For the last installment of “Twelve Days of Cthulhu”, I thought I’d bring it back around to the most important aspect of any Call of Cthulhu adventure, the Investigators, and provide a more inwardly focused scenario. Please check your rotten fruit at the door.
This falls under my comment from a while back: Just because you’re group routinely faces mind-bending horrors, doesn’t mean that everything you encounter is mind bending. Like Christmas. A handy sub-plot could easily be that the Investigators are spending Christmas together, they get gifts for each other, and that’s it.
If you have a really roleplay oriented group, this could be the plot. Some groups can just take a little seed like that and run with it, playing in character for hours. But for most normal groups, it works best as a background element.
The great thing about something like this set-up is that players have to think, “Well, what kind of Christmas present would my character get for his fellow Investigators?” What an Investigator gets a teammate can be a good indication of not just what sort of person the Investigator is, but also what he thinks of the teammate. Multiply this by however many people you have in the group. Add cloves.
So, there it is. My last big idea: Have your players celebrate Christmas in character. It’s not full of eldritch and cyclopean horrors, but it can provide a great insight into characters.
For those just tuning in, here’s the links for the run down. “On the twelfth day of Christmas Cthulhu sent to me…”
- Twelve Investigators
- Eleven Changeling Children
- Ten Evil Toys
- Nine Killer Snowmen
- Eight Tainted Eggnogs
- Seven Grinches Grinching
- Six Cults a-Culting
- FIVE FORBIDDEN TOMES!
- Four Visiting Ghosts
- Three Great Old Ones
- Two Christmas Goats
- And a ghoul hiding under the tree!
And be sure to go back to the original intro, “The Twelve Days of Cthulhu” to see how this monstrosity got started. Happy holidays you wacky gamers.
Jeremy Zimmerman is a teller of tales who dislikes cute euphemisms for writing like “teller of tales.” His fiction has most recently appeared in 10Flash Quarterly, Arcane and anthologies from Timid Pirate Publishing. His young adult superhero book, Kensei, is available as part of Cobalt City Rookies. He is also the editor for Mad Scientist Journal. He lives in Seattle with five cats and his lovely wife (and fellow author) Dawn Vogel.
