Well, most of the first hour was taken up by both the players needing to feed themselves and develop their Characters. I pretty much sat back and made the players find where I had posted instructions to develop their Characters before hand and follow them. While I enjoy beverages during a game, I really think meals and snacks should be done away from the session. As a GM I am not up here yapping so I can listen to crunching and watch ppl chew with their mouths open, so food just gets on my nerves. Then as the last bites were consumed, we did the GM-Player thing about filling out the Characters with their backgrounds. Then we took a break because we were at the 55 minute marker and I am 50 minute play-10 minute break enthusiast.
Apologies to my European friends but starting later in the North American evening for a horror game was awesome. Once everyone had full bellies, the lateness of the hour in our collective diurnal cycles helped set the mood. The titillation of the darkness of night only getting darker and deeper, just had everyone in the mood so to speak. Indeed the two players, Peryton and Curtis, are very experienced roleplayers but neither had sat around in CoC groups from 1980 until about 1992, experiencing the 1920s fetishism; they somehow got the vibe quickly. I was answering questions about whether coca-cola still had cocaine in it as late as 1927 and everyone was looking for a speak-easy.
The two Characters had perfect CoC Occupations, a reporter and an art historian as I sexyed up the Pickman story. The art historians were called to an art gallery where an undiscovered Pickamn painting needed to authenticated. I had made notes on the paintings', the new one and two for comparison, subjects and details. I think my descriptions of the paintings along creeped out the players. The experts Curtis, Kurt Van Dyke, and his coworker Judy Penworth would conclude that the found piece was convincing but a forgery because it was too new. Meanwhile, Pery, Becky Fitzgerald, would be a little too curious about the paintings, the Pickman family, and the art house owner Berthold Lancaster, like a good reporter.
At the hotel, Van Dyke would spend some time on the restaurant veranda looking through Pickman's works. Fitzgerald would use her time to get the contact information for the artist's next of kin using the night desk at her newspaper. The night finished off with the art scholar seeing a ghoul in the woods watching him. A Sanity Check had the professor convincing himself that he had a seen a local walking past but had "Pickman on the mind."
In the morning while the Characters breakfasted, the local sheriff stopped by and started asking them questions about themselves and their interview with Lancaster the evening before. When one of them asked, finally, why did he want to know, he informed them that there was a break in at the art gallery and that Lancaster had not gone home to his wife that night. When he heard about the Pickman paintings he asked which of the two were they checking out. Eyebrows raised, the PCs answered. They were asked not to leave town as he "checked a couple of things out."
Becky would spend the morning getting in touch with Pickman's nephew in New York to find out that Lancaster had no permission to do anything near his uncle's work let alone family property. So just after lunch, the group, not able to leave town anyway, decided to some, well, let's call it investigating. Bumping into the Sheriff at the Pickman household, the PC's mentioned that they had spoken with the family member in charge of the property, and he was a little too busy to not assume that they did not have specific permission to be there. He had his notes and left them to their business and left. The PCs found that someone had tried to burn down the garage after doing some graffiti using expensive art school paints on the wall. The inscription read "You Fraud!" and other things. like a pretty drunk and angry owner of an art gallery getting a little out of hand.
Of course the investigators promptly broke into the house and went directly to the basement. They found the artist's work space and a hidden door that lead into a collapsed tunnel. Fitzgerald would lead the party outside and find thr traces of the collapsed tunnel in the lawn and garner the general direction it would have lead. Even when I had Professor Judy try to distract them with exploring the house some more, they decided to explore into the woods.
It is here where they found the abandoned cemetery and a car that they recognized as Lancaster's. And it was only 4pm. They found a mausoleum that was in a fairly decent state of repair compared the rest of the place. And they found what had to be clothes of one of Pickman's models from the now missing third painting.
The party's unease increased when the noise of something like a coffin lid falling onto a floor. They started retreating quickly summarizing that Pickman was indeed still alive and painting. He was an insane psychopath that wasn't above living a graveyard and possibly eating human flesh. Then they found Lancaster's crucified body, and confirmed that eating human flesh wasn't out of bounds. It was late enough in the day to where I had the ghouls start to scamper about in the shadows. The investigators realized that there such things as ghouls and there were a lot of them. Lancaster's car became a quick getaway vessel.
Back in the town proper they got a hold of the Sheriff and related their tale. He detained them as he gathered a few men to investigate their far fetched claims. The PCs cooled in their heels over night. In the morning he would show back up harried and disheveled. About an hour before the 11:13am train to Boston would show up, he'd let them go and them not come back to town ever again. Before they left though, he'd ask Fitzgerald, "You say that you saw green glowing eyes?"
It was then she realized that he had seen them as well.
Analysis:
The players deciding to save the house exploration until later, really threw a kink in my night-attack plan with the ghouls, but it worked out.
As much as I am a fan of the Dreamlands and the ghouls of Lovecraft's writings, I kind of over them being the hobbits of CoC. They are creatures that reject their humanity for cannibalism and they shouldn't be played as nice and the people around them are not balanced sorts. It was kind of nice to ruffle the feathers of the PCs by having them move into the shady world of occultism and its truly brutal nature, while providing just a glimpse of it.
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