For the past eight months or so I’ve been playing in an online Call of Cthulhu game which I did not intend to play in, because as you know if you know anything about Cthulhu as a game setting, first everybody gets really paranoid, then they go insane, and then they die, which didn’t sound like great fun, tbh. However, the GM then said the first adventure was going to be set in 1920s Peru, and…that sounded like too good a setting to pass up (and it was, he’s done an AMAZING amount of research and development for the world and it’s so good!).
Anyway, so I’ve been playing a Texas oil man’s new-money daughter, Alice, whose driving force is curiosity, which has led her to make very many stupid decisions. Worse than that, I keep rolling really badly on my saves, so poor Alice has gone off the deep end. I’d like to say “temporarily gone off the deep end” but in fact I won’t know for an in-game month, which will be many real life weeks, if she recovers enough to be played again. Pour one out for Alice, mates.
And enter Teddy.
Teddy is Alice’s fiance. He is, for reasons that now escape me but were funny at the time, based on Ted from Bill & Ted. Teddy is absolutely useless in this campaign. He cannot sneak. He cannot sense trouble. He can fight and is good with guns, but mostly he’s just a massive golden retriever bouncing along adoringly after Alice. He is, in other words, good-hearted but very, very dumb and very very beautiful (looking, as he does, like a 27 year old Keanu Reeves). And his only goal is to be reunited with his beloved Alice, who, unfortunately, was last seen running and screaming off into the streets of London.
This game has gotten five thousand times funnier since I started playing Teddy. :D
For one thing, I’m doing my very best to manage the “Whoa!” vocal intonations and, where I can, overblown language that Keanu Reeves uses as Ted. An example: Teddy is an artist. For Reasons, one of the other characters (Lord Summerset) in a panic, asked him if he could paint.
Teddy, lifting a fist and his eyes to the sky: Paint? Paint? Of course I can paint! I paint the beauty and the truth of the human heart!
Summerset: BUT CAN YOU PAINT A BI-PLANE?
Teddy: Oh. Yeah, of course, but will it help me find Alice?
Summerset, wild-eyed: DEFINITELY
Teddy: Okay!
Teddy, in order to actually paint the actual thing needed, which was basically a magic spell, then drank a concoction so disgusting the GM’s descriptions had us all gagging, so I’ll spare you that, but then he did paint a biplane and fly into a painting and rescue AS IT TURNS OUT, NOT HIS FIANCEE!
He did shake off a withering spell and help rescue the team members who were lost in the painting, then when the group decided the correct way to get back to their world was to crash the plane into the back side of the painting (yes, I’m skipping a lot of details here, the painting was a portal to a land before time, etc etc etc), rolled a critical success and FULLY Matrixed his ass through the painting, spun, kicked the door shut just before the plane engine hit it, & got 2 stability back for being so fucking cool. :D
But he did not find Alice.
Summerset told him he believed Alice had returned to their hotel, which was a lie but also the only way to get Teddy to not knock on every door on the street and ask if they’d seen his Beloved Alice. Upon their return to the hotel, the doorman told them Alice had not come back, so naturally Teddy fell to his knees in front of the fanciest hotel in 1926 London and raised his fists to the sky and howled, “Alice, my beloved! Where are you!? I will find you somehow!” while the utterly mortified group tried to get him inside.
We all retired (in the mid-afternoon, I think) to a private bar in the hotel, where everyone else began to drink themselves insensible while Teddy first flirted with Evelyn the socialite’s gay NPC fiance (I swear, all they did was exchange “Teddy,” “Freddy” but it was fraught!), then, good-hearted soul that he is, brought the artist who had painted the original magic painting up to his room and gave him some paper and pencils to sooth his heartbroken, insane soul with.
As it turned out, that was a terrible mistake, because despite trying to keep an eye on him, the artist ended up managing to commit suicide with the pencils. Fortunately, Teddy has not, and may never, realize that he gave the poor man the instruments with which to enact his own death.
The reason he may never realize this is…just as he found the poor guy’s body, the hotel rang up to inform him he was needed at the front desk, so he went down, said, “My friend is dead!” and they said “Your fiancee has returned!” and Teddy immediately forgot all about the dead man (who he met yesterday and is not really his friend) and dashed off to see Beloved Alice.
Beloved Alice is catatonic with sanity loss, staring into the middle distance, not responding to anything. Teddy does not notice anything is wrong. He expresses his relief that she’s back and promises that everything will be all right now. She pats his hand. He says, “I love you too, my love!”
He brings Alice up to show everyone that she’s all right. Everyone else can clearly tell that she is not all right, but since they’re busy folding the dead body into a steamer trunk and trying to leave the hotel without anybody noticing they’re carrying a dead body in a steamer trunk without letting Teddy know they’re doing this, they do not feel this is the time to bring up Alice’s not-all-rightness. (Evelyn volunteered one of Alice’s steamer trunks, and took all of Alice’s clothes. Not so Alice would have them later, but “because this always would have looked better on me anyway.”)
So they drive off toward Scottish highlands and Lord Summerset’s ancestral grounds (where they can bury a body without anyone noticing). They are in two cars, Teddy driving one and sharpshooter Dylan driving the other. But lo! They are followed by Persons Most Unsavory, Dude!
Dylan successfully shakes the tail. Teddy, however, CRITICALLY failed an evade & flipped the car, ejecting himself, Alice, and Summerset from it.
Teddy rolled a critical success & for the second time in a row, Matrixes his exit from a crash and superhero-lands without a scratch on him. Summerset succeeds and is unharmed despite going through the windshield.
Poor catatonic Alice, unsurprisingly, does not succeed. She is thrown from the vehicle, sustains a terrible head wound which which Summerset first-aided until it wasn’t bleeding so much, & then Teddy…critically failed his first aid AND CUT HER THROAT!
Fortunately Summerset kept her alive. O.O
Throughout all of this, poor catatonic Alice has made not one single sound. Upon arriving in Scotland, Teddy announces to the others that he thinks perhaps there’s something wrong with Alice, which sends Evelyn into hysterics while Summerset, who is really leaning into the panic and paranoia thing, announces to the wife he hasn’t seen in six or eight months that he and Dylan are going for a walk by the loch immediately, because, uh, “Dylan has never seen one before.”
Teddy, who still doesn’t know there’s a dead artist in Alice’s steamer trunk: Dylan has never seen a LAKE before?
Summerset: Shut up!
So we left them with Summerset and Dylan bringing the trunk out to the lake to sink it, Beloved Alice still gazing into the middle distance, and poor, darling, dumb Teddy starting to think that maybe, just maybe, something is actually Terribly Wrong here…
…but probably not. :)
This sounds wonderfully fun for a CoC game!
it is AMAZING!
We were having a great time before I switched to playing Teddy but it’s become sheer chaos and hilarity any times he’s around now. He’s gonna die so soon. The rest of the party is gonna make sure of it!
The last time I played Call of Cthulhu (which the GM ported over to the Fudge system), I played Darrell Lawrence (a thinly-veiled version of Larry Darrell from The Razor’s Edge). He was a philosophical drifter. The GM was much more interested in exploring Weimar Germany than driving us insane from interacting with the Mythos, so it was a bit of a tangent from standard CoC. I’m not sure that last time I played in an actual CoC game. It was a long time back.
As I tend to typically try to play Big Damn Hero types in TTRPGs (in the same way that the crew of Serenity were Big Damn Heroes, often with a very roguish bent), cosmic horror doesn’t usually appeal to me. Sounds like you have a good group and a good GM!
And, obviously, you’re playing the hell out of Teddy!
Cosmic horror isn’t usually my thing either but I’m genuinely really glad I joined this game. I’d been playing in the last game with this group, a Blades in the Dark thing, and hadn’t intended to join this one but yeah, it’s been so much fun!
I *normally* play big dumb “hit them first and ask questions never” types, although honestly the more I think about it the more fun I’ve had with other character builds, like Teddy, who is an absolute riot. He’s so over the top in his dumb sweet way that it’s easier to RP him than a lot of characters I’ve played, I think!