Call of Cthulhu: The Dean in Yellow
After Lori's game, I went to the Call of Cthulhu room to play Dean in Yellow, a scenario in the Burke University sequence.
- Brian Martin -- GM
- Patrick Crowley -- Evelyn Watson, Linguistic student
- Steve Schoemehl -- Kachina Windrunner
- John Addis -- Skip Gates, coach
- Me -- Helen Brantley, archivist
- ? -- Vlad Drozhy, aka the Mad Russian
- Michael McMurray -- Aloysius Noakes
- Carlos Navarro -- Quinn Gellatelly
I'm not sure I got all the names right, despite the nametags, courtesy of yog-sothoth.com. I gather that the website has a downloadable nametag. The front has space for the character name, while the back encourages players to sketch a diagram of the table, showing who all the PCs are, what gender they are, and one's own PC's relationships with the others.
I'm a bit vague on what happened in the game. The slot was 11 pm to 3 am, and the game ran way over. I, however, left at 3 am, as I was blacking out.
Despite my grousing the next day about how a gm in this slot really should stick to the slot, I did have warning, as the gm said that the previous night's scenario ran 7 hours. He read my abbreviated con report on the labcats blog and apologized for running over. It's a combination of three factors, I think, two of which he identified.
- He doesn't want to discover the session only runs, say, two hours, and have the players, who've paid money for this, feel gyped.
- He doesn't have opportunity to playtest, as his home group won't play CoC, and these were new scenarios in the Burke University sequence.
- I think Andrew Zorowitz was correct when he said that gms running in the late night slot assume that it's okay to run over because there's no game after theirs. This, of course, fails to take into account that people may have other commitments, either even later in the evening, or the next day.
In any case, I enjoyed the part I was conscious for. The set up was good: The PCs all knew and trusted each other, having been through some very strange adventures, both on and off the campus of Burke University. Burke was located somewhere in the midwest, IIRC, I think touting itself as the Harvard of that area. It had been shaped by the Dean, whose name I'm blanking on. The Dean had taken some flak for his policies, such as hiring women as instructors, and the like. The PCs had helped him before, and he knew about their strange adventures.
So, I suppose, technically, we were playing "veteran" adventurers. It was interesting to see what this meant in practice: Some of the PCs were dreamers. Most of them, I think, had Cthulhu Mythos lore -- of 3% or so. They knew a smattering of scattered information about the mythos, but were far from having the big picture. And, while the gm wryly acknowledged that it was pretty obvious what the scenario was about, from the title, the PCs had no such insight.
It was October 22, 1935. Kenneth Gold had written an article about how the Dean was planning to retire at the end of the school year. Gold speculated that the Dean would name as his replacement one of the following three people:
- Richard Watt -- Board of Regents, whom the PCs quickly learned to detest
- Dr. Arthur Slate -- Professor of Psychology, Emeritus
- Dr. Nora Hamil -- Head Librarian, whom my character was rooting for
All of us made luck rolls to see if our characters were aware that folks on campus were heading for a particular building. Quinn's player failed his, so Quinn was teaching in a room with no window facing in the appropriate direction. Everyone else except for Evelyn headed over. Evelyn remained in the library, working on her paper.
It turned out that the crowd was gathered because there was some rumor of something violent having just happened in the building. Campus security was politely, but firmly, keeping everyone out. The PCs present tried to figure out their next step, and the gm suggested that the group get together.
Skip: So, the only 2 people who can help us are Evelyn and Quinn.
GM: That's the kind of logic that has made Skip a legend.
The gm also asked us outright later on to please not split the party into more than two groups, lest he get confused about tracking who was where investigating what. When I mentioned this to Josh, he said that there was an answer for this problem: Aggressive scene framing. I think I agree. I would probably have opened with all of the PCs at the building to begin with.
The PCs did gather, and they went to meet with the Dean. As they entered, Richard Watt was yelling at the Dean, accusing him of incompetence. Watt stormed out, referring to the PCs as the Dean's pets as he passed them.
The group asked if it were true that the Dean was retiring. He confirmed this, but added that he was going to retire on his own terms, with a clean record, and was not going to be forced out by Watt or anyone else. He confirmed that Gold had made some astute guesses as to possible successors.
The group asked what had happened in the building that drew such crowds. The Dean explained that Dawn Cassidy, a sophmore and Business major, had committed suicide there. He wanted the PCs to investigate, discreetly. They agreed. The Dean added that Watt was directing campus security to investigate as well, and that the group should not obstruct, and should, indeed, cooperate with campus security.
Real World digression: IIRC, one of the players whose wife works in the appropriate field had heard from her that statistics on suicides weren't gathered in the USA until about 1937 or 1938.
Evelyn and Helen went to Dawn's room, and found some interesting signs of her state of mind. Helen read Dawn's diary.
Someone: She's about to lose san.
Me: No. It's just sad.
Someone: Well, it does prove the old rule. If you're reading someone's diary in a CoC game, they're dead.
Campus security in the person of Michael Duffy joined the women. While Helen tried to keep the diary a secret at first, Evelyn took the Dean's request for complete cooperation to its fullest extent, mentioning it. She also drew Michael's attention to a couple of things she had noticed earlier.
First, all of the textbooks were arranged alphabetically on the shelf, not by subject matter. Second, all of the items on the desk were arranged in size place order. While it was before the term "Obsessive Compulsive Disorder", Dawn had clearly had that disorder.
Her diary was more disturbing. Dawn had developed a passion for an unnamed instructor, and had pretended to be less intelligent than she was in order to get him to agree to give her private lessons. Eventually, she revealed her passion. At this point, the diary claimed, he said that she was a lovely young woman, and that their meetings were inappropriate and must cease, for her sake. And, they started meeting clandestinely, only he was cruel and hurt her. She could not make him stay away. This dovetailed with the suicide note she had left, which said, "He is coming for me."
Helen had feared that the person Dawn was meeting might be the Dean. Indeed, there was a picture of the Dean in Dawn's room, one probably taken without his knowledge. The Dean's secretery confirmed that the person Dawn had been meeting with was the Dean. The group, including Duffy, went to ask the Dean about this.
To Helen's immense relief, the Dean's story did not precisely match Dawn's. Yes, she had approached him. Yes, he had agreed to tutoring. And, yes, she had revealed her passion, and he had responded, verbally, as recorded in her diary. But, he had not seen her after that, and they had not had an affair. This matched the tone of the words Dawn had recorded.
Helen concluded that Dawn had deluded herself, and had then turned the lover cruel because, on some level, Dawn understood that what she wanted was wrong, and she was punishing herself. Everyone stressed that the Dean should not blame himself, although he continued to do so. No one doubted the Dean's story. After all, he had never hidden any of this. I believe that the Dean was telling the truth, but I didn't stay awake long enough to learn whether there was anything to Dawn's delusions, like, say, an illusion or all too solid demon lover.
The group next went to the coroner when the autopsy report was done.
Coroner: Officially, the cause of death could be either strangulation or exsanguination, because she cut her wrists -- see the hesitation marks? -- then hung herself.
Someone: And, unofficially?
Coroner: I would have to go with strangulation.
He said that it wouldn't have been a quick death either. The group asked about whether the deceased had been having sex recently, assuring him that it was important. He checked the body and said that the corpse had an intact hymen.
Helen: Mr. Duffy, do you know what an intact hymen is?
Michael: I have no idea.
Coroner: You want me to take this?
Helen: Yes, please.
As the coroner realized exactly why people wished to confirm that Dawn had not had sex, he called Vlad to take another look at the body with him.
Coroner: Help me flip.
Vlad did, and the coroner confirmed lack of anal sex as well.
Someone: Well, case closed. Ice cream, anyone?
Evelyn (to Michael, who is married): Do you have a brother?
Given timing, I would have been tempted to cut the scenario there if I'd been gming, but I can see why the gm didn't. It wasn't even half the story, and the supernatural had barely begun to rear its head.
I'm much fuzzier on the rest of what I was there for. I remember that no one could get into the Dreamlands, and that all the PCs had some odd sort of nightmare. I remember people doing research in the library and finding something about the King in Yellow, and Evelyn realizing that gold is sort of like yellow, and that the byline on the article about the Dean's upcoming resignation was "Kenneth Gold". I had wondered about this myself, but I think now that it was a red herring.
I remember the gm saying that one way he coded something being a dead end was to name the NPCs connected with it Shucky Johnson. That is:
Player: Okay, we want to talk to X person. Who is that?
GM: Oh, that's Professor Shucky Johnson.
And the player then realizes that the gm's saying, "This will be a waste of time."
I also remember the following quotes.
About Skip:
GM: You wonder why he's the coach.
Skip: Well, the old coach died.
GM: You know anything about baseball?
Skip: Yeah, it has 4 bases.
GM: Fine. You're the new coach.
Evelyn: Well, I was devastated -- I mean, I would have been devastated. I wouldn't remember.
Someone (about a book, I think): The part fingered by Coach Gates.
Skip: So I got a bit of handlotion on it!
GM: You're in the I'm-in-the-library club and you're all going to be there.
GM: Oh god -- in the library! And if one of you goes to the rest room -- boom!
Someone: I have to go to the rest room.
Skip: Naked chickies swarming all over me!
Someone: What?
Skip: Outside voice again.
Someone: Aren't you married?
Skip: -Out-side voice.
GM: You lose 6 SAN.
Skip: I go into porno land!
Skip: I not only made it; I -impaled- it -- wait -- let's go back to that impaled.
Skip: Books. I hate books. The kind with writing in them, and not pictures.
Someone: I've got something in the new text books coming in.
Evelyn: That's riveting.
The gm summarized what happened after I left when he commented on my blog. It sounds really neat. Basically, there were several apparently unconnected odd incidents which were all part of a ritual to summon Carcosa to Earth. I'd love to see this scenario and the other Burke University pieces, and maybe run them some day.
