The resolution - Learning to GM part 5

So after all the prep and the panic I finally finished the second part of the two part session of Cthulhu Dark which was my first GMing experience. Warning – some body horror.

So, firstly, I was lucky enough to be a player in a Cthulhu Dark game run by an excellent GM the night before. This was pure coincidence, it happened to be running at London Indiemeet but I didn't know that it would be. I learnt so much from playing it about how to push your players in certain directions while still giving them agency. (I still died horribly at the end of course.)

I planned this game to death and about halfway through I threw away the majority of my plans other than the general idea. It made the game 100% better and 100% more fun for me.

Someone on here suggested when I complained that I didn't look or sound scary enough that the thing to do is talk to your players like they are your best friends and they are in danger. He also suggested looking behind them occasionally while you're talking to create a sense of paranoia. Do this – it works!

I altered the character sheets so that they asked some questions of the players, including why they were there and asked them to invent an NPC they were close to. As a result my characters were:

Junji Ito – Former corrupt police detective in his 60s who used to do favours for the mob. Now working at the museum on Christmas Eve so he didn't see he son who he believed was being hurt by his influence. His NPC was Robin, a quiet cheerful man (who it transpired knew more than he than he appeared to).

Stephen Murphy – Working Christmas Eve because he had no where else to be. Former TFL worker. Once hit his ex wife during a particularly nasty argument and hates himself for it. His NPC was Reggie – a former bus driver, now a cleaner with a drinking problem who steals from the museum.

We also had a curator, Erik Kristiansen – I asked him slightly different questions on the character sheet and this, in addition to where the plot went kept him close to his NPC, Katrine Hansen throughout the game. On his character sheet he described beautifully one of the scariest moments of his life; walking across a frozen lake with Katrine and hearing it crack under his feet. Katrine was Erik's friend but became one of the cult's victims, albeit one who survived. I think, in hindsight, it would have been good to have asked him the question I asked the other PCs about the worst thing he ever did.

It was really helpful to have character secrets and fears that I could play on in the game – this made it so much easier to improvise. (At one point I had Eric having a vision of being trapped under ice in a lake. His roll to escape was OK but not great so when he came back his fingernails were bloody and falling off.)

Some things I did that weren't so great:

• One of the character's didn't care about any of the psychological stuff, although the body horror worked. I don't think there was much that I could have done about that – it was in the character to behave like that, but a few times he left me not knowing how to respond (or have the NPC respond).
• There are only so many times that you can say 'you see a corpse' before it loses it's value.

It was fun though – in a different way from playing. I enjoyed it a lot more once I got rid of my notes and made it up as I went along. I'm not going to GM full time but I will definitely do it again. (I've got a copy of Monsterhearts on order and I'm going to try it out at London Indiemeet.

There were some bits that seemed to work really well (I am going to put in a trigger warning here for self harm – due to the cult's influence there was a lot of it).

• One of the psychological horror things which worked really well, the radios that the characters were carrying got increasingly staticky and the PCs started hearing loved ones talking to them.
• The cult taking over Katrine and making her carve an Ankh in herself was effective, but mainly because of the reaction of Erik who loved her. If he had been indifferent it wouldn't have been as interesting.
• When the characters tried to set fire to the museum the sprinklers turned on (I think it was one of the characters rather than me who first mentioned sprinklers, and I just ran with it!).
• To open the room to where the relic was that held the power a character had to cut themselves quite badly. I expected that one of the characters would do it themselves but Stephen jumped on Junji and cut him.
• I expected the destroying of the relic would be the end but Junji insisted on looking for the cult and ended up going insane while the building collapsed around him.
• Eric had another vision where he had to choose between his life and Katrine's. He choose hers and they both lived and escaped the museum.
• Stephen and Reggie lived and went off to the pub despite Reggie trying to stab Stephen moments before.

So now that's over my next GM project will be Monsterhearts. In the meantime please let me know if you have any topics that you'd like me to blog about.