This scenario is from Gateways to Terror, and is another quick beginner’s scenario for Call of Cthulhu. It’s designed to be played in one hour, but I am very skeptical about that for our investigators. Last Saturday the Keeper packed both the Necropolis and What’s in the Cellar, intending to run both scenarios, but they spent all evening on the Necropolis. I guess they like taking their time to explore and set the scene, and the Keeper is totally okay with that for now. Eventually he’ll build a sense of urgency to move them along, but for beginning players trying to set the stage, that’s fine.
Handout #1 was the newspaper handout you can give to the investigators. I scanned the image from the book to use as the front of the newspaper, and used the image of an old newspaper from a file I had saved to my computer a long time ago as the back of the newspaper. (the filename is md-1, but I have no idea where I got it as I tend to save prop documents/prop ephemera to my computer if I think it might be useful later). I printed the document double-sided on newsprint paper, then ripped the right hand edge to make it look like it was ripped out of a real newspaper:
The next “handout” we created is Arthur’s voice recording, which was created using the absolutely fabulous completely free voice recording/changing resource at: https://voicechanger.io/
We used the voice effect that looked like this one:
since it’s a .wav file, WordPress won’t let me upload the file, but I’ve included it in the zipped file to download at the end.
Next, we created a very basic attorney authorization letter for the investigators to be at the property, and used an old-looking vintage key that we found at a home goods store (not pictured):
It took a bit of googling, but I found a photo of a basement sufficiently filled with blood and used a free online tool, Inpaint to “photoshop” the guy out of the photo. I have absolutely ZERO photo-editing skills whatsoever, so when I need to do stuff like that, I usually let free online tools do all the work, assuming I can figure out how to use them. Then, I couldn’t figure out how to “drain” the basement so that we’d have a Before and After photo set, so I had to find a similar-ish (sort of!) looking picture to give to the investigators to demonstrate the “After” – when they actually visit the basement, and printed both photos out on photo paper:
We found the prop ring at a local antiques store in town – it’s huge, gaudy, and reminds me of an over-engorged tick for some reason:
The best part is that it’s so generic-looking, we were able to find a photo that matches Clue #3, which was a painting of “a stern-looking man in Puritan clothing. An ostentatious black-jeweled ring on one of his fingers catches the eye”. Of course, it’s difficult to create a painting as a prop, so I opted to print the image out on super old paper (since the item is supposed to be from the 1700s):
And for the handwritten journal entry and scrap of paper, I admit, it was a bit of a cop-out for the journal entries after Edge of Darkness where I created the whole journal – but to be fair, Geedunk did all the work for that one, and it’s just not feasible to create a whole journal from scratch for every Call of Cthulhu scenario that calls for journal entries. I used a free Blackletter HPLHS font and printed them out on the same piece of paper so I didn’t waste my special “old” paper:
And with that, the handouts for this scenario are complete!
tessa33blog.wordpress.com 