Yes, (belatedly) congratulations! It's well-deserved.
Spoiler: Originally Posted by Emrys Do you somehow have access to my notes? Well, if you will keep reflective surfaces in your laboratory... I'm very fond of hunting horrors, which feel a bit underused to me. Maybe because they're too tough to be ordinary combat encounters, but not typical major antagonist material? There must be a scenario in there... Anyway, they're perfect car-napping size. Although thinking about it, a horde of warped gremlins toting it away would be quite fun too. Originally Posted by Emrys Unfortunately I fully expect this to have been forgotten about by the next session - and basements tend not to burn well anyway. I think explosives are what's needed here. Unfortunately, this will mean that they lose access to the secrets they managed to avoid during their spelunking. True, unless you could persuade them to combine raiding and burning? I suppose the other thing is that they could be trapped in the basement by a fire, and have to do some exploring to find an escape route. Although from what I've read so far, I can't see them wanting to go back.
Originally Posted by Shimmin Beg The car meeting is a nice plan - I've not run into that one before. Although it's also a nice opportunity to be chased by, say, a hunting horror. Or kidnapped by one, come to that! Spoiler: Do you somehow have access to my notes? I've had a Horror waiting in the wings for a guest appearance for a while (sent by someone they seem to have forgotten all about). This beastie may make its appearance after something that happens in the next session. Originally Posted by Shimmin Beg It's taken them this long for arson to come up? I'm surprised. Spoiler: Unfortunately I fully expect this to have been forgotten about by the next session - and basements tend not to burn well anyway. I think explosives are what's needed here. Unfortunately, this will mean that they lose access to the secrets they managed to avoid during their spelunking. Originally Posted by Shimmin Beg I'm quite liking the interlacing of scenarios. It's one of the things I find tricky, because they're liable to either miss the clues, or else drop everything to chase up some foreshadowing and forget their immediate objective entirely. But you seem to be keeping a better handle on things. Spoiler: I'm trying to get a couple of the threads resolved (Chapter One of SOYS, The Books of Uncle Silas and the School of Positive Thinking red herring - as will hopefully become clear in the next session) if I can just persuade the investigators to take some action. If Mr O'Malley were to somehow acquire a cache of explosives I think a few threads might be wrapped up in a rather spectacular manner - his player's already earmarked his psychotherapist (or a colleague thereof) as his next character.
The car meeting is a nice plan - I've not run into that one before. Although it's also a nice opportunity to be chased by, say, a hunting horror. Or kidnapped by one, come to that! It's taken them this long for arson to come up? I'm surprised. I'm quite liking the interlacing of scenarios. It's one of the things I find tricky, because they're liable to either miss the clues, or else drop everything to chase up some foreshadowing and forget their immediate objective entirely. But you seem to be keeping a better handle on things.
Lol, I remember my Shellback ceremony. On the Tortuga. Loving the game session reports!
The pre-roll is something I usually do for D&D to avoid going back and forth a book to see what the players are going to fight. What I had not considered is adding information to each encounter, which is certainly a good idea
Congratulations
Thank you, Cole and Kuroda, much appreciated in a difficult week for me. Some news about this blog, actually - it's going to be published in the Veterinary Times.
Thank you! Your veterinary practice postings are themselves enough to bring me to YSDC -- I'm always glad to read them, even (or especially? I come here, nominally, for the horror...) ones like this.
Well-told
Nice review. I've only read the scenario and not had the chance to play it but I agree with your comments about the difficulty in Keepering the early part. Too few encounters and the players lose that feeling of the chaos and confusion surrounding Operation Dynamo; too many encounters and you run the risk of it turning into a squad based skirmish combat simulator (I liked the ASL nod). I think if I was to run this I would be tempted to pre-roll or choose my encounters and then try and find a way to include some piece of useful (but not vital) information in each one. That way they would seem more than just flavour/hIt point reducers but I would still have the option to cut them out if I thought the scenario was getting stagnated.
Thanks Johnny. I look forward to reading your thoughts.
This caught my eye: one day, perhaps, it might help?
Good heavens I didn't see that bit, it was well buried. But I understood that the business of these companies was to get packages from their 'customers' (people who look somewhat like you), aggregate them for easier shipping, clear them through U.S. Customs, and drop them in the mail at American domestic postage rates (which are bad enough but nothing nearly so outrageous as American overseas rates; I assume the situation is the same in Europe and Britain) addressed to 'retailers' or 'end users' (people who look somewhat like your recipients in the US) That is how I understood this: "Approved Global Direct Entry wholesalers work closely with customers to get shipments from overseas locations, have them cleared by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and entered into the United States Postal Service domestic network for delivery to a retailer and/or end consumer." It seems to be a species of freight forwarder for the postage be-rated and disgruntled. Incidentally, $250,000 in U.S. domestic parcel postage works out to just over 20,000 packages using the 12.35 express mail box (which can ship up to 70 pounds) While you may not do that individually, a quick tour round the rest of the British war gaming, manufacturing, and publishing community may well surprise you; I bet there are lots of people in the same state as you are.
Interesting read, but unfortunately we don't do a minimum of $250,000 a year in postage. Which reflects my point about small vs big postal operations and costs.
On the US Postal Service Website there is something called Postal Qualified Wholesalers, and Global Direct Entry Wholesalers, the last of which help exporters enter goods into the US, and into the US postal system domestically, and then expedite them to end users. I gather this would let the exporter obtain American local postage rates. https://www.usps.com/business/qualif...olesalers.htm?
Thanks for your kind words Pazuzu.
Originally Posted by Shimmin Beg ... unless someone walks headlong into an ambush ... The one advantage of Mr O'Malley's current state of mind is that he's unlikely to wander down any dark alleys on his own. Not voluntarily, at least. The others may not be quite so fortunate.
As long as everyone stays interested in what's going on it's not too bad. Like you said, it gets really hard to justify everyone hanging around all the time, especially when they're not actively investigating somewhere and they've all got different backgrounds. I suppose that's a slight disadvantage of how broad the character range gets in Cthulhu, but then unless someone walks headlong into an ambush or everyone gets the fidgets, it's not too bad. Ah, that makes sense. I started doing that myself for pretty much the same reason (my players never showed any enthusiasm for note-taking and I was too busy), although I'm slowly drifting into podcasting because all those audio files sitting around idly makes my inner librarian twitchy I know the feeling of trying to batter table talk into some kind of coherent structure after the fact... particularly when their ideas are full of gaping holes that were disguised by ten-minute gaps to make a cuppa or run a different scene.
O'Malley's descent into insanity is proving to be most amusing deeply concerning. Hopefully he'll now take the hint and seek help. I admit it'd be a lot easier if everyone kept together when doing research rather than heading off in different dirctions and I'm very aware that this means 3 or 4 players are sitting around whenever someone else is active, but it doesn't make a lot of sense for them to travel around en masse. I'll suggest they avoid splitting into more than two groups unless that's unavoidable (I can't imagine O'Malley going on a stake out with 4 other investigators getting in the way). There's definitely no podcast. I record sessions to save myself from having to take notes during play (already have plenty of things to keep myself occupied as it is). This has the added advantage that I don't forget about things that happened and can, where appropriate, quote scenes verbatim (as happened with the art gallery scene in this session). I shudder to think about how much editing would be required to get the audio in a fit state for broadcast and that's just not going to happen - for one thing a couple of the players are way too quiet. It already takes me 5 hours to transcribe and edit* 2.5 hours or so of gaming and that's plenty, thanks. * having to do things like moving discussions that were had across the table when they were actually in in the Orme Library, at Boston Public Library, on a train and poking around in the docks, for example, to taking place later that evening at Wilson's house.
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