Our second session of Cthulhu Dark, continuing from Session 0, 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. The dig goes on. The investigators dig deeper—in every sense—and things at the camp are getting stranger.
The characters
This session sees a different lineup from Session 0. Winnie and Philip are laid up in their tents with some kind of food poisoning, and two new faces join the dig.
- Josephine Hartley, bookkeeper (TM)
- Margaret “Peggy” Sullivan, stenographer (DZ)
- Chester Holbrook, nurse (HB)
- Edmund Thorne, stringer (JW)
What happened
We resume on the afternoon of the second day. Chester introduces himself to Francks. Edmund talks to Hanshaw and learns about his motivations for being at the dig. Peggy cares for Minnie and Philip, who are unwell in their tents. Meanwhile, Josephine sneaks back into Mills’s tent and steals his revolver and a box of ammo. Our bookkeeper is not messing around.
The group decides to investigate the Anakoke village. Hanshaw drives them over in his sedan. They pass ancient, abandoned farms on the way, then make the quarter-mile trek through the forest to the old dig site. Several square pits mark the locations of previous excavations. Chester and Josephine investigate and are treated to horrific visions of the village being burned down. In the ruins, they find a small statue of a monstrous, betentacled frog. They return to camp shaken but with a prize.
That evening, Chester, Edmund, and Josephine spend time in the lab tent. Peggy talks to Jim while cooking dinner. Josephine, to her great horror, connects the dots between the dam’s established age, the village, and the stones on the mound. All six hundred years old. The legends could be true. Then, the papers she’s been going through fly off the table onto the floor. Francks, angry, tells them to leave. On their way out, Edmund grabs a few papers off the floor.
On the morning of day three, Chester, Edmund, and Peggy wake up after a night of restless sleep and bad dreams. Josephine’s sleep wasn’t as bad as the previous night, but still not great. Mills returns to camp that morning. Chester and Edmund introduce themselves and tell him about the statue they found in the village. Mills hurries to the lab tent to study it.
Josephine, ever the opportunist, makes use of Mills’s absence to sneak into his tent again to check whether he has brought his briefcase. He has. Chester goes to get ready for a day of work at the mound. Peggy looks up Francks to ask him when they’ll get paid. Not before the end of the week, he tells her.
Josephine goes looking for tools in the storage tent. Quiskamohan visits the camp and once again tells them they really should be leaving if they know what’s good for them. They do not leave.
Josephine breaks open Mills’s suitcase, removes a journal, and manages to close it without barely leaving a trace. The rest of the crew—everyone except Mills and Josephine—heads to the mound to remove another stone.
While inspecting the hole left by the stone, Chester feels like he’s being observed by something from within the mound. Then, an invisible force pushes him off the mound and into the swamp below.
Meanwhile, Edmund ducks out of helping at the mound. On his way back to camp, he runs into John Read, who quizzes him about whether new valuables have been turned up. Back in camp, Josephine reads Mills’s journal, which definitively disproves her suspicions about his malicious designs. But it only deepens her obsession.
Edmund returns to the lab tent to study the papers he stole the night before. Mills is there as well, at work on the statue. Edmund finds hints that the Anakoke Indians were deformed—having too many or too few limbs. Mills, for some reason, appreciates Edmund’s dedication and promotes him to research assistant, granting him unrestricted future access to the papers in the lab tent.
The fourth stone is removed and carried back to camp, where it is placed in the lab tent with the other one. Josephine tosses Mills’s journal into the campfire pit. Chester changes out of his soggy attire, joins the rest at the fire, and zones out while staring into the flames. Read and Mills argue over the statue. Read wants to move it to the BSAIR offices in Boston for public display; Mills wants to keep it for further study.
We end the session there, on the afternoon of the third day.
Director’s reflections
Players take note: spoilers ahead!
Insight rolls
Insight rolls are becoming more prevalent compared to Session 0, and the mechanic continues to work really nicely. Players are becoming more comfortable risking it, and the moments when it triggers feel genuinely tense. One thing I’m finding is that adding horrific extras on a roll of six—when investigating, say—takes less effort than improvising brand new information on a high success. I can lean on atmosphere and dread, which comes naturally, whereas pulling a new revelatory clue out of thin air mid-scene is harder. I need to build a deeper bench of clues ready to deploy.
Pacing
Pacing is the big thing I want to address going forward. My players noted that things could move faster, and I agree. We covered about a single in-game day across the session. Still, the scenario’s timeline is keyed to in-game days, so the next major event doesn’t trigger for several more days. In hindsight, I should have advanced things more aggressively—when they were once again inspecting a hole in the mound, for instance, that would have been the moment to push toward the next big beat.
The Cthulhu Dark book addresses this. It says to be brave about cutting and fading scenes, to cut when nothing new or interesting is happening, even if the investigators are still doing things. The book even models it explicitly: “Okay. So, the next morning, you all come down to breakfast…” You can skip days entirely by just saying so. I need to exercise the scalpel more confidently.
But I think a mechanical structure would help too, as a crutch for knowing when to cut and when to escalate. I’ve been thinking about a few ideas, mostly stolen from other games.
The cleanest fit is probably clocks from Blades in the Dark. A clock is a circle divided into segments. When fiction-relevant things happen, you fill segments. When it fills, the event fires. I could make a timetable clock that I manage behind the screen: every time a scene ends with something meaningfully advancing—they learn a real clue, the horror does something, a day passes—I fill a segment. The players don’t need to see it. When it fills, the next big thing happens regardless of what they’re doing. This reframes the five-day timetable from counting in-fiction days to counting dramatic beats, which is what actually matters for pace.
I’m also drawn to Trophy Dark’s ring structure. Trophy apparently grew out of the same design lineage as Cthulhu Dark, and it organizes the horror into concentric rings of depth. You advance to the next ring when the current one is exhausted—when there’s nothing left to discover at this level of proximity. Instead of asking “how many days have passed?” you ask “how deep are they?” The big event isn’t tied to day five; it fires when they’ve moved through enough rings. The mound hole isn’t a time question; it’s a depth question.
I might also try framing play in larger time blocks: morning, afternoon, evening. Open each block with a single question—”It’s the following morning. What are you trying to find out?”—play a scene around that intention, and cut when it resolves. This is essentially what games like Ironsworn do. It won’t fix pace on its own, but combined with more aggressive cutting and a clock ticking away behind the screen, it should help a lot.
One idea I considered and discarded: tying the advancement of the timeline to rolling a six on the Cthulhu Dark dice. Tempting, but the six is already doing important work—it’s the “glimpse of the horror” result. Adding a second effect muddies the design, and the hacking chapter warns against precisely this kind of rule stacking.
Housekeeping
One minor thing I’ll do before the next session is pregenerate a schedule of attendance for the major NPCs. I came up with these clever n-in-6 rolls for NPC attendance, derived from the original scenario, but rolling through them at the start of each in-game day is more of a chore than I’d like. A pre-rolled schedule will let me just glance at a table and know who’s around.
I also tweaked my soundtrack playlist, using some analytics to filter out the songs that are too propulsive, too short, or that have lyrics. The mood music is working well, but those tracks were breaking the atmosphere.
Overall
We’re having a lot of fun with this. As a director, I find the story-focused, rules-light system quite freeing and a welcome change from running classic D&D. Two sessions in, the investigators are thoroughly enmeshed in the dig’s web of secrets and suspicions, and the horror is only beginning to make itself felt. Looking forward to the next one.