Unspeakable: First play

[spamtramp]

Our Inspectres kinghts were having a long vacation, one of them was on life support, so this week we had some unexpected turn of events, at least for me unexpected.
It turned out that the order of Black Rose maintained a good relation with the cult "Ineffables".
So we got a bunch of Ineffable Novices joining the Frat House (now it is called Black Rose Stronghold),
so the Unspeakable game started where we left the Inspectres game.
The new characters had "Wisdom" instead of Sanity. But this is just a name change, everything else was the same as in the Unspeakable game except for Cool. The rool book does not say a word about Cool. So we used it just as in the previous game.
Except that you can not use it in Sanity checks.
I mean Wisdom checks.
Even so for a long time nobody lost any Sanity.
The character backgrounds were rather normal: miner, trapper, a trader at an elf trading post, lumberjack, etc...
They said they have already lost 3 Sanity when the game started. With this they bribed me into letting them set it up the way they wanted.

Previously they did not know each other. All of them were visited in their dreams by the Great Cthulhu, and told them
to go to this particular Black rose Stronghold, and offer their services. He imbued them with some investigative powers(they selected Shadow Run totems) and they got a spell. This spell needs all of them to be cast. It consecrates a place into a Threshold.
So the Pit is called Threshold.
After they joined the Stronghold, they have set up the Threshold in the basement at an empty wall, now there seems to be a gateway opened, but they did not dare to cross it just yet. The gateway over the threshold emits a midnight blue version10 light, they also experienced that any torch in the basement emits light only on the opposite side from where the Threshold is. They had 5 scores/investigator in it, and for the 3 Sanity lost they got 1 point in each of the Unspeakable skills.

At this point they heard some kids have disappeared around the pastures, and something is sucking the blood of the cows.
The suck marks turned out small Byakhee suck marks, closer observation prompted taht after the Byakhee left his marks there something else came and sucked out even more blood, making sure that did not disturb much the very specific Byakhee suck marks.
At the end of the previous game one of the characters obtained a baby byakhee, which is imprinted to him, and it is also invisible, and I was reminded that it also smells very good but if you try to figure out what the smell reminds you, you loose some sanity.

So here the investigation started, there were 2 major fights, and one person went absolutely insane by the end of the game.

This game went completely orthogonal to anything I expected, they were waiting more for my instructions than in the previous game,
and I wasn't ready to tell them any events.
I need to have a larger set of events at hand.

It would be nice to have a list of "what happened" events in lieu of modules for this game.

For me the evens were:
-lost kids
-an earthquake (the game takes place on a cloud city, so in theory earthquakes are not possible)
-a summoned monster appearing (the thing from the woods)
-werewolf marks all over the place

The characters set up a nice fight with a dark elf cult an defeated the thing from the woods,
they painted themselves in the corner against the werewolfs, so they had to run,
the last big fight happened inside the stronghold they had to run from there too,
they run into some other vampire like creatures,
(Barbies: if they bite you, you turn into a Barbie or a little pony)
they realized that their previous characters ARE in the stronghold
where the werewolfs are being rampant, so they managed to recruit the vampires to clean out the stronghold from the werewolfs.
They wanted to kill the Barbies, I mean vampires afterwards, however one of the character acquired the "Horny Boy" trait and valiantly defended them right until he went permanently insane.

We used a CoC insanity table every time someone lost Wisdom. So they finished the game with lots of phobias.
The miner's first phobia was fear of depths, then he got claustrophobic and fear of heights, and he also got fear of darkness, and he got this urging impulse to set things on fire.

It never turned out who sucks the cows' blood because in the middle of investigation the entire barn burned down, this includes the cows in there, and some nasties were trapped there too. (you see there was this miner I have talked about above with gallons of holy oil at his hand, it was a dark night, and there were hairy things lurking in the barn, and he got this urge...)

All in all things went well, I need to have more events and somehow tailor them more for the group, so they can do something with it.
The inspectres game made them much more active, they got a lot of good ideas from the events I told them.

The confessionals went OK.

I will not be surprised if in the next game the knights get some squires, because they will be still on vacation and the Ineffables need some calm recovery time too.

A request from the players is that sometimes I should roll for the nasties too to see if they get successful with the things that happen.

for example when a kid is gone (apparently stolen by the werewolfs) I should roll to see if they botched the job, but for this I should know in advance if it was a werewolf job, so I don't know....
They also requested a more elaborate combat system.
Take the following thing for example:
A vampire is hiding in the bushes mentally controlling his minions.
One group of zombies advancing on the characters, on a little hill close by a group of skeleton archers shooting at the characters, and there is a ghoul priest behind the zombies in the middle of a pentagram, busy with some kind of ritual.

So how is this going to be played? Lets say a character grabs an axe and rolls a 6 on his single Athletics die.
Can I let him tell how he defeated all these forces in hand-to-hand combat? It does not seem to be right.
Some problems like this came up during the game.

It is allright to give the control to the player, but the scale of success should be better determined. Maybe the opponent should get a roll too, and their comparative roll should give some input to the player how he can turn the events.

[spamtramp]

I have just got a copy of InSpace. It tries to address some of the problems I had in the last game.