then they could pretty easily be vectored into that area.

Sweet. How hard is this to run?

Oh gosh, this is, this is the same as like Dead Border, like just real easy. I mean, a little bit more complicated than Dead Border, I guess, because it's multiple like areas to investigate, but still it's very, very easy, very plug and play. Like 1.5 out of 10 difficulty.

Oh, that's, that's really accessible.

Yeah.

Let's reach escape velocity for our next choice cut.

Death is the Final Escape by Brian Rudolph and Josiah Duke Harris. Apologies if I messed up the names. So I encountered this because Keith was running it for Into the Darkness, and usually if he's enthusiastic enough to run it, it's worth checking out. So I grabbed a copy of it. You can get a physical copy and everything. So that's always a big one in my book. And it involves escape artistry, which I think is pretty interesting to begin with. So the idea behind this is it starts out with a murder-suicide with the murderer being the— this prominent escape artist, right? The diabolist kind of guy. Very like, ooh, what's he up to? Why'd he murder this person? And your investigators are there to figure out. what the hell went down. There's some weird jewelry in this situation. Like, there's some artifacts that are almost immediately obviously hypergeometric in some fashion, right? Like, you look at them and it just hurts to look at. So hopefully that's enough of a hook that your players keep going. And eventually they'll find out that there is a straight-up cult, the Cult of the Clair, I I'm guessing that's how you say it. It's got a K and a layer afterwards. The idea of this cult is that they have all eaten a bit of essentially a shoggoth, right? Some creature that's now split a bunch of ways between them. And as long as it's split out among the bodies, everybody's chill. They just have to terrify and kill somebody every so often. Other than that, totally chill. Totally chill. Right now.

Sounds totally normal. I don't know what you're talking about.

So this is another one. I guess this is like a long-term solution. This has been going on forever. And it just so happens that this escape artist was a member of this cult. And he decided, you know what? I think I'm going to be buddies with that guy instead. And I'm going to start reconstituting this creature. But ah, damn, it really sucks because I don't like— I want to do it on the down low. So he kind of seduces this nurse who will be the murdered victim and has her swap the brain between him and another cult member. And then they kill his original body.

Whoa.

So yeah, you've got this fun, like, body swap in there. There's going to be a guy running around with a gauzed-up forehead because she cut his brain out. And yeah, I think it's just a pretty interesting sandbox to go into because there's not a lot of good solutions to this, right? Like the cult is not wrong. This is the way they're keeping the creature contained is good. Well, it's not good, but it's a solution. Now, unfortunately, they have to keep killing people and they're kind of like, maybe we don't have to kill them. Maybe we just have to scare them. But I don't think we want to take that chance.

What is the beating heart of the scenario then?

So I think the beating heart here is that cult and the body swapping. That's what's really going to get your players into it, is them digging in and figuring out what the hell is going on and then choosing a side, right? Choosing some solution to this of do they find a person to sacrifice? Do they volunteer to be a sacrifice? And because it's got that like escape element, they kind of give you a toy box of like, this straitjacket is one you can get out of. So if you want to go with the cult, you know, you could prepare yourself to escape. That is one of the downsides though, is from a player side, I don't know that there's enough of a hint that you don't have to die in the scenario. to use the escape artist stuff. So that might, you know, there might be some avenues there where you give them more of a chance to use some of the fun fake handcuffs.

I think I'm seeing a lot of opportunity to really dive into this for a couple of things. First, I want to pick up on where you just left off, that maybe you can more clearly have a PC indicate that, no, no, no, you can use this and then you'll be able to get back out, but make them sketchy as fuck so that the players that themselves don't know, like, is this above board? Like, will I actually be able to get out of this straitjacket or am I just signing up to die? And, you know, find some way to reward your players for really going all in on that for some reason. The other thing that I think would be very fun for GMs to get into, if you would be so inclined, I don't see body swaps come up often in TTRPGs at all. And if you wanted to set up a table to characterize the different NPCs and say like, this is their tone of voice, and then here are some of their expressions or speech inflections so that you would be able to kind of capture— If you do have someone who would have a slightly higher and more nasally tone of voice, but then he calls someone tiger at the end of a sentence, that that would be their sign that something fucking weird just happened. And be able to juggle that at different stages of the scenario, I think could be really interesting for players.

Yeah, there's enough leeway in the cult and like undefined characters that you could give the main guy more cultists that are on his side, right? Because his entire thing is just he's gonna kill people and then gobble up their bits until there's enough of their bits in him,

as one does,

that it can recreate the Clayre proper. And it'll burst out and do all kinds of bad things or whatever. You know, it's, it's bad news bears.

How would you reanimate and maybe mediate out some of the problems in this scenario then?

Yeah, I think there's a couple times where this gives avenues for players to go into that the book itself admits are unlikely to do. So for example, the body-swapped guy, He has bought a new house for himself using his old per— like his old money so that he can just live the life of luxury free from all his previous debts. And would you know it, he doesn't have a staff yet. So he has a help wanted sign out front. And your players can get a job there and start working and start like investigating inside and going up to the forbidden second floor that you must not go to. But of course they, they will. But I mean, I don't know about your investigators, but mine will just go, no, we'll break in at night, or we'll watch him leave and then we'll just break in. Like, who's getting hired to do this? So a few jumps in logic like that. Same with the escape equipment, Lex, kind of like you were saying. I would have liked to see some more avenues where that would be useful. Maybe more cases where you had to fool people, something like that would probably be interesting.

So they're not going to take the long con where they apply for the job, get it, and then work for the person for 10 years.

You know, I guess that's one way to get into one faction. You go, he's paying the checks. I got to go with this guy.

You know, maybe that would be interesting then as a way to incentivize them to actually take the job and get hired is they would be able to more clearly Clearly identify what escape equipment would actually be able to further things at the end, or if they wanted to try to sabotage future scenes and things like that by swapping it out with a real lock or something.

Well, and the real kicker is with the way that the, you know, the ritual is done is they basically put a guy in a straitjacket, dump a bunch of scorpions on him, and bury him alive. And that's scary, and that fuels their sleepy time spell for the player. And that's where, you know, your player can just get out of the straitjacket, punch Kill Bill style out of the dirt, I guess, and escape. I don't know that that's signposted enough or that there's enough of a time to do it, but just the idea is enough there that it, it makes me want to to look into it more.

So how would you say this is to run as a GM? Is it easier, tougher?

This one's tougher, I think. I think you'd want to really get your mind around the cult, have that faction bit, and just the body swapping of it all can be a little bit more complex to portray and then not just blindside your players with a character that knows a lot of stuff that can make them lethal pretty fast. So tough.

Excellent. Thank you, Nathan. Going right down this pipeline of choice cuts, we're gonna move on to—

Step on the gas is what you meant.

I'm stepping on the gas, all right, because my choice cut for today is The Pipeline by Alex Guillot. So I saw this scenario first on Into the Darkness, and it was just like a fascinating actual play that enthralled me because the intro was what hooked me. So the, the premise is that an oil company team comprised of like repair persons and like private security want to investigate loss of communication from a pumping station out in the middle of nowhere in British Columbia. So the reason why they have the private security company is the fact that the company thinks that it was caused by eco-terrorists. But what has actually happened is that there's just fucking yetis. There's yetis attacking people, like trying to do this ritual to summon Ithaqua. And on the way there, Like, first scene, plane ride. Plane gets taken down by a thrown rock, a boulder, by these yetis. And there's this harrowing wilderness survival that follows through. They got to follow this oil pipeline to reach safety. So I ran this one for, you know, like a couple of years ago for like a Halloween special. It took 2 4-hour sessions. The scene that like captured me was the whole, you wake up in the, in a plane crash upside down, like hanging in your seat. This plane is teetering on the edge of a cliff. Grab what you can. I'm like, holy shit, that's so fucking awesome.

Yeah, you don't hear yetis used very often either.

Yeah.

It's a fun, fun threat.

Yeah, scenario is a ton of fun.

So I would say the beating heart of this scenario is the whole like environmental horror. You've got a complete isolation in a hostile like environment. Yeah, it's, it's the middle of nowhere. You're gonna freeze to death if you don't do anything, if you don't do anything to survive. Uh, there's also the yetis, of course, uh, hunting the, the player characters. And the journey to safety to survive.

Yeah, I definitely think for all of our complaints about a missed opportunity for environmental horror in Jack Frost, this one really delivers on it. And it has some good details for GMs for portraying if you are out in the cold, this is an active threat and like the stages of things as they're building up. So I think it can be a lot of fun.

Yeah. And like, I know people can say, oh, it's, uh, it's snowy. It's, it's a winter environment. It's just going to be Ithaca. But like, yeah, sure. This is a fun scenario. It's well-written. It's well laid out. It's got a solid concept and it's just fine. This is what I wish Jack Frost should have been, would be, to be honest with you.

More Yeti.

Yeah.

We're just going to play Jack's Pipeline. Wait, no, nope.

Well, hey, uh, if you wanted to expand this, you could definitely port this over to Delta Green pretty easily when they're investigating, like, hey, spooky stuff goes missing, you need a plane, oh, plane goes down, bam, you're still in it.

Yeah, expanding on this a little bit, this has been on my bucket list to run for some time because another agency in the Delta Green lore that doesn't get talked about at all is M-Epic. The Canadian equivalent of it. So my goal in running this would be— we have a few Canadian players on the server, and so it would be to have a closed table briefing for each of them. Some of the group is Delta Green, who are told that they're going in with civilians to investigate the American interest. The Canadians are told, there's something fucking supernatural going on. We're pairing you up with these American assholes who are forcing their way into this situation. Just keep them occupied while you do the stuff. And that way there's that miscommunication. Each of them have conflicting goals. I've been waiting for it for some time.

Definitely. There's another great scene where they're following the pipeline and then they just come upon the body of one of the employees, which is just like propped up, like almost crucified against it with their face peeled off. And it's like, holy shit, this is the first new person we've seen. after days of travel. It's, it gets pretty, it's pretty grim. Um, this is a choice cut for me because I just really love the set pieces. I love the scenes. There's an ancient, like, entombed ice temple. Um, it's like a more action-oriented Mountains of Madness if there was, if the travel there was, uh, completely fucked and there's yetis plus Ithaca.

That's a real enforced timeline too. Like, we often talk about how fast players run, and this sounds like it's gonna take days. You know, not, not in real life, but in game time. Like, there's no fast way through this.

It definitely depends. This scenario is very largely dependent on, like, pacing, and I would advise that this is run just like as a multi-session slow burn. I'm choosing a lot of slow burns. But yeah, GM difficulty level, I would say, is intermediate because there's like the mechanics you got to keep track of with freezing. There's a large, a large cast of unfortunate, like, victims of this yeti outbreak. And as for reanimating this scenario, I would flesh out the town a little more. Because that might be a logical place for the player characters to go or end up going there. Yeah, and I would add some more.

That would be number one on my list. If you said you have places to go, would you like to go to town? Yes.

And everyone inside the town is frozen where they stand. Damn it. And that's whenever you find this lake. Oh shit.

Yeah. Um, so one thing I'm conflicted on is the fact that, yeah, there should be more like survivors or backup PCs, but that then goes against the feelings of isolation that you're building up. Uh, but yeah, some of these victims, they're getting captured and they're being sent back to this ice temple for sacrifice.

So you could have like, uh, an escapee, a Wampa escapee or whatever.

Yeah, for sure. Well, that's it for, uh, my second choice cut. We're gonna move on. Uh, I don't know how to transition this, but— I'm waiting for a segue here, Alex.

Come on, tell me something good. Away from the ice and down towards the docks.

Something about feet? Is that something?

No.

Stuck in the middle of Barker Avenue.

You know what? Yeti's got feet. So then what else loves feet?

Dogs like feet.

It's a Tarantino thing, damn it.

Yeah.

It worked on multiple levels. Nathan was right. Don't worry. He's right. My second choice cut is Dockside Dogs by Paul Fricker. This is one of my favorite scenarios to run, like top Top 5 of all time.

Yeah, I think this is a great scenario. I think it's just a lot of fun.

It's so good. So what's the premise?

Well, because I'm going to be saying spoilers about it, I know some of you may want to take your headphones out for this part.

Oh yeah.

No, everyone's good now. Lex took his headphones out and the rest of us have played it.

Oh, he already did. Okay, so Lex has been staring at us wondering this whole time.

We can finally have fun.

Oh my God. So anyways, uh, I encountered this scenario at a weekend with good friends over at the Good Friends of Jackson Elias server. It was hilariously very early when I found out about Call of Cthulhu. I had no idea who Jackson Elias was, why all these people are friends with him. And it was a random post like, hey, do this scenario, like play this. I'm like, sure. And it was a memorable experience being run over Discord because they set up different one-on-one voice rooms for just keeper and player to pass information.

Oh, that's really cool.

And it was a really clever way to— I wish for the life of me I could remember who ran it, and I was digging through my DMs trying to find it. But, uh, yeah, it was fantastic. It was a very memorable experience.

Sweet. So what's it all about?

It is a group of well-dressed criminals who just carried out a heist and now have to wait at the warehouse for the ferryman after the police have shown up And ruined the attempted heist.

Uh, I— can I contradict that and say it's a group of well-dressed criminals plus one?

Plus one. Yes, yes, that, that was gonna come up in the, uh, the GMing part of this because you gotta gaslight your players for several hours. But, uh, I, I say to people, have you seen, uh, Reservoir Dogs? It's that but with a sprinkling of the Mythos on the top. And it's also very carefully chosen with language of saying, you executed a heist. What did we steal? The loot. What are we doing? You're waiting for the ferryman. Where's he going to go? Across the water. You choose very careful words to hide what's actually happening.

Yeah. And what is actually happening then?

What is actually happening is that— I had to double-check this as we were prepping the copy here. It's essentially everybody is John. You are all playing different facets of a single person, and it's not revealed to you until the very, very, very end that you're all just characters in a movie script that have come to life. And in reality, you are all just facets of this one gentleman, this Taylor Meldrum character, who's probably sitting in his, uh, And it's how I was just smoking a joint, reading a script, and just dissociating, learning about this Mr. Yellow guy who promises him all this wealth and knowledge and power. And it's totally— it, it gives it away from the beginning. On the character sheet, it even says, be happy you're not Mr. Yellow. And I've had players pick up, they go, Mr. Yellow? Is this a Carcosa scenario? And I go, I don't know what you're talking about. Of

course,

Mr. Yellow is the guy who sent you the script. Clearly.

That must be really terrifying, having that reveal hinge on just that name in the character sheet. If he— and but it's built into the premise that people don't talk about their names. They use code names.

True. You all use code names.

Yeah. What would you say is the beating heart of this scenario then?

The Beating Heart is just social deduction and care. It's the most player-driven scenario I've had the— ever had the joy to run. I can sit there in silence for half an hour, let the game just run in front of me, and just watch people at each other's throats. And they'll be like, I want to shoot him. Like, go for it.

Yeah,

yeah, go nuts.

It's, it's really fun because it's It's an exercise in gaslighting your players for until the big reveal that Mr. Gray is not actually there. You just— I just sit there, go, okay, you're at the warehouse, what do you do? And one person inevitably, I go to the catwalk and start looking for bugs. I want to check the loot. I want to go have a sandwich. And I just go, cool. You hear a baby crying. What? It's very, very light work for the Keeper in that respect, but I think that's the beating heart of it, is that it's, it's so player-driven.

Definitely. So how would you improve this scenario?

Uh, how would I improve it? By making some more of the references to Carcosa a little more evident. Because when I first played this, I was still very new to the Cthulhu Mythos world, and it ended with you get off the boat to a city that smells of warm spices with cobbled streets, and the king awaits you in Carcosa. And I'm like, I feel like I should know what that means. I

said,

I'm like, who's the king? What's Carcosa? They're like, oh buddy, you like missed everything.

Yeah,

apparently so.

They didn't write the script.

I'd play with that a little bit more. There was a few moments of like a quote from The Great Gatsby can show up and it's intentionally wrong. It's a call for an intelligence roll. I'm like, nobody's gonna recognize this isn't right. And I've tried it for every time I've run. I'm like, hey, does this sound right to you? And they go, yeah, sure, that's what F.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote.

What am I in, English class? Come on.

Pretty much. But it works once they figure out that, that things are horribly, horribly wrong.

Nice. Any other ways you'd reanimate this scenario?

I would make sure that the players know upfront they are driving the bus. I've had a table of this where nobody wanted to talk.

Hmm.

And I, I— anybody who's run it knows you have, I think it's 7 hallucinations in your back pocket. By the 5th one, they were like, maybe something's wrong here. I'm like, you think? You had an old man turn to dust in a chair. You got a baby You got a kid with a boat that just happens to have all of you on it and none of you thought maybe shit's weird.

It's probably worth signposting that this is a PvP game as well. You know, I think everyone always and usually enters Call of Cthulhu games with like a spirit of collaboration and don't want to be the guy that like starts a fight or whatever. So maybe signposting that.

I will say when I ran this once to the PvP element, A buddy of mine has the record for the fastest sequence of character deaths ever.

Nice.

It is a strength of the scenario that if you die, that you can get a new character sheet as the reader, Taylor Meldrum, like the overarching person. And you're like, oh, I'm, I'm reading a script. Everything before me is a movie. And a buddy of mine was playing this. His character got shot in a shootout, which inevitably happens. Anybody who's run this If you don't kill these 2 characters, what are you doing? But his character came back in, we spent about 5, 10 minutes going over the new sheet, like, here's what's happening, do you have any questions? Everett is in the other room. He walks back in, does those, hey, start up those fryers! And immediately, immediately at point-blank range with a 0-1 on a firearms roll, had his head blown clean off.

Oh shit.

I was like, I don't know what to do here, Paul. I mean, I— this is, this is uncharted territory, buddy.

Oh, just send in another one.

Well, actually, I do have a— one thing I do, I would say, to reanimate this, I have a character sheet for, uh, the reader's cat. So you can come back as the cat. The cat.

Or have an extra player as the cat. Wild.

The cat is inherently mythologically Enhanced because it's a cat.

Invincible.

You can communicate with anybody because you're a cat. Anybody you don't want to talk to, just hear meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. It leads to beautiful chaos.

That is—

that sounds like the way to get out to the good ending though, is you're just like, I've got my backup character. We're all going to Ulthar.

I mean, yeah.

Love that. Um, would you even recommend expanding this scenario?

The only way you could would be to maybe explore Carcosa at the end, but it feels like given the big twist reveal, it's almost too contrived to be like, hey, go through Carcosa now knowing that you're a figment of some guy's imagination.

Yeah. Yeah.

So probably best for a one-shot then.

Yeah.

So what would you say, like, what, what GM level would I have to be to run this?

I would say advanced beginner. I've run it. It was one of my earlier scenarios I learned to run, but you also make all the mistakes early and fix them. But also because you have to manage a table of 5 to 6 players at a time, none of them like each other. I ran this once in person in a very small room. So everybody was texting me what they wanted to do secretly. I felt like I was just sitting on my phone the whole time rather than running the game. So I feel like if you, if you're new to Call of Cthulhu, it's not the best one to start with, but it's definitely one that you should put into your repertoire earlier rather than later.

Awesome.

And the gaslighting also takes a lot of effort to play a character that's not there the whole time. and then suddenly take one person aside and go, by the way, he's not— he hands you a notebook and disappears. Walk back to the rest of the table and go, that guy's nuts and been talking to some guy named Mr. Gray the whole time, which works so well in an in-person setting. I've run this at Chaosium Con all the time. I have a notebook, the Mr. Gray notebook that people get handed, and they keep adding notes.

Oh, nice.

So it's a living prop that every year gets new notes just scribbled in the margins. Oh,

I love that.

I love that. It's wonderful. Yeah.

It is one of my most cherished props, second only to the infamous one from Gatsby and the Great Race, but I won't spoil what it was because I'm going to run that again next year.

That's next choice cuts.

Next choice cuts, definitely. Oh, I could go on and on about that one. Then the infamous double bromine battery-powered vibratory muscle relaxing device that was invented.

Poor Lex, he just heard the infamous and the headphones went right off again.

He's trying to keep us on time and just ends up hearing about a vibratory device that was developed.

It was not.

You're good. You're good.

I've played this game before.

No, we weren't even talking about Dr.

Lath. It was not her lath attempt.

Oh, uh, all right, let's keep this party going by going to the next choice cut.

This next choice cut has been marinating for some time in a special brew of trash can punch, beer, and this stuff I found in this weird old bottle. I'm sure it's fine. I really want to talk about OMEGA KAPPA DIE in all caps with 3 exclamation points by Colin Signal-to-Noise Richards. Um, Colin ran this scenario for us at Chaosium Con 2025. And it remains one of the most raucous and fun games that I have ever had in my life. It is full-on The Re-Animator meets National Lampoon's. It's a fucking hoot. And I would be remiss if I did not recommend it on this chat today.

Yeah. So what the hell is going on here?

It's a very good question. A couple of things are happening here. The scenario starts with a cold open in 1930 where you're handed a handful of pre-gens that are all students who have been working with this kind of kooky old professor that figured out that one of the other professors there was a cultist. So you all have broken in and murdered everyone inside this Ashcroft Manor who were clearly cultists to try and stop a ritual. But then as you search the house somewhat, You pull back this grandfather clock and find a carved stone pathway and staircase leading down. And that's when the last cultist goes, You're too late! Just as these rifts and tentacles and horrors and things from beyond rip your pre-gen investigators apart. And maybe the NPC or one of the last PCs would be able to kill the cultist and disrupt the ritual. But they can't stop it. They can only postpone it for roughly 70 years if they're lucky. So nicely, the scenario picks up 69 years later in 1999, where all of the PCs are dumbass frat bros who are redecorating the old Ashcroft Manor into Delta Kappa Pi's new frat house. We had a blast with the character creation because there's tons of like custom skills and abilities and things. It's like almost pulp, but not really, just to lean into the dumbass National Lampoon shenanigans. As we're creating our characters, we're also creating the house itself. And so we use the same map of Ashcroft Manor, and then Colin hands out all of these different labels where we get to decide which one of these is the body painting station, the makeout room. Oh, that's great. the beer pong table, all of this other stuff. So you're, you're making your characters, you're remaking the houses, you're setting it up to be the rager of the century. Of course, all of this is going to be challenged by that uptight Dean Zare and his screeching 35-year-old weirdo stepson Ronald. Ah, I had to do it. Colin did it every time. Um, that they're there with sticks up their asses that are trying to— they're going to tell us that we're going to be expelled if there's any illegal activity going on at this party, which naturally means tons of illegal activity and drugs are going to be going around at this party. We drink from weird bottles which accidentally inoculate us against the more cosmic horror-y things going on, because as we are getting progressively fit-chased, more and more bizarre, horrific things are happening around us. People are getting mutilated and mauled apart, but we're too drunk to notice half the time. Until we finally do, and then it's time for us to act because there are 5 rituals that have to be completed in different spots of the house that just so happen to coincide with like drinking games and bullshit that will enable us to get keys that can stop the final summoning underneath the house and everything. Like it's— it is the penultimate beer and pretzels game. The plot doesn't fucking matter. The plot is an excuse to really emphasize All of the bullshit going on at the table.

Makes you drink. Yeah. So Lex, what would you say is the beating heart of this scenario then?

3 words: dumbass drinking shenanigans. The scenario emphasizes this with some custom rules where everyone has to drink every time anyone high-fives, or any time, like, you roll a 69, everyone around the table has to go, nice and then drink again, like really playing all of that stuff up to an 11. This is a scenario that you would want to play in person and ideally in a setting where you and your players can drink and have a great time while it's going on. This is the only Call of Cthulhu scenario that I have legit built a beer can pyramid at the table during the play of it. So, you know, call that a claim to fame, I guess.

Oh, we got a picture of that.

We really leaned into the LARPing on that one. That's it, it's LARPing.

We were just committing to the characters. That's

it.

Do you add a bonus die if you manage to add a new layer to the pyramid?

Oh shit, we should have done that. That's a great idea actually. Or if you can keep it going up, if you happen to topple the pyramid, maybe it's a penalty die for a party foul.

No,

there's lots of custom tables and stuff in this scenario to really play up a lot of these themes. So yeah, it's just, it's If you are looking for something that would be dumb and fun where you have some friends coming over and want to play a game and drink too much beer for an evening, this is your scenario to a tee.

Yeah. And for those who don't drink, you could definitely enjoy the role-playing.

A nice glass of tap water. Yeah. And have some nice sober role-playing.

But yeah, you can play this without alcohol.

Oh, you certainly, certainly can.

You can. Colin has run this. conventions without alcohol at the tables, at least so I think. He was handing out water bottles, but I'm sure it's fine.

Oh, just straight vodka? Hell yeah.

That's, that's, those are the kind of games where you're at a convention and the table next to you is so rowdy and you're like, what the hell are they playing over there right now?

This is 100% it. This would be disruptive at a convention in a very fun way, at least for your table, I suppose.

So why is this a choice cut for you? What exactly Did you like about it?

This is another choice cut for me because I couldn't bring it up in another dedicated episode for this podcast because there honestly is not a lot that I would want to reanimate or change about it. This is all about the bullshit shenanigans and vibes. And like, I am willing to look the other way. I don't even know if there are plot holes in this scenario because it does not matter. This scenario is about a goofy premise to have a goofy session for an evening. And at that point, like, that's what I would call a choice cut. Like, if you are looking for something dumb and fun for a one-shot evening, this is that.

Sweet. Uh, do we have any war stories from that night?

Oh my God.

I am never going to forget building the goat shit Gatling gun to use against cosmic horrors and the corrupted—

Excuse me, that's the Shatling gun.

The Shatling gun. Oh, how could I forget? I still— oh God, I want to have Colin roleplay another character. I want Ronald to show up and just— I love Ronald's scenario. I need to get him to record that so I can drop it into this episode.

I'll add that to the Discord soundboard.

I did love the, again, the Animal House-esque endings where everyone gets like their own credits. I forgot about that. Everyone gets their own ending.

This PC's now the President of the United States. The Supreme Court Justice.

Yeah. The Attorney General of the United States.

Oh God, it's, it is such a fun scenario. You gotta have players that are like really just willing to run with it though, because like Lex said, it's, it's silly, but it's, it's a lot of fun.

I, I, I love cold opens. I'm a sucker for cold opens. I remember donning, uh, like an old knight's suit, like armor, uh, and like thinking, oh, I got out, I got out. And I run outside and get lit up by the police.

Yeah, I think the party planning really hit for me too of it's not necessary, but it's fun to just come up with all the dumb stuff you're gonna throw at this party.

Yeah, I mean, you can't say you've ever done that in a scenario before. So being able to kind of relabel all the rooms of this house that we the players know horrible murder things just happened in. So yeah, we're gonna make the atrium the body paint station.

And honestly, like, Doc, I know you said you've read this already because you're the kind of perpetual GM for your group, but I think you could probably just play it anyway and just run with it because it's so fun. Like, you can just—

Yeah, I mean, the shenanigans alone would be worth the time. You have a shatling gun.

Shatling gun, yes.

Yeah. And also I'll say Colin did a great job with the kind of primer and introduction for this scenario because it gives a bit of guidance in being able to be aware of what your group is interested in. And, you know, if your group is into slapstick humor, then play up people falling down the stairs and dumb things like that. There's also a very nice list of inspirations for dumbass frat movies like Animal House and Back to School that you can watch to kind of get in the vibe for bullshit to make up at the table. That, yeah, it's just a ton of fun.

Oh, you could Doc, you could definitely just, uh, drink enough so that you're in an altered state so you don't remember reading the scenario.

An ascended state, rather.

I mean, it just sounds like a delightful plan. Hey

Ozzy, March 2025.

We all meet up again in Michigan next year.

Just run it again.

We all just get schnockered at the bar, grab Colin again. Like, run it again for us.

I would be down to play this again, just completely drunk. Because like, yeah, it's It's, again, the plot doesn't matter. Like, we, we're just playing through this goofy National Lampoon's in Arkham style movie or whatnot. Like, yeah.

Beautiful. So how would you say, how beginner friendly is this?

This is where I get to temper all of my enthusiasm because while this scenario is undoubtedly a blast with the right group of players, the numerous custom tables and planning and effects might be a lot to juggle for a new GM. So I would not recommend it for someone just getting into Call of Cthulhu, but maybe to try running it after you're comfortable with the system enough to riff with improvisation and play up some of these custom tables and things in the scenario.

Awesome. All right. We are wrapping it up. We'll insert some, some deli meat onto the scale sounds, the price scanner sounds. 'Cause we've got our order of choice cuts right here. We hope our manic ravings are helpful in bringing each of these choice cuts to life at your table. Be sure to check out the show notes of this episode for links to find these scenarios any RPG resources we can share, actual plays of this scenario we recommend, as well as an invite to our lab's Discord server to discuss more reanimations. We also post these episodes and resources to our Patreon that's free to follow, or if you'd like, you can make a charitable donation to help us keep the ominously flickering lights on at the H. West Memorial Mortuary and Laboratories. Doc, do you have any plugs for us?

Uh, yeah, actually, uh, you want to pick up the scenarios that I've written, I have them on Draft Through RPG, as well as the recently published Year of the Goat, a collection of a variety of scenarios organized by Heinrich Mohr and Evan Perlman. That's the big one lately because it's getting closer and closer to print on demand, and just a lot of great scenarios in there. And feel free to check out Symphony Entertainment where I do a bunch of stuff on Twitch and things like that, including a game recently played with Alex involving a death chariot Segway. If you want to find out about how that works, you got to check it out.

Definitely, definitely. We'd also like to give a shout out and thanks to our newest Patreon interns, Mark, David, Zan, and Raymond. Thank you so much for donating your bodies to science. So until next time,

thanks for listening to RPG Reanimators,

where your games can die

or live

on the table.

Next choice cut.

That's my segue. God, let's escape onto our next choice cut.

Next time on Choice Cut Z.

Let's break out to our next choice cut.