Halloween in Dunwich: post game ruminations

Halloween in Dunwich is the first part in a series of four adventures for Call of Cthulhu from Golden Goblin Press contained in Eldritch New England Holidays. I backed it on Kickstarter. I liked the premise. The book has grown out of an original adventure written by Oscar Rios for Chaosium on the theme of Halloween. He followed it up with Christmas in Kingsport. The Kickstarter campaign allowed him to develop it into a four scenario anthology.

All four adventures are set in Lovecraft Country, author H.P. Lovecraft's fictional corner of New England. They are all classic 1920s scenarios, but with a twist: all the pregen player characters are children in the 11-13 age group, all cousins related to each other from an old New England family with a few dark secrets. This new take on investigation is what drew me to the Kickstarter in the first place.

We have played through the first scenario, Halloween in Dunwich, in two sessions. We used online play via Discord as I find Roll20 too fiddly for the most part. What follows is not a plot summary per se, but just how I found running the adventure.

I liked the atmospheric setting of the fall in Dunwich, and the players seemed to get into their roles as kids. One nice touch is that some of the kids do have additional special abilities which come from their background. 

Only two investigators chose Dunwich-based kids, the others were from branches of the family in other parts of New England - e.g. Arkham and Kingsport. Two of the pre-gens are from each of the major sites in Arkham Country. Rios does encourage the Keeper to swot up on the background to Dunwich if you have access to the 1990s Chaosium Dunwich supplement.

The players seemed to enjoy the change of pace, playing kids rather than adults. It did have the feel of a 1920s Stranger Things episode to it. The Dunwich plot introduced one of the dark secrets of their family, which I thought was suitably horrifying, rather than just a random, external threat. It draws heavily on Lovecraft's writing, which was nice.

I have three main issues which emerged for me with this adventure. I've not read the other three yet, so cannot comment on whether this applies to those as well.

Firstly, the cousins spend the day of Halloween on the farm of their great grandfather, and a big slice of the early scenario involves the kids taking part in various activities he has organised for them. This helps to familiarise them a little with the farm, and I suppose could be used as an opportunity for players to get to know their characters. But I did worry that it is a little bit of a railroad, with the children competing against each other - for example in apple picking - as they are guided from task to task by Silas. It almost feels like the tutorial level on a video game. This consumed a big piece of our first session and it felt more like the Famous Five than a CoC adventure.

Secondly, there is an important clue which, while missing it would not derail the adventure, is an important part of the family background and provides plenty of colour on the threat the cousins - and their relatives - are facing on Halloween. 

The scenario presumes that the children will either come across it in a thorough search of the house or can be induced into the room by the main villain. I was faced with a situation where the children were already out of the house, had not properly searched it, and were not really in a rush to go back in. It was only the fear of what might happen to sleeping relatives which took them back in. 

Missing the clue would not have been a major problem, but at the same time, the players were not aware that they were racing against the clock initially and could have decided to wait things out, which could have been fatal.

The third and final issue relates to the rules system. Every time I run Call of Cthulhu these days I find it slightly unsatisfactory. I have played this game since about 1990, and it is beginning to show its age, despite its relaunch as 7th edition. It is not a perfect system and yet again I found it getting in the way of the story rather than helping things along. In particular the combat is starting to feel clunky and we end up focusing on just a small handful of skills for the most part. The Sanity system is also a lot less slick than the mechanics that now exist in other games.

Having also run Trail of Cthulhu and Monster of the Week in the last year or so, returning to CoC feels like getting back inside an old 1990 Peugeot...

The author provides some detail on a couple of farms in the immediate vicinity should the children decide to go for help - they have access to a horse and cart so this is plausible. In both cases this is not a good idea, as this is Dunwich on Halloween after all. My players never went with this option. I'm not sure it was that obvious for them to be honest but there are a couple of pages in the scenario devoted to this. I suppose it does encourage the feeling of a sandbox where the characters could conceivably go off site for help.

Finally I made the mistake of not opting for a hard copy and just getting a PDF. It uses a lot of ink to print this baby and trying to run the game with a PDF on screen is just a pain.

I am running the scenarios in the collection as close as possible to the holidays they portray. I think this enhances the atmosphere and it was fun playing the Halloween adventure in close proximity to actual Halloween. The next one in the series is Christmas, in Kingsport, when the cousins are once again reunited under one roof...