Since January I have been releasing one short, single hour scenario per month, under the series title Flash Cthulhu. I collected the first four into a ‘Season 1’ bundle, and now I’ve done the same with the next four, putting them into a ‘Season 2’ bundle.
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 are usually 6 pages long, come with four pregen investigators, and are written to fit (if very snuggly) 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 limited to a 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.
Scenario 5, Fruit from the Dust
Beaver, Oklahoma Panhandle, Sunday, April 14th, 1936. In the middle of the Oklahoma Panhandle, the Gray family’s cherry orchard is vibrant and financially successful. The farm drew the attention of the federal government, who now send an investigative team to see if they can find anything that could revitalise agriculture and fight the Dust Bowl.
Fruit from the Dust is a condensed traditional Call of Cthulhu investigation set in a Depression-era orchard, giving players a mix of social interaction, physical investigation, and stressful action.
New Years Eve, San Francisco, 1971. Meredith Dunkle’s Fellowship of the Deeper Arts is making waves with its surreal, transgressive, and genre-bending and medium-crossing creations. Artists across the country are eager to get involved, and now Dunkle is holding a New Years Eve party at her penthouse in San Francisco.
The Deeper Arts is a primarily social and trippy art and drug-fueled investigation set in a San Francisco penthouse party.
Scenario 7, Waves to Vistas Unknown
Kwadacha Wilderness Provincial Park, British Columbia, September, 2024. A group of estranged old friends have a reunion hike up to a glacier park, hoping to rekindle their strained relationships.
Waves to Vistas Unknown is largely focused on investigator-drama and panicky reactions, with tongue firmly placed in cheek despite a horrific situation, set in a wilderness campsite.
Oita, Japan, August 13th, 1992. Avoiding their rough family homes, a group of troubled teens dare each other to spend an Obon holiday night in a small abandoned cemetery.
Alone on Obon is a classic ‘teenagers in a spooky graveyard at night’ scenario, but focused on and using themes from the Japanese Obon festival instead of Halloween.
If this sounds interesting, you can find the Flash Cthulhu Season 2 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
Scenario 5, Fruit from the Dust
Fruit from the Dust is so far the most free form and classically-CoC-styled scenario in the series, meaning the investigators have the most freedom, but likewise that the Keeper needs to maintain tighter control on the pacing, as the scenario can stretch as long as the investigators let it if they keep poking around.
The investigators arrive at a cherry orchard, trying to find out why it is able to be so productive despite being right in the middle of the Oklahoma Panhandle during the Dust Bowl. They have some opportunities to talk with the farmer, maybe some workers, and poke around a bit. Whenever the Keeper feels appropriate, they can spring an event to move things forward by having a worker with a shotgun appear, making a fuss and wanting to go into the centre of the orchard. The investigators can learn what is going on if they trust and follow the armed worker, finding that the orchard is kept alive by willing sacrifices offering themselves to a worm-like creature wriggling under the ground, enriching the soil.
As mentioned, the most difficult aspect of the scenario is that it has less of an obvious ticking-clock than its sibling scenarios. The only real clock is the worker, a woman hunting for her missing husband, who can hop out and start a scene whenever the Keeper needs her to. Should she be incapacitated by an investigator, though, the Keeper needs to decide how the farmers react – do they calm down, let the investigators take the women away, ending the scenario early? Or do they target the investigators, worried that the incident will bring more official attention?
If the session time limit allows, the Keeper could step back and allow the players to lead events at their own pace, potentially stretching the scenario beyond two hours. If the time limit is set around one hour, the Keeper could have the farmers become panicked and violent, forcing an escalation, if the investigators don’t leave.
Fruit from the Dust is also probably the easiest scenario in the series to expand backwards, rather than with a follow-up session, allowing for a traditional information gathering phase before the investigators head out to the farm.
The Deeper Arts is an attempt at making a scenario focused on SAN loss itself and art as Mythos Tomes, along with some conflicting pregenerated investigator backgrounds. It also uses The Call of Cthulhu itself as plot’s basis, as the big squid-boy himself isn’t featured all that much in Call of Cthulhu, especially shorter scenarios.
The bulk of the scenario has the investigators wandering around a 1970s narcotics-fueled penthouse party for artists, observing various art pieces and interacting with party-goers, including the host, the enigmatic auteur Meredith Dunkle. The art pieces (including paintings, poetry, a statue, and a guitar riff) function as mini Mythos Tomes, causing SAN loss potential Mythos skill gain, as well as an increase to an Art/Craft skill. These pieces give visions of Ry’leh and Cthulhu and spur artistic fervour.
Eventually Meredith Dunkle has the investigators display their creative skills, and if she is impressed, she invites them into her artists’ association, as well offers a bump of a mysterious blue powder (which is ground up dust from the Cthulhu idol featured in the short story).
The scenario ends with the FBI raiding the party, leaving the investigators with the decision of how to react – smuggle out the idol at Dunkle’s request, turn it over to the FBI, surrender, slip away, fight back, etc. This is complicated by one of the pregenerated investigators being an FBI informant, but they could have been turned by Dunkle during the party.
The main difficulty for the Keeper, and the scenario’s main weakness, is that the bulk of it does not involve much investigator interaction. The investigators generally individually look at art pieces, react, then move onto the next, until Meredith arrives and the ending pops off. The Keeper needs to change focus frequently enough to keep everyone engaged, while moving along quickly enough to arrive at the last act when the investigators have to decide how to react to the raid.
A potential way to inject some more tension and interaction between players is by having it be known only one of them will be accepted into Dunkle’s association, making the investigators more prone to sabotage or be suspicious of one another.
Scenario 7, Waves to Vistas Unknown
Waves to Vistas Unknown is a simple single-location, largely reaction scenario. The investigators are presented with an increasingly dangerous issue, and left to deal with it. The slight twist here being if they just back off and do nothing, they are in little direct danger.
The investigators (each with some conflicting background drama if using the pregens) are hiking in a remote mountain park when they come across a woman in a tent seemingly overdosing. The situation intensifies as a bear appears, which also appears to be under the influence of something and sees things the investigators can’t see. Eventually the investigators find out that both the woman and the bear actually are seeing Things from Beyond they can’t see, and those things are hungry. Without any intervention from the investigators, the Things from Beyond eat the woman and the bear alive.
The investigators of course will likely get involved in some way, as players are wont to do. This could wind up with them confronting the bear, which aims to eat the woman to get at the delicious spooky drugs in her veins, or trying to get the woman away from the invisible creatures trying to consume her. This is nearly impossible, unless of course the investigators also consume the spooky drugs so they can see and interact with the Things from Beyond – as well as be eaten by them.
Waves to Vistas Beyond is one of the easier scenarios to run in the bundle, and series overall, with the Keeper able to space out a handful of beats and otherwise allow the investigators to react as they will.
Alone on Obon is also fairly simple, with some brief investigating, then a steep descent into panic, then allowing the players to choose to try to escape or solve the problem, though it can devolve into excessive combat rolls if the players or Keeper allows it to.
The investigators are Japanese teenagers with troubled home lives in the immediate post-bubble era, spending a night smoking and drinking at an abandoned cemetery on an Obon festival night. After starting a ‘courage challenge’ to walk through the cemetery without getting spooked, giving some chances to learn a bit about the cemetery and its interred, ghosts start popping up. Initially harmless, the ghosts grow restless and eventually horrifically disfigured and aggressive. The investigators can then either try to escape, requiring swimming through suddenly bottomless waters in the flooded rice fields surrounding the cemetery, or try to solve whatever issue is causing the ghosts to run amok.
The Keeper can give the players as much or as little time as they want or need to decide what to do, with the simple trigger of tossing more or less ghosts at them. If they toss too many ghosts, though, it can bog down into endless fighting rolls until the investigators are inevitably overwhelmed. The ghosts have the ability to force their manners of death onto the investigators, allowing for a mechanical way for combat to end early, but Keepers should still keep attacking ghosts at a minimum until it is clear the investigators are no longer able to escape, or urgently need some encouragement to make a decision.
If this sounds interesting, you can find the Flash Cthulhu Season 2 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