Since January I have been releasing one short, single hour scenario per month, under the series title Flash Cthulhu. I’ve collected the first four into a ‘Season 1’ bundle, and as I’ve only done a write up for the first Flash scenario, Cafe au Morte, I’ll do a little overview of each here.
As they are super short, I’ll start by just giving the logline and general theme for each, then dive into a more detailed overview after warning off players.
Flash Cthulhu scenarios have so far all been 6 to 8 pages long, come with four pregen investigators, and are written to fit into a one hour session. They also come with suggestions on how to extend the session, how to work in preexisting or custom investigators, how to adjust difficulty for Pulp Cthulhu, how to continue with follow up sessions, and how to swap eras or settings. To fit the one hour time frame, they are mostly single location and usually have a ticking-clock element of some sort. As such, many of them are meant to be stressful in some sense for the players, pushing them hard towards a rapidly approaching ending they may not be prepared for.
Boston, 1928. Some old friends are out for coffee when the tinkle of the bell announces an unexpected patron’s entrance…
Café au Morte is set in a single room, and focuses on stressing the players out while testing their negotiation and social problem solving skills – or potentially a burst of intense violence.
Scenario 2, Fair Porcine Prize
Lydford, Southwest England, 954 AD. The harvest fair competition brings folk from all the neighbouring villages to show off and sell their prized vegetables, fruits, and livestock. Infrith, a good-natured but rather pitiable peasant, brought his favourite sow, Pigwynn, to compete for the Biggest Porcine prize. But only half an hour before the judgement is about to commence, Infrith causes a scene, crying out that his beloved Pigwynn is missing! Stolen! A black tragedy!
Fair Porcine Prize is a Cthulhu Dark Ages scenario that flows like a regular investigative scenario, letting players use their investigators various skills to poke around and question people, but stuffed into a small package. And it focuses on a pig.
Scenario 3, Be Good Neighbours
Arkham outskirts, 1933. The Matthews, a depression-era family in hard times, find an old farmhouse outside of Arkham for a shockingly low price, and given the economic downturn, they take the chance.
Be Good Neighbours has a combination of investigation, fretting over a moral dilemma, paranoia, and a good bit of nasty violence. The players’ investigators are also all family members, which can give some fun role playing if they lean into it.
NYC, July, 2008
The Great Recession is in full swing and jobs and homes are slipping through swaths of the nation’s fingers. The investigators – or in this case, interviewees – are desperate for work. Luckily, they ran across recruitment ads for positions at Surya & Tara Associates. They now converge on the company’s offices for a group interview.
Sell Yourself takes place almost entirely during a group interview, and as such is focused on competitive dialogue as the players have their interviewees try to land the job.
If this sounds interesting, you can find the Flash Cthulhu Season 1 bundle on DriveThruRPG.
Before you go, maybe you would be interested in some of the below reviews or replays?
MJRRPG scenarios, Chaosium-released scenarios, Miskatonic Repository scenarios, Japanese scenarios
Café au Morte is meant to put immediate stress on your players and force them to make use of their investigators’ Interpersonal skills. There is of course an option for violence, and if they do resort to bloodshed, it should be quick and brutal, but there are many options for them to avoid direct combat.
The scenario is of course set in a little café, and the problem to solve is a clearly unhinged gunman entering the shop and searching for some people he means to shoot. The twist on the problem is that there is another group of patrons in the café that look the exact same as the investigators. A classic ‘don’t shoot the real me!’ scene, with the investigators as the ones being copied, and the guy with the gun not knowing who either group really are. Those other patrons are, of course, cultists in magical disguise, though the investigators won’t know that at first. And so, the main thrust of the scenario will be the investigators trying to convince the gunman not to shoot them, or to shoot their doubles, or potentially even working with their doubles to subdue the gunman.
The most difficult part of the scenario when running is dealing with two parties of NPCs. Going along with the general rule of thumb for running NPCs, the Keeper should avoid having the cultists and the gunman conversing with each other instead of the player characters. Try to have the NPCs be largely reactive to the players once the initial situation is established, If the players fall silent, the NPCs should first directly address them.
If the Keeper still requires the NPCs to interact with each other, they can still have everything they say prompt the players to act, even if the cultists address the gunman, or the gunman address the cultists.
While the scenario can be ‘solved’ by the players through argument or violence, the ‘best’ solution is through empathy. First calming down the gunman, then talking with him to gain a semblance of trust, and then learning his backstory, gives the players the full picture of what is happening, as well as the most mechanical bonuses to convince the gunman to trust them over their doubles.
Or, as one of my playtests went, the investigators could trust the doubles over the gunman, subdue the gunman, and then shoot him after a cultist used a Dominate spell on the investigator with the gun.
Scenario 2, Fair Porcine Prize
Fair Porcine Prize is a bit of a silly investigation around a medieval fair. The main NPC is meant to be goofy, and the pregen investigators also lend themselves to more flamboyant play. Things of course get weirder as they go on, ending with an underground burrowing pig turning into a gate to Shub-Nigurrath and swallowing all the livestock at the fair, some of the fairgoers, and maybe a couple investigators.
There are few clues to find looking around the fair using your standard eyeballs and ears, but the highlight is questioning the missing pig’s doddering owner, Infrith, and having him relay a fairytale he was told by a wandering traveler. As Infrith, like most medieval folk, are illiterate, this story takes the place of a regular handout or Mythos tome. If at all possible, investigators should be prodded to question Infrith so he can give this clue, or at worst he could just blurt it out.
Roleplaying Infrith is key to the scenario, as if he’s boring, the players won’t care about finding his pig. I’ve had success making him as doddering but kind hearted as possible – if you enjoy doing voices at the table, this is the time to bring out an old man voice, complete with meandering stories, random pauses that stretch far too long, and forgetting what you’re talking about.
The finale has the missing pig turn into a gate to Shub-Niggurath beneath the centre of the fair, creating a sinkhole and sucking down anything unfortunate enough to be above it. The only way to stop is to throw an apple (or a bucket of apples) down its gullet. The story Infrith tells hints at this, as well as later on some fruit and vegetables disappear with the exception of apples. Of my three playtests, two groups were saved by apples – one group intentionally chucked a sack of apples into the pig-gate, while an investigator in the second group was extremely lucky, having stolen an apple earlier on then completely forgotten about it, only to be swallowed by the gate with the apple still in their pocket.
Scenario 3, Be Good Neighbours
This scenario is the first to really benefit from being given a bit more time, but I still prefer keeping it as close to one hour as possible. The extra time gives the players more opportunity to investigate, roleplay amongst themselves, and fret over what choice to make before the finale, while it also gives the Keeper more time to ease into the weirdness.
The scenario has the family of investigators moving into a new house, then meet their neighbours who soon leave but promise to come back for dinner. After a bit of poking around the house, they hear voices in the pipes, and eventually find something in their well. It tells them the neighbours are murderers, and asks the investigators to let it out of the well. Cue dilemma. The neighbours will return for dinner, either to brutally murder the investigators, or be horrifically eaten alive by the ghouls (spoiler, it was ghouls) in the well.
The key point of the scenario is to of course make the dilemma actually a dilemma. If the neighbours are too obviously suspicious, or way too kind, the players will smell that something is off and won’t think twice about letting the well-creatures out to eat them. I found the best way to make the neighbours seem less suspicious was to have them acknowledge something is weird with the house and seem a bit nervous about it, and promise to tell the investigators more at dinner. This makes it seem like maybe they’re afraid of something, and so could be allies of the investigators against a different threat.
Or, if you’re a bastard of a Keeper, you could have the neighbours be completely innocent if it seems the investigators are completely convinced the neighours are evil. Then they have to deal with the reveal the neighbours didn;t plan anything nefarious before watching them be savagely devoured.
Sell Yourself is the weirdest of the four, and for some the most uncomfortable. Job interviews suck, group interviews suck more, and having the interviewers ask bizarrely uncomfortable questions doesn’t help at all.
The investigators start off the interview with things more or less normal, but as the interview progresses, the questions get stranger and more uncomfortable, while the investigators are buffeted by assaults on their senses that trigger painful memories. By the end, they should all be in various degrees of panic or insanity, and the players likely disorientated.
Only one investigator is chosen by the two mysterious interviewers – at which point the remaining investigators find themselves back in that painful memory, their dying moment. The winner is also taken back to a near-death experience, somehow just barely escaping it, but at a great cost, likely losing a loved one in their place. Faustian deal accepted.
This scenario is easy to, and should be, customised on the fly to the players actions and reactions. Everything essentially plays out through how the investigators answer questions – they have no real ability to physically confront or change anything, as they are in some sort of purgatory-like state. While the scenario has lists of questions to ask in succession (and there are probably more questions there than can comfortably fit in an hour long session), the Keeper should alter the questions, or make up new questions, as they feel fit to make the investigators turn on one another.
You can find the Flash Cthulhu Season 1 bundle on DriveThruRPG.
Before you go, maybe you would be interested in some of the below reviews or replays?
MJRRPG scenarios, Chaosium-released scenarios, Miskatonic Repository scenarios, Japanese scenarios
