I am just back at Cthulhu-Reborn-Central after 2 & 1/2 days spent in Melbourne for PAX Aus 2016. At the convention I had the opportunity to hang out with the Chaosium folks and also meet up with many great Call of Cthulhu writers, past and present. In fact I even had the absolute honour of sharing the stage with many of those same writers for a really entertaining panel session titled “The Cool of Cthulhu” which delved into the many different reasons why HPL’s creations are successful today and how much the CoC RPG has helped that success.
However, the highlight of PAX was undoubtedly meeting dozens upon dozens of gamers and running sessions of Call of Cthulhu. My aim this year was to get some Australian content onto the Chaosium running list. So, while there was ample Arkham-based mischief being run for gamers who wanted it there was also four different Australian-themed scenario — all of them from future or recent publications. Thanks especially to Tristan who ran three separate sessions of Phil Anderson’s eerie Tasmanian scenario “Black Water, White Death.”
One of the best play experiences I had, though, was running “Un-Fresh Off The Boat” for a group of six players on Saturday morning. This run of the scenario featured all the things that make Convicts & Cthulhu such a compelling setting. We had moments of high tension between the three convict investigators and the military investigator who suddenly had responsibility for the (unruly) convicts thrust upon him. We also had investigators on both sides struggling to come to grips with the new society that they were about to join — with convicts desperately trying to figure out ways that they might clamber up from the bottom of the social heap to avoid the worst that the colony has to offer. There was plenty of revulsion (again on all sides) when confronted with the nature of “convict settlement justice” … although that was as nothing compared to the revulsion that they encountered when the forces of the Cthulhu Mythos entered the scene.
In the end the scenario ended with many semi-insane investigators trapped in a room with a pair of horrors while one of their number set off an enormous explosion by selflessly dropping a lit lantern into a prised-open barrel of gunpowder. It was almost a total-party-kill, although the reluctant leader Captain Ross did manage to survive to limp back to civilisation to explain. Or to try to explain at least. It seems like a Call of Cthulhu type ending π
In prepping this scenario for convention play I created a bunch of resources that others might find helpful. Here’s some download links:
- Session Sign Up Sheet (with a description of the setting and scenario)
- Staging notes for running the scenario in a 2 hour slot
- Pre-filled PDF character sheets for six pre-gens: Capt Robert Ross, Doctor William Nash, Mrs Charlotte Savage, Molly Rowson, Arthur McVeigh, Jeremy Vaux
- Two pages of stand-up Table Cards to illustrate which of the pre-gen characters are being played and by whom: Table Cards 1, & Table Cards 2.
- A large colour version of the map of Sydney from the Convicts & Cthulhu book [see below]
BTW: if you do use this material to run your very own convention session of “Un-Fresh Off The Boat”, we would love to hear about it (and in particular how well the scenario ran for you)!
Finally, thanks to the six brave players who signed up for the Convicts scenario — they all approached their chosen roles with great enthusiasm and commitment. A particular thank-you to the (I assume) father and daughter group who took on the two female characters (the plucky free settler Charlotte Savage and the mild-mannered convict Molly Rowson). Both did an incredible job at portraying their characters and trying to establish a moral compass for the group when conflict threatened to tear the group apart … I’m sure the fact that the players hail from somewhere not too far from Sydney Town made it just that bit easier to imagine the squalid life of NSW convicts π
November 10th, 2016 at 7:02 am
No worries Dean,
You also had some table cards for “Black Water, White Death”, just saying π
November 10th, 2016 at 7:20 am
Actually there are collections of resources (pre-gens, table cards, props, etc) for all four Aussie scenarios that were run at PAX. Maybe once the rest of the scenarios themselves have been published I can share their associated stuff via Cthulhu Reborn
November 24th, 2016 at 8:09 am
I played Black water at PAX and had a great time. Is that in a book? Or forthcoming?
November 24th, 2016 at 8:47 am
Hi Nick,
Great to hear that you enjoyed playing “Black Water, White Death”. It will be in Chaosium’s upcoming book “Secrets of Australia”, out some time next year.
March 12th, 2017 at 12:51 pm
The Google Doc links to the character sheets seem to no longer be working. Can they be fixed? Thank you for sharing these.
March 13th, 2017 at 1:30 am
The links actually still do work … but I can see why you might think they are broken. Due to a quirk in the way the browser plugin version of Adobe Reader when you click on the character sheet links you probably see a page that says “Please Wait …” — that’s because the plugin version can’t display the PDF properly.
If you, however, click the download icon in the top right, you can still save the PDF to your hard drive (and open it using the full version of Adobe Reader or Acrobat). The download icon BTW is the one with the downward pointing arrow on top of a horizontal line.
March 13th, 2017 at 1:35 am
Thank you – they do indeed work. π