Rich Morris' Comics - YAFGC and The ComixBlog

Given that we are talking about a setting where you make spare characters in the beginning of the game and those who die are considered lucky, what was your worst/best/most insame Cthulhu ending so far?

My very first game was a TPK.

More SPOILERS

I ran Crack'd and Crook'd Manse for a few people around Halloween. It was a one-off. Their investigatos included a former police detective (now security guard), a math professor, and a graduate student, all from Miskatonic University. They went to the horrible house and looked around. In the end, the strange amoeba-like creature the size of a small house appeared in the large foyer as they got ready to leave the house.

College student failed his sanity check: lost 19 points of sanity! He went completely into denial that any of it was real and fled to the nearby bedroom to read the book they'd found. He even put on the slippers they'd found there.

X-detective drew and fired. Very natural reaction for a cop. College professor did the same. Not as much a natural reaction. They lived a couple of rounds (thanks to lots of lucky dodge rolls) but in the end the thing grabbed them, oozing into their noses and mouths and then expanding INSIDE THEIR BODIES. Very nasty.

College studen, still in denial, continued to read, even banging the wall and shouting at the "frat boys" to keep it down when the shooting had started. The thing oozed into his room and slowly wrapped him up, even as he swatted it away, annoyed! In the end, he died the same way the others had.

Good times.

My second game was three more players (different players who didn't know at all what happened in the first game) going after the first missing three. They managed to defeat the creature though it was fun to descibe the bodies of the half-digested first three investigators (one of which had been a cousin of one of the living PCs) to them.

Another good ending took place during the Blackwell Horror - in this case, the characters were in the sheriff's office and had just killed him (he was a cultist and they knew it) after he'd arrested them. They took far too long to get out of town and the rest of the cultists had surrounded the small sheriff's office (which had no curtains and which every light was turned on) and started using Domination spells on them. The best use was when the museum curator ran out, followed by the priest. The curator heard chanting and then all went black. In his stupor, he turned around and unloaded his shotgun into the priest at point-blank range. Scratch one priest.

The npc deputy ran out next, followed by the PC bounty hunter and the whole thing played out exactly as it had the first time. First guy dominated, blows second guy away with shotgun. I later pointed out to them that in the pouring rain and darkness of the night, the cultists could see just about everything they did through the windows of the sheriff's office and were ready for them whenever they made their move to escape. I noted several times during play the windows and the lights, as well as how hard it was to see outside, but let them draw their own conclusions.

The museum curator and the npc deputy escaped, btw.

Well you already mostly know how my very first one-shot Cthulhu scenario ended but the one and only Cthulhu campaign I played had a ... unparalleled ending ... partly because it was also a rather unusual one ; )

Indeed our characters were not investigators but cultists ! It started with our characters being forcibly recruited into a phony pseudo-celtic/druidic sect based in the heart of 1930's London. Soon they had to survive against REAL cults with REAL powers who weren't fond of meddling proto-hippies. A year of campaign later, the surviving and mostly insane characters have traded "Celtic" for "Cthulu", conquered or annihilated the opposition and some of them even gave up their humanity such as my own character, Donald Jacobson, contract killer and ... Deep One ?

The GM decided to end the campaign in a big scenario set after a dozen year time warp: In the middle of World War II, the stars have aligned ... and the child of the Gate, the child of the Key will open the way !. After finding an odd man with a strange tatoo (played by a new player) and deducing he is the Chosen One who will bring Cthulhu into this world, our characters fought and bartered to gather the elements for the ritual, even once accepting, in exchange of something they needed, to steal from the Nazis a particular artefact and destroy it...

(The artefact was the Lance of Longinus aka Spear of Destiny, which has the property to render any army possessing it invincible on the field of battle. Shortly after the theft, the Nazis started to suffer major setbacks in Russia...)


Once they had all the items they needed, the great ritual could begin ! It would take place on the deck of Donald's headquarter : a converted oil tanker which housed his large clan of deep ones in its twisting interiors.

In the middle of the pacific ocean, as the stars aligned, the ritual proceeded without too much trouble (a couple traitorous characters had to be put down by the faithful) and soon the son of the Key, the son of the Gate opened the way....

Thing is ... It was the new player, as the Chosen One, who could chose which Great Old One he brought into our world and would become the Avatar of.... and instead of choosing Cthulu, he chose Cthugha...

(which was just about the worst thing that could happen to us. To sum up Cthulhu is water, Cthugha is FIRE. Painful incineration awaited us)

As a titanic fireball appeared high in the night sky and started to descend toward the doomed cultists, the Avatar of Cthugha laughed, impervious to the desperate attacks of the sorcerers. With a thought he neutralized them, forcing them to kneel in abject reverence before Cthugha engulfed them all ...

... It was then that the terrified silence was broken :

"CTHULHU FHTAGN R'LYEH !", it was Donald Jacobson, urging his clan to fight and brandishing in his webbed hand the very much not-destroyed Lance of Longinus. Surely the thousand Deep Ones assembled here counted as an army !

The campaign ended on this final, defiant, unresolved shot. Surely since the world isn't turned into ash / ruled by Cthugha, it means the Deep Ones were successful in banishing the Great Old One, despite the impossible odds, don't you agree ? ; )

PS: I know "Cthulhu Fthagn R'lyeh" isn't much of a war cry (it means "Cthulhu waits / dreams in R'lyeh") but honestly it was the only Cthulhu centric sentence I could think of at the time.

We must be record beaters. We played for 3 years -first batch of characters ended up as slaves of the Migo, doomed to mine uranium till radiation got us. Second batch survived but i accidentally caused the Dark Ages all over again -all because i did not want to be dissolved in acid . Honestly, we were in a mad science lab with dissected corpses galor, and i run away as fast as i could when two guys came in which was, obviously, the reason a sphynx appeared in Egypt and the world went into a religious frenzy.
Insane game.

Wow. My games sound tame compared to some of these. I'm not a good one at pitting players vs. players, however. Though it sometimes happens on its own.

The characters must have been "blind as bats" to survive that long with their sanity intact... (Cthl is the only game I know of where lack of character perception/observation is a definite survival skill)

Essential survival traits:
Towel Usage - The axiom - 'if you cant see it, it won't harm you' is true. If it still harms you, you were screwed anyway.
Illiteracy - can't read the books, dont lose SAN
High movement skills - you dont have to outrun the monster, just the other PC.
Pyromania/explosive skills - Burn everything. It's safer.
Lawyer Skills - Hire NPC's to go out and 'investigate the cult', then clean up on the life insurance from your office.

Well we were experienced players and we knew about the perils of the game plus this was a preconstructed campaign so it started tame and then climaxed, but what really helped was that a player did a psychologist. Since there was time between sessions she would psychoanalyse the others and help them regain their footing.

Much good that it did us in the end .

PS Why pit player vs player in Cthulhu? It is hard enough with a team that cooperates.

Note to Self: Next time I play Cthl, it should be as a Psychologist who also moonlights as an insurance salesperson... this might actually be fun: "Now that we've dealt with your childhood insecurities, have you considered insurance against your adult worries? For some people, insurance relieves the stress of the unknown..."

More likely - "Okay 10 session of $300 dollars each - here's my bill".

Though in our CoC we house ruled that you could become 'immune' to a specific SAN check over time and exposure. It eliminated circumstances where players would go mad on seeing a dismembered arm, just after they had waded though a river of blood in "Jack the Rippers playhouse, with Guest Star Jason" but held onto their mind.

Eg: A Deep One causes you to lose 1d6 San if you fail the roll, the house rule was if you made your save on 6 different occassions (the maximum possible SAN loss) Deep Ones didn't send you bonkers you anymore as you were 'used' to seeing them. If something caused a d10 SAN loss you needed to save 10 times, etc

Same with ripped up bodies and such - it may be unpleasant but youve seen it many times before and can handle it. You could even look at Cuthulu without having a SAN check if you met him (and saved and lived of course) 100 times.

Actually, once a character has lost the maximum amount of sanity a monster can cause him to lose, He won't lose any more for a reasonable interval, having gotten used to the creature. That's why it's good to keep track of how much sanity you've lost for each monster. However, that reasonable interval could be a day, a week, or just that adventure.

Yes, makes sense.
I have to say that for our game keeper though: no matter what creepiness we saw, the ones we feared the most were always the humans behind events. Cultists, politicians who had sold out...

At least you can shoot them and they are (usually) actually hurt.

My own players were always good at killing my cultists/sorcerers quickly. I ran Punitive Measures (which took place during the Punitive Expedition to Mexico in 16) and the main villain, the snake shaman, was killed at range by an impale from one investigators Springfield rifle BEFORE HE WAS ABLE TO CAST MORE THAN ONE SPELL! The skeletons turned out to be more of a problem.

They were assaulted in a jail by a half dozen cultists and managed to kill only two before the surviving investigators (two of four) escaped from that place.

On Monhegan Island, they managed to shoot several cultists and deep ones. One of the players (whose dice are usually terribly cold) had a private investigator who was a dead shot with a .45 revolver and managed to kill most of them.

Come to think of it, most of the scenarios I ran didn't have many cultiists or humans.

Well, we refrained from shooting humans. One, killing people registered as horrible in itself and two, we did not want to end up in jail. Maybe this is why they were so horrifying: just like in real life, you could see evil but you were powerless to do something about it.

Come now, killing humans isn't that bad, you just press the button then they squirm a little, make more or less noise and stop being a problem. Nothing to get upset about really ...

... why yes my characer in our "1930" campaign was a hitman, how did you know ? ; )

His survival was due to a few things
1) He took upon him to selflessly stand guard for the group, which meant he would shoot things from afar rather than going up close with every horror we encountered. The best defense is to stay out of range from the claws/fangs/tentacles/etc.
2) He preferred to let others get a good look at the cursed tapestry, the maddening tome or the unholy scrolls. In case they got possessed, driven murderously mad or anything, it combined well with point 1).
3) While caution won't save you from an awakened Great Old One, it does help against the more "mundane" abominations. In general it is a lot easier to rationalize things and keep calm when you see them from 200 meters away rather than while being held by their slimy appendages, feeling their reeking breath on your face and being seconds away from being eviscerated by their bilious talons.

For example :

Our group of wannabe cultists find themselves in south east asia travelling north toward an important objective when in a village they learn of the existence an ancient crypt which is rumored to be cursed... with the undead !

Of course, the mad doctors, archeologists and other supposed intellectuals of the group are very excited and vote that we look into it, despite it having nothing to do with our main mission. After a few hours trek in the jungle they find the crypt and a staircase that descends into its depth. Futhermore, examination of the glyphs reveal that the entire graveyard might be under the effect of a necromantic spell.

Donald Jacobson, the hitman, announces : "Well ... I see a ridge overthere which would be a perfect position to shoot from in case ... you know ... an army of skeleton rise up from the surrounding graves, lusting for the blood of those who dare defile their final resting place for example ... Surely you see the wisdom in having someone making sure you have a clear escape route from the cursed crypt ?"

He even convinces the others that Elizabeth, the cute red head ex-barmaid he had a secret crush on, should also stay out to provide fire support. They take position while the other five enter boldly into the crypt ...

After a narrow staircase they follow a long corridor leading them into the darkness. All the way they encounter crude sarcophagi of rotten wood lining the walls. They hesitate ... Should they open them ? Destroy them ? Would that... awaken the dead ? They decide to let them be, surely exploration is the best thing to do. Looting and destruction can wait...

Finally they reach a large round room and torchlight reveals, in the middle, a tall throne and its occupant. The skeleton wears the worn remnant of a rich garnment, a large onyx ring is wrapped around his index and his hands rest on the dusty pages of an opened tome in his lap...

Henry, the doctor, smiles and he leaves boldly the tight group to approach and take the tome from the skeleton... who, despite having no sinew or muscles, doesn't let go of it. He doesn't have much time to ponder that strange fact before the owner of the book seizes his throat, bony talons piercing his flesh and streams of eldritch imprecations flowing from his gaping maw.

Around them and in the graveyard above, the dead rise at their king's command. Horrified, the group tries to back up into the corridor while Donald and Elizabeth, from their vantage point outside the necromantic perimeter, open fire to prevent skeletons in the graveyard from entering the crypt.

Igor, the big asylum warden and trained brawler tries to take the lead, using his talents to dismantle the "lesser" skeletons clumsily trying to grab him. Unfortunately there are too many of them for him to make real progress. Behind them, Dr. Henry falls on the ground, his severed throat having remained in the King's hand.

Terrified, George, the archeologist pulls out a stick of dynamite from his duffel bag and lits it on his torch. Did someone bump into him during the chaos or was his hand shaking too much ? The lit dynamite slipped from his grasp, fell at his feet, rolled outside his frantic reach and blew up, killing all but one in the blast or under the falling rubbles of the collapsing corridor.

All but one, indeed poor Jeremy, the engineer, survived George's initiative and he was left wounded, alone, in the dark, walled in by tons of rubble and in the company of the irate undead King...

Thus only Elizabeth and David made it back to London, their mission aborted but giving their chance to a new group of cultists pulled from the ranks to fill the slots and prove their worth !

Ok so it wasn't a total party kill nor a campaign end but 5 / 7 killed is not too bad, right ?

PS: On a side note, I must learn to summarize my posts