Hello everyone! I'm looking for a preferably non-mythos adventure, containing ghosts or haunted locations, with a lot of puzzles and plot twists. I'd prefer it to be set in modern day setting, but that's not most important.
I know this is very specific, but can anyone recommend an adventure that might fit some of the description?
Thanks!
Don't want to see these links? Register & Log in to YSDC.
Personaly I dislike the idea of non mythos adventures featuring supernatural accurances but I do seem to remember that a member of the forum talked about a number of such adventures on the Gaslight thread. Perphaps he might be interested in letting you playtest a few of his.
I'll try to find it.
I understand and agree that non-mythos supernatural elements should be used with caution (if at all) in a mythos adventure, but this is gonna be a completely non-mythos adventure. Basically just using the CoC ruleset. I figured this still might be the best place to ask for advice
"Music From a Darkened Room" would be perfect, I think. It's Delta Green, but you could adapt it pretty easily for non-DG Investigators. Best of all, it's free to download at Dennis Detweiller's site. I ran it once, and it's a great haunted house scenario.
EDIT: also, something I've always wanted to do that I think would be a reasonable amount of work is to adapt MR James's short story "The Treasure of Abbott Thomas" into a Call of Cthulhu adventure. There's a nice puzzle presented there involving decoding a Latin message using a triptych of stained glass window, but with a bit of work you could make it work using handouts and translating the message into modern English.
"The Haunted House" scenario by Keith Herber in Trail of Tsathoggua (reprinted in Curse of Cthulhu) is an old-fashioned (or not... but it's not Mythos-connected) haunting with a twist. It could also be argued that the classic "The Haunting" scenario from the rulebook is a classic non-mythos haunted house adventure, the Mythos tome contained within notwithstanding.
"Suffer, Little Children" from Day of the Beast also concerns spectres and ghostly apparitions, as does the first and last scenarios in the Coming Full Circle campaign. In fact, Coming Full Circle is an entire campaign devoted to "regular" folklore in CoC.
That's what I could think of for now. Hope that helps.
Max
"How can I believe in a pig that talks?"
I'll second this one, it's pretty good and the house hates people more than a whole convention of misanthropes. To make it non-mythos you'll mostly need to replace the [spoiler] with Satan or Kali (may require cultural tweaking) and the [spoilers] with the corisponding cultural icons.Originally Posted by Dr_Locrian
As far as non-mythos hauntings go there arn't many published although there is a pretty simple format to use with a place/person that hates living things and a way to undo it or burn it down or just the goal of escape.
Also, there is another scenario that I think is in the v5.14159 rulebook, it may be in others about a house and a thing that rips out hearts that can be translated into ghost by saying the thing is a ghost.
I ran a CofC adventure called "Memories of Madness" at GenCon 2006 that was based (in a twisted way) on my ghost hunting experiences as the science advisor for the VGHRS (now CPRI; though I've not been involved since 2005 or so) and, of course, my 20+ years playing and keeping Call of Cthulhu. The working title was "ghosthunting gone bad" It takes place in 1999 (so it is "semi-historical") near Madison, Wisconsin. As a tournament adventure, I have fully developed pregenerated characters that can be used (or you could allow PCs to run their own, though the "hook" is a ghost hunt being conducted by a fictional Wisconsin Paranormal group, so you might need an NPC or two for it to work.
If interested, let me know and I might be able to scan the handouts that are not already PDFs (main adventure is). Music froma a Darkened Room also looks quite good.
I'm a big fan of non-mythos horror roleplaying, and I too use the CoC ruleset to represent it (in fact, there's a section in basic roleplaying on this very topic, and it presents the CoC sanity rules to represent the effects of fear and the supernatural).
If you can pick up the Gaslight supplement 'Sacraments of Evil' on eBay, there are a couple of non-mythos adventures in there - not ghosts, unfortunately. The 1920s Great Britain monograph 'Kingdom of the Blind' has a non-mythos 'black shuck' scenario. Aside from those, I'd recommend reading some classic ghost stories and adapting your own scenario - as mentioned earlier, M R James is a great one to start with, and check out Susan Hill's The Woman in Black (book, play or film) for a contemporary take on the Victorian ghost story.
The scenario 'Masterwork of Nicholas Forby' out of Sacraments is basically a ghost story.the Gaslight supplement 'Sacraments of Evil'
It's not modern day tho, and probably couldn't be converted, which may be a bind for the original poster.
The Haunted House, last seen in Curse of Cthulhu, is the biggest and best for the OPs purposes.
With a few changes to dates it could be brought up to the present. In the scenario as it stands (1920s set), the house has lain empty for several years. You could just extend that adding in a couple of incidents in the meantime such as the time the maintainance crew was hired to fix the roof and the disaster that could have happened, and perhaps even the time the parapsychologists of the 30s visited and went away defeated.
The Coming Full Circle offers 4 separate non-mythos scenarios designed to be run in sequence but which could be dealt with individually.
The monograph The Parapsychologist's Handbook would be useful background, though it lacks scenarios.
I've run 'Suffer the Children', and there is an account in my journal.
http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.p...isplay&jid=465
Hope this is helpful. Best, malcojones
To this day, my favorite experience playing and keeping in Call of Cthulhu are from that particular adventure. I still run it every few years when I can get enough new players lined up. Brings back memories! As far as adventures goes, I usually *heavily* modify "stock" adventures because they are too easy, linear, too many clues, not enough red herrings, etc., that adventure is virtually perfect (IMHO) as is...The Haunted House, last seen in Curse of Cthulhu, is the biggest and best for the OPs purposes.
Am I the only one who thinks this is exactly the kind of thing we could do with having uploaded to YSDC ? Any chance you could package up the pdfs and host them on the archive vonkeitz?I ran a CofC adventure called "Memories of Madness" at GenCon 2006 that was based (in a twisted way) on my ghost hunting experiences as the science advisor for the VGHRS (now CPRI; though I've not been involved since 2005 or so) and, of course, my 20+ years playing and keeping Call of Cthulhu. The working title was "ghosthunting gone bad" It takes place in 1999 (so it is "semi-historical") near Madison, Wisconsin. As a tournament adventure, I have fully developed pregenerated characters that can be used (
If interested, let me know and I might be able to scan the handouts that are not already PDFs (main adventure is). Music froma a Darkened Room also looks quite good.
I am mulling over a modern day CSI/Silence of the Lambs/The Cell proceedural/supernatural scenario for a Gumshoe game myself but have as usual not written anything yet.
Kadath
Be honored to Kadath. I drew the building layout (to be investigated) based on pictures from a now defunct website that featured pictures of abandoned buildings so I the handouts include black and white pictures of "views" of various places inside and outside the long-abandoned (and long since demolished) building. I'll look into revising the adventure some to make it more "generalizable" but the tourney character sheets include pictures of people I gleaned off the web, so I'll need to remove the pix.
How does that sound?
At the risk of shameless self-pluggery, there's a non-mythos ghost scenario in the GM booklet for Uncanny Midnight Tales that might suit you. It would need conversion to BRP, but that's not hard. It's theoretically set in 1930, but there's nothing in it that can't easily be modern day instead.
-The Gneech
gneech.com -- My writing, comics, and art, including Suburban Jungle, NeverNever, and the Brigid & Greg Fictionlets
In a word is sounds faaaaantastic
Kadath
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks