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Post by Deleted on Mar 18, 2012 15:59:42 GMT -8
My 4e game is taking another little trip to Cthulhu land. I have a gaggle of published adventures for CoC, but I wanted to do something a bit out of the norm - my group is TERRIBLE with Out of Character Knowledge, one players first in character words during the first CoC adventure were "Cthulhu wataggan"...
I really wanted to do John Carpenter's "The Thing", but as I said, my players can't NOT use OCK!
I LOVED Top Secret back in high school (mid to late 1980's) and I remembered there was an Antarctic mission in an old Dragon magazine...
So I've taken the base mission, added in some unnaturally slow aging and a heaping dose of Elephantmen and pregen PC's to get what I hope will be a fun adventure.
Our first session was 3 hours of the players asking me for everything under the sun EXCEPT what would fit thier characters backgrounds, personalities or knowledge base... Including the Structural Engineer not understanding WHY he didn't get a silenced pistol!!
I try to "yes and...", but I felt I had to stand my ground against a metric sh!t tonne of pure rediculousness because my players can't/won't ROLE play... The rules set is CoC, so obviously this is going to be "horror" and they need to arm themselves to the teeth... WTF?!?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 18, 2012 16:23:04 GMT -8
I did let the players know that I put "easter eggs" in SOME of the characters...
And I provided over a dozen pages of hand-outs: UN ID's, a UN Security Council briefing, a UNATCO briefing, an FBI dossier of the head bad guy, photos of the head bad guy from 1952, 1967 and a sketch of his believed current appearance, briefings on the related corporate entities, etc...
I started the session with a full verbal briefing (with aerial photos, thermal images, recon photos) and clarification WHY they were chosen over thier peers - yes, one of my players fealt her (male) character should NOT be on the mission and one of his younger peers should be.... another WTF moment!
Anyway, back to the "easter eggs" - we have a psychiatrist named Harold Katz; remember the old MTV animated show Dr. Katz? and "Harry" is short for "Harold", this guy is hairy cats! - our structural engineer's middle name is Richardo, he's from Brazil, he was investigated for the murder of a bartender in a fight over a dancer; in the song "Copa Cabana", Rico kills Tony in a fight about Lola the "show girl", the Copa Cabana is a beach in Brazil. - the medical doctor is Nicolette Rivera from Springfield, USA; Dr. Nick on The Simpsons last name is Rivera. - our police detective is a bit of a stretch... J'Han Quentin Tso, most people call him John, Jack is the nickname for John, if you say Jack Q Tso fast enough it starts to sound like Jacques Clouseau.
I'm a scatter brained geek, I know... :-)
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Post by Deleted on Mar 31, 2012 6:20:45 GMT -8
We had our second session this week.
The team has flown to Christchurch, NZ and then to Antarctica. Once on the ground they visited the crash site of the first team and then went to the mission site. They have had thier initial contact with the primary bad guy, got some great leading questions in and picked up a few door opener clues.
I had to get a little heavy handed dealing with the "me too"'s coming from the 12 year old girl and 9 year old boy; flat out telling them the reason they didn't find anything regardless of thier successful rolls is becuase there was no reason form them to roll in the first place. "Me too" and "I got a 7, what skill was I supposed to be using?" is driving me nuts!!!! I get this mostly from the young girl (daughter of another player), she rarely pays attention to the game, constantly wants to roll when ANYone else rolls regardless of whether she is even in the scene, rolls with no clue what skill she should be using, can't read the percentile dice half the time, etc... The young boy (family friends son) is constantly trying to pick a fight between his character and some of the others, but avoiding legitimate in game conflicts with NPCs/monsters...
We ended the session around the end of the game day and that opens them up to some free exploration of the site and the random encounters charts at the begning of next session.
All in all, it's going better than I expected, but as good as I hoped.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 30, 2012 17:10:35 GMT -8
Finally got in session three this past week...
More free form exploration of the site. The group split into two (and then three) teams and that actually made it alot easier to maintain some sense of suspense! I'd let each team get in very few actions/questions, then I'd roll on the random encounter table and switch to another group; I found that it really cranked up the emotion when I'd just change focus to someone else right as the first person was about to ask the question they had paused to think up.
They uncovered part of a seperatist movement within the group they are investigating - not everyone like the "utopia"... And they also (thru the random encounter table) stumbled upon a key witness who has seen too much/just enough and is blabbing hysterically.
I've started using sound effects using my laptop and my players seem to like it. I found a couple of sites online with free software and sound effects. Toss up a general background sound on a loop track and keep the volume low enough that the players aren't sure they even hear it, then if you have to stop the loop to play a specific sound it's not as jarring.
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