Our third session of Cthulhu Dark, continuing from session zero and session one, 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 time around, I committed to really leaning into the directorial stance implied by Cthulhu Dark, and away from the wargamey, sandboxy approach I’ve gotten used to running classic D&D. As a result, we covered about double the in-game time we did in previous sessions. There was less dice rolling. Less extended NPC conversation. More hard cuts. It felt right. Read on for the play report.
Play report
The characters
- Philip Hennessey, itinerant photographer (MG)
- Margaret “Peggy” Sullivan, stenographer (DZ)
- Howard Pemberton, automobile mechanic (NtH)
- Chester Holbrook, visiting nurse (HB)
What happened
We resume on the afternoon of Day 3. Two new arrivals at the dig. Howard Pemberton has been driving along the Pike in his flashy car when he spots the marsh from his dreams and decides to pull over and investigate. Philip Hennessey rejoins the group as well. He’d gone back to town to develop his film. Photos taken in and around the mound have turned out completely black. Must have been some kind of technical error.
Three stones remain on the mound. The team gets to work removing the fifth one. Afterwards, Howard visits the lab tent, introduces himself to Francks, and inspects the artefacts uncovered so far. The toad-thing statuette gives him the creeps.
Day 4. Mills returns to camp along with Mildred, Alice, and Will. The team spends the morning removing the last two stones from the mound. In the afternoon, the investigators go to visit the abandoned Calban farm. Jim guides them to the site. It’s not much more than a half-collapsed shed at this point. Various animal bones and skulls hang from the porch. The whole thing gives them the willies but produces no useful information. In the meantime, the dig personnel back in camp begin excavating the mound proper.
Day 5. Francks, Mildred, Alice, and Will leave. Hanshaw returns to camp, and the Keirs visit too. Reid briefly swings by to give Mills another hard time about transporting artifacts to Boston, stat. Dalton Keir asks Reid about when they’ll go hunting again. Reid says he’ll come back with some friends for a hunting party soon.
The team excavates the mound further and finds the remains of a skeleton. When reconstructing it back in the lab tent, Chester discovers that it has a cleanly amputated ring finger. The team continues digging and uncovers arrowheads and axe heads. Later, they uncover a second skeleton. When they assemble this one, they realize it has a vestigial tail.
That night, Howard wakes up from dreams of chasing lights through the marsh. He sees an actual yellow ball of light outside his tent. He chases it into the marsh. At some point the light stops and dances up and down, as if indicating something. When he’s almost close enough to touch it, he drops into a deep hole. The light winks out. Luckily he manages to drag himself out and make his way back to camp.
At dawn, the rest of the investigators find Howard sitting at the smoldering remains of the campfire, covered head to toe in marsh mud, with a haunted look on his face.
Day 6. Mills leaves. Francks returns. Mildred leaves too. Alice and Will arrive, take a quick look around, hear what’s been happening, and Will insists they leave again. Philip heads back to town to develop his latest batch of photos.
They resume excavating and find a huge pelvic bone. When Chester studies it in the lab tent, he determines it must have belonged to an enormous amphibious creature. Francks confidently dates it to about 600 years ago. But there were no huge amphibious creatures back then. Surely there must be some reasonable explanation for all of this. They also find more deformed skeletons. Bone growths. Vestigial limbs.
Day 7. Mills returns with Mildred. Peggy has woken up feeling so terrible she cannot go on. She takes Winifred and makes to leave. The rest watch the two sisters head off down the trail, but then hear them speaking with two men with a thick farmer’s accent.
We end the session there.
Director’s reflections
Players take note: spoilers ahead!
Happy accidents
The hook that Howard Pemberton’s player rolled during character creation was “drawn by recurring nightmares of a marsh and yellow lights.” This turned out to be a happy accident. When the timeline indicated it was time for the first full-on lloigor attack, I rolled for which type it would be. And what do you know: I got the will-o’-the-wisp attack. Howard’s backstory and the scenario’s event calendar dovetailed perfectly without any planning on my part.
Hard framing
Hard framing of scenes went much better than in previous sessions. I tried to skip the inconsequential lead-up and cut away as soon as something meaningful had happened. I also told the players up front that I’d be doing this, and they were okay with it. As a by-product, I found myself using more visual description, or more precisely, describing as if we were watching things unfold on screen. Everybody seemed to enjoy that aspect.
Less rolling, less talking
As a kind of side effect of this more proactive directorial stance, I leaned less on die rolls unless something really was at stake. Similarly, I handled most NPC interactions “off-screen” unless playing out an exchange actually added something. Which, at this point, was hardly ever the case. What remained were short sound bites from NPCs, interspersed with quick descriptions of the interaction. This kept things moving without losing the camp’s flavor as a busy, populated place.
The prep pays off
The reorganized layered timeline I put together between sessions worked well. It helped me focus on a small subset of events I’d want to trigger at the next opportune moment, rather than scanning through everything each time. The pre-generated NPC attendance schedule for each day proved its worth too. It was kind of fun to do a quick update of the comings and goings at camp each in-game morning, and it made the world feel alive without requiring any improvisation on my part.
Looking ahead, I think we are likely to get one, maybe two more sessions out of this scenario. It’s been a fun diversion so far. Having now sort of cracked the code on how to use Cthulhu Dark to run classic Call of Cthulhu scenarios, I might want to try my hand at one or two more that have been on my bucket list for ages. (For example, The Secret of Castronegro.) On the other hand, now that I’ve had a little break from my on-going classic D&D campaign, I wouldn’t mind refereeing some nice and simple dungeon crawling again.