One hundred thousand!

"Me? An IRA man? Mixed up in WW2? Preposterous!"

Three big things happened this week. One, the Chinese stock market and the New York stock market both almost fell over within 24 hours of each other, for different reasons. Secondly, this blog passed 100,000 visits, which has to be a major milestone (I'll be celebrating with a glass of prosecco this evening). Finally, we concluded our World War Cthulhu story arc most unexpectedly.

I'm really only going to focus on the third of these, the conclusion of our current World War Cthulhu campaign, at least for the time being. My RPG group tends to disappear over August, hence making it useful for any current campaign to wrap up before that happens. Regular readers will know we've been playing World War Cthulhu for a while now, and a more detailed exposition of events can be found over on our GM's blog.

Suffice to say, from a player's perspective, we'd reached a point where we felt our cover had been compromised. Our SOE team had hijacked another SOE team's mission in Vichy France in order to hunt for a missing German occultist. At the same time we were trying to breathe some much-needed life into a local resistance cell, although the presence of a copper mine nearby, and the interest of the German army in said mine, were making things increasingly difficult. That's before you factor in the presence of some kind of cult in the valley we were operating in, and the general level of incompetence and tomfoolery displayed by the resistance cell.

Following the visit by a Mythos entity to the cottage where three of our team were staying, resulting in the detonation of our entire supply of C4, and the destruction of the house, it was felt that we needed to move quickly to find the missing German occultist and get out of town. A close encounter of the Gestapo kind eventually deteriorated into a midnight gun battle which resulted in the deaths of two Gestapo men. This, we felt, was not going to be ignored by the Germans, and we concluded there would be too much heat coming down on us.

Don't let the pan pipes fool you - these things are lethal.

We thought the missing occultist might be held in some tunnels we'd discovered under the village. We decided to break into them through the orchard of a resistance member we suspected of being a cultist (we had found the exit from the tunnels previously and detected signs of people coming and going on his land). Before we could get into the tunnels, we were ambushed by Mythos creatures (see picture) and fought them off with some well-applied gunfire, including once again demonstrating the sheer lethality of fully automatic weapons in Call of Cthulhu. While we survived, we knew the entire German garrison would be coming down on our heads.

It was a necessarily brief debate. I was for gambling all to go down the tunnels, but the bulk of the team was for fleeing the village in a stolen Gestapo car, with Gestapo badges, and making for the Spanish border. This we succeeded in doing, living to fight another day. We had, however, failed in most of our objectives.

It is entirely possible we'll be revisiting this setting with the same characters later. However, I myself am tempted to retire my PC, Pierre-Yves Bertrand, as he was simply  too much of a liability. Although a local national, his knowledge of the country and people didn't come in that handy, and his skill as a trained pilot was never called on. Coupled with horrendous interpersonal skills and lack of any stealth, he became more of a liability than an asset!