by Andrew Leman played May 8-11, 1990 in Urbana, Illinois An ancestral curse destroys a prominent Arkham family, despite fearsome supernatural efforts to avoid it. Black Tentacle Awards This game took home three Black Tentacle™ Awards: Best Artifact, Best Scenario, and Most Horrifying. All three trophies honored one thing: the cemetery scene in which the investigators dug up the corpse of the Brisbane infant. The body itself was voted best Artifact, while the episode took the Scenario and Horror prizes. This scenario was played in some actual woods across the road from an actual cemetery, in the middle of an actual rainstorm late at night. Luckily, it was a warm night and the rain was a lot of fun, in addition to being amazing atmosphere. Game Notes Nick Offerman was given a codeword whereby he would know that he was injured by the shotgun blast in the opening scenario. Although the honor system is usually all that’s needed to regulate melee in Cthulhu Lives, in this case the Keeper wanted to make sure that one of the Investigators would be hit by gunfire, mostly to help ensure that he himself would have time to escape and lead the players to the vantage point from which they could see the ghost. If they had caught him too soon, they might never have been able to see the ghost, and the story would have been seriously hindered. Making sure one of the Investigators was hit was a way of slowing down the chase. Although the opening scenario of this game was played in an actual cemetery, the exhumation of Vivien Brisbane’s casket had to be played out in the imaginations of the Investigators. The Keeper just wasn’t able to provide a diggable grave location for that scenario. The exhumation of the infant, however, was played out completely live, in woods across from the cemetery. The ghost of Vivien Brisbane was played by a woman wearing white ghostly shrouds. The hole in her skull was simulated with a bald cap and makeup. The ghost of the infant was a puppet operated by two people via long plastic rods. When the infant transformed into the specter of Death, the benevolent infant part of the puppet was stripped away, revealing the large skull underneath, and the body of the Death specter, made of thin fabric, was pulled out of a hidden storage compartment inside the skull. Thus a normal-size infant seemed to transform into an 8-ft. tall ghost in just a few moments. The character of Gunnar Bachlund was originally an Investigator character (Game 10, Feeding Time), but it was quickly discovered that a mortician with absolutely no sense of humor makes for an awkward player. But he’s still a good character, so he was converted to NPC status, and has appeared a few times in that capacity. At some point in one of the cemetery chase scenarios, player Jamie Anderson lost the costume glasses he had been wearing. When an actual Urbana policeman happened to drive by, Jamie, being a first-time player, assumed that the Keeper had arranged for police involvement, and he actually waved down the passing officer, planning to ask for help. Luckily the Keeper managed to avoid letting the cop realize the full extent of what was going on, and the game was not derailed. Even the friendliest policeman is a surefire way to bring a Cthulhu Lives game to a grinding halt. The Keeper himself got a genuine shudder during this game from a creepy coincidence. When the Investigators were attempting to acquire rope in order to mark out the elder sign in the cemetery, the Keeper was called upon to play a hardware store clerk in an impromptu scenario. When the Investigators asked how much rope would be needed, the Keeper, exasperated by an overwhelming number of questions, replied, "I don’t know, fifty-five and a half feet," just pulling that number at random out of the air. Later, one of the Investigators did the arithmetic, and realized that fifty-five and a half feet is 666 inches. "My recollections of that game seem to be just off in my peripheral vision: when I turn my focus to look directly at them, they fade out. I have no clear idea how we came to any of the conclusions in the game. What I do remember with immediacy is fighting off encroaching panic as we navigated our way through living woods in a tight little bunch, and the starburst of adrenaline shooting out of my heart at the first sight of the baby's corpse, and the unlooked-for, unexpected tenderness and care I grew to feel toward the baby as I held him--there was a point at which I think I wouldn't have been surprised if that baby had cooed and cuddled and cried. This game was clearly a mostly emotional experience for me, much less so a rational or tactical one." —Lindley Curry, Investigator "Alice Jamison"