“It’s a Cold and Wet Sunday” – Calendar and Weather in Investigative Horror

Closed on Sundays

Recently, in both 1920s Call of Cthulhu games I’m running, the players laid forth plans to get out on the town and get some shit done – knock on doors, talk to folks, figure out what was happening. But as they went about their business, they soon found that all the shops were closed and people were unavailable. It was Sunday, and most places are closed on Sunday.

This forced the players to retune their expectations and come at the problem in different ways. In one game, where they wanted to interview a shop owner, they asked if there was an apartment upstairs that might be the residence of the owner. There was indeed a residence, and a successful Luck roll later, they found the shop owner home on a Sunday morning, surprised in her morning robes, but willing to bring them in for tea and a brief visit.

In the other case, the group wanted to find a professor of archaeology at Miskatonic University and ask them some questions. Since there’s no school on Sunday, chances are the whole department is closed and no one available. “We’ll try anyway – see if anyone is working the weekend.”

Another Luck roll and this was a Critical Success – as it happened, they found the department head redoing his bookshelves on a Sunday, and were able to capture his imagination with their recent artifact finds. They engaged with the NPC and got the clues that sent the story off on a whole new direction…

In both cases, what might have originally been seen as a blocker – it’s Sunday so no clues for you! – was actually an opportunity for both the players and me to reframe the scene and solve the problem in a new way. It was less about preventing clues or encounters and more about verisimilitude and presenting the world in a way that feels real.

I love the word “verisimilitude.” First off, six syllables is a lot, and 50% more than my last name, so it’s just a big, neat word. Also, it packs a lot of punch for investigative horror games where the disparity and dichotomy between our “normal” reality and the cosmic horrors we encounter are what gives these stories a lot of punch.

The word means “the appearance of being true or real” and while that seems pretty straightforward, it’s definitely a tool that can easily be misused or mishandled in these sorts of games. It’s an amazing tool that definitely needs careful use.

I’m not even going to talk about people who use it to justify prejudice (racism, sexism, etc) in their games, saying “XXX people had no rights in that time period, so we’re going to lean into that part of the game.” Blech, no, shut up and go away.

I’m talking more about people who get lost in the details of the period and roleplay the least important part of the games – like buying bus tickets or presenting a dinner menu. These are neat, yes, and certainly taking a brief moment to set the scene and ground the story in historical appropriate details helps build the atmosphere.

But often writers and GMs get lost in these details and use them as excuses to avoid real stakes or interesting traction in the story. Just in my above example, I could have just said, no the place is closed on Sunday and moved on. But the players pushed back and asked for a way to work around in a manner that felt real. So they themselves leaned into the details and countered the real situation with appropriate details of their own.

This is good, and we want to encourage and reward this behavior. Good players, here is a clue.

But also good GM – I didn’t let the verisimilitude get in the way of the story and instead used the details to create something different than what was expected.

Cold and Tired

The next thing I’m trying to do with this verisimilitude is with the weather, which everyone is discussing but no one is doing anything about. Seriously, I describe the weather all the time, especially when it becomes inclement – rainy or even snowy and cold. One of my groups is currently in London during the month of February, and before that were in NYC in January, so I was constantly describing the cold weather in an effort to bring the scenes alive.

And that’s great, but… then what? So it’s raining and cold and overcast and damp, and we need to carry umbrellas and wear coats and hats… And then? How do these details make acting during these scenes more interesting and real? What tools can we as GMs bring to bear that make the weather more impactful?

I don’t actually know at this moment, but what I am wrestling with is being realistic with PC exhaustion, or “you haven’t slept in 36 hours because you’ve been running and gunning from the police, so you’re too tired to do anything.” Again, this came up in both of my games, and I wrestled with how to bring realism to the game and still keep it fun.

No one wants to be left out when the group gets together to discuss clues and the mystery and what to do next. I don’t. Those scenes are one of the best parts of the game, and it’s no fun to be told by the GM “you failed your CON roll so you’re asleep in the other room.”

I know that it’s not fun, because I did that in both games and watched the players itch to get back in the scenes. As a follow up then, I had the PCs check their CON, and that potential success could end in a reward of MP or HP, resulting from a good night’s sleep. And then I just picked up the whole scene and brought everyone together for breakfast together. It worked great.

Paying Attention

Verisimilitude is not just a great word – it’s a tool to use to ground players in the realness of our game, and is particularly useful in period games. But it can be overused or misused to put up roadblocks or churn for players who just want to engage with the story.

Paying attention to the day of the week often feels like too much bookkeeping for my tastes, but it allowed me to bring some realism and shift the tones of scenes without much effort. It worked very well and I will definitely use it again.

However, if my investigators spend too much time out in the cold rain and happen to get colds or the flu, I’m not sure needing to spend the weekend in bed will be as fun for them as it is for my storytelling. I need to find a better way to use weather to impact the game.

What are your tips for using verisimilitude to build details and realness in your game?

George Norris – Crime Reporter – London 1925

The following character can be used as an NPC (or replacement PC) in the England chapter of Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign for Call of Cthulhu.

Spoilers for that campaign abound!

Geoff Norris is a crime reporter for the London Times who has been covering the “Egyptian murders” for the last two years, and the PCs will be pointed toward him if they inquire about further details that perhaps Inspector Barrington doesn’t have.

Norris is a gruff, no-nonsense reporter with a strong nose for bullshit – he knows when people are lying and is willing to call people out on it. He’s suspicious of authority and believes that “the people ought to know,” but is also cagey enough to keep himself out of trouble.

Norris is a tall and lanky 25 year old who chain smokes and perpetually looks like he slept in his suit (which he often has). Unlike many NPCs in authority, Norris will actually believe the PCs’ story about cults and murders for an ancient god, providing they’re willing to let him in on the scoop. That said, he’s not Mahoney at the Scoop – Norris will need pull out all the “occult mumbo-jumbo” to ground the story in abuse of power and will be an advocate to bring Gavigan to justice, even if it means a bigger scandal.

For the price of a couple of pints, Norris is glad to share all he knows, especially if it becomes clear to him that the PCs know more than they’re letting on. He is glad to join in on the investigation, or just follow one step behind and help break “the scoop of the century.”

Background

Born in 1900 and raised in the industrial city of Manchester, he grew up in the working class parts of town and knows how to keep his head down and out of trouble. Too smart for his own good, he quickly learned the hard knocks of life but could not keep his mouth shut when he saw hypocrisy and abuses of power. He figured out at a young age that the best way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them early, and quickly slid to the middle of the pecking order, ignored by teachers and hoodlums alike.

Norris found his calling when, in 1916 at the age of 16, he broke a story about criminal smuggling and black-market sales of baby food and chocolate during the Great War. Seeing the unjust nature of the smuggling, and the police department’s apparent willingness to look the other way, he used interviews with struggling young mothers with babes at home to draw a bleak picture of corruption and malfeasance during a time of national crisis.

He then sold the story, and two follow up pieces, to the Manchester Guardian and began his life as a crime reporter. However, having made enemies of both the police and criminal underground, and with the war in Europe at full pace, he soon skipped town and spent the next two years in the trenches of Belgium, where he came to understand the true cost of unchecked power.

Returning to England in 1918, he watched the world continue to burn as the so-called Spanish Flu continued to ravage England and his peers. Not wanting to return to Manchester, he settled in London as a young reporter with an eye toward uncovering corruption and exploitation. He pitched himself to the London Times, where he was able to uncover a hospital that was experimenting on its patients and hiding failures among the influenza victims. With a slightly salacious tale backed with solid interviews and that broke the news first, Norris had made it.

Now, at just 25 years old, Norris is works the crime beat hoping to uncover the corruption and abuses of power he knows are taking place. The Egyptian Murders are very suspicious to him and he has interviewed both Gavigan and Shafik, though kept their stories out of the papers without anything directly tying them to the crimes. As yet he has not yet seen any abuse of power or motivation to tie the murders together, and senses that Barrington is doing everything he can, especially after the disappearance of Munden.

He knows something’s rotten about these murders, but doesn’t have the facts to put a story together. However, if the murder of Munden can be proven, that will override any clout Gavigan has and that will be the “scoop of the century.”

How He Can Help

Norris is eager to engage with any story of conspiracy or hints that there is more to the murders than is apparent, especially since Barrington has nothing new to share. That said, Norris does not have much more information than Barrington, and is most useful to add context as well as be encouraging to the PCs’ involvement (as opposed to Barrington’s hesitancy).

He did not meet Elias and has not read any of his works. Barrington did say at one point that an American writer had come around asking questions, but then he left and was never mentioned again. As such, Norris has not heard of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharoah, but he will definitely be interested in learning more about it – if sources can corroborate its existence.

Norris has much of the same information that Barrington has around the core facts of the case:

There have been 19 murders over the last three years each with same MO.
17 of the murders have been Egyptian, and one of the non-Egyptian was of an Ethiopian national (see below).
All of the murders have been committed with the same weapon, but forensic evidence points toward the assaulter being of different heights – again, more evidence that there is a conspiracy of some kind.

He has a few clues that Barrington does not, which he hasn’t reported because he can’t get any sort of confirmation. These are more rumors than facts, but he is glad to share:

One of the non-Egyptian nationals was an Ethiopian man named Badhu Girma (Yalesha’s boyfriend). He has spoken to the family and has not put together the connection with the Blue Pyramid Club. He can give the names and address of Badhu’s family in the East End (who can then point the PCs toward Yalesha).
Barrington’s predecessor, Munden, was an honest cop who probably got too close to the truth, but Norris has no additional facts to share. Sadly, Munden was a bachelor whose death was quickly cleaned up by Scotland Yard. Norris spoke to Munden about a week before he disappeared, and Munden had indicated that he might have something shortly for Norris. Then – snap – he was gone.

Norris sees himself as a champion for the oppressed and innocent, and can quickly be recruited as an ally for the party. He is also a fantastic replacement PC.

Skills

Norris is a skilled journalist and Great War vet, quick on his feet and quicker with a word. He shies away from violence, however, having seen his share in the trenches of Belgium.

Art/Craft (Journalism) 65
Dodge 40
Fast Talk 45
Fighting (Brawl) 45
Fighting (Rifle) 40
Persuade 45
Psychology 65

Dance Card Full

Whew – be careful what you wish for! After last year’s multiple traumas for many facets of my life, I vowed to lean into more gaming, both running and playing. Well, as of June 2024 my dance card is full, and I thought I’d take a brief moment to write about the four games I’m playing and what I’m hoping to get from each of them.

See, my time is my rarest resource, and it would be very easy for me to wander off into a crappy or even mediocre game. So I really need to be diligent about why I’m playing a game – what do I hope to get out of it?

I don’t like to sound so sticky about this – they are games, and isn’t it enough to just have fun? Mmmm… Maybe. But again I hold my time very tightly and if I’m going to get the most out of my gaming time, I would like to move past just having fun and be thoughtful about the people and games that I’m gaming with.

So yeah – I’m playing and running four games now. Crazy! But for the moment they have seem to moved into equilibrium, and I seem to be sustaining all of them. So here’s to having a full dance card of amazing games!

Game 1 – Masks of Nyarlathotep

I talk about this a lot on my podcast. I am running one of the greatest ttrpg campaigns of all time for MUP Professor backers. We have a full table of six, which is really one too many than ideal, but the greater table does allow for the game to go on even with absences. More importantly, the table is STRONG. Everyone in the table is fully engaged in telling the best possible story and leans into both the investigation and the world building with great fervor.

I would like to keep a journal and share it here, but that seems like a heavy load at this point to go back and write all of that up. 18 years ago I wrote a journal tracking my first playthrough of Masks (which you can find here if you are a member of YSDC), and I definitely would like to at least capture some thoughts for each of the chapters. Hm. (We have also been recording our sessions with an eye toward sharing with MUP Patreon backers – I will let you know if that happens.)

My goal for running Masks is twofold: one was to run the entire game, with all seven chapters, as I’ve never run Australia or China before, and Peru was new in the updated book. And, as I mentioned on MUP Ep 299, the sooner I started it, the sooner it would be done. But am also running it for MUP top tier backers, and all of my players are wonderful supporters and community members. It’s also a massive challenge to GMing skills to manage a game at this level – I learn something new every session.

Masks is amazing but so, so large. It’s June now, and so we’ve been playing for almost 1.5 years. There’s no way we’ll be done in 2024 – so now looking at EOY 2025 to complete. Wow.

Game 2 – Arkham Antiquities and Appraisals

This week I ran our third session of Call of Cthulhu with my new in-person group, comprised of strangers I met entirely at cons and discord. It was way easier to create a group from scratch than I thought – pretty much I said I wanted to make it happen and suddenly we were gaming together.

It’s a good group of friendly and engaged players, though we are still working out how best to navigate everyone’s personalities. Everyone engaged with the safety tools quickly, and that made table safety for a group of strangers feel easy and welcoming.

We just completed playing The Haunting – I’ve run this a few times in the last 30 years and it’s always fun to start a group new to CoC with it. (I think it was the second scenario I ran for CoC, after trying my hand unsuccessfully to run a Dreamlands game in college.) I’ll be tying some of the findings around the Chapel of Contemplation into the overall campaign, and there is enough mystery and questions to easily seed future scenarios.

I really dig the new Arkham book – I’ve read it cover to cover and it really paints a full picture of a living, breathing town. I learned a lot from running Bookhounds in San Francisco – a city I love and am familiar with. It’s so easy to breathe life into a place you know well, so there’s a challenge with bringing a fictional town to life.

So that’s one of the reasons I want to run a long-term campaign in Arkham – I want to lean into the town and create a version of my own. I want to run a number of scenarios set there, some of which I’ve run before, others I haven’t. And I want to create NPCs, factions, and events with my table that give life to this very Lovecraftian town.

Most importantly – I started this game to start playing with people in person. I have a set of friends and we play boardgames together every month or so. But I need consistent in-person gaming to fill my soul. I’ve been really struggling this year with feeling connected to people, and this game is doing a great job so far of meeting that need. Here’s to more of that.

Game Three – Blessed and Blasphemous

Running two bi-weekly games is enough. Really, I just needed to stop craving games so much that I would stack new games to run back-to-back. It’s just not sustainable. But playing games is!

An MUP community member approached me about playing in the pre-WW2 CoC campaign The Blessed and the Blasphemous, which I had heard of but not backed or read anything specific on. He wanted to run a more serious, in-period focused game and wondered if I was interested in joining. The short answer was HELL YES.

So we recruited a couple players from my Masks game (other community members, which is so awesome), and carved out a small slice for a weekly 2-hour game. The idea is that a smaller ongoing game is better than nothing, and everyone jumped in creating a very brainy party that has found itself in Morocco circa 1938. We have played one session so far and it was great right off the ground.

It’s really important for me to play more games on the player side. As a forever-GM I spend so much time not only with all the organizational efforts, but also knowing all the secrets. It’s super helpful both as a GM and ttrpg writer to play in a game and know nothing about the book or mystery. I love that I know absolutely nothing about this campaign and can just focus on living in the moment, showing up with my best player capacities and leaning into every scene.

We’ve just committed to playing the first two scenarios (of six) for now, which I think is a great way to keep everyone engaged with a longer campaign. We don’t have to worry about committing to two years – though it would be amazing to still be playing this when I finish Masks in ’25. I feel very blessed to make this work out. See what I did there?

Game 4 – Dragonlance of Youth

Finally, I’m playing in the latest Dragonlance campaign for 5^th edition of D&D. As mentioned above, this spring I was feeling that I really needed to play in more games. Literally the next day my friend Ian texted me and asked me if I wanted to join our group of high school friends in playing through the new Dragonlance campaign. It’s a monthly-ish game on Sunday evenings, and is just infrequent enough for me to make it work as my fourth game. I was in.

Frankly, I’ve played enough 5e for my life, and there are so many more interesting and engaging games that I don’t feel I need to ever play it again. Going back to my original point – it’s not enough just to play a game. Why play a game that I don’t even like?

This is the same group that I ran Goodman Games’ Expedition to the Barrier Peaks for way back in Covid times. They are at the opposite end of my CoC games – they are old friends who take the roleplaying less seriously than my MUP community. But they love each other deeply, and use the D&D game as an opportunity to hang out and go on adventures together.

This less-serious take on ttrping is really important for me to remember. They play 5e because now they’ve been playing it off and on since it came out, so it’s easy for them to jump into and get a game going, trying out new classes and feats, and just using it as an excuse to hang out (the five of us live in four different states).

In the end, it’s really good for me to identify the reasons and expectations I have for playing and running a game. But it’s just as important for me to see where I’m having fun and lean into that.

But What About

Of course, part of my brain is clamoring about all the games I’m not running. I tried unsuccessfully to get a group of new gamers playing some Mothership, and have decided not to pursue that further. And of course there are always cons and playtests…

This year promises a whole new set of RL challenges that are just around the corner. Honestly. It’s not enough to just have our kid head off to college. It’s just change after change.

So I will keep this pace as long as I can. It’s sustainable now, and it’s easy enough for me to skip a game and not have the whole thing fall down. I had to cancel a Masks game last week and was not able to schedule a replacement. It is what it is.

I’ll give an update on these games later in the summer and see if I can get some sort of journal up and running. More soon.