Full Fathom Five GMs Advice

 A ran a one-shot play report for Call of Cthulhu.  Full Fathom Five was written by Paul Fricker and is available from Drive-Thru RPG, there is wonderful art on the cover and within from John Sumrow.

This is a breakdown of how I would now run it differently, what worked and what failed miserably.

Whales are obviously incredible, intelligent creatures and this is just a story, but there is a real danger that the next generations to come will only ever hear about them in books, so if you wish, you can donate to put off that day here.

...Here Be Spoilers...

Online Preparation

So, here was my set-up to run this, I used Roll20, the free Call of Cthulhu (CoC) 7th Edition character sheets in the main.  I transferred all of the handouts into Roll20 (pp10, pp13, pp16, pp22, pp27, pp33-34) I like to include any images from my games and that helps to build the atmosphere, I just use Snip & Sketch on Windows 10 for this.  

Next, oh my god, I set up the 23 NPCs, each of which was set up as characters, because, if you run the game, you'll know that ANY of the NPCs can become a PC.

I then set up the background, I settled for two map areas, one would have the list of NPCs plus the Barclay plan views (pp 30-32) and the other would have a larger image of the Barclay top-down to play out the final scene (pp32).  I tend to do more theatre of the mind CoC but sometimes it is nice to have a battle map to play out big end scenes. 

The list of Barclay's crew on the main screen was good fun, crossing out the players / NPCs with a nice red cross or jail bars as they got bumped off or incarcerated, the players also annotated NPCs to give them clues as to who they suspected, and for me to keep track of who was playing whom.

Screen 1

The cherry on the top were a few sound files, I'd found on youtube an ambient sailing ship file so used audacity to cut it to a smaller length and played that at very low volume, this really added to the atmosphere and the players loved it.  I then added David Coffin's - Roll the Old Chariot, again from youtube and had this playing at the start, when the players joined Roll20.  I had also planned to play the Innsmouth Sailor by The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society at the end of the adventure, but no one survived to this point, I played it anyway, it's got some great graphics, so I recommend playing the video too.

Non-Online Preparation

So that was all the online stuff done, but I then had to read, re-read and read again the scenario, it's really important to plan out in my head how each scene should play out and then deviate from there, as with my group, it is very likely to.  Probably as important is to read the biographers of the conspirators and the starting characters.  This is brilliantly done in the book, giving little snippets of backgrounds and roleplaying hooks/catch phrases!  

At this stage I tend to break down a few of the mechanics I'll need to know for each scene, a rough flow of skills/tests/combat, just something in notepad that I fling up as I play through the scene.  There are also some great artefacts in the book firstly pp28, Timeline and Scenario structure I ended up constantly referring to this so added it to my notes at the top, likewise with the GMs version of the crew manifest on pp8.  The final thing I referred to was the table on pp23, which is used in the final scene, more of that later.

I got the players to choose characters in advance and this gave me a bit more set-up time and to add a rumour (pp6-7) to each of their character sheets to add some more flavour and intrigue before we began, I had to remember to do this once each new character was handed over to the player.

Running the Game

The first scene went smoothly, it's a great introduction, straight into the action our group missed with the first Harpoon but hit with the second - success.  One of the characters, chosen at random looked into the depths and saw his Nana, Nana Coffin - what an awesome name!  He reacted brilliantly, trying to dive over the side to reach her and the others wrestled him to the floor.

Back on the ship, I read through and embellished pp12, getting a little into the day to day of the whaling ship and deepening the experience.  Then Valentine Thomas and Melvin Weeks started adding more drama to the ship and we were introduced to the obsequious Lawson Bond, a nasty confrontation with Aurangi, who the players tried to support and a possible hint at the conspiracy between Bond and the Captain.

Next, we played out Victim One, I found it quite a hard scene to run, I played it as a series of dreams, but the outcome is then real.  I was really pleased with how this worked, we had players who knew they had seen Matthew Cole kill Silas Coffin, but it was in a dream, would they focus on their mythical beliefs or not.  Luckily they went full in playing out the superstitious nature of the sailors, casting Matthew Cole as a Jonah, even though no one had seen him do anything, especially as I messed up, see below section.

We continue on with the funeral service, nice to play out the unnaturalness of this, the water continuing to pour out of the corpse, the Captain purposefully missing out "Jesus Christ" and then as they left, I threw in the whispers, for this, I ignored the POW rolls and just went with the other recommendation of pulling in the player with least involvement, a really good ploy and it worked very well.

We continued with Matthew Cole fighting the rest of the crew and the second murder, interspersed with a bit of gambling.  I put emphasis on the image within the bucket and played on this when handing out jobs after this second murder, NO ONE wanted to scrub the decks and an audible groan went up when they were handed the bucket the second time.  The second murder is particularly grisly and I played on this to maximum effect, it is a credit to the players that they went with this, appreciating this was a fair amount of bending of the rules.  

I'd messed up a little, with the timing of the Captain's Cabin, again see below, but eventually folded it in and the players picked up Henry Joy's book on summoning Mother Hydra and the journal entries from the Captain, pretty much joining these two together showed the whole conspiracy.

After a quick scene with the Captain and Mother Hydra, we moved on to the final murder I think it is good at this stage to play in the replacement for the final murder victim, with a little scene of their own, otherwise, it is easy for you, the players to forget this character.

It was at this stage that the players decided to take matters into their own hands, the plan was to poison the conspirators and throw them overboard.  Unfortunately, they planned this for a couple of night's in the future, after gathering support from the rest of the crew, when of course the scenario would have finished, I had to suppress a chuckle.

I moved pretty quickly into the final scene, the last victim coming alive, the Herald, the sirens and undead sailors all clambering over the side, it was all very chaotic, I seem to remember shouting out, it's chaos, complete chaos.  One of the players joined in the revelries and then when the Herald sank and entered R'lyeh, two more went temporarily insane, leaving one, relatively sane character to help the others free a boat.

This last scene was tough to run and I definitely needed to prepare more, I should have printed out the table on pp23, the table was suggested by Dirk the Dice in playtests and is a godsend, but writing the names of the players in the columns above would have helped me run things smoothly.

As it was, it was a perfect ending, one player laughing insanely on The Barclay, as it went down, another swimming for his life into the sunset and two escaping in boats, one surviving for longer by eating the crew.

How I messed up?

• I forget to tell the players (or give them a spot hidden chance) that Matthew Cole's beard and shirt were soaked after the first victim was found.  Instead one of the players decided his dream was in fact the truth and started telling all who listened that Cole was a killer, this worked just as well.
• I ended up running the scene outside the Captain's cabin with the cabin boy before the second murder, so ended up replaying this scene in a different way, the cabin boy forming a pact with one of the players and looking out for when the cabin was empty, so they could investigate and find out what deal had been struck.
• I jumped the gun, telling those that had heard the whispers that they could see through the eyes of the Herald before he fell off the boat.  Primarily this just added to the general chaos but made the same not quite as effective as it was planned to be.
• I don't run a lot of Call of Cthulhu so often come unstuck on a few of the rules e.g. temporary insanity, fightback and dodges, impales, luckily I have two CoC GMs in my group who politely point these things out!
• I didn't spend enough time reading through the last scene, it was chaos both in front and behind the GM screen (!), I winged it and hence messed up as per above, but it was okay in the end, focusing on a few key parts of the scene got us through it.

In Conclusion

In general, I should have read the scenario through a few more times, in particular the final scene, of which the second paragraph on pp 24 is the most important.  You perhaps need to prep the players that this is not a normal scenario and plays a little fast and loose with the rules.  Leave the fact you may die but can take over another character as a secret up until it happens as that is a real "Ahh, cool" moment for the players.

Get the sequence of murders/scenes straight in your head, it's easy to mix these up, whilst not critical will get you scrabbling around for alternative scenes.  Try and involve the new character (whose previous character has been murdered) in the very next scene or use one of the Pacing the Deaths scenes on pp18.

A minor criticism, the final murder seems a little bit more sandbox, I wasn't sure what triggered this and why a 7-year-old girl, maybe it is devised this way, to allow the GM to be more free form, after the more prescriptive first two murders.

Use visualisation to bring the crew to life e.g. X to mark they are dead, bars to mark they were caught and put in the brig, ?s for possible conspirators, knives/clubs for those that attacked Matthew Cole ... the crew manifest become an impromptu murder board of who did what or was under suspicion, it became a great focal point.

And again, read, read and read again, so you have a whole multitude of plots in how it can play out, this will really help improvise when the players take their own direction.

Use the art of John Sumrow, it's great to throw up the pictures as handout as you play through key scenes, it really adds to the whole package, especially the core colour plate of the Herald.

This is great, if sometimes strange scenario, there are obviously a lot of diversions from core Call of Cthulhu rules which may point to running this with a group that either a) haven't played Call of Cthulhu before or b) have played it and are forwarned about some of the differences they'll face.  Highly recommended for a good four hours of nautical fun.

NB: I ran this on Roll20, but I'm moving to Foundry VTT.  The reason?  I'd previously set-up 12 of the 23 NPCs on Roll20 and couldn't face going back and redoing these on Foundry... but, watch this space for Of this Men shall know Nothing, the Good Friends of Jackson Elias Patreon scenario, again written by Paul Fricker... this will be 100% Foundry!