#394

One Shots

This week I ran the Call of Cthulhu scenario Dead Light, incorporating some of the suggestions from Seth Skorkowsky’s review like starting the evening before the scenario with the PCs making plans to attend a seance. The players caught on pretty quickly that the adventure was here on the road, and that the seance had just been a framing device, but I still think it was a good choice.

The scenario is pretty limited in scope, it’s kind of a “theme park” adventure where the GM just presents weird things to the players that they can’t really influence, but that’s ok for a one-shot (or as a brief interlude in a campaign). I prepared by coming up with a list of key scenes beforehand, and more or less just worked my way through the list over the course of the session. The players did end up trapping the Dead Light back in its box, they conducted the ritual to seal it away but used the doctor’s dead body rather than a living victim, I had the Light visibly unsure, looking between the corpse and the living characters, and the one leading the ritual had to make a hard POW roll (which they succeeded at) to convince it to go for the body. If they’d failed, the Light would have consumed them.

All in all, a fun sidetrack. Next week we’re going to do some Whitehack, to make sure everyone enjoys it since that’s what I’m planning to use for the next campaign. If someone does hate it, I guess it’s back to the drawing board!