Starting in January I have released one short, one-hour scenario per month, under the series title Flash Cthulhu. The final four are completed and now part of a ‘Season 3’ bundle, as well as together with the previous seasons into a full, 12-scenario ‘Year One’ bundle.

I’ll give a short logline and general theme for the last four scenarios, then a more detailed explanation and overview after warning off potential players.

Flash Cthulhu Season 3 – Call of Cthulhu

Overview of the final four scenarios in my series of tiny, one-hour Call of Cthulhu series, Flash Cthulhu. You can read the text version of this overivew on mjrrpg.com https://mjrrpg.com/flash-cthulhu-season-3-overview-4-final-one-hour-call-of-cthulhu-scenarios/ You can find the Flash Cthulhu Season 3, or the full Year 1 bundle, on DriveThruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/508193/flash-cthulhu-season-3-bundle?affiliate_id=3534349 https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/508194/flash-cthulhu-year-1-bundle?affiliate_id=3534349  Thank you to Cryochamber for use of their album, Cthulhu.

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 9, Lost in the Stacks

Coventry, England, 1947. Staff and patrons of a recently reopened small library find their evening interrupted by a frantic visitor searching for a particular book.

Lost in the Stacks is a dream-like trip in a literary setting, slowly (or as slowly as an hour allows) building weirdness until forcing the players to make quick decisions with limited information.

 

Scenario 10, Whispering Bones

Los Llanos, Venezuela, 1861. The Federal War rages. A party of Federalist guerillas on a foraging expedition head to a small hacienda in los Llanos, seemingly untouched by the war.

Whispering Bones is a conventional ‘closed’ scenario, with an emphasis on investigation and PvP tensions, splashes of brutal violence, and a very clear and pressing ticking clock.

 

Scenario 11, The Cavernous Haunt

Transcaucasia, 15,000 BCE. A group of exiles find an odd cave to hunker down in during a frigid autumn rainstorm, but they aren’t the only ones seeking shelter.

The Cavernous Haunt is a ‘classic’ Flash Cthulhu scenario, with a mix of social and physical interaction with a chance of violence, stuffed into a small location with a looming danger forcing stressful decisions – but with some paleolithic flavour.

 

Scenario 12, Christmas on Charon

Pirx Station, Charon, December 25th, 2099. It’s Christmas, the first for Pirx Station on Charon, and Tycho-Exo Corp’s CEO and founder, Brahe, joins the station’s skeleton crew and station AI for a live-steamed (though with a 5 hour time delay to Earth) holiday event the human race will never forget.

Christmas on Charon is the weirdest of the bundle, and probably the most out there of the whole series along with Sell Yourself. Admittedly difficult to run and play, but it should make for a neat change of pace for experienced groups.



If this sounds interesting, you can find the Flash Cthulhu Season 3 bundle, along with the Season 2 and Season 1 bundles, or the full Year One bundle, on DriveThruRPG.

Before you go, maybe you would be interested in some of the below reviews or replays?
MJRRPG scenariosChaosium-released scenariosMiskatonic Repository scenariosJapanese scenarios

 

 

 

Spoilers Call of Cthulhu

 

 

 

Scenario 9, Lost in the Stacks

Lost in the Stacks is set in one of the archetypal Call of Cthulhu locations – a library (though while most of the pregen investigators have respectable Library Use rolls, in my playtests, few players made use of them!). The scenario is overall a very reactive one, with the Keeper having almost total control of the pacing, and therefore the session length. This can leave some players feeling dissatisfied though, with little time to take stock of the situation and devise plans, so a Keeper should take care to leave a few minutes of breathing space. The nature of the scenario’s threat also means it’s a fairly individualistic scenario, with players not having a lot of opportunity to interact with one another – this is supposed to heighten the stress, as everyone is forced to deal with their own issues, but it once again risks annoying the players if the the ‘spotlight’ remains on one investigator too long, or if everyone feels like they’re playing their own solo games overlapping with one another.

The scenario structure is fairly simple. The investigators wander about a small library as they are beset by increasingly vivid – and dangerous – hallucinations from their favourite classic (and out-of-copyright) novels. Investigators cannot see or interact with one another’s hallucinations, and while investigators can be harmed, or even killed, by their hallucinations, other investigators cannot see any physical evidence of the wounds. This can end with the fun situation of one investigator forever feeling and seeing a horrible amputation at the jaws of a dinosaur from Sir Arthur Conan Doyles’ The Lost World, though others can clearly see and touch the unfortunate investigator’s unharmed limb.

Escaping the library is the easiest (and in playtests, the most common) solution for the investigators, but getting to the source of the hallucinations and saving the library requires finding a Mythos Tome hidden in the storage room. A few clues can lead them there, but Keepers would probably need to heavily emphasise them for the players to pick up on them, and even then, if using the pregens, most players would still probably roleplay their investigators as wanting to get out alive over solving some weird book mystery.

The tome eats text, sucking away the written words on all the books in the library. When a frantic French NPC investigator hunting for the tome enters the library at the beginning of the scenario, the book ‘attacks’ by consuming him, and then turns its attention on scaring away, or killing, the investigators. They could track down the tome by remembering what the crazed Frenchman yelled at them, noticing the disappearing text in the library books, or the weird pleas for help appearing in books (the Frenchman, consumed by the tome, can exert some influence on the books). The closer the investigators get to the storage room, the more aggressive the hallucinations. If all else fails, a kind Keeper could give a POW or Idea roll to give the investigators the impression something is trying to keep them away from the storage room.

But even if the players aren’t interested in tracking down the tome, the group can still have some frantic fun escaping the literary hallucinations. The pregen investigators are beset by adversaries from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the sea and whale from Moby-Dick, dinosaurs from The Lost World, and the creature from Frankenstein. If using different investigators, there would be plenty of opportunities for more creative, and more copyright-restricted, hallucinatory threats.

 

Scenario 10, Whispering Bones

Whispering Bones is meant to be a very ‘tight’ scenario, even in the confines of the Flash Cthulhu formula. The investigators are stuck in a spooky hacienda, surrounded by armed opponents that will inevitably kill them if they try to escape, and they very quickly realise something is in the hacienda with them. The closed location and ticking clock should keep the pacing moving along steadily, with the Keeper able to push the players towards a suitably violent conclusion, whether the players instigate it themselves or otherwise.

It is undoubtedly the most violent of the series, with little chance for a non-combat oriented outcome. The creature haunting the hacienda, a Call of Cthulhu-ized El Silbón (or, The Whistler), pushes the investigators towards killing one another. If the players don’t take the bait, El Silbón directly confronts them, with little to no chance of the investigators surviving, though the creature continues offering chances to kill one another until none are left. Or, of course, the investigators could try to flee into a hail of bullets from the cultists surrounding them.

The scenario does offer some initial investigation of the hacienda, letting the Keeper ease up the tension. Though in play tests it became easy to let the players poke around for too long. A timer to regularly have the creature’s whistle sound, making the timing of the ticking clock more obvious, helps encourage the players to start making decisions and stop peering into every dark corner.

As with any Call of Cthulhu scenario (or TTRPG game, really), and especially in short sessions, combat can grind pacing to a halt. The investigators all being heavily armed and in short range should ideally mean most violent confrontations end swiftly and fatally, and El Silbón has high enough stats that most attacks should obliterate whoever is unfortunate enough to be in the way. Ideally, of course, the environmental exploration will show what confronting the creature will result in, leading the players to make a conscious decision to kill each other, flee, or suicidally fight the creature, rather than the ending being an anticlimax with the spooky monster suddenly popping out and killing everyone without any heads up.

 

Scenario 11, The Cavernous Haunt

Despite the exotic paleolithic setting, The Cavernous Haunt is once again a fairly straight forward set up. The investigators are in a cave that turns out to be more than a cave, with a storm outside, and something approaching. Closed location check, ticking clock check. There are fewer ‘bangs’ in the Keeper’s arsenal to reinforce the timing, meaning there is a risk players will be caught off guard when the Keeper starts to push the final ‘act’ – though the scenario also has a small risk of the players ending it very early themselves, though one of the few ‘bangs’ could interrupt this.

The investigators, outcasts from a paleolithic tribe, find shelter in a cave during a frigid storm. As they investigate the cave, they quickly find it is no natural cave. Indeed, it is an old and abandoned Elder Thing outpost, fitted with a still functioning portal to their city beyond the mountains of madness. Should the players stumble into operating the portal, there is a chance they could teleport themselves out of the session in under half an hour.

The first ‘bang’ is meant to interrupt the investigation of the cave, especially if the investigators seem to be coming close to escaping the location. Another small group of wounded people show up at the cave, begging for shelter and warning that something attacked them. It is, of course, a good ol’ shoggoth. Confronting, questioning, and then either allowing the outsiders in or somehow deterring them, usually provides enough distraction to prolong the investigation for a little while. At least enough time to hint towards the approaching second ‘bang,’ or the arrival of the shoggoth.

When the flubbery old bastard does arrive, the players will hopefully have enough information and be ready to make a decision – confront the shoggoth (obvious death, in most cases), flee the cave (and likely freeze to death), or try activating the weird wall-portal thing. A well-timed arrival makes the escape frantic, possibly leading to one or more investigators staying behind to slow down the shoggoth while the others escape – or try to, as the gate requires a large expenditure of MP to activate, likely meaning sacrificing a potentially dangerous amount of supplemental HP.

 

Scenario 12, Christmas on Charon

The final scenario, Christmas on Charon, is also the strangest. Like the fourth Flash Cthulhu title, Sell Yourself, it is meant to play with the system and general roleplaying game expectations. It therefore comes with the risk of annoying players coming into it expecting a traditional Call of Cthulhu investigation. 

Christmas on Charon begins typically enough – though in a futuristic setting – with the investigators in a scientific mining station on Pluto’s largest moon, Charon. A regular enough constrained location. After some initial stage setting, the investigators notice a suitless figure walking towards the station across the surface of the moon, which will probably reach them in a little under an hour. Ticking clock, set. But then things get weird.

Until the end of the scenario, the investigators find their consciousnesses being mixed together, effectively giving the players control of each others’ investigators, until ultimately every player has full control over every investigator. If running the scenario as a single session one shot using the pregenerated investigators, and especially if the players have run through other Flash Cthulhu scenarios or similar short one shots, this can cause some whiplash, as it is in a way changing the scenario from a traditional RPG to a sort of storytelling RPG, with the players no longer inhabiting a single character and instead collectively controlling the whole party.

While using the pregens creates some fun extra tension as the investigators have conflicting views and intentions, I would be curious to see how the scenario plays out with existing investigators, and how players deal with their potentially long-lasting characters being shared with the rest of the table.



Once again, If this sounds interesting, you can find the Flash Cthulhu Season 3 bundle, along with the Season 2 and Season 1 bundles, or the full Year One bundle, on DriveThruRPG.

Before you go, maybe you would be interested in some of the below reviews or replays?
MJRRPG scenariosChaosium-released scenariosMiskatonic Repository scenariosJapanese scenarios

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