Tag Archives: GUMSHOE

**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**

Last night was the final installment of my Armitage Files campaign. After nearly two-and-a-half years and twenty-three sessions, we reached the end of our story and the investigators faced their final challenge.

I think it ended well.

We picked things up in the moment after the last session ended, with our intrepid ((And significantly battered, by this point.)) heroes opening the conference room door to find Cyrus Llanfer transformed into one of the crystal snowmen that mark the attention of Chaugnar Faugn. That threw everyone into high gear, and also some confusion. At some point along here, Crosby put together some pieces he had read about Nyarlathotep ((That is, he used his Cthulhu Mythos skill to find out about Nyarlathotep.)) and realized that Kim Nak was probably a mask of Nyarlathotep, heralding the arrival of something bigger and more terrible – Chaugnar Faugn. Finally, a very stressed-out Moon got everyone moving by dint of being angrier than anyone else in the room – he grabbed Dyer to take them to see Danforth up at the asylum, because Roxy thought he might have an idea or two to share, and the rest of the Armitage group were sent to scrounge up whatever information they could find about what was going on or where Armitage himself was.

Now, I hadn’t expected the group to call on Danforth, but he seemed a good vector to start delivering the information the characters needed to clarify what was going on, so I was okay with that. They took Dyer’s car – and Dyer – because they didn’t think they could get permission to see Danforth otherwise, but when they arrived at the asylum, all the people in it had been turned to the crystal snowmen. By the time they had made it to Danforth’s room, Dyer was starting to crystallize ((Confession time. I always try and remove anyone the characters can count on to save their bacon in the last act. Why? Because I think that the stars of the show, especially at the climax, should be the player characters. If it’s someone else who figures out the way to save the world, or who hands them the item they need, or whatever, then the PCs are relegated to simple plot devices, rather than the prime movers of the story. I mean, if the Armitage Group got back together with the investigators and said, “Right. Here are the steps to thwart Chaugnar Faugn. Do them in order, and everything will be fine,” it would be a pretty sucky ending, right? So, I let NPCs perform little services – provide some information, get them somewhere, deliver a clue – then clean them off the board so that the character only have themselves to rely on. They get to be the heroes.)). He gave his notebook to Moon, and Moon shot him in the head to put him out of his misery.

Danforth was still alive; in fact, besides the characters, he was the only one in the asylum who was. His room was rimed with frost, and he was in restraints on the bed, but he seemed lucid and willing to co-operate. Crosby freed him, and Danforth grabbed something wrapped in a pillowcase from under the bed that he said would help protect them. Back in the car, Moon and Danforth had a little crazy-talk session ((That is, Moon used some of his Cthulhu Mythos. They’re not holding anything back, this session; they’re leaving it all out on the field.)) that provided a little more insight into the nature of Chaugnar Faugn, how Nyarlathotep was preparing the way, and what might be done about it. He remembered the song they had used to cure Solis of his crystalline infection, and decided that that might be something they could use to buy a little time.

The next stop was Moon’s bookshop, where he had arranged to meet members of the Armitage Group who had gone to loot the rare book room at MU now that Llanfer was dead. Of course, the tcho-tchos knew all about the bookshop, so when our heroes arrived, they found a pile of professorial corpses and a sink full of burning books. They salvaged what they could from the sink and scarpered.

There followed a kind of muddied debate about what needed to be done next. They finally decided that they needed to get some audio equipment from the university – they settled on the cone-style megaphones, because they didn’t know if they’d be able to haul a generator for electronic amplification to wherever they needed to sing the song. That was the sticking point for them: they didn’t know where the song should be sung. As a creature outside of and only impinging on normal space-time, Chaugnar Faugn would only truly be vulnerable to the song at a specific place and time.

See, my thought for this ((To be clear, I had no plan coming into this session except one: I knew what one action would end the threat. Everything else that happened was me responding to character action, trying to provide them with the information they needed and keep the pressure on them. So, when they brought up the song, I thought that sounded like a good idea, and it became one of the things they needed to do.)) was that the song should be sung at the Monument Creek dig where the first idol was unearthed. But Roxy suggested the Kingsport lighthouse they had visited last session, I changed my mind and made that the place/time. After all, it was already unstuck in time and space, and that had to put it “closer” to Chaugnar Faugn. Moon suggested the Monument Creek site, Roxy suggested the lighthouse, and they were stuck – not enough information to make an informed decision. They’ve learned enough of the system, though, that they knew what to do if they didn’t have enough information: go find some more. Moon pulled out his once-per-game ability as an Antiquarian to say that he had a book that should help them ((He tried to say that he just had the information, but I held him to the rules that said he had an informational item back at the shop.)) back at the shop, so they detoured to the shop, on high alert for tcho-tchos and other bad things.

In the shop, they found Austin Kittrell, sitting at Moon’s desk, reading the book he had come for. I tried for a little bit of banter, but Roxy was having none of that, and shot Kittrell a couple of times. It didn’t have the desired effect; he just took it and smiled. Moon grabbed the book from him, but then got backhanded across the room ((Down to -8 Health. Did I mention they came into this already kind of battered and spent?)) and knocked unconscious. Danforth lifted his hands and started chanting in a strange language, and the air got colder around him, so Crosby and Roxy grabbed the book and the unconscious Moon and started dragging him from the shop. The last thing they saw of Kittrell, he was punching his fist through Danforth’s chest. Danforth continued chanting, though without sound now that his lungs were mainly missing.

Crosby made it out of the shop with Moon, but Roxy slipped on the now-icy floor, and fell far enough behind to hear a wet explosion and a whistling cry of “Tekeli-li!” ((Yup. Crazy Danforth summoned a shoggoth, which took out him, Kittrell, the bookshop, and all the buildings and people between the bookshop and the river. I figure, it’s the last session, time to pull out all the stops. I was a little disappointed that none of the characters looked back to see the thing, though.)) from the back room, then she was out and running to the car. They got in and tore away, Moon madly reading the recovered book ((After some First Aid spends to bring him back to consciousness and stop him dying.)) and Crosby reading the salvaged books from the sink.

Eventually, they got the idea that they needed to get to the lighthouse and sing the song to stall Chaugnar Faugn’s arrival. They made their way back to Kingsport, and hauled Moon up the headland ((Health checks all round to keep going in the face of exhaustion and exertion.)), past the now-silent cabin, and to the huge pile of bones overlooking the pristine sea. Down below, small, dark figures frolicked in the water, and a twenty-foot tall crystal elephant snowman stood beside the bone pile.

I ran the song as a magical ritual, with no opposition just to simplify things. I decided they needed to get a total of 30 on their rolls, each roll representing a half-hour or so of singing time. After each roll, the characters had to make Health checks to keep singing, or have their voice give out. I put in a couple of trigger points where things would start happening – at 10, Roxy noticed that there was something huge making it’s way through the sea towards the headland ((She’s been troubled for some time with dreams of a vast being waiting for her beneath the sea.)). At 20, the giant crystal idol woke up and started moving towards the investigators. At this point, Moon lost enough Stability to move him into the Blasted category, and he decided that, in his madness, he would sacrifice himself to the elder god in hopes of distracting it long enough for his companions to finish the song. I liked this idea, and gave him free rein. He said that, because he had seen outside the normal dimensions before, and because now he was insane, he could unfold his own timeline back to the first time he had killed a man – as a boy in Russia – and get Chaugnar Faugn to focus on him. I said okay, but took it a bit further, weaving it into a moment of extradimensional perception for all the characters, as they got to see Moon’s yeti-like multidimensional form consumed by a wall of probosces, eyes, mouths, and other organs.

I thought this was going to be the end of the whole thing, because I couldn’t show them that and not call for some hefty Stability checks, and I refuse to pull punches in a Cthulhu campaign endgame. But Roxy and Crosby made their checks and finished the song, forcing Chaugnar Faugn’s attention away from them. They then set fire to the bones ((Well, to be fair, they threw dynamite into it, but I had the dynamite transform into a torch and ignite the bone-fire.)) and ran away – the flash of the fire drove off whatever was coming through the water to get Roxy, and a white ship sailed in to dock at the top of the headland, but they weren’t having none of that, and just ran like bunnies.

At this point, the players started acting like it was all over, so I used a reminder that there was still work to be done – I had another packet of papers show up on the car seat. This was a less-than-perfectly successful clue; things ground to a halt as the players read through the papers, looking for the clue that would show them where to go next, when the arrival of the papers was intended to be the clue. I reminded them that, according to their information, all the song had done was buy them some time to fix the real problem. Roxy started to get fixated on the mention of the Nophru-ka tablet in the papers, and started planning to go to New York ((Which had nothing to do with what was going on. Curse my decision to give out more papers! They were nothing but a distraction!)), but decided that she needed to find Armitage and stop him from killing Petrovich, also mentioned in the papers.

They also found Danforth’s pillow case in the car, and found inside a floor tile with an elder sign scratched on it. Crosby used his Cthulhu Mythos to figure out what it meant and how useful it could be, and he, too, wound up Blasted. That left Roxy essentially on her own.

She headed back to the university, and found one of the last members of the Armitage Group, Ashley, and got him to tell her about a bolt hole Armitage had set up in the last place anyone would look for him – the ruins of the Whateley farm in Dunwich. She persuaded Ashley to take her up there and distract Armitage while she crept around back with a shotgun. Ashely got Armitage talking, and he expressed genuine puzzlement and horror at what was happening, and no hint that he was deliberately causing it. At this point, Roxy popped up, asked him if he knew a Petrovich, Armitage started to say no, and she cut him in half with a shotgun blast.

This was the key event to end the threat. See, if Armitage died before he sent the documents back in time, then there would be no disruption of linear time to attract the attention of Chaugnar Faugn. The readjustment of time caused most of the big bad things that happened to undo, but being close enough to ground zero of the temporal reconfiguration, Roxy’s brain was shattered.

She found her consciousness floating in extradimensional space, with the voice of Fred Jahraus speaking to her. He offered to take her to live with them, because she had been kind to them. She would be, he explained, a pet. Roxy rejected that, even though Fred told her that her brain was too damaged to hold all of her now. She still decided to go back.

I finished with a quick epilogue. In the new timeline, bookseller Aaron Moon vanished one day, never to be seen again. Roxy Crane was found be her (restored) butler and housekeeper catatonic in bed – they think she suffered a stroke. Malcolm Crosby was hospitalized after a complete mental collapse, and never recovered. And August Solis, MD, still died in an explosion out in Montana.

I am very satisfied with the ending, especially the way each of the characters went out:

• Moon, paranoid hoarder of information, gave himself to something that was the very epitome of entropy, destroying all he had learned, to buy the time to complete the ritual.
• Crosby, who had been seeking real mystic knowledge for years, was destroyed and shattered once he found it.
• Roxy, manipulator extraordinaire, faced the final challenge alone, with no one to help her, and no points to spend on ANYTHING. And then turned down an offer of (kinda) salvation.

It’s been a fun run, gang. As usual, the end of a campaign is a bittersweet thing if it works well. I’m sorry to see it end, but I recognize that ending on a high note is far better than devolving into boredom.

I want to thank a few people for this gaming experience:

• Robin Laws for designing GUMSHOE andThe Armitage Files campaign.
• Ken Hite for turning GUMSHOE into Trail of Cthulhu.
• Simon Rogers at Pelgrane Press for publishing all this great stuff.
• All you folks who have been following along with the campaign through the two-and-a-half years its been running.

But most of all, I want to thank my players for trusting me to run this kind of improvisational campaign, and going along with some of the weird and crazy ideas I’ve had through the run. Thanks to:

• Michael as Aaron “Read ‘Em And Burn ‘Em” Moon.
• Sandy as Roxy “Who Will I Be Today?” Crane.
• Tom as Dr. August “Bleed On Everything” Solis and Malcolm “I’m Psychic!” Crosby.

It’s been a blast, folks.

Bonus Warning

I try to keep this blog pretty inoffensive in terms of language and imagery. This session of The Armitage Files, though, took a bit of a surprising turn into a dark place. It was a wonderful bit of roleplaying on Sandy’s part that really stands out, and I’m going to talk about it below, but I warn you, it’s strong stuff. To give you the option not having those pictures in your head, I’m going to put the relevant section behind spoiler tags.

Read at Your Own Risk

**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**

Well, my players did not get back to me before the last session of The Armitage Files to let me know what they wanted to investigate, so that turned the evening into Opposition Action Time! I wanted to hit each of the characters separately, so I came up with a good threat for each of them, and went to town.

Aaron Moon, alone in his bookshop, had a disorienting moment of seeing his body from outside himself, and felt something trying to push its way into his consciousness. Being a paranoid who had read a lot of occult – and a few mythos – books, he immediately decided that something was trying to possess him ((He was right about that. It was the Mind Exchange spell.)), and ran to the basement, where a rather high-difficulty Preparedness roll revealed that he had a protective circle of salt ((Here’s the way the exchange went.

Moon: Okay. With my Occult skill, do I know what things can prevent possession? Like, a circle of salt, or silver, or things like that?

Me: According to Occult, all that kind of stuff works, as does prayer, crosses, and other symbols.

Moon: Great. I want to make a Preparedness roll to have a circle of salt in the basement.

Me: Hmmm. I’m gonna set the difficulty of that one at 8. It’s kind of a weird request, and it’s very specific to this unexpected attack.

Moon: Okay. I’ll spend some points, and I succeed!

There follows a few rounds of repeated possession attempts as Moon staggers down to the basement and collapses into the circle of salt.

Moon: There! Does the circle of salt help?

Me: Nope. Not even a little bit.

Moon: Bastard!)) laid out on the bare floor. When that didn’t seem to work, he wracked his brain ((And Cthulhu Mythos.)) to figure something else out, and wound up carving a protective sigil into the flesh of his chest. This allowed him to hold off the possession attempt, and he hurried over to Roxy’s place to warn her about the attack. On his way out, he noticed that there were tiny crystals scattered along the trail he had taken from the shop down to the basement.

Roxy Crane, meanwhile, had been out trying to track down a lead on the mysterious Kim Nak, and spreading word that Charlie had been killed and there might be a reward for anyone who could help find the responsible culprits ((She assumed Kim Nak was behind it, but with the overthrow of godfather Elio Marcuzzo, it could have been someone in the new mob hierarchy.)). She was met on the street by Austin Kittrell ((Last seen way back here, where he didn’t fare too well.)), who seemed quite chipper and eager to speak with her. He offered to buy her supper at a local club, and they retired there. In the midst of their conversation, with Kittrell dropping hints and asking leading questions showing that he had some knowledge of the kinds of things going on, he showed Roxy a drawing, asking if she recognized it. It was a quick, crude sketch of the crystal snowman that the gang has come to identify with Chaugnar Faugn. She confirmed that she recognized it, and asked him to destroy it, which he did. Then he asked her if she recognized another drawing, and showed her the symbol that had infected her mind in the Kingsport warehouse way back here.

Roxy had been dealing with strange, watery dreams ever since, and seeing the symbol again knocked her right into one of them, where she was swimming down into the depths, where a light awaited her, escorted by strange fish-frog-men. In this dream, I kicked in a little more horror ((Drawing a bit on Alan Moore’s Neonomicon.)), I told her that her swimming was hampered somewhat by her advanced state of pregnancy. She fought off the lure of the depths and swam up to the surface instead, to find that a vast, beautiful and terrifying city was rising out of the sea.

She awoke, bloody and without coat, shoes, or handbag, in an alley in the predominantly black section of Arkham. It took some doing to find a bar where she could make a phone call to have her cousin come and get her.

Malcolm Crosby ((I forgot to mention something from last session. Along with the Tears of Azathoth, the gang found a red lacquered box that buzzed in the warehouse. Remembering the warnings about Moebius wasps and the dangers of opening the Red Box from the early documents they had read, our heroes decided to destroy it, burning it in Moon’s furnace. When they tossed it into the fire, it buzzed louder and the metal puzzle clasp that held it shut began to work itself open. Crosby reached into the fire and held the box closed until the buzzing stopped and the whole box was aflame, burning his hand terribly in the process.)) was headed over to Moon’s shop to do some research, seeing if he could learn more about tcho-tchos and/or Kim Nak, when he felt a little sting in his neck. Having heard the tales of the investigators’ run-ins with tcho-tchos and their poisoned weapons, he ran as fast as he could ((Taking a few more blow-gun darts in the process.)) to a busy street to hail a cab. He had intended to have it take him to Moon’s shop, but when the player was reminded that they no longer had any tcho-tcho antidote and no one to make more, he changed his mind and went to the hospital. He made it there before passing out, and was able to give the dart to the doctor to help make the antidote.

Once everyone was back and safe, they repaired to Moon’s shop to work out a plan ((Also, an objective.)). Some research and Cthulhu Mythos led them to make some connections between Chaugnar Faugn and some recent thought experiments by Danish theoretical physicists, implying that the attention of the Eater of Tomorrows collapsed the waveform of a person’s life and future into one of absolute entropy, thus killing the person, and extruding part of the Eater into the three observable dimensions as the crystalline snow men that they had witnessed before. They also discovered that tcho-tchos were the degenerate descendants of the miri-nigri, amphibious creatures created by Chaugnar Faugn in the ancient past.

The things that attracted Chaugnar Faugn’s attention included ritual sacrifices and worship, but it was also drawn by incidents of non-linear time, and that it increased the occurrence of such incidents as it collapsed possibilities into entropy, and surviving possibilities tended to expand into extremely improbable quantum events in the possibility vacuum thus created ((This is, of course, all crap that I made up, trying to blend my feeble understanding of higher-dimensional physics and quantum theory with horrific ideas from the neighbourhood of the Cthulhu mythos. I think it sounds suitably plausible – certainly plausible enough for a Cthulhu game.)). This led to some speculation about Moon’s irregular temporal perception and visions, and through there to the idea that the documents, coming as they seem to from the future, might be the cause of the very catastrophe they try to prevent.

And that’s when they started thinking that they needed to kill Armitage to prevent him ever sending the documents.

After some discussion, they decided that killing Armitage would be Plan B, with Plan A being to run away and hide for a bit, then come after Kim Nak with everything they had. To that end, Crosby decided to read A Discussion of Higher Dimensions, the single tome that they haven’t destroyed ((Yet.)), and that they obtained from Edwin Carsdale’s farm.

When they went to Roxy’s place to pick up her luggage and some money, they found that Roxy’s husband and wife butler/housekeeper team were dead in their bed ((Why am I picking on Roxy’s servants? Simple. She’s the only character that has created any NPCs around her – friends, family, servants, whatever. The other two tend to be brooding loners.)), their blood turned to a brittle, rusty solid in their veins.

And that’s where we left the game. I figure two more sessions to wrap things up.

**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**

I’m really behind on this update for the Armitage Files campaign ((Lots of reasons, boiling down to me just not doing it when I should have.)). What’s finally prodded me to write the damned thing is the fact that the next session is this Saturday, and the players deserve a recap. It’s gonna be a quick one, though.

The game picked up pretty much where the last session left off, with the investigators deciding to go check out what the junk dealer had told them about a big bible he had sold to a local pastor. The gang was suspicious of that ((Along with everything else. This is a Cthulhu game, after all.)), so they figured they’d pay him a visit and see if the bible was a valuable book that the linguist, Lars Fargerberg, might have been kidnapped for. The upshot of the investigation was that no, it was just a nice, old family bible that the pastor used to replace the water-damaged one he had been using.

I messed up a bit, at this point. See, the new character in the game is a parapsychologist, and his player asked me if he could make an Occult spend in the church to see if he could sense any psychic emanations or auras. I blinked at him a bit and said, “Sure.” Then I proceeded to spin a completely false psychic impression for him based on his character’s current emotional state – as played by the player. So, his nervousness and apprehension after starting to glimpse the horrible truth behind the world made him feel that there was some dark, evil stain on the church, a horrible foreboding that hinted at destruction and death.

He lapped it up. And he tried using the ability a couple more times during the adventure. Each time, I asked him for an Occult spend, and then lied to him about what he was sensing.

Why would I do such a thing? Isn’t it a huge dick move?

Yeah, it kinda is ((Sorry, Tom.)). In my defense, it was the result of differing expectations of the metaphysics of the game. I was operating on the assumption that the player shared the standard understanding of in-game supernatural powers: it all stems from horrible mythos sources, and you only get access to it through reading mind-shattering tomes. So, when he asked to take a psychic reading on the church, I just assumed it was a roleplaying thing – he was playing Crosby as believing that he had these psychic powers.

Well, as the evening went on, it became more and more obvious to me that the player wasn’t operating on my assumptions. He figured that, since I had let him do what he had asked for, it was real information his character was getting. When I finally made that connection in my head, I told him what was going on, and apologized for screwing him over. I then talked about how the supernatural stuff usually works on Cthulhu games, and how I was sticking with that for my game. So, we sorted it out.

Anyway.

After no clues turned up at the church, and they exhausted all the investigation they could do about the red herring church psychic miasma ((Sorry, guys.)), the gang decided to go see the main crime boss in Kingsport: Elio Marcuzzo. Fargerberg had owed some money to the Marcuzzo family, so our heroes figured that they might have something to do with his disappearance. With Roxy’s criminal connections, it was pretty quick work to arrange a meeting, and Marcuzzo and company pointed ((Rather obliquely; they’re not stupid, after all, and the investigators have come to the attention of the police on more than one occasion.)) to an Asian crime syndicate operating around the docks. They also told Roxy a little bit about Kim Nak ((This is, as far as I know, not a real name in any Asian language. I wanted to convey the flavour of an indeterminate south-east Asian culture without drawing directly on any particular one. After all, I’m gonna add tcho-tchos to the mix, and that’s not a nice thing to do to any real culture.)), who was sort of a bogeyman enforcer for the gang, reputed to use demon-possessed children to do his dirty work.

A little more investigation led the intrepid sleuths to a warehouse down by the docks. The doors were locked, and I think I put a couple little booby-traps in place ((It was a while ago. I can’t remember for certain.)), but the place had no tcho-tchos or criminals or, indeed, any creatures in it. A safe in an upstairs office had a strange book in it – the much-sought-after Tears of Azathoth.

Moon almost convulsed with ecstasy at having finally got his hands on the book. They grabbed it and burned the warehouse down ((Fire. They use it for everything.)) before running back to their hotel. At the hotel, they found that they hadn’t got away clean, after all: Roxy’s faithful driver, Charlie, had been killed and left in the car for them to find ((What can I say? It’s a horror game. And sometimes the best way to scare and hurt the players is to mess with their favourite NPCs.)). They abandoned that car, stole another one, and fled back to Arkham.

There followed much soul-searching and debate over what to do with Tears. Initial investigation showed that it was a very dangerous book ((Though I’m starting to think I’m losing my touch. I don’t think Moon has failed a Stability check in the last three sessions. Gonna have to do something about that.)), and they finally decided to burn it. As soon as they had made that decision, the book vanished ((There’s a whole reason for this stemming from my interpretation of the write-up for Tears in the campaign book.

And that’s where we left the game.

We are now on the last few stages of the campaign. I have three more sessions scheduled for the game, and plan to have things wrapped up by the end of June. We may wind up ending the game one session sooner or later, but I’m betting on three to bring things to a close. It’s been a tremendously fun game to run, and has really helped me stretch my GMing improvisation muscles. I’m going to be sorry to see it go.

But I’m eager to run something else, too.

**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**

It’s been a while since the last Armitage Files game. Even though I’ve only got three players, getting them together in this recent season of deadlines and illness and travel has been a bit of a challenge. But we managed to get together last Friday night and play ((Though we ended a little early, thanks to the aforementioned illness.)), and it was good to get back to the game.

We opened a little slow – last session, if you recall, one of the characters died, and the opening of this session was introducing the player’s new character to the group. This is always a bit delicate, especially in a game of horror and conspiracy, where the current characters have every reason to distrust newcomers. Fortunately, we had worked out the basics of the approach at the end of the previous session, and my players are all more than willing to meet me half-way to make the game happen ((Thanks for that, guys!)).

The idea was that the new character, a parapsychologist named Malcolm Crosby, had a book that he wanted to sell, and took it to Moon, the bookseller, to handle the sale for him. I asked what the book was, and got a request for a treatise on the weird automata that the gang had found in Emigrant. “Fat chance of that,” I explained, “Pick something else, you cheater.” ((Okay, maybe I didn’t put it that way.)) The next request was, I believe, for The Tears of Azathoth, which is a big clue and MacGuffin in the campaign ((If it wasn’t Tears, then it was another big clue tome. Sometimes, my players think they’re being sneaky.)). Again, I gently advised, “Stop trying to cheat, you cheating bastards!”

I suggested instead that the item in question not be a book, but a collection of letters from the Fox sisters. These would be quite valuable to collectors of spiritualist paraphernalia, and Moon’s expertise in authenticating such items and his contacts in that community would both be useful in getting top dollar for the letters.

There was some good character interaction between Moon and Crosby, and I played a little bit with Moon’s time-perception problem, and Moon called on Roxy to bring him a book he had left at her place with examples of the Fox sisters’ handwriting ((A very nice use of the profession’s special ability to have a handy item “in stock,” I thought.)), so they managed to all get together in one place a little quicker than I had feared.

Anyway. Moon did his authentication of the Fox letters, and spent a point on it, so I gave him something interesting – I told him that the letters seemed to be partial palimpsests, where portions of the page had been scraped down to remove what had been written there,and then something new had been written on the newly blank sections. He figured that he could recover some of the text that had been scraped off ((Using book science! Also, GM fiat.)), but that it would likely be a destructive process, ruining the chance of reselling the letters.

Moon explained this to Crosby, who was more intrigued by what might be hidden in the letters, quickly gave his consent, and Moon went to work. After a few hours ((Which seemed much longer to Moon, thanks to his distorted temporal perception.)), Moon managed to piece together a few little snippets of text: “hotep,” “little glass snowmen,” “Cho-Cho,” and “ears of azat.” That was enough to get them all fired up ((At this point, I started rapidly skimming the Wikipedia article on the Fox sisters, because I realized that I had just put a big story hook in front of the players without any idea what the actual story was. “All hook and no plot,” as one might say. I had visions of the group going haring off after the secrets of the Fox sisters, and me not having any idea what they might be. Fortunately, they decided to stick to the original plan.)), and Moon and Roxy wound up telling Crosby all about all the weird stuff they’d been doing, and Crosby got all excited and wanted in on the investigations ((Moon spent some time – well, quite a bit of time, actually – trying to talk Crosby out of getting involved. Great roleplaying, but man, don’t try so hard to kick the new character out of the party, dude!)).

Next day, Roxy went by Miskatonic University to talk to Dyer, with some plan to have Crosby granted faculty status there. Dyer explained that that’s not how things worked, and that MU was unlikely to give a position to a charlatan like a parapsychologist ((I’m not sure exactly what she wanted to accomplish with this, beyond trying to get the same access to University resources that the late Dr. Solis had.)), so that didn’t work out.

Then it was off to Kingsport ((Lovely, lovely Kingsport. The gang has had such fun there.)) to try and track down Lars Fargerberg, a linguist who might have a line on The Tears of Azathoth. The document they were following up on led them to a clip joint in a seedy part of town, where Moon and Crosby were rapidly divested of a point of Credit Rating each by the charming hostesses. Roxy, more worldly, found a contact there, and got some information on Fargerberg using a story about Moon having paid for a book from him that he never received.

They found that Fargerberg hadn’t been around lately, but that he had a room in one of the boarding houses nearby, though no one knew which. Roxy went to the police looking for more details, spinning the same story about Moon’s payment for a book, and Moon wound up primary suspect in Fargerberg’s strange disappearance ((After all, he was the first person they’d found with a motive, however fake, for wanting something bad to happen to the linguist.)) and spent a few hours answering questions.

While he was being detained and Roxy was wrangling a lawyer for him, Crosby hit up the newspapers ((Quote at this point: “I can’t believe it took us this long to look something up in the newspapers. Isn’t this a Chtulhu game?”)) and found the original story about Fargerberg’s disappearance, along with his address. With Moon sprung, they went to talk to Fargerberg’s landlady, who told them that she had already cleaned out Fargerberg’s room, and that a junk man had carted off all of the linguist’s books.

They tracked down the junk man, and found that he had several of Fargergerg’s books still, but had sold off about half of them already. He seemed to be holding back some information about who he had sold various things to, but did admit that he had sold a big bible to the pastor of a nearby church, and that’s where the gang decided to head next.

But at that point, Moon’s player was succumbing to his nasty cold, and we called it a night. Hopefully it won’t be another two months before the next session.

**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**

Last Saturday night was the first Armitage Files game in about two months. I try to run my games with a session every three weeks, but we’re all busy people, and the holiday season tends to be difficult to schedule. So, obviously, it’s been a while, but we’ve got back to it.

In the week leading up to Saturday’s game, I asked the gang what they wanted to investigate this session, so that I would have a chance to do some prep work before the game. At the end of the last session, they had blown up a mine full of… strange creatures, and narrowly escaped the Donlands-Fuschack gang.

The group decided to continue with this investigation, trying to figure out how the fortune teller back in Emigrant fit into all of this. So, I went back to my original notes ((By which I mean my scribbled diagrams. Of course, I had forgotten what all my shorthand meant by this time.)) from the first time they visited Emigrant and fleshed things out so that there was something interesting for them to investigate.

As has become something of a tradition, we got together fairly early in the evening to dine on some very nice Indian food and talk a bit before starting the game. When we were ready to begin, we discovered that Moon was pretty badly hurt from the last session. As we were picking things up pretty much from where we had left off, the investigators decided that, before confronting the evil ((Allegedly.)) fortune teller, they should head back to a big city to let Moon spend some time in the hospital.

While Moon was convalescing ((With a revolver hidden in the hollowed-out Bible by his bedside.)), Roxy and Solis did a little more digging on background for the fortune teller, finding nothing of any use. When Moon was back in fighting trim, they bought a shotgun and some dynamite, and went back to Emigrant.

They parked the car about a quarter mile outside of town, down the railroad tracks so they could follow them back and not get lost if they were in a hurry ((What are the odds of that happening with this group?)). They then crept into town, to the fortune teller’s shop, and broke in to the back.

Their first concern when breaking into her shop – the upstairs of which was also her home – was finding a pair of men’s boots in the mudroom in back. They did a cursory examination of the kitchen and the shop’s back room ((Strangely – to me, anyway – they didn’t actually do any more than peek into the front room of the shop.)), finding nothing of real interest ((Though I think Roxy lifted her Tarot deck. Am I remembering that correctly, folks?)). Solis was able to identify the range of patent medicines on the shelves, and even a fair bit of the herbal remedies, and determined that they were nothing out of the ordinary for a rural practitioner who billed herself as an apothecary.

They crept upstairs, through the little sitting room, and into the bedroom, where they found the fortune teller lying on the bed. This caused a few moments of panic, especially when it looked as if she wasn’t breathing, but just lying fully dressed on top of the bed clothes with her eyes open. Solis finally plucked up the nerve to examine her more closely, and was quite shocked to find that she appeared to be no more than clothes and skin draped over a padded armature.

Everyone got very nervous at that point, and Solis was going to make a closer examination, but at that point, she blinked, and everyone decided to get the hell away from her. Cue the mad scramble down the stairs. They paused to take a closer look in the kitchen, and found that it had no food in it, and no sign of having had food in it any time recent. They poked about a bit, looking for a cellar door ((I don’t know why, but they were obsessed with finding a cellar. It all started with Roxy saying she wanted a peek in the fortune teller’s basement, and it was off and running. She tried explaining that it was just a figure of speech, that she didn’t know if the fortune teller had a basement, but everything seemed to start to revolve around how to get into this non-existent root cellar.)) until Moon realized that, in this style of house, there was probably no cellar. There would, however,  be crawlspaces both under the house and between the first and second floor.

So, of course, everyone ran back outside to look under the house. At this point, I just gave up and went with it.

They got the little wood lattice gate off the entry to the crawlspace and saw a number of oilcloth-wrapped bundles inside. Roxy volunteered to go in a haul one out, and it proved to be a bundle of siding boards. A second bundle turned out to be bricks. The players looked at me curiously for a bit, then said, “I don’t get it. What do these mean?” And I said, “These mean that there were left-over building materials that she’s storing safely in case the house needs repairs. That’s the kind of thing people keep in crawlspaces.”

They tried to figure out if I was lying for a little bit, then shrugged and Solis crawled in to make a better examination of the space. He found a mounded section of the earth floor, and used his knife to try and dig it up. The knife blade went through about an inch or so of loose dirt and then hit a piece of wood.

That’s when the tcho-tchos pushed aside the planks that were hiding their tunnel and leaped on Solis ((For this bit, I took the player into the kitchen, so that the other players were kept in the dark about what was happening.)). There were three of them, and one grabbed each of Solis’s arms, while the third – who had drenched his shirt in poison ((I like tcho-tcho poison. It does whatever I need it to do, and the little guys aren’t afraid to put in on everything!)) – wrapped his arms and legs around Solis’s head. The good doctor struggled gamely, but was pulled into the tunnel and only managed to get out a muffled yelp before the poison shirt rendered him unconscious.

At this point, I had to start juggling scene cuts to give everyone a chance to do stuff and be involved in what was going on. Some of the time-frame got a little skewed, but it worked in play, so I count it as a win. Of course, I can’t remember exactly when I cut between characters, so I’m just going to go character-by-character through their stories.

Moon immediately crawled under the house, and down the tunnel in pursuit of Solis. I decided to give the gang a chance to rescue Solis – in a suitably challenging and cinematic finale – so the tunnel ran under the street down a few buildings to a warehouse. Moon made his way there, shooting the tcho-tcho that had been left to ambush him, and popped up through a trapdoor ((I had briefly considered making this come up in another crawlspace, but that just felt too mean.)) into the warehouse.

Roxy, waiting by the fortune teller’s house, heard a car on the street and hid. It turned out to be the doctor they had previously met. He came into the back yard and started calling for the characters. This struck Roxy as suspicious enough that she struck the doctor with a brick ((See what I done there?)). Twice. And then stood and watched as he gasped to death on the sidewalk. Then she heard Moon’s gunshot, and ran down the street, finding the warehouse, and picking the lock on the front door to burst into the room.

Solis, meanwhile, had regained consciousness stripped naked and tied to the immense belly of a giant statue of an elephant-headed man. Yep, their old pal Chaugnar Faugn. Surrounding him were a dozen or two tcho-tchos, also naked, except for elephant-like masks. Some of these had the weird, fluid limbs of the things Moon and Roxy had faced down in the mine. Leading them was a large man wearing nothing but a full head mask that was a large version of the little crystal snow-man heads that they had learned was the effect of Chaugnar Faugn’s attention. This happy fellow started cutting on Solis, who managed a heroic Athletics roll to break the ropes tying him to the idol.

Which is when everyone else arrived.

Roxy managed to get the door open just in time to see Moon shoot down one of the kerosene lamps providing light in the building. The high priest ((Of course that’s what he was. Didn’t I mention the full-head mask?)) started chanting to put the flames out, and the tcho-tchos started swarming Moon and Solis. Solis tried to run for the door, but he was still suffering from the hallucinatory effects of the poison. Moon, worried that the high priest was going to put out the flames, threw a stick of dynamite into them.

Moon fully expected to die, along with the tcho-tchos and the priest. He thought it would be a valiant rescue of Solis, sacrificing his life to end this threat and save his friend. Unfortunately, Solis blew his Fleeing roll, and had already been roughed up a fair bit. I checked the damage on a stick of dynamite, and rolled it on the table in front of everyone.

Moon survived. Solis was brought to exactly -12, and was dead.

So were the tcho-tchos and the high priest and the statue and the walls. Roxy was hurt, but she and Moon managed to get Solis’s body back to the car and out of town.

Now, I hadn’t planned on killing anybody that night. In fact, I tend to go out of my way to make sure that there are chances for the PCs to escape and survive – it just means losing, sometimes. That said, this is a horror game, and the mortality of player characters is an important trope. If there’s no chance of losing, there’s no tension and no horror. So, I let the die fall and determine the outcome fairly and openly.

We ended the session a little early. The last thing we did in play was to hold Solis’s funeral. I wanted to make sure that the event was memorable, and to send off a good character with the kind of finale he had earned. I asked ((That’s a lie. I demanded.)) each of the other players to deliver a short, in-character eulogy of Solis, and I provided one by Prof. Armitage to round things out.

Then we called an end to gaming and helped create the new investigator.

Oh, and I told them the outcome of their investigation. Russel Fuschack was killed a few days later trying to rob a bank on his own, without his partner. Half the population of Emigrant, Montana was found dead. Again, the players asked me what that meant, and I just shrugged. I know what it means, but I’m not giving away any information on this one. They may decide to follow it up.

So, that was the first PC death in my Armitage Files game. All-in-all, it worked out, though I’m going to miss Dr. August Solis. He was a fun guy to torment.