Okay, back to Fate of Cthulhu. See here for my broad pre-game overview, and here for sessions #1-4. I had hoped to post this sooner, but we lost a few sessions due to real life.
Recap
So, the TL;DR from last time: Our heroes (Roman played by Terry and Kaspar played by Jon) are trying to prevent the rise of Great Cthulhu. They have stolen a key cult artifact but haven’t worked out how to destroy it yet.
#5 The thing in the idol
In Arkham, the PCs rented a storage locker where they could store their kit and experiment with ways to destroy the idol.
Terry had the bright idea of dissolving the idol in hydrofluoric acid. So they bought a plastic tank and some hydrofluoric acid and dropped the idol into it to see what happened. (I didn’t roleplay collecting all this—I may have asked for a Fate point for them to have it all conveniently available. I don’t know how easy it is to buy hydrofluoric acid in the US, but I imagine it’s a controlled substance.)
After a while, this appeared, completely unfazed by the acid.
And so now the players must deal with a Cthulhu skin parasite! (This is picture of a lobopodian I grabbed while the players were chatting.)
As well as working out what to do with the idol, the PCs investigated bytes and bodies. To draw out cultists they put the idol on Ebay (this was before they dissolved it in hydrofluoric acid). They also met, and befriended, Dr Agatha Manderley (Dean of the Miskatonic School of Occult Studies).
#6 The ritual
Finally, the PCs destroyed the idol and the thing in it. Dr Manderley found The Eye of Light and Darkness, a ritual that banished/warded evil things. (Thanks Masks of Nyarlathotep!) So the PCs cast that (spending quite a few Fate points in the process) and finally destroyed the idol/creature, finishing the first mission.
While the PCs survived the backlash from the spell, Dr Manderley wasn’t so lucky. When she recovered, she discovered that she now had a Yithian passenger in her mind…
We finished the session sorting out advancement and milestones, and I worked out what changes had been made to the timeline. There’s a process for this—it could be clearer, but I think I figured it out. Overall the PCs succeeded with two positive ripples and one negative ripple.
The way this works is you apply them to other missions, and a + means something is better than you thought (so I’ve decided Dr Manderley will be more helpful and survives longer than in the original timeline) and a - means something is worse.
#7 The junction box
The PCs made good progress on bytes and bodies and located the hacker’s lair by pretending to be an IT security company and approaching the New York financial institution mentioned in the briefing. They offered to recover the ransom for 50%. The institution said yes.
The PCs did this through a combination of Rapport and Deceive. I first made them spend a Fate point to have everything they needed to look like a business, then Jon used Rapport to create a good first impressions aspect that Terry invoked for his Deceive roll. With success with style, the PCs were rewarded with all the detail they needed—namely, the junction box that the IP address had been traced. From there, some legwork got them to the hacker’s lair.
On this occasion, skills worked better than approaches as Rapport and Deceive worked well in tandem. This wouldn’t have been so intuitive with Fate Accelerated’s approaches. Sneaky probably replaces Deceive, but what would Rapport be replaced by? Clever? Flashy? Sneaky again? It’s not so clear.
We ended with the PCs staking out the hacker’s lair—we should finish this mission next time.
#8 The hackers
We end bytes and bodies with a fight in the hackers’ lair. There’s more of them, and they have a Ghoul, but they’re only NPCs and it isn’t long before the PCs have vanquished the bad guys and destroyed all the servers.
As we started the session I realised I needed a picture of the hackers. I had just been watching The Big Bang Theory, so that’s who I based the hackers on: Sheldon, Leonard, Howard, Raj and Penny. Sheldon was the lead hacker, obviously.
This session was mostly combat—and it turns out that Fate of Cthulhu uses popcorn initiative. We’d decided to use popcorn initiative before checking what the rules said, so it was nice to be playing run-as-written for a change.
Jon really leant into the murder-hobo aspect of Fate of Cthulhu. His character put a bullet through the brain of the lead hacker (Sheldon), and once the others had been dealt with and helped wreck their IT kit, he executed them. As part of the major milestone that happens after a mission is completed, we added murderous to his key concept.
I’m happy with how combat went—it felt like Fate, with aspects and burning Fate points to get results.
One hacker (Penny) got away, disappearing down a Ghoul tunnel. I have no idea if we will see her again.
We ended that session with the hackers dealt with, their lair and IT destroyed, and a copy of the Necronomicon in the PC’s possession. I’ve updated the timeline (a positive ripple for the resistance, this time) and next time we start a new mission.
So what do I really think of Fate of Cthulhu?
We’ll take a break now to return to a previous game and pick Fate of Cthulhu back up later in the year. So here’s what I think of Fate of Cthulhu so far.
Core concept: While the idea of Terminator v Cthulhu sounds great, it turns out to be much more murder-hobo-y than any of us had expected. When I think of The Terminator I think of Reece and Sarah Connor battling the Terminator—I don’t think of it from the Terminator’s viewpoint. But that’s exactly what we have.
This may be the nature of the Cthulhu apocalypse, but in every case you’re stopping something, or killing someone or blowing something up. And given how big the stakes are (preventing the end of the world), the PCs shouldn’t lose sleep over killing a few people to avoid the apocalypse. (Quantum Leap, this isn’t.) That’s a challenge for us, as we’re all in our fifties, and our murder hobo days are long behind us. So it’s taking some getting used to.
The missions: The missions themselves are fine. They would be better if they were a little clearer, but there’s just enough detail to work with (and they’re loose enough to improvise with). They need to be flexible because as the campaign progresses and the players change things, ripples in the timeline mean that things will change. I expect the final mission could be very different, depending on how the earlier missions fare.
One thing I appreciate about the missions is that they make it clear what the players have to do (although there is often a twist). That means we can skip the initial what-is-going-on part that you get in a lot of investigations and focus on the solution instead. That feels like a win to me.
Fate Condensed: As is probably clear, I struggled with Fate Condensed’s list of skills. (I have concluded that I’m not a fan of skill-based systems). The rest of Fate Condensed is fine, although sometimes I think we’re too old-school to play Fate ‘properly’. But we enjoy it, so that’s fine. And, of course, there’s no wrong way to play.
Am I going to run Fate of Cthulhu ever again?
I want to finish this short campaign to prevent Cthulhu from rising (or at least make it less-worse). But after that, I doubt I’ll run it again.
While I enjoy running it, it’s too murder hobo-y for my liking. We’ll get to the end, but once we’re done that will be it. I have so many other games I want to try.
No comments:
Post a Comment