I ran a Call of Cthulhu game recently on startplayinggames.com. The Keeper screen is still on my desk. The printouts of my original module are still on top of my reference books. Dice are still in the tray.
This fresh off a game I have a new insight about how Keepers can mess with their investigators’ sanity through a mechanic completely different than Sanity rolls: Pushed rolls.
I ran my original adventure Choo Chew, a modern era Call of Cthulhu adventure (you’d think things would be easier with the investigators having cell phones) where the investigators are members of a board of a nonprofit that is working to restore a 75-year-old train station in downtown Buffalo that has been abandoned for the past 40 years.
Workers hired to rewire the soda shop in the grand concourse have started to go missing. The only clues are an open door to the sublevels that should be locked and a wallet on the stairs leading to the sublevels from a man who disappeared in the 1930s.
My group of heroes did a little research, split up to get supplies and reunited to venture into the sublevels. They weren’t too far in before they found a room where people had obviously been tortured. There are tables holding terrariums full of spiders.
The player of the boy scout troop leader wanted to make a roll to identify the spiders. He rolled and failed.
In Call of Cthulhu, I want tor remind you this isn’t the end of the action. Failure on the first roll means the status quo remains. In this case the character doesn’t know anything else about the spiders. He has a choice to push the roll and reroll. This means he’s using extra resources or taking extra time to get it right.
He gets to reroll the dice. However, if he fails again something bad happens.
For instance, a character climbing down a drain pipe in the rain, while cultists are knocking down his hotel room door, makes a Climb roll to scurry down the pipe. On a failure, he realizes how slick and rickety the pipe is and clings to it for dear life. He doesn’t make any progress, nor does he fall and break a leg. He may choose to push the roll, overcoming his fear and going against the slickness of the pipe to descend.
The Keeper then should taunt the player with horrible things that could happen if he fails. He might drop and break a leg. He might land in a dumpster and be swarmed by rats.
My player was an experienced Call of Cthulhu player and asked what horrible things would happen if he failed the roll. I thought and said he wouldn’t know what the spiders are but suspect they’re nasty. He’d also assume every inch of the sublevels are filled with things designed to kill him.
The player loved the idea and rolled the push. He failed. I had him write on his character sheet under phobias: Conspiracy theories. I told him he fears there are biological contaminants in this sublevel that will not only get him sick but affect the health of his wife and children.
The player immediately began playing his character as unhinged. No Sanity rolls were needed to make this happen.
Later we got to the climax of the adventure. In the next room, a cult was sacrificing one of the workmen to a pair of giant egg sacs. They began to peel open. Sharp appendages cut through the leather-like substance. Giant spiders, the size of wolves, climbed through the eggs and prepared to pounce on the captive. A seven-foot-tall blonde woman read from an ancient tome, invoking the name Atlach-Nacha.
The player of the nurse character asked to make a roll to find something to help defeat the forces of evil. She failed. I asked if she wanted to push the roll. She asked what would happen if she failed.
I said she’d see something that might break her mind.
She went for it and failed.
I described a light coming from behind a brick in the wall. She found she could peel the bricks away. There was a shimmer like the surface of water. Through the green hue she saw what looked like a highway on the other side of the portal. Then she realized the entire length and width of the highway was a single massive silken strand of a spider’s webbing.
The character screamed and took off running.
Were Sanity rolls involved?
Not at all.
Like all good Call of Cthulhu sessions the characters were driven mad by decisions they themselves made. Sure, in the game characters failed their Sanity rolls and fled from the danger.
But the most memorable sanity breaks happened from failed pushed rolls.
