Casting Shadows

During the preceding days of #RPGADAY2024, I have been reviewing our collected Actual Play videos looking for a short and compelling moment that could be shared without too much context in a YouTube short or a short blog post. I was doing this in preparation for today’s response to the standard prompt for Day 18: Memorable Moment of Play. I found a lot of stuff that I want to share, but to my amusement the moment that checked off the most criteria for ease of sharing with minimal context, shortest duration, and having both audio and video impact while still being easy to share as text in post here on the blog turned out to be… unexpected.

I looked at a hundred different ways to present some of our high-energy, high-risk hijinks from our Alien Colonial Marines campaign, What Comes Home to Roost, and our over-the-top Leagues of Adventure campaign, The Sky is No Limit, but getting them to be short enough, comprehensible enough, and still carry the same punch seemed too unlikely. I went through our Star Wars campaign but met similar problems – too much need to explain the situation and the situations themselves build over too long a time for a short post for #RPGaDAY and way too long for a Short if I wanted to make one for this day. I checked out the learning series for Broken Compass we ran, Ravagers of the Frost Giants’ Tomb, and the introductory Mythras adventure we shared, Homecoming. Both had some that I could have made work, but then my friend Ivan reminded me of something from our current campaign, which uses Call of Cthulhu. Despite being an adult and often horrific game, I could share this powerful moment with practically no context, no cuts or edits for brevity, no game system explanation, and without worrying about having to warn an audience about the content.

Does that seem impossible? Well… you be the judge.

The Moment

This clip comes from our first session of Call of Cthulhu together, not long after the session started. The tension was building, the call to action and the discomfort of the looming unknown were growing. Then…

As a result of this memorable moment, a new character (seen in the clip) was added to the list of active NPCs in the campaign and while he hasn’t had much interaction in the campaign since then, he has been around and might explode into a situation at any given moment – it’s up to the dice.

As a side note: he was present without being seen in Session 15 and was responsible for a tumble in an alleyway by the hard-pressed (and at that moment alcohol poisoned) Psychiastrist PC in the group~