Trail of Cthulhu - whatever happened to Cheery Patterson?

Private Roade reports for duty

And so we approach the conclusion of our thrilling tale. We left our trio of stalwarts as they stumbled across what looked like some kind of cult, composed of patients and at least one member of the hospital staff, celebrating a pagan ritual under a ruined barn. It is France. It is 1917. It is almost dawn, and it is time to take down the bad guys.

Roade retreated from the cellar to consult with his new comrades. What followed was a debate between the investigators as to the next best steps. While they were doing this, Private Gurdip Dal emerged quietly through the door behind Roade. Only Anne Thrope spotted him (Sense Trouble roll) before he attacked Topless with a kukri. Topless was hurt (-5 Health IIRC), but Thrope responded with a needle from her knitting kit (Preparedness check, TN3), stabbing Dal through the hand and causing him to drop his knife.

Thrope suddenly found herself in a bunker, somewhere on the Western Front. There were two Indian soldiers in the bunker with her, Dal and another wearing a gas mask. Dal was humming to himself as he cooked a curry in a mess tin. He welcomed Thrope into the bunker and explained cheerfully that the war would be over soon and that he and his brother would be returning home to India.

The other soldier remained mysteriously incommunicative. Filled with trepidation, but responding to her Curiosity drive (I forgot to give her a Stability reward for this), Thrope pulled the gas mask off the soldier, only to find below it the face of a man many weeks dead. Dal shrieked and Thrope found herself back outside the barn, with Dal now frothing at the mouth and in convulsions at her feet. She sought to apply First Aid to the soldier, but he died almost immediately with no other obvious wounds on his body.

At the cry, Roade, who had his .303 rifle with him having just come off guard duty at the administration tent, charged through the door back into the barn. Here he found the strange green mist event thicker, but he didn’t pause, and shot one of the cultists, disrupting the ceremony.

Lieutenant Parker-Bowles, the blind officer, turned to Roade, shouting “Stop! Stop!” Roade aimed his rifle at the blind man, point blank…and found himself in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in London.

Except Roade had never been to the Royal Academy, or London, so it all seemed strange to him. He was still holding his rifle. The only familiar figure was Parker-Bowles, now seated at the base of a statue in the centre of the courtyard, speaking with some other men. He smiled and waved when her saw Roade. The orderly approached cautiously. Parker-Bowles explained to Roade that he was better now and could see again. The war was over and he would be able to return to his career as an artist. Roade was dumbfounded. But before he could speak, the double doors that led into the RA flew open and he could see beyond the unmistakable trenches of the Western Front.

Parker-Bowles screamed in terror, and Roade found himself back in the cellar, with the artist now in convulsions at his feet. Around him, other cultists were starting to fall. He could hear a deep voice coming from the direction of the altar, thrumming with an unearthly vigour: “One may not escape the angel of death, or say to him, ‘Wait until I put my affairs in order…!’”

The candles in the room died down, and the only light was the glow coming from the skull on the altar. Roade took aim at it and fired (TN5), hitting the skull and shattering it into pieces. The chanting ceased, as did the screaming. Thrope entered the cellar, bringing her lamp, and surveyed the carnage.

All the cultists had perished together, and seemed to have died having the same fit. Among them were Borden and Dicky Fallon. More shockingly, Roade also saw the body of Cheery Patterson, who had been recruited into the cult (BIG Stability check here).

The altar was piled with a seemingly random collection of objects, mostly military equipment. They were heaped on some wooden planks, across what looked like an old - and empty - Roman tomb.

Summations

As Roade headed off to find Major Parker, we ran out of time and had to pack up, but I was satisfied with the conclusion. On re-reading the adventure, I think I was kind to the investigators in the final scene. They were facing down a Great Old One that should have done a lot more damage to Roade at the very least. Given that in the Delta Green adventure we played we achieved a total party kill, the players were all somewhat disappointed to emerge relatively unscathed.

Topless had a bad knife wound, but was still in positive Health, and nobody had dropped below zero Stability. There had been some erosion of Sanity, but nothing too drastic. Roade was the closest to going insane, although Topless had started the adventure fairly unstable.

I ran the adventure in a three-hour slot. It felt a bit rushed at times and I escalated the conclusion, but I wanted to avoid the possibility of the authorities/Major Parker getting too involved. The scenario has provision for this, and it included the military police being called in if the characters discover the body of Father Pombal (murdered by the cultists). But that would have burned up precious time. I wanted to keep the players focused. Four hours would have been preferable to be honest.

I really wanted to run a World War 1 scenario, and Not So Quiet fits the bill perfectly. On first reading it seems a little hard to understand how the adventure is meant to progress. But I figured it out using a mine chart and working out which scenes were core to the plot, and which were optional extras. This also makes the adventure fairly elastic – you could easily expand it to two sessions. The cult did not have to be revealed quite as quickly as it was, for example: even if Thrope had tried to point the finger of suspicion at Borden, the blame was more likely to fall on Mrs Ogilvy, as it was her medicine cupboard the green poison had been discovered inside. Mrs Ogily, while a tyrant and an unpleasant individual, was not a cultist.

The best way to run Not So Quiet is as a sandbox. The important scene is the meeting of the wounded characters with the medical characters, and this is achieved through the barrage scene early in the adventure. It also introduces the character of Cheery. If I’d had more time, it would have been good to play out more of the Roade/Cheery plotline and the Roade/Topless blackmail plot, but there was no scope for this. Cheery’s death at the end was a perfect closure piece, I felt, and it certainly shocked the Roade player! He was checking the dead cultists hoping not to find her, but right at the end, there she was.

Gumshoe seemed to work well here. I am working on a WW2 Mythos adventure and have thus far been developing it system-free. I wanted to see if a military-based one-shot would work with Gumshoe and it certainly does seem to have achieved this.

I felt the loss of some good roleplaying opportunities – this group likes to get into character, but it can lead to some long in-character discussions with NPCs which, while eminently enjoyable, do consume time.

There is now some debate as to what to do next. The Roade and Topless players are considering whether they would like to continue with the soldiers' post-war careers, in which case some kind of campaign may be in order. I am also pondering a one-shot for them in Egypt in 1920. The Thrope player has expressed an interest in generating her own character, potentially one of the generation of pioneering female pilots that emerged in the inter-war era.

One the other side of the coin, there may be interest in a campaign of some kind. Thoughts naturally stray to Masks of Nyarlathotep, which I have never run before…