Rip it & Run! The "Old Acquaintance" >:(

There is an old chestnut in gaming for hooking-in characters and much published Call of Cthulhu material relies upon it quite frequently – the ‘Old Acquaintance’. This is always an old school chum, a distant relative, or an old significant other who contacts one of the party members to ask for aid. Many modules advise Keepers to inject information about this person into earlier sessions of gaming so that the associate doesn’t just spring abruptly, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, into being. This is good advice, but oftentimes, the average Keeper has not been so forward-thinking. The poor player who gets suddenly saddled with some bizarre old geezer from overseas, or out of town, can very likely feel that part of their major creative input – their character – has been high-jacked away from them. In my experience (and, I suspect, that of a lot of other Keepers), players tend to object to being told that they know this NPC, the source of impending death and derangement, and they try to fob the curse off onto someone else; or they suddenly do something bizarre to distance themselves from the attachment, leading the story into places it was never meant to go.

 

A way to streamline this process is to ask all of the players to provide as many relatives and mutual friends as they can during the character-creation phase. Rounding out the characters in this way provides the Keeper with a handy list of old associates from which to pick and choose. Once a decision has been made about which old associate is the hook for the party, the Keeper should – barring some necessities required by the impending story – ask the player whose character is the link for the tale, to provide as much background about the individual as they wish. In this way, the party gets its hook, the player feels as though they have made a significant contribution to the adventure, and a lot of the Keeper’s workload has suddenly been reduced (pretty sneaky, I know).

As time passes and the party gains some history to draw upon, hooking them into adventures becomes that much easier: Notoriety, or fame, can bring the authorities, or special-interest groups (such as ghost-hunting clubs), out of the woodwork to ask for assistance and old NPCs can be revived and folded-in to ongoing tales. The initial hook, though, is always the Big One; spend some time getting it right and your game will be the better for it.