Category Archives: The Armitage Files

**Potential Spoilers**

The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.

**You Have Been Warned**

We’re trying to squeeze in two Armitage Files games before I leave for GenCon, because when I get back, two of the three players head off to Europe for about a month, and we won’t get back to a regular schedule until September. Given that this summer has already seen some challenges in scheduling the game, we wanted to get a little momentum built, to make sure the game doesn’t wither and die.

That’s why we got together this afternoon to play, and are planning on doing it again next Saturday night.

We had finished off the Monument Creek storyline last session, and the characters were taking a couple of weeks to rest up after the beating they took on that little outing. As is my usual practice, I asked the group to let me know about a week in advance what reference they were planning on following up next. They decided to look into the Kingsport Yacht Club, because the Captain from last session was heading to Kingsport Harbour with the idol when they blew him up. And the Yacht Club was near the harbour, so…

Now, I cheated a little bit on the prep for this one. I had already decided that the group was going to receive the next document this session, so I wanted to tie in a few extra threads to the storyline for the Yacht Club, because it’s probably going to be the last one from these documents that gets investigated. Maybe not, but I think the pressure of a new document, with new hints, is going to get the group fired up about some of those. That meant that I wanted to draw in a few of the things that had featured peripherally in the earlier investigations, specifically Austin Kittrell and Diamond Walsh.

That seemed like it was tailor-made for stealing one of the spines from the Scenario Spines chapter of The Armitage Files, which I did, choosing The Dweller Within. I tweaked it from the basic structure to better suit what my group are starting to show as their play style, did up a few sets of stats for various things along the way, and away we went.

Their first step was to try and infiltrate the Kingsport Yacht Club by having Dr. Solis pose as Arthur Matthews, a recent widower returned from South America with a daughter (Roxy, starring as Mary Matthews) who wanted him to meet the right people and start getting involved in the local society circles, so that he’ll stop paying so much attention to her life. Roxy’s high Credit Rating meant that she knew the names of several people who were members, including Austin Kittrell, a wealthy party-boy (and collector of strange documents) with whom she’d had some minor dealings previously. He knew her too well, though, so she and Solis went to Samuel Hepburn, a lawyer who didn’t know her as well, and prevailed up on him to put Arthur Matthews forward for membership.

Why Dr. Solis? Well, Roxy is a woman, and Aaron is Jewish, so neither would have a chance of getting in. Welcome to 1935.

On the night of the membership drive, Aaron went along with the pair, disguised as their chauffeur. While Solis and Roxy were hobnobbing with the other members, prospective members, and their families, Aaron was hanging out with the staff below stairs, trying to pick up some gossip. The character, unfortunately, doesn’t have a lot of skill in that area, but his roleplaying and the things he paid attention to got him some solid information. For example, among the waiters, cooks, maids, and drivers, there was a pair of goons in bad suits sitting by themselves with a bottle of whiskey. Aaron decided to see what he could get out of them by pulling out a deck of cards (with dirty pictures on them) and gambling with them for some whiskey. Over the course of the evening, as he lost a fair bit of money to them, he found out they were Walsh’s men – the gangster who had been transporting the idol for the Captain in the last investigation. He also found out that Walsh was married to Zora Gardiner, daughter of Oliver Gardiner, and president of the Yacht Club. The men were bemoaning the fact that, ever since the wedding, Walsh had been getting soft, and was now trying to get respectable by joining the Yacht Club.

Aaron also caught sight of a small figure – possibly a child – hiding in the bushes when he went to check on the car at one point, but didn’t get a good look at it, nor did he follow it into the shrubbery.

At the party, Solis and Roxy met the Gardiners, Walsh and his very pregnant wife Zora, and Dr. Lynch, the club secretary. They found that Gardiner had a fondness for local history, especially that of the native peoples, and that the club library – the province of Dr. Lynch – contained many books on local and maritime history. Other than that, and a strange encounter between Austin Kittrell and the disguised Roxy, everything went very well, and our heroes retired at the end of the evening with every expectation that Arthur Matthews would soon be receiving an invitation to join.

Over the next few days, they did a little more research on the Gardiners, and on Walsh and the Yacht Club. Their digging turned up the origins of the extended Gardiner clan in Merry Mount, in the early days of Puritan settlement, where they made good money at fishing. A Cthulhu Mythos use reminded Aaron of a passage from The Book of the Voice, which spoke of how the pre-European inhabitants of Merry Mount (called Mounte Dagonne by the early French explorers) had worshiped an ancient sea-god, and were said to have interbred with the children of this god.

Further research turned up a pattern of stillbirths, miscarriages, and deaths in childbirth among the extended Gardiner clan over the past year. All of the physicians of record were listed as Dr. Lynch, which struck them as odd, because they knew Dr. Lynch was a surgeon, not a GP or OB/GYN. At this point, Aaron’s player was getting very nervous about things, so he spent a Cthulhu Mythos point, and recalled hints he had seen in old books about how the offspring of the sea-god’s children would be vulnerable and mortal for the first two-score years of their lives, until they shed their mortal form and returned to the realm of their god. Some of the men who had made pacts with these creatures had sought various ways to force this transformation in utero, eliminating the vulnerable period of the god’s grandchildren. He recalled how pregnant Walsh’s wife – Gardiner’s daughter – was, and how in two days, there would be a spring tide, a time of power for Dagon.

Some quick checking confirmed that Walsh, a forty-year-old gangster, had no children, which was so unusual as to strain credulity. The investigators came to the conclusion that Gardiner was getting control of Walsh and his business using the promise of a child and respectability. Checking with the police revealed that Gardiner’s enemies and business rivals had a habit of disasters; disasters that someone like Walsh could easily arrange. A check of Lynch’s past showed that his father had also been a member of the Yacht Club – along with Kittrell’s father – and that Lynch had been a battlefield surgeon in the Great War before traveling extensively in Europe and Asia, finally returning to Kingsport six years previously.

And so our heroes wound up arguing over the corpse of a stillborn child in a graveyard at midnight.

They had all agreed that they needed to examine a body to confirm their guesses but, when they had finally unearthed the tiny coffin (suffering some nice Stability tests), Aaron refused to allow the others to take the body from the graveyard and desecrate it farther. They had a quiet, desperate argument there in the dark before Solis finally went under the blanket with sad little body and a flashlight.

Cue Stability check, with extra Sanity loss.

He found that the body was fairly decomposed, but the limbs seemed to be a little too long and spindly, and the webbing between the fingers and toes was still fairly pronounced – unusual in a foetus at six or seven months, but not all that strange. What bothered him most were the signs that the thing had undergone surgery in utero – there were healed scars over its abdomen and torso. That and the tiny, needle teeth in its mouth.

They  reburied the body and left the graveyard, badly shaken, and unsure what to do about the situation, knowing that they have two days before something is likely to happen to Zora Gardiner and the child she’s carrying.

And that’s where we left it.

Next game is this coming Saturday, and that should put paid to this scenario, though I think they’re going to have some tough choices to make about how they settle things.

Oh, and I dropped the next document on them, while Aaron was working on the research and Roxy was talking to the Kingsport Police. Cyrus Llanfer brought it to Dr. Solis, saying that he had found it inside the Necronomicon, which he periodically checks to make sure that, for instance, no half-breed wizard from Dunwich makes off with it.

So they’ve got that to think about, too. I’m interested to see what they come up with.

I’ve been running The Armitage Files since the middle of last March, and have got in five sessions in that time, with two more scheduled before I head out to GenCon. That’s a long enough time that I want to look back at my initial assessment of Trail of Cthulhu and The Armitage Files, and talk a little bit about what it’s like to run, how I do it, what things I find work well, and what still gives me some problems.

Basic System Stuff

I cannot get over how much easier this system is to run than I had feared.

One of my big worries was figuring out how to use the investigative abilities, and where to draw the lines between the different abilities. While running the game, I soon came to realize that the abilities pretty much did what they said on the tin, and that I shouldn’t worry about drawing lines between them. The whole point of the investigative abilities – and the system in general – is to get information into the hands of the characters. It is wonderfully focused on that single, over-arching goal, and once you get your head around that as a GM, everything becomes clear and easy.

So now I don’t worry about whether a clue would be better found by Evidence Collection or by Forensics. I just see that a character is looking where they should to find a clue, and give it to them. I keep a list of what abilities the different characters have, and I phrase the evidence in keeping with whichever of the abilities makes the most sense given the information. If they’re looking for more, I’ll ask for a spend from a particular ability, or I’ll ask them what ability they’re using to get more information.

The two important things are that the clues get found and that the players enjoy themselves.

As for the general abilities, I’m coming to a new understanding of them as we play. With difficulty ranges on target numbers for general abilities running from 2 to 8, and averaging (in game) around 3 or 4, really what your points in a general ability do is give you a pool of automatic successes for a given ability. They let you guarantee success when you really need it. So, shooting at that cultist before he sacrifices the baby? Yeah, you’re gonna want a guaranteed hit on that one, so you spend 5 points from your firearms pool. Overkill? Maybe, but you don’t want to risk failure at a critical, dramatic moment.

Spending in smaller amounts is certainly a viable strategy in game, but I recommend that players ask themselves whether they really need to succeed at something. If the answer is no, don’t spend. If the answer is yes, go all in. And if you wind up with a few failures that complicate your life? Well, that’s how stories are made, right? Complications are your friend. They make things interesting.

In general, the light system with its sharp focus on getting clues to characters makes prepping for the game very easy. Creating the mechanical side of encounters is takes little effort, and is easy to do on the fly – I can whip up a set of mundane cultists in under two minutes, and take about five to put together an interesting monster. Running the light system is a breeze, and it lets me really focus on creating the scene, and adding colour to what’s going on, rather than worrying about the minutiae of the rules.

Combat quickly devolves into desperate, panicked action, and there is a constant threat of something very bad happening to the heroes. This is the way it should be in a horror game, in my opinion. The lethality can be easily scaled to make things more or less survivable in general, and it’s even easy to do on the fly, if you want to change the risk factor in an ongoing encounter. So far, I haven’t killed any of the characters in my campaign, but I think they’ve felt the risk of it every time we get into combat, which is the vibe I want.

The real place I put in prep time is in creating the mythos pieces for the game – coming up with the history of the book they find, finding a good picture to show them of the standing stones, creating a background for why a specific cult exists and what they want, making hand-outs of some of the things they find, etc. Good, meaty story and atmosphere stuff. And that’s where I want to be spending my time.

The Improvised Campaign

I’ve got to be honest with you. I was somewhat disappointed when I started looking at The Armitage Files, because of the way it focuses on an improvised campaign. I wanted something more scripted – like the Esoterrorists adventures I’d seen, where the spine of the investigation is nicely mapped and all the clues are cleanly presented. I looked at the campaign, saw it was just a toolbox of elements to use, and grew a little discouraged.

I’m no longer disappointed.

I don’t follow the advice about running an improvised campaign the way they present it in the book, but I’m still running a very player-directed, sandbox kind of campaign. See, I don’t like having to come up with all the big, interesting pieces of the game on the fly, with little or no planning, but I do like the idea of the players getting choose what direction things are going in. My main problem with the improvised campaign idea is that I can come up with much better stuff, with more internal consistency and depth, if I have a little time to work it out.

What I’m doing sort of splits the difference between the improvised approach and the fully scripted approach. I let the players tell me what they’re going to investigate, and how they’re going to do it, before the game. I then have a few days to take a look at the source material and figure out what’s going on behind the scenes. I map out the relationships between the various involved elements – NPCs, organizations, events, artifacts, etc. – and flesh out a few details, like coming up with some brief stats for potential combatants and a writ-up on any mythos items they might find, along with something to tell them if they use Cthulhu Mythos as a hint machine.

Once I’ve got this structure mapped out and my background stuff prepped, it’s easy to just turn the characters loose on the investigation and create the clues they find on the fly, based on what they do and what I know of the the adventure secrets. And I’ve got a couple of set pieces ready to drop on them for good reveals, so the game feels like there’s a direction, a beginning and end, and all the other good things you want for the thing to have some shape.

The Armitage Documents

One of the things that challenged me at the start was figuring out how to use all the little tidbits the source documents mention. I actually went through and made a list, document by document, of all the interesting references in each document -  the Document Keys section does some of this, but there are a number of things that caught my eye in the documents that aren’t covered in the keys. I then tried to build a single spine out of each document, relating all the items to one mystery and tying everything together.

For the love of all that’s holy, learn from my mistake and don’t do that.

You wind up with a very forced mishmash of elements, where things are shoehorned in and a lot of the connections just don’t work that well. The resulting mess would have been completely opaque to the players, no matter how thick and heavy the clues were flying, because I could barely make sense of it. They would have had no chance. Worse, it would have strained credulity far too much, and that would have broken the mood and the suspension of disbelief.

The question then arises, “So how much should I include in a given mystery?” That’s a hard question to give a solid answer to, because it’s going to vary from group to group and adventure to adventure. You’ve got to look at how long you want this specific scenario to run, and how important it’s going to be for the ongoing story. Usually, I pick two or three elements from the document, and string them together, and that gives me a solid evening or two of play. I pepper the session with casual mentions of some of the other references, either from the current document or from a future one, to keep the group interested and aware that there are other things going on besides their current investigation.

Now, this can backfire on you if they latch on to something you threw in as colour and go haring off after it. That’s usually pretty easy to deal with, either by working that reference into what you’re currently doing, or by stonewalling that investigatory avenue until you’re prepped for it. Kingsport Yacht Club? Well, you need a membership to get in. And to get a membership, you need to find someone to vouch for you. Do you know anyone in the Kingsport Yacht Club? It’ll take a while to track a member down.

The risk of stonewalling is two-fold:

1. You need to make sure the group has other leads to follow up. If they don’t have other things to look into, then you all just ran out of story and sit around twiddling your thumbs. Of course the wealth of leads in the documents should mean that that never happens.
2. You must, must, must make the payoff worth it at the end. If you put off the investigation of an element, your players will be able to tell you’re putting it off. That’s going to make them more eager to investigate that particular element. So you need to make sure you put in the time to develop it, and to make it cool enough that it was worth the wait. Otherwise, you’ll just look lame.

One of the other risks you can run into is that the characters ignore something that you want them to follow up on, because you’ve got something cool planned for it. I’ve found the best way to push them towards something is not to push, but to drop other references to it in the investigations they’re currently pursuing. No one wants to check out the Kingsport Yacht Club? Well, the idol you intercepted was on its way down to the Kingsport Harbour. Why yes, it is near the Yacht Club. Surely there’s no connection…

One last piece of advice on using the documents – and this is mentioned in the book – is not to let the players follow up everything. Drop a new document on them before they’ve tracked down everything in the documents they currently have. Not only does this guarantee that they always have new and interesting leads to follow, it avoids the artificiality of treating the documents like a dungeon, where the characters clean out every room before moving on to the next dungeon.

Most importantly, though, is that it imposes a time pressure, a sense of urgency to the investigations, as the players see more and nasty stuff coming down the pipeline at them, and realize that they have to pick and choose what they want to do something about. They will be leaving things behind, and that will add to their anxiety and desperation, and they will worry that the investigations left undone will come back to haunt them in the future. And that’s the kind of attitude you want in a Cthulhu game, right?

Ongoing Challenges

***SPOILERS***

Generally, I try to avoid spoilers in talking about published adventures, even ones as loose as this one. But there are a couple of things that I’m still having challenges with that might give away some of the secrets of the campaign frame, so I’m hiding those behind spoiler tags. Click the Show button to reveal them, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Here’s the first:

And here’s the second:

One other thing that’s still giving me a bit of a challenge, and that doesn’t need to be wrapped in spoiler tags, is that I need to learn to relax more into the process of the game, letting things evolve naturally based on character (and player) interest, rather than trying to run things down a plot line that I create myself. I used to be much better at this, but over the years, I got out of the habit by playing games which reinforce a more rigidly structured play experience, like D&D. I’m rusty, and keep second guessing myself.

That will come with time and practice, I know, but at the moment, I’m still a little frustrated by it.

Parting Thoughts

Ending on the challenges might make it sound like I’m frustrated by this game and campaign, but nothing could be farther from the truth. I think the game system and the campaign are fantastic, and I’m enjoying running my Armitage Files campaign immensely. My players are great fun, and also seem to be enjoying themselves, so that’s a big win all around.

This game has done a lot to revive my faith in myself as a GM who can work without the crutch of highly-detailed combat and fight-a-week-style adventures. I used to run a lot of non-D&D games, and great as I think D&D is, it encourages a very particular play style, just by the amount of rules text devoted to certain topics and the structure of published adventures.

Trail of Cthulhu is crafted for a very different play experience, one I’m out of practice with. But as I run the game, I’m remembering why I loved this style of play. The spill-over from what I’m doing here can definitely be seen in my other games, like Fearful Symmetries. It’s making me a better GM, and its doing it in a way that’s fun and low-stress.

But you folks don’t really care about that.

What you care about is this: Trail of Cthulhu and The Armitage Files are a blast to play. I’m very glad I decided to give them a try, and I look forward to each session.

The next one is this Sunday afternoon, and the following one is Saturday after. I will, of course, post the results here for you folks to peruse.

**Potential Spoilers**

The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.

**You Have Been Warned**

Saturday night, we wrapped up the Monument Creek storyline from the previous session of The Armitage Files. After the somewhat rocky Hunter game the previous evening, I put in a little extra time Saturday afternoon prepping for the game, making sure there were enough productive avenues of investigation for the characters to follow.

The game went pretty well, though. I had the characters fearing for their lives, and panicking, and going to extreme lengths to save themselves and stop the bad guys.

Now that the scenario is over, I’m safe revealing (most of) what was going on, so here it goes:

In the construction of the new army base, the soldiers had dug up a strange crystalline statue, roughly man-sized, that looked (if you squinted just right) like an elephant-headed snow man made out of faceted spheres, disks, and cones. This was a focus for Chaugnar Faugn, which I used with a bit of a twist.

One of the great things about the Trail of Cthulhu rulebook is that the inestimable Ken Hite gives several different interpretations of each of the Great Old Ones, and I liked this idea of his:

Chaugnar Faugn is a moving cluster of sentient, malevolent discontinuity that leaves crystallized “elephant-gods” or idols behind it when it encounters our universe. It sometimes alters human hosts likewise into twisted pachyderm-like monsters. It builds up energy to transit along its lifeline by severing the lifelines of other time-bound entities, such as humans or serpent-folk, and drinking their potential existence.

I decided that this was sort of a mythos-flavoured version of the Observer Effect, in that Chaugnar Faugn’s immaterial attention drained the potentiality from life forms when he focused on a given space/time locus, and that the draining took the form of a crystallization, producing the idols. And the presence of something interesting around an idol (ordered information, in Charles Stross’s Laundry parlance) draws Chaugnar Faugn’s attention.

So, the story is that one of the privates unearthed the idol, it got some blood spilled on it (digging foundations is hard, sometimes dangerous work), and the attention of the Great Old One was drawn to the site. Now, the sign of the increase in entropy – the life draining – in the area is that more of the idols form in the things being drained. Bugs and worms drain quickly, and are transformed into the tiny idol-crystals that our heroes found last game. Larger, more complex life forms take longer, and the conversion process is slower, as the crystals form within their bodies, forcing their ways in between the existing organs and under the skin. If the level of attention focused on this locus is high enough, humans can also be converted completely to idols, but more often, they just die as the crystal intrusions in their bodies prevent them from working properly.

This is what they saw happen to Private Lonnie Pennick.

Anyway, for reasons that the players did not uncover, the Lieutenant in charge of the construction snatched the idol and hid it away, planning to transport it to Kingsport and put it on a ship.

Back to the game.

The morning after Pvt. Pennick’s death, our heroes returned to Arkham – Dr. Solis went to conduct the autopsy, Aaron went to do some more research at the MU library, and Roxy went to have breakfast. Aaron’s research turned up a link between the tiny crystals and the dolmens they had heard were up an Monument Creek, and the history of a native tribe who left the area pretty much over night about six hundred years ago. He then asked to use his Cthulhu Mythos skill for more information.

Now, I had prepared for this with a passage from the single mythos tome that Aaron had read, but somehow I lost the print out of it, and couldn’t find the electronic file, which made me sad, but I was able to give him what I remembered of it, as well as a little sketch of the elephant-headed creature depicted in the petroglyphs at monument creek. I told him that the Book of the Voice contained a reference to the Stealer of Tomorrow, with the head of an elephant, whose sign and presence was his idol, and who stole the future from all he looked upon.

Somewhat shaken, Aaron went to have a drink in the University Lounge, then went to Roxy’s house. When he arrived, he found that only about a half-hour had passed, though he had done at least three hours of research. He had another drink, and a little lie-down.

In the meantime, Dr. Solis performed the autopsy, removing a number of “calciferous tumours” from the body – strangely crystalline structures that looked more like faceted, milky quartz than anything biological. I also told him that the tumours were not growing off any of the organs in the body, but seemed to have formed in between the organs, forcing them aside, though there were no obvious entry wounds. When he lay out the pieces of crystal, he found that they formed the rough skeleton of the same snow-man-like figure shown by the tiny crystals they had found.

He came up with the theory that they might be activated by living biological material, so he took one of the tiny crystals, put it in a beaker, and added some blood. His blood.

This wonderful little sacrifice drew Chaugnar Faugn’s attention immediately. I hit Solis with a number of time-distortion effects, as well as the concomitant Stability checks, and then with some Health checks as the crystals started to form in his body.

We had a great little scramble, as Solis quarantined himself and sent for Roxy and Aaron, and they roped in Moore from MU and a couple of his grad students to haul an oscilloscope, amplifier, and speakers down to the hospital to use sound waves to shatter the crystal in Solis’s body. I liked the idea, and so it worked, though it hurt him a great deal and laid him up in the hospital for a couple of days.

While Solis was in surgery to have the crystal shards (very, very sharp crystal shards) removed from his body, Roxy and Aaron drove out in the dark to Monument Creek and hiked up to the dolmen, where they discovered a story about how the Stealer of Tomorrow descended on the local tribe after they had found a crystal idol, and how their shamans had turned its attention away, and then left the area to make sure they never drew it back. Aaron was able to decipher the medicine song they used, and he and Roxy drove back to the hospital to exorcise Solis.

We had another tense scene, with the exorcism drawing attention again, and several time distortion effects, and the beginnings of crystals forming in everyone’s bodies, as well as the small life forms in the room and the leaves of the trees outside. In the end, they were pretty roughed up, but managed to drive off Chaugnar Faugn’s attention.

Remembering the story of how the native tribe had found a crystal idol that started the whole mess, Roxy and Aaron drove back out to the army base and questioned the Lieutenant about any idols being found. He was quite concerned, and very sorry for Solis’s state, but could offer no explanation. He asked for Solis’s hospital room number so that he could go visit, and they gave it to him.

Roxy felt that he was hiding something, so she and Aaron kept watch in Solis’s room that night. Shortly after midnight, someone climbed in through the window with a gun. Solis shot him to death, and Roxy recognized him as a button man for Horace “Diamond” Walsh, an underboss for the Marcuzzo crime syndicate. She hit the streets, and (with an impressive spend from Oral History and Streetwise) found out that Walsh had sent the man at the request of the Lieutenant, and that Walsh’s men were supposed to pick something up at the army base that night and drive it to Kingsport Harbour.

So, the troops loaded up with pistols and dynamite, stole a car, and lay in wait near the army base road. When the truck and its escort headed out, they followed it out past Arkham, about half-way to Kingsport, before Solis drew along side and Roxy threw three sticks of dynamite into the back of the truck.

After the horrific explosion, there was a nasty firefight, with tommy-guns and pistols on the bad guys’ side, and dynamite and pistols on the good guys’ side. Despite an unfortunate accident with one of the sticks of dynamite, which cost them their stolen car and almost Dr. Solis’s life, they managed to kill the Lieutenant and Walsh’s men, and used the rest of the dynamite to completely destroy the shattered idol that had been in the back of the pickup truck. Then they limped back to town.

I’m giving them a couple of weeks of downtime for the characters to recover somewhat, because they’re pretty beat up and need to keep their heads down. I’ve also asked them to let me know what they want to look into next.

All in all, a nice Cthulhu game, with a number of good moments. I’m liking both the system and the campaign a whole lot.