CthulhuTech: Head Case: A One-Shot Adventure

On Sunday, I got the chance to play in a one shot with two of the players in my Warhammer Fantasy Game, as well as Patrick Benson from Gnome Stew (though I didn’t know his credentials until after the session).

I went over to Ed’s house, about a half-hour drive, and settled down at his table. We’d be playing CthulhuTech.

Now, I own the rulebooks for the game, due to reviewing one of the books in the past, though I haven’t looked over them extensively, so I didn’t know all of the ins and outs of the rules. He had a set of four characters for me to choose from (since I arrived first),

I ended up playing a female character named Pendy, codename “Angel”, who was able to transform into a Tager, a supernatural creature by the name of Whisper. Each of the other characters was playing a Tager as well. The adventure we played was from the Cthulhutech Quick Start Rules, Head Case. Ed encouraged us to look at the adventure after we had played in it, and he really added a lot more depth to it than the adventure itself states.

We were told of a shipment coming in by boat, a Tager known as Glass, who would be carrying the Orthanich Stone, an item only recently uncovered in Ireland. It was to arrive in the Port of Chicago, and we were to escort the Tager with the stone to Northwestern University where it would be studied by a sorcerer who worked there.

Instead of just arriving at the docks that evening, we did a little recon earlier in the day. My character went to the Port Authority during business hours, and was able to glean the name of the ship, so that we could use that to determine where the crate carrying our cargo would be. After that, we arrived at 9, a whole hour before our rendezvous. The ship had already arrived.

Moving quickly, my character changed into her Tager form, the Whisper, being able to fly, and dropped one of the other Tagers, Lee, off on the ground, before using her thermal vision and x-ray vision to try to see our target inside the crates. Nothing.

She did, however, see movement in the water, before it disappeared.

Diving under the water, and able to use sonar, she found an enormous beastie of a creature, an Elid I believe it was called. A creature whose natural element is the water, she chose to flee, erupting from the water just moments ahead of its snapping jaws.

After some research by the others, we discovered that not only was our contact nowhere to be found, the Chrysalis Corporation, a front for the Children of Chaos, had been tipped off that we’d be here. There was a mole in our midst.

We headed to find our Handler, suspecting she may have been in on it. She owned a nightclub, but when we went there, there was an assassination attempt on her, and as we apprehended the would-be assassin, he was killed by poisoning himself. We knew we needed to immediately find our Lorekeeper, and the sorcerer who would be studying the stone.

At the Lorekeeper’s, we found him dead. We immediately headed over to the sorcerer’s house, where he was being dragged away by members of the Chrysalis Corporation. Running them down, we discovered they were Dhohanoids, similar to Tagers. They changed into their monstrous forms, and we had to take them down, rescuing the sorcerer. We still didn’t have the stone or our contact, however…

That’s where we ended it after 5 hours. The session went really well, with us getting into our characters fairly easily. It was the first time I’ve ever played a female character, which was interesting, though I spent more time in Whisper form than as a female.

Though we didn’t finish the session, according to Ed, there’s only a big final fight. He encouraged us to read the adventure, because, as he told me, next time we’ll run something he comes up with himself.

I really enjoy the system, with the way the d10’s work. You can check out the quick-start guide for more details on the system.