SESSION 1
Synopsis
At the campaign's opening, the characters were standing on a subway-surface trolley platform near City Hall in Philadelphia. It was Friday, June 4, 1920. None of the characters knew one another and each was traveling somewhere in town for their own purposes. As they all rode along in a Route 34 trolley car, a fight broke out between two passengers (one accused the other of pick-pocketing his wallet). As the fight became heated, the passengers slowly drifted to the middle of the car around the two men and the driver stopped the car in the middle of the tunnel, between stations. People clamored; a few players tried to bribe the driver to keep the car moving; bedlam was erupting.
While this was happening, one passenger (an old woman) discretely grabbed hold of another passenger (a young woman who was pregnant), pressed something in her hand to the young woman's side, and spoke strange words. Though most were focused on the fight, one player noticed the women and tried to intervene, which caught the attention of another passenger (an NPC), who jumped in and separated the two women. The old woman lashed out with a small knife before crawling out an open window, dropping down into the tunnel, and running off into the darkness. Eventually, the driver pulled up to the station, where police were waiting, having been alerted by a Philadelphia Rapid Transit Co. worker who was in the tunnel near the trolley when it stopped.
Analysis & Commentary
The players first gathered in the late summer of 2015. For a few months leading up to this, I'd been reading through the 7th Edition Keeper's Rulebook, which I'd gotten a few months earlier, trying to wrap my head around all the rules. As I mentioned in the previous post on the campaign, this game wasn't entirely new to me, as I'd played 4th and 5th Edition CoC many years prior -- but it had been long enough and there were enough changes to the rules that I had to hustle to get things in order for the start of the campaign. I had started planning even earlier -- quite a few months earlier, in fact -- making notes towards an overarching plot and starting to design some of the campaign's major NPCs and groups with which the players would interact.
At the start, I structured the sessions as in-person events. I had teased the notion in my original pitch to the players that, at some point, if necessity warranted it, we might switch over to playing sessions online. But this was my first time running a game in about 20 years, so I felt that it was important to maintain the physical presence of everyone involved, allow everyone to benefit from nonverbal communication and the vibe that emerges when a group of friends is gathered together.
I also wanted to run the campaign with a lot of flourish, mood, and atmosphere, which seemed more achievable working with a group that was right in front of me. I had plans to throw myself into the NPC roles, too, concocting voices and audible mannerisms for some of the major characters with whom the players would interact. I wanted the immediate impact that pointing at someone directly across the table and raising my voice could capture. In high school, the last time I had done any GMing, I made it a standard practice to use candles as light sources and to cue up mix tapes of atmospheric music in a boom box I placed behind me at the table (we played in my parents' basement, often at night, and I ran a lot of 2nd Edition D&D Ravenloft-setting adventures back then), and I took a page from that same playbook this time around. I placed my laptop aside me during the session and piped a track of dark ambient music through a Bluetooth speaker placed in front of my Keeper's screen.
The scenario was an original one that I had written for the campaign. It was composed of two "halves" that could theoretically be run back-to-back as a one-shot scenario, or split and dropped into two different spots within a longer campaign. I was using the latter approach. Overall, the scenario is a short one, made even shorter when run as two separate instances. This first portion played as practically a vignette, only taking about an hour to play through out of the scheduled 4-hour session -- the rest of the time had been taken up with character creation, which takes a while, especially if your players are new to CoC and you need to hash out things like explanations of the many skills.
I remain, even now, pretty conflicted about the effectiveness of this scenario, especially as a campaign opener. On the positive side, I like the central plot, what's going on at the heart of the adventure (I'll cover this in detail later when this series of posts reaches the second half of the scenario). And I had decided that I wanted the players to be dropped into a tense, escalating situation right away, leading to a quick succession of events that set up the rest of the campaign's premise. I didn't really want to kick things off in medias res, as some do with their adventures (I wasn't convinced that would work in a campaign designed for as slow a burn as this one), but I did want to place the players in a situation where circumstances might compel them to cooperate for a while. And a situation in which that seemed most likely to happen was a low-level crisis in a public space -- something in which tensions would run high, but most rational actors would band together to try to resolve matters in a safe and civil manner. Not quite as intense as a train crash, but with some potential for a little danger. At first, I thought of an injured person in a public place -- strangers working together to help save the person -- but I wasn't sure how it might play out, especially regarding the assailant (the old woman) and how players might handle them.
But flaws are apparent in the design of it. If the players killed the old woman outright in the trolley car, the objects they find on her (again, more on this later) might still move investigations on to the scenario's second half (maybe). But, if they disarm and detain her, turning her over to the police, it's easy to see how the entire thing could grind to a halt. There is also the risk of losing momentum once the immediate threat is neutralized. What motivation do the investigators have in continuing to look into the cause of the strange occurrence. I was fortunate in that I suspected the campaign itself would eventually provide that momentum, but if the scenario was being run as a one-shot, I'm not convinced it would carry over successfully.
Fond Memories & Favorite Moments
- One of the players, getting impatient when the trolley driver stopped the car in the tunnel, tried bribe him into driving on to the station so that she could get to her appointment. When that didn't work and he moved back into the car to intervene in the fight, she pulled the lever, opened the front doors, and stalked up the tunnel to the station platform nearby. (The police still caught and held her when she emerged at the station.) I enjoy it when players stay true to character, even when it pushes against the inertia of the plot and forces a GM to adapt and re-calibrate.
- An awkward, funny moment right after the old woman slipped out the trolley window into the tunnel. Shortly after, the passengers got the driver to resume movement towards the station. I asked if anyone wanted to do anything while the trolley drove; no one did. So I described all of the passengers standing quietly in the aisle of the car while it slowly slid forward along the tunnel, slowly passing alongside the old woman, whose head bobbed into view at the bottom of the windows, drifting towards the back of the trolley as it gained speed, everyone just standing and watching her pass until she disappeared behind the car.
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