Rip It & Run! No, REALLY Bad Guys!

The last time I wrote one of these it was to look at the possibilities involved with running a game where the team was flying close to the outlaw side of things – flouting the law in order to bring their enemies to Justice. Today, I want to push that envelope a little bit further: what if your team of players was composed entirely of cultists?

To provide some back-story, a lifetime ago, I was running my team through the Chaosium campaign “Shadows of Yog-Sothoth”. The first adventure in that linked series of scenarios is called “The Silver Twilight Lodge” and it requires that one or two members of the party infiltrate the cult and learn what it is that they are about to do (hint: it involves ‘Destroying Something’ and ‘The World’). Anyway, once the party decided who the best member of their team was at pretending to be a cultist, they began their mission in earnest.

In order to maximise the roleplaying and to heighten the tension, I split the group up. In one room, I had the infiltrating player going one-on-one with the cult leaders, withstanding their scrutiny and background checks and surviving all the pointed questioning; in the other, I had the remaining party members, doing research and preparing to leap into action. According to a pre-determined timetable, they met up to exchange information and to take stock of how they were progressing.

Finally, it all came down to a huge confrontation, an ambush devised by our cult-busters that went horribly awry after it transpired that the infiltrator had turned to the dark side and sold out the other party members. It was a huge eye-opener.

Obviously we didn’t get too much further along with that adventure, but it did make me aware that there are other ways of playing this game (“Call of Cthulhu”, obviously, but it would possibly also work for other horror games too). Why not try batting for the baddies?

If you look at any scenario, particularly one that involves a cult and its hidden activities, it’s easy to see how you can go about this. Cults have agendas – there are things that they want to achieve. In order to attain these goals, they need to collect information, hire personnel, obtain certain material components of their master plan and then put everything into action. Think about the well-known Keith Herber scenario, “The Evil Stars”: in that adventure (spoiler alert!), the cultists are a famous heavy-metal rock group on a national tour which is a front for them preparing and casting a time-consuming spell to summon Hastur to the planet. The spell requires an enormous arrangement of standing stones to be created and emplaced in a gigantic “V” configuration; each stone has to be consecrated and activated before the final ceremony to summon “He Who Must Not Be Named”. To this end, the band members employ roadies as muscle and groupies as handy sacrificial material, all the while travelling from gig to gig, recording new music and dealing with all the headaches of being a rock band on the road. Now imagine your players are those rock stars.

Essentially, this is just the flip-side of what your players would normally be doing in the course of the game. In chasing this cult, they would be doing research; scoping out the head honchos from the hired hands; learning the background to the band’s formation; and tracking down former associates for whatever insights they might have. Then they would start preparing their own magical response to the summoning ceremony, finding ingredients and preparing all the other requirements of spell-casting.

Of course, it needs to be said that the Bad Guys in a “Call of Cthulhu” campaign are all hopelessly insane, so how do you finesse that part of the equation? In essence, you don’t. Just as when, in “Dungeons & Dragons”, you are just Chaotic Evil if you choose that alignment, so too, if you’re playing the Bad Guys here, you just choose to be mad. Think of your cultist character’s SAN points as ‘negative sanity’ points and run them just as you would normally. Mad or not, cosmic entities and processes still affect human psyches in the same way – seeing a Byakhee is going to blow your brain, insane or otherwise; the difference is how your mad brain deals with it, ie., accepting its presence rather than attacking it, or fleeing from it (which might happen on a bad roll anyway). The penalties for SAN loss affect the good guys as well as the bad ones and it is at these crucial moments that your narrative will stand or fall regardless of your group’s moral code.

Of course, you need to think about such things as seeing a dead body. For the Good Guys, this is usually a shot to the brain bucket, especially if the corpse is someone that they knew. Bad Guys don’t have this issue since, in the normal run of things, they are the ones making all of the dead bodies. Consequently, other things have to impact the villains, such as having an element of their plan thwarted, or a major setback taking place. Think about the baddies in movies: what sends them off back to their hideout to lick their wounds and pout about their lack of success? Those things are what you need to throw at your team to rattle their sanities.

The potential downside of playing in this mode is that your players will be mucking about in the dark areas of the Mythos and a few sessions might leave your players feeling a bit morally grubby. Running this version of the game should – depending upon the players involved – be used sparingly and be just a palate cleanser for when the normal fare seems to have lost its sparkle. Intriguingly, if your cultist team isn’t successful in its endeavours but manages to get far enough along that other twisted entities might pick up the ball and keep trying, you could have your Good Team try to take them on, having put in all of the hard work for you as Keeper. Wicked, huh?