We played our first session of Cthulhu Dark last week, running through the classic Call of Cthulhu module The Watcher in the Valley by Kevin A. Ross, from the anthology Tales of the Miskatonic Valley. This has been a long time coming (seven, almost eight years, according to my notes), and I’m thrilled we finally made it happen. What follows is a play report from our first session, along with some GM reflections on preparation and running the game.
Play Report
The Characters
Our cast of investigators consists of Josephine Hartley, a bookkeeper; Winifred “Winnie” Graves, a millworker; Margaret “Peggy” Sullivan, a stenographer; and Philip Hennessey, an itinerant photographer.
What Happened
On a Monday in late summer of 1929, the investigators travel to the dig, each with their own reasons for being there. Phillip is on assignment. Josephine is delivering books. Winnie and Peggy are volunteering. They take the bus and get off at a BSAIR marker on the turnpike, then walk the rest of the way.
They cross a decrepit covered bridge, then come to a second one with three cars parked in front of it. They cross this as well and arrive at a deserted camp. Hearing noises from the woods on the other side, they investigate and discover a group of people busy removing two stones from a mound in a swamp. As they watch, one stone disintegrates with a loud popping sound.
After introductions, they help transport the remaining stone back to camp. Josephine talks to Professor Mills, who is very pleased to have received the books she brought. She begins organizing his papers. Winnie and Peggy settle in at the women’s tent and become acquainted with Mildred Cunningham, who proves to be very welcoming. Phillip heads to the men’s tent, where he meets Will Abner, who is clearly full of himself and only there to humor his girlfriend Alice.
In Mills’s tent, Josephine catches up with Alice, an old friend from university. She manages to read up on the history of the site in Morris Wheaton’s Studies of the Indians of the Miskatonic Valley. Meanwhile, Winnie, Peggy, and Phillip head to the mound to investigate and perhaps remove another stone. They notice the mound is completely barren and that their flashlights flicker while standing on it. Winnie single-handedly removes the smallest of the five remaining stones and returns it to camp.
Alice and Will leave for Arkham. The investigators talk to Stephen Francks and observe that he’s a stickler for details and a real control freak. Mills prepares to leave after dinner, which Mildred and Jim cook. After the meal, they talk to Jim about his conflicted relationship with the dig and his heritage.
That night, they sleep restlessly and have bad dreams. The next morning, all except Winnie feel more drained than normal. At breakfast, they are visited by Quiskamohan, who tells them an elaborate tale of the mound and admonishes them to leave. They wave him away.
They get to work at the mound again, joined by George Hanshaw. They construct a clever sled-like device for moving the rocks back to camp and successfully remove the largest of the four remaining stones. As they transport it back to camp, Francks tumbles into the muck at the edge of the swamp. Back in camp, Winnie realizes everything went silent shortly before Francks fell…
Meanwhile, Josephine was digging around in Mills’s tent again. She discovered an old news clipping about the Calban family, along with Mills’s .38 revolver and ammunition. All worked up by this discovery, she shares it with her compatriots. What is going on here?!
We end the session there.
GM Notes
Players take note: spoilers ahead!
Background
I’ve had plans to run this scenario for a long time. Back when I was originally planning it, I even went so far as writing up house rules for third edition Call of Cthulhu, integrating some updates from Delta Green and 7th edition CoC. I never finished that project, and my notes suggest I had plans to use Cthulhu Dark in parallel as well. However, it appears I wasn’t sold on the updated version from the Kickstarter and was instead thinking of using the original rules alongside guidance from Walmsley’s Stealing Cthulhu. I don’t recall exactly what I was thinking at the time. I also read Wilson’s Return of the Lloigor at the time. I remember thinking it was a very successful mythos tale, and quite disturbing.
After some initial activity, mostly in 2019, and what appears to be an attempt to revive it in 2021, this project lingered in my backlog of hobby projects for ages. But I never completely forgot about it. At the end of 2025, sort of on a whim, I suggested we play this in the new year, and suddenly I was committed. I was in the mood for something different after several years of running Planet Karus, both in terms of setting and system. This felt like just the ticket. And for many in our gaming group, CoC was the first TTRPG we seriously played back in the nineties, so there’s a lot of nostalgia for this material.
I have a basically complete collection of first-edition Chaosium Lovecraft Country books. The Watcher in the Valley frequently ends up at the top of lists of favorite classic era scenarios in the CoC community. It ticks a lot of boxes for me: a small sandbox, the classic trope of an archaeological dig, and a genuinely great, genuinely scary mythos monster. This thing has it all.
Why Cthulhu Dark?
I opted for Cthulhu Dark after all, because I really didn’t feel like going back to the CoC rules. Way too much crunch and overhead. I wanted something very lightweight and story-focused, also as a nice change from GMing OD&D, which isn’t complex per se, but still in that same pedigree as CoC. Cthulhu Dark is so simple that a quick read is all it takes to learn the rules. In terms of preparation, I could use the limited time I had to analyze, deconstruct, and transform the scenario into a format that would actually be gameable at the table.
Prep
So how did I go about prepping? I began with a read-through of the original scenario to get an overall sense of it. Then I went through it a second time to extract and build out several lists that would form the core of my director’s notes. Classic era CoC scenarios are notoriously wordy, essentially walls of text, and are totally unfit for use at the table. The lists I made were: NPCs, monsters, locations, clues, and events. I took some inspiration from this 19th Level blog post for this approach.
Once I had my rough set of notes in place, I relied on my trusty LLM to populate it with details from the scenario. I removed any CoC-specific mechanical details or restated them where appropriate in Cthulhu Dark terms. Conducting this transformation was fairly straightforward, and the document that resulted from this process was perfectly serviceable at the table. I did not need to refer back to the original scenario during play, except for one or two instances when I was unsure about something, which I could have ignored and improvised on, in hindsight. I can’t share these notes here because they contain too much of the original material.
What else did I do? I created a quick-start guide for my players, which they could use to get into the vibe of the scenario and create a character. I made a custom list of male and female names for them to choose from or roll on, a set of occupations, and a set of connections to the scenario. This worked out great at the table—players had jotted down an interesting character on an index card in no time at all. I’ve shared this guide below.
I used Photoshop to edit the area map into an incomplete player-facing version, and did the same with the camp map. I strive to provide players with as much information as possible to help them make informed, meaningful choices. I scanned and printed the large area map from Tales of the Miskatonic Valley, cut out and printed the NPC portraits, and included the image of the statue they can find.
The rest of the handouts in the scenario I recreated were taken from the text and reworked in Pages.app. While I was at it, I created a few additional newspaper clippings for the various legends of the mound, a BSAIR membership info handout based on the boxed text in the book, split the two versions of the tale of the mound into separate handouts, and created a newspaper clipping to share the basic information at the outset.
Another thing I created, something I can share here, is a Cthulhu Dark hack for the lloigor’s magic point drain attack that occurs throughout the scenario. I could have chosen not to translate this into a mechanic. Still, it plays such a prominent role in the original that I couldn’t resist giving it some heft. I gave players their Drain Die after the first night they spent in camp. That was a cool, dramatic moment.
Finally, I made a set of Cthulhu Dark reference sheets for my GM screen, acquired and printed the outside art from the 7th edition CoC keeper’s screen for the exterior, got some cool green dice for the Insight die, and put together a playlist with mood music, mostly Carpenter movie soundtracks, some Tangerine Dream, and similar fare.
I proposed this idea on December 15, and we sat down to play on January 10. Granted, I had two weeks of holiday break during that period. Still, I didn’t get to spend as much time on this as I initially thought, due to other commitments, and my day-to-day life is pretty busy with work and family. All of which is to say that this did not require a tremendous amount of work to put together. And everything was hugely enjoyable.
Running the Game
Character creation was a breeze and kind of fun, particularly the part where players brainstormed how their characters were related and chose the hook that best fit their character. I had decided to skip over all the initial scenes in the module about getting to the dig and made the opening scene the one where they see a stone go up in smoke. That worked well.
We settled into a rhythm of going around the table and asking players what they wanted to do, then resolving small scenes accordingly. I think next time I want to be a little more forceful with framing and ending scenes as a director, but for the most part, the play flowed fairly well. I had a lot of NPCs to learn and juggle, which was a bit of a challenge, and sometimes conversations petered out where I could have cut earlier. But nothing major. I was glad I’d embellished the NPC notes with character actors from films from the 80s and 90s to emulate, along with wants, needs, and things they could offer players.
The Cthulhu Dark rules state that players should be the ones deciding when to roll their Insight die, and we stuck to that. It takes some getting used to because you’re essentially making life difficult for your own character. Some players took to it more than others, and one player commented that they forgot to roll when caught up in the moment of the director describing something creepy or horrific. I think we had about one or two Insight rolls per character.
We also had a moment where we were unsure about the rule that you get to reroll as often as you like when the Insight die is included. Two aspects are crucial here: the Insight roll triggers immediately, and a lower roll still stands. So you can’t cherry-pick.
The degrees of success worked well for me as a director. If a player got more than they bargained for, I could simply look to my list of clues and progress to the next one. Disconnecting clues from locations, events, and NPCs is crucial here. It means there are never any dead ends.
The Failure die being shared among players is also fun. On one occasion, a player rolled against another when they felt it would be entertaining for that character to fail.
Players got the idea that this was a game about doomed investigators, and that it was about watching their slow descent into madness or death. I like how the game is laser-focused on this. That extends to there not being any combat subsystems. If you try to fight mythos monsters, you will most likely die, plain and simple.
We ended on a cliffhanger. Already looking forward to next month’s game.
One thing I’ll have to finesse is the fact that we have a varying group of players from session to session, so we might need to explain away the absence of characters from the previous session and the sudden presence of others. This is one of the strengths of the old-school style of D&D, where each session begins and ends in town. But for a miniseries, we can handwave the issue.
Resources
Here are a couple of things I put together for this game that might be useful if you’re planning to run this scenario yourself.
The Drain Die
A supplemental rule for Cthulhu Dark to model the lloigor’s nightly magic point drain in “The Watcher in the Valley.”
Setup: Each investigator takes a second die, distinct from their green Insight Die. A sickly yellow or pale die works well thematically. Set this Drain Die to 6. Your Drain represents your vital energy. As the lloigor feeds on you night after night, it decreases toward 1.
When to Roll: Roll your Drain Die each night you sleep within the lloigor’s territory (generally north of the river, within a couple miles of the mound), or when the director decides the lloigor is specifically targeting you for draining.
Making a Drain Roll: Roll your Drain Die. If you roll lower than your current Drain, decrease your Drain by 1. For example: your Drain is currently 4. You roll and get a 3. Your Drain drops to 3.
The Effects of Drain:
- 6: Healthy, full vitality
- 5: Restless sleep, unsettling dreams
- 4: Persistent fatigue, dull headaches
- 3: Injuries refuse to heal; a successful roll using occult knowledge reveals the weakness feels unnatural (costs 0/1 Insight)
- 2: Obvious frailty; you may not roll the Human Die for physically demanding tasks
- 1: Bedridden, delirious, or barely functional; the lloigor may single you out for possession or worse
Protection: An Elder Sign worn while sleeping protects you from draining, so you do not need to make Drain Rolls. However, the lloigor notices this protection and may single you out for other forms of attention.
Recovery: You can recover Drain by escaping the lloigor’s influence. Spend a full day and night outside the lloigor’s territory (south of the river, or far from the mound). At the end of that rest, roll your Drain Die. If you roll higher than your current Drain, increase your Drain by 1. Recovery is slow. You can only attempt one recovery roll per full day of rest outside the valley.
Design Notes: The Drain Die mirrors the Insight Die but inverts its logic. Insight starts at 1 and increases toward 6 (lost to madness), while Drain begins at 6 and decreases toward 1 (helpless, targeted). Insight rises when you roll higher than your current value; Drain falls when you roll lower. Together, these two dice create a pincer: the horrors push Insight up. At the same time, the lloigor pulls Drain down, squeezing the investigators from both sides.