Call of Kid-thulhu - Haunted Halloween

The Stat Sheet

The Snapshot

• Legend in town that kids who come to a haunted house never return
• Roger, some bully, dares us to do it. Locks us inside the house. The house apparently can be locked from the outside?? LAME.
• We explore the crappy downstairs, and no one wants to go upstairs.
• Explore the fireplace. There's a pair of boots in the living room as if someone has been squatting here.
• We see spooky shadows in a mirror that try to talk to us. Joey is charmd by it and tries to go into the basement.
• We go upstairs and find Roger with a knife. We lure him into a hole in one of the upstairs room, and he falls to his death. His body was not his body.
• Joey is lured to the basement, and we all go and try to figure out how to escape + save him
• Find a lair through a basement drain and destroy an atlar and her before dying....yay!

The Party

Key: Player Name: Character Name (Halloween Costume) - Vibes/Notes

• Lyndsey: Shirley (Amelia Earhart) – Walking ad for the girl scouts, wears her scouting uniform as much as possible; talks about camping all the time
• Aaron: Joey (Boba Fett) – Leather jacket, has had to repeat 5th grade multiple times, cusses, and smokes
• Kati: Paul (Batman/Mothman) – Class clown, you know
• Zac: Joe (Jason) – Poor as fuck, loyal

The System

I've played quite a bit of Call of Cthulhu, so I was curious about the kid-version of it. The number of skills available is quite stripped down, and instead

The Brief

We walked into the house. There’s a bunch of candles everywhere. Roger was bragging about how we won’t stay the night. There are plants, and they’ve been well taken care of? How bizarre, how bizarre. We ask if Roger has been living here, and he says no way.

Roger throws the key out of the letter flap on the door and tells us Ace is coming in the morning to let us out. Paul asked how we’re locked in (my GM said to go with the module haha). He tells us there’s a spare key hidden somewhere in the house.

There was a cat that was alive! The cat tries to swipe at Jo who barely misses. Jo doesn’t kill it, but it runs aways and scurries up the staircase.

We get to the basement door, and Roger can’t get it open. He says he’s been down there before, but it doesn’t seem like it. None of us can get it open, not even Joey. We go back to the family room and look at things a little more closely. We notice that all the figurines and pictures that are in here have eyes scratched out. There’s one photo that we take that looks like a girl about our age.

In the dining room, we found a shattered mirror. Joey picks up a piece of the shattered mirror and sees a shadow in the mirror that’s not there when he turns around. In the hallway, there’s a pair of boots that look bad and smell as bad as the knapsack I found.

Jo sneaks away and goes upstairs to follow Roger. After Joey continues to look in the mirror and tells Paul to look in the mirror, we see the shadow again. Then Joey continues looking into it and sees his grandma. He’s acting weird. I try to snatch it from him and fail.

Eventually, we go upstairs and explore a crappy bathroom. I see the shadow again in the mirror and shatter the mirror with my slingshot. We go into a scorched bedroom where it looks like there was a crazy fire but only in this room. I catch Joey trying to sneak off and try to get the mirror away from him again. I end up using my slingshot on Joey’s hand to disarm him. He runs downstairs to get another piece of mirror.

Roger appears at the end of the hallway with his arm behind his back. We try talking to him, but he has a knife in his hand. He doesn’t seem scared or to recognize pain as if he was possessed. Three of us are fighting Roger upstairs, while Joey goes gets another piece of mirror. Then, he immediately heads to the basement. The woman who looks like his grandmother asks if he’s ready, and the door to the basement falls off its hinges.

Joey seems normal again after some time. It’s almost like he doesn’t remember the debacle with the mirror. After luring Roger to a hole in the room, he falls through and dies. Bugs run away from his body as if he was possessed. Shirley finds a dead body in a closet with a missing left hand. We think it’s some squatter, since we found some boots and a backpack.

Joey comes up from the basement, while Shirley and Paul come back downstairs. Joey and I have a smoke. Jolene holds the cigarette but doesn’t smoke it. We try to call 911, and the operator takes our call but doesn’t seem to hear us. We hang up, and a creepy old woman calls us back. We quickly hung up the phone.

We go to the basement, and eventually find this disgusting woman's lair that's through one of the drains below. We find this altar with a hand and destroy it, killing her in the process before we're killed.

The Takeaway

Pros

• I can see the appeal of this for kids
• The dynamic lighting in Roll20 added a good level of immersion for the group as we explored the house

Cons

• The module requires quite a bit of buy-in (no one wanted to go upstairs)
• Seemed to require GM work to get us from point A to B. Our GM did a great job in having spooky stuff happen to keep us moving forward.

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