So I have a player who may be relocating out of state in a few months, so I asked him if there was anything he'd like especially to do in-game and he immediately said "I wanna go back to Bonshonce".
Bonshonce was a scenario I ran about four years ago, for what was then six guys and a girl, three of the guys first-time RPG-ers. I wrote it myself, and it featured The Deep Ones, an aquatic race that has a special place in the Cthulhu Mythos and in the history of my BRP Call of Cthulhu games. They are nasty, capable of inter-breeding with humans to produce hybrid offspring. The canonical story is "The Innsmouth Horror" and it is a scorcher.
The basic story line of the game scenario, set in 1987, was that there was a degenerate community, a place I chose to call "Bonshonce" deep in the Louisiana bayous that had "an arrangement" with the Deep Ones going back into the early part of the 20th century, but the breeding lines had become too corrupted and so the Deep Ones needed fresh blood. The humans of Bonshonce (actually, hybrids) came up with a scheme to kidnap girls from around the country, but one of their victims was the relative of a Senator and so the team were detailed to find out what happened (they being FBI officers in "real life"). The players followed the clues of this "mundane" kidnapping case into a hellish situation that cost the lives of two of the player characters' lives almost as soon as they arrived in Bonshonce. It got bloody. It got seriously weird and it got very creepy.
Everyone had a ball and this adventure set the pace for what came after. I soon found myself spending hours writing plot arcs and manufacturing hand-outs to be used as clues to whatever the mystery of the day was. We play once a month and one scenario took the best part of a year to conclude, and required a portable white-board so the players could untangle the web of clues and lies and monstrously suggestive hints.
And I burned out.
When a major campaign plot point was reached I switched to running only published scenarios, and we lost a many players to real life, some of whom were replaced by new gamers.
When I was asked to take the team back to Bonshonce it actually tied into something I'd been mulling off and on for, well, years. I'd hinted and outright stated any time anyone asked that the Navy had taken over at Bonshonce. Well, in my head, a super-secret department of the Navy had cordoned off Bonshonce and established a number of facilities in order to secure the area, study the hybrids and look for Deep Ones.
The new scenario is set in '97 and the Hook is that the Navy project has been off the radar for years and in fact seems to have gone silent. Extreme compartmentalization, paranoid or simply self-serving information hoarding by those in charge, sudden and drastic changes in budget and an unfortunate death have prevented anyone who would have noticed from being aware of the issue. I had used a major character from the original game, now a high-up in the secret Delta Green conspiracy, as the NPC "feed" who gets the player characters involved.
Can't say much more as the player characters are only now finding out what's what.
I invested about four hours in producing the initial batch of paper-trail clues (partial logs, diaries and so forth), and about the same time in figuring out who was there and what they were doing and where they are in 19971.
One set of logs were from a burned-out site, with the log itself badly burned with only a few partial pages surviving. These give a fragmented narrative of the Navy project from one point of view and give an insight into the truly nasty person who wrote the log. I printed the pages on my laser using a distinctive script font, stained the pages with highly diluted sepia ink and then burned away the edges of the paper almost up to the text. This gave a very good illusion of a salvaged text block from a larger page.
I also made a bottle of pills from an old plastic vitamin bottle, a fake label and some salvaged BBs from my Airsoft tommy gun (for rattle), and added an Airsoft .22 automatic labeled "rusty"2 which would reinforce a written clue from the log.
Long story short, one of the old group saw the game description and wanted "in", and I naturally welcomed him. We had a ball the first game session which took place mostly in Washington DC, Michigan and Florida.
The second session had the player characters moving into Louisiana and finding Bonshonce, or what was left of it, planning the mission in detail and approaching the town by Zodiac boat after a short recce of the Cannery. The team had to wade through head-tall grass and weeds to approach some sort of encampment in what had been the waterfront/main street part of town, and were more than a little put out when one of them saw a sign with "MINEFIELD" written on it. There followed a nice tense walk to the fence, a short debate and then they climbed the electric fence (long defunct).
The camp was a mess, large parts of it burned out with signs of multiple explosions having ripped through the staff quarters and laboratory building and signs of freed captives and assassinated captives in what was obviously some sort of detention dormitory. All good stuff that allowed the players to reconstruct a picture of what went down, with enough wiggle room for misconceptions and alternate explanations. In the last half hour of play they found the burned log and I gave them the burned, stained pages.
And there was my payoff for all that work. The look of sheer joy on everyone's faces at the look, feel and smell of the clues, obviously salvaged from a fire. And then they began reading and their buy-in increased tenfold. The players had their characters bed down for the night in an armored car they found in the motor pool and we closed the session. I felt it had gone well, and everyone was smiling and talking about how they would start the next session.
And the next day, as I was settling in for my bi-weekly Pathfinder game3 I got the nicest bit of feedback over the 'net from one of the players saying how much he'd enjoyed the game, which probably made my face light up the same way theirs had after finding the log pages.
Players like this group are rare in the gaming world. They work well together, play off each other well and have so much willing buy-in that they encourage me to outdo myself each session, upping my game. I like to think this in turn ups their game, a synergy that ramps up the energy and immersion for all concerned. Either way I've already invested about ten hours in yet more immersion-enhancing stuff, from paper clues to learning how to use Blender so I can model parts of the coming experience in 3D. Hope they get as much fun from this session as they did the last.
I'll keep you posted.
