Hopping over to something more insidious, we look at Terrence Clancy from the AWESOME Grinhouse Collection for Call of Cthluhu. It is created by Alex Guillotte and published via the Miskatonic Repository. I am not recieving any suggestion or sponser to do this, but I love this collection of adventures as they are great one-shots that offer some very unque settings and in some cases a couple a newer mechanics. You can find the Grindhouse Collection on Drive Through RPG here. I've found the pregens are succinctly put together in a way that new players can pick up and play. Highly recommend it, and I may even create a review on the blog at a later date. Anyway, about our pick for the spotlight...
Terrence Clancy is one of the opponents your PCs (or in the case of this scenario, the "Hoodlums") will face during the adventure. Other than his ghastly appearance, what me and my players found particularly fun with this character was how unsettling this character actually is. Let's get to the technical details first, then explain the other things that made Terrence rise to the spotlight this week.
Terrence has a 13 HP pool, and isn't supernatural, so definitely of a simpler character than the usual mythos creature. He get a DB of 1d4. His Brawl is 40%, Stealth is 75%, and has around average abilities for Listen, Spot Hidden, Swim, and Throw. With this in mind, he particuarly likes to lurk in the shadows and surprise his prey. He also has 1 attack, but with his adapted eyes can see perfectly in darkness (think Dark Vision from D&D).
So overall it's his appearance that's his most terrifying thing so far. But as you fellow Call of Cthluhu players know, it's not the abilities that are as scary as the information we know about the world of 7e Cthluhu.
After being accidentally knocked out by someone Terrence was delivering a package to, the man persuaded Terrence into helping him clean his lab and leading people to him so that the man could experiment on then. After the man had a breakthrough in his strange work involving using the people Terrence would deliver to him, the man fed Terrence all sorts of elixirs that made him faster, stronger, more capable of healing wounds and the ability to see in the dark.
There's much more than this to discuss, but I will leave it out as this one-shot is a great game to play and I want to leave the surprises for you to discover.
In short, it's pretty creepy stuff.
One thing that is down excellently is the environmental story telling in this adventure, with elements of Terence becoming clear (such as his personality and developmental growth) as players investigate the story.
Something I've found 3rd party publishers are great at is providing unique characters and a host of creepy non-mythos (or not the traditional mythos ones at least) opponents for players to encounter.
I ran this with a group of completely new-to-Cthulhu players and between the fantastic 7e of Call of Cthluhu, and the great cast of pregens available, the players slipped right in and were engulfed by the creepy home Terrence inhabits along with some other threats. Terrence's odd personality and poor intelligence can give players non-physical means of bypassing him which was a nice touch.
These small attentions to detail really elevate the uncomfortable feeling Terrence presents to the players, especially as he is much more than a 'bad guy', and maybe even feels more like a 'victim' depending on what the players extract from him.
For my players, Terrence was the highlight of this story. He had a lot of screen time, some of it sad, some of it violent, some of it really scary. Terrence was picked this week due to the great sculpting the creator done for this character, and because of how much fun my players had with him during the night.
Thanks for checking out this post, and please feel free to recommend anything or let us know your thoughts on our poor ol' pal Terrence. Until next time!
-KJ
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