2nd Session
Our current line up:
Joyce Summers (Catherine Ramen), 34, veteran of Masks of Nyarlathotep, ever more convinced that somehow, Nyarlathotep is behind this, though trying desperately to convince herself he can't be.
Vito de Genaro (Chris Bell), I think in his 40s? This is the PC of the player who missed this session. Veteran of Tatters of the King. (NB: Chris wasn't able to make the 2nd or 3rd sessions.)
Martin Locksley, 26, recruited by Joyce, as she needs a Book Guy she trusts, and they know each other through the demimonde circles.
Cecil Walker, late 20s / early 30s, originally a psychoanalyst, but lost a patient to the asylum, so went into engineering, because a) it's an exciting field in the 1930s and b) machines can usually be fixed, and when they can't, it's not like failing a person. Recruited by Joyce, as her last mechanic left (one of the PCs from the first session).
Lillian Avery (Alden Strock), in her early 20s. Briefly self-institutionalized until she realized that, while she was a bit off, she wasn't actually crazy. We agreed we were fine with the Amazing Coincidence that the institution in question would be Joy Grove, and that she decided to check herself out after seeing the PCs come and go in the first session. She tracked Joyce down (not all that hard -- I had the Thai thugs do likewise). Joyce knows her because Joyce has occasionally flown her family around.
Joyce Summers noted that her three companions had apparently abandoned her. She hoped Tony, her mechanic, really did have something important to do and wasn't lying to cover up cowardice. Either way, though, she needed a mechanic and a book guy.. Sure, she had Remi's contact information, but she didn't really know him, and she certainly didn't trust him.
She decided to deal with the mechanic issue first, recruiting Cecil Walker. Originally a psychologist, he switched fields after being unable to help a woman who was a patient, losing her to the asylum. I gather that, for someone wanting puzzles where a failure did not break a person, engineering was a very exciting field to work in during the thirties.
Joyce discovered that her new mechanic had other, unsuspected-by-her, areas of expertise.
Joyce: You went to Hopkins?
Cecil: Yes.
Joyce: That's like a big thinky doctor place, isn't it?
Cecil: ...Yes.
Joyce: Do you know a Dr. Keaton?
I asked if it were likely. We think the field of psychology was small enough at this time that he would at least have heard of him.
Joyce next visited her friend Martin Locksley, trying to recruit him as her book guy.
Joyce: Martin?
Martin: Yes?
Joyce: Martin? You look terrible. Martin. You're not in touch with him again?
Martin: Who? Oh, Samuel? No.
[Samuel is one of Martin's Sources of Stability, as well as Martin's abusive ex.]
Joyce: You're sure?
Martin: Yes. Sometimes.
Joyce told him why she needed a "book guy", explaining about Henslow's journal and the magical rock.
Martin (after Joyce explains things): Oh, the rock is magic! I thought it was just magnetism. So you have a magic rock and the book.
Martin (on LA, after I mentioned public libraries): Do they even have public libraries down there? I thought it was still a frontier.
Having recruited her book guy and new mechanic, Joyce went to the hangar to meet them. She got there before either man, but not before Lillian Avery.
We agreed that we were fine with Lillian's period of institutionalization had just ended, and that she'd been at Joy Grove during the events of last session. I told Alden that, as these events had already happened, Lillian wasn't going to have made contact with them in any meaningful way, and certainly none with Joyce, who had met her and flown her places.
Lillian decided it was time to check herself out, which, while not easy, was well within her capabilities. It occurred to me that women might not have been institutionalized in the same facility as men, but I didn't worry about this, as we all wanted to streamline this bir of reality / realism.
There was a montage of Lillian finding out Joyce's registered flight plan and returning to New York. And, that is why Joyce found Lillian inside the hangar.
Joyce explained that she couldn't take a customer.bLillian explained that she wasn't a customer, just someone planning to go where Joyce was going. Joyce learned that Lillian had been at Joy Grove.
Joyce: What were you doing in the nut hatch, Lillian?
Lillian: Discovering that I'm not crazy.
Joyce: Are you sure? Did you get a second opinion?
Lillian: Oh, I didn't ask -them-.
Joyce tried to talk Lillian out of coming along. She couldn't look after Lillian, and Lillian was simply too delicate for this.
Lillian: Delicate? I spent several months in an asylum with Fred and Douglas.
Fred Culver was an inmate who was a biter. Douglas Henslow was a burned out former investigator.
Both women made a Sense Trouble roll and realized people were trying to sneak into the hangar. Cat made a quick sketch of it, describing it as basically a metal box. Two guys tried to come in the front, and two tried to sneak in through the office in the back.
Lillian grabbed the arm of the man coming in first in the front and flipped him onto his back on the floor of the hangar.
That is, player easily hit and rolled 0 damage, as all unarmed attacks do damage of d6 - 2. Flipping was chrome / description. It has an effect, but did no damage.
Joyce got her gun out, so the leader of the thugs did likewise, and there were shots fired. I think she managed to take the leader down to 0 Health (although Health both is and isn't hit points). I decided that he was either dead or dying, player choice.
Cecil came in around then, and I think he grabbed a pipe or wrench or something and helped out. The thug still standing near the rear of the hangar decided to run away. Somewhere in there, either Lillian or Joyce got the note "Drop this case. Go home." from the thug on the ground.
The thug still standing in the front of the hangar decided to leave as well. Joyce handed off her gun, I think to Cecil, I think because Lillian revealed she had her own little ladylike gun.
Martin came into the hanger from the back, via the office, having passed the thug fleeing from there as he came in. Joyce ran out the front door, grabbing her shotgun en route. Exiting the hangar, she called for the man running from the front of the hanger to stop.
Joyce: I _will_ shoot!
The man kept running. Joyce reminded herself that he was no longer on her property (well, the property she rented, but it amounts to much the same) nor a clear and present threat, and, in fact, he was running away. Reluctantly, she lowered the shotgun.
Cecil (understandable nonplussed): Excuse me -- how much were you going to pay me? Because maybe I just want to go home.
Joyce: Cecil, do you know any first aid?
Cecil: Yes.
Joyce: Come with me.
Cecil: What? I was just here to fix the plane!
Joyce, motioning to bleeding cultist: Well, now you can fix this guy.
The group spotted the tattoos. None of them could speak to the conscious thug, and Joyce had the dubious fortune of being able to realize that, while the thug understood English just fine, the language he spoke was probably no known human tongue. Joyce thought it might be Aklo, but I noted that it just didn't sound like any Aklo she'd heard (not that she's actually fluent in it).
Joyce got in touch with a contact in the police to report the situation. He said it would be good if no one died before he got there.
Joyce: Don't worry. I've got my mechanic working on it.
Contact (sarcastic): Oh, good.
Someone pulled out either a bottle or a flask, figuring everyone could use a drink.
Lillian: A lady shouldn't be seen doing such things. What's that over there?
This was the first serious combat I've run in this Eternal Lies campaign, and it lasted longer and drained more resources than I'd expected. So, I called for a full refresh before Los Angeles.
Martin, discussing angle of approach for something in Los Angeles: Lillian can be my date.
Lillian: Oh -- you were making a joke.
I'd printed out the wonderful fully written Henslow letters written by one of the Yoggies. These walk the line perfectly between "That's it? Just a sentence from each letter?" and letters that are too long and too distracting because the players will assume that there's more there than there is.
I also wrote a new letter from Douglas Henslow, as Joyce and Vito led him to believe that they'd been sent by Walter Winston, and he had no idea that Winston was dead. He mailed his letter to Walter Winston, which meant that Janet Winston received it. She sent it to Joyce.
Joyce (reading it): He thinks we're on the case.
Me: You -are- on the case.
Joyce: Oh God!
Joyce took her co-pilot (and Source of Stability) Fred with her, but did not take her lover, Sissy (also a Source), which led to some tension and a fair bit of shouting. But, Joyce had already decided she'd rather lose Sissy than bring her into the danger she was beginning to believe existed.
As her Drive is adventure, she posted either the latest Henslow letter or the note from the thugs in her cockpit. And, off everyone flew to Los Angeles, which I was informed was pronounced Los Angelees in 1937. And, Hollywood was there.
Someone, I think either Joyce in character or Alden out of character: Actors -- the only people more high strung than Lillian.
Once folks arrived (a trip that took a few days, as the plane did need to stop and refuel), Lillian and Martin decided to collect the safety deposit box.
Joyce: There's a small but significant possibility that the safety deposit box will be watched.
Lillian: That's fine. I can keep Martin safe.
I asked where folks were staying. Someone said that the group had to do the cliched thing and rent a beach bungalow in Santa Monica.
Martin: I -hate- beeches.
Lillian decided that meant they had to rent one, as Martin wouldn't be happy without something to complain about. Folks talked about The Highly Effective Los Angeles Transportation System.
Martin and Lillian went to the First Bank of Long Beach -- only to find it closed, a casualty of the Depression. At least one of the players loved this twist. It's brilliant -- so obvious when you think about it, and completely unlikely to cross the players' minds beforehand.
Martin sat down with the folks on the stairs leading up to the bank, putting his arm against one of the men, "Boils" McGillicuddy, who was surprised, but happy to tell the sad story of the bank's fate in return for a sandwich. Lillian, delighted to have something to do that Normal People did, bought sandwiches for everyone on the steps.
(OOC, the players noted with amusement that, yes, Martin would tell Lillian to make him a sandwich, and yes, she would do it.]
Boils explained that something called the FDIC came through about a year too late for the bank, but the FDIC would be where to ask for anything like the safety deposit box. Lillian and Joyce did that the following day, and were sent to an FDIC warehouse to collect it.
Joyce got in touch with a conntact, Bernie Ohs, who used to work for the DA and was now working in the office of the Los Angeles County Sheriff. He got her a copy of the police report about the 1924 incident. This gave a location, as well as descriptions of bodies. Those known to be dead included Ramon Echevarria (the cult leader), Richard Spend (cultist and B-movie actor, and three of Winston's team: Vince Stark, Katherine Clark (whose head was never found), F. C. Kullman (wheelchair bound, dragged from the car). No bodies were found matching descriptions of Edgar Job, Walter Winston, Douglas Henslow, and George Ayers. The first three were known to have lived past the incident.
Joyce noticed someone in the Sheriff's office giving her the stink eye, but neither she nor Ohs had any idea why, nor did they confront the man, who would likely have denied doing anything anyway.
Cecil, meanwhile, went to UCLA to look for George Ayers, cultist and History professor. He learned that Ayers had gone somewhere on sabbatical or a dig or something years back. A new professor had claimed the office, as it was far better than the lack of space he'd been given. Cecil sympathized. He talked to the department secretary, who was happy to refer him to the department chairman. However, Cecil lacked the bureaucratic skills to get the information the group needed. He decided to return the next day with his, ah, assistant, yes, Martin, who could handle all the paperwork.
Martin looked properly respectable and efficient to the chairman, and flirted shamelessly with the secretary, who not only looked up the information he needed, but also offered to have Professor Ayers's things sent over to the university, rather than having folks trek out to the warehouse.
Meanwhile, Cecil tried to understand some of his companions' oddities, as Joyce fretted about how this was now "probably something" and starting to sound like "East Africa all over again".
Cecil: I don't get what's so bad about Africa. My father came back.
Lillian also puzzled him.
Cecil: You don't look insane.
Lillian: I'm not.
Cecil: Why were you in an institution?
Lillian: To make sure.
I forget the context of this:
Cecil: Are you sure, Miss Summers?
It might have been referring to Lillian's sanity, to Joyce's, or to Joyce deciding not to let Cecil psychoanalyze her. I don't recall. Nor do I quite recall how this conversation got started:
Lilian (to Martin): You have a profoundly masculine aura.
Martin: Really now?
Lillian (to Joyce): You also have a profoundly masculine aure.
Joyce: Thanks, I guess.
The safety deposit box contained photographs of people engaged in multiperson sexual acts. The photos were disturbing, rather than titilating, and Lillian blew her Stability roll. Joyce didn't.
Joyce:: Boring. Boring. Boring. Painful. Boring.
Lillian: Is that... actually possible?
Joyce assured Lillian that it was. Edgar Job was in two of the pictures. Olivia Clarendon was in none of them. As the group later found out, George Ayers was in some, and Ramon Echevarria was in all of them.
As I didn't care for the picture of Echevarria up on the support page -- he's supposed to be a charismatic cult leader, not a trenchcoated thug firing a machine gun -- I found a few pictures of an actor that I thought worked better.
Player: I understand everything now. Ryan Gosling is a cult leader.
They brought the pictures back to their bungalow, along with encoded account books, which had also been in the safety deposit box.
Cecil had no interest in the pictures, and didn't look at them.
Martin (in actual innocence): Are they dirty pictures? I probably want to look at them.
Cecil took a look at the account books. This was a case where certain skills could cut down on the time necessary to decode them first into math and then into English. But, as Cecil noted, there was no indication that there was any looming deadline.
Cecil: If you're not in a hurry, can I take two days, instead of one?
Martin (now that he knows there really are dirty pictures): Can I look at the dirty pictures?
Lillian: When I'm done with them.
Martin: Ladies shouldn't look at dirty pictures.
Lillian: And yet, we so frequently do.
Once Martin finally got a look at them, he, too, found them disturbing (i.e., blew his Stability roll).
Joyce started pinning them up.
Martin: Can we put a sheet on these photos when we're done putting them on a pin board?
Joyce didn't see the need for that, but Lillian quietly got a sheet and covered them.
At least once over the next day or so, folks blew a Sense Trouble roll. This is one roll that can't really be called for as a red herring, as players may want to spend points on it. Cat's take is that, on a failure, it's like the characters in a movie thinking for a moment that something's up, and then dismissing the notion.
Joyce: I may just be being a paranoid, old lesbian --
Lillian: Probably.
Martin helped Cecil with the account books while Joyce went to UCLA to pick up George Ayers's materials. This included a signed poster of Olivia Clarendon and Ayers's 1924 Ethiopian itinerary. I'm not quite sure what the authors mean by "itinerary", as no actual itinerary or summary of one is provided in the book. But, I've been reviewing the Ethiopia section, so I've some idea of what information they should actually have now.
Joyce also found Ayers's speculations about the being that Echevarria's cult worshipped. Echevarria called it the Fisher from Outside, and said that it was Gol-goroth. Ayers was skeptical of this, considering Gol-goroth a cosmic buffoon, albeit a highly dangerous one. He suspected an inner and outer layer to the cult's worship.
Joyce also spoke with Stuart Tichener, a math professor who had been Edgar Job's advisor. Tichener said that Job had been obsessed with math, and that he wanted to be a great math student, but simply wasn't. He wasn't a misunderstood genius. He just wasn't that good at math, despite great effort and all-nighters leading to triumphant work that was utterly wrong.
Lillian got in touch with a contact in Hollywook, Arlo Kemmer, aka Uncle Arlo, hoping to leverage that into a meeting with Olivia Clarendon. Meanwhile, the group discussed going to the LAPD to ask some questions about the police report on the 1924 incident. Lillian thought that she should go.
Martin: The LAPD? Don't they rape women?
Lillian: They're welcome to try.
Joyce: Time for me to break Josh out.
Cecil: Josh?
Joyce: Josh Summers.
Cecil: Your brother?
Joyce: Let's go with that.
Actually, Josh Summers is a male persona created by Joyce for situations where it's useful for her to pretend to be male. However, if I recall correctly, Martin was the one who went to the LAPD. He talked with Detective Trent Huggins, who had never been happy about the way the multiple murder case had been dropped. He couldn't give any official help, of course, but was willing to do what he could unofficially.
This meant that the group now had two dedicated pools:
- a 2 point Cop Talk pool for the LAPD
- a 1 point pool on Gol-goroth
Meanwhile, Lillian went to visit Yolanda Spenzl, sister of B-movie actor Richard Spend. Spend had died in the 1924 incicent. His sister now worked as a domestic servant and was very bitter about her position in the world, I think blaming her brother for wrecking everything they'd built.
Despite that, she was popular with the players. I'm not quite sure why. She gave her spiel about the parties, or rather, "parties" that her brother went to.
Yolanda: Did he invite me?
Everyone, including Yolanda, even the folks not there: No!
Player: I like her! Can we keep her?
She talked about how her brother would get violent sometimes and moody sometimes, how she thought he was involved in making porn films. Lillian told her that it was probably a drug, and probably just as well that Richard didn't tell Yolanda any of the very unpleasant details.
She was very polite and flattering, and got one more thing out of Yolanda. There were two cops who came around before Richard had died -- as opposed to the many cops who came by afterwards. These cops had asked her questions about her brother and about Echevarria, about whether her brother were taking drugs, and about Nectar, which she thought might be the name of a porn film her brother was secretly working on.
Lillian asked for a description of the cops. She described Douglas Henslow and Vincent Stack.
Players: Of course! They were PCs!
Yolanda also told Lillian to make sure that Lillian's brothers listened to her, just like Richard should have listened to his own sister, i.e., Yolanda.
Lillian did not make her Sense Trouble roll, so, after leaving Yolanda Spenzl's home, she practically walked into an ambusher's blow in a secluded area.
Alden: Now, where did I put my health?
This combat highlighted some of the tricky bits (for me, at least) of Gumshoe combat. Some systems seem to hate unarmed martial arts. (Call of Cthulhu is one of these, as taking that skill really doesn't get one much. We did a bit of house ruling to make it more useful.)
Scuffling and Weapons are two different skills in Trail (though not in all Gumshoe variants), and it doesn't matter how good one is at unarmed combat for damage purposes. One will always do d6-2 damage, which means that it kind of sucks if one wants to take someone down.
Mind, we get why this is the case. As Cat noted, there is no way to protect oneself from being hit apart from getting behind cover (which doesn't necessarily help that much). There is no dodge skill. Therefore, randomness gets shifted to the damage result.
For this session, we tried a house rule she used in her game: Specify points spent before the roll as always, but you can also specify that some of those points go into increasing damage if the attack goes through. E.g., I spend 3 points on the roll to hit, and 2 on damage. Those get spent regardless of whether I succeed or not.
For next session, we're using some of the rules from NBA and the Martial Arts Zoom instead, which should let Lillian do the sorts of things Alden envisioned when he made the character. This may also make Weapons and Firearms more awesome as well, and cover a hole in first edition Trail: As far as I know, there isn't a way in Trail as written to disarm anyone.
In addition to the quirks of the Trail flavor of Gumshoe, Eternal Lies has a couple of rules for specific combat. Fr'ex, the leader of the Thai thugs has some stats whose value depends on their highest value among the PCs. Lillian's ambusher was trying to rough her up and question her, and, to that end, would only do one point of damage to her Health, regardless of what he rolled on the die. If she tried to fight back, he'd draw a gun as a way of making it clear that she'd be better off submitting to the beating. The rules for The Drop from Stunning Eldrtich Tales were reprinted in a box in case Keepers wanted to use it, but this Keeper wasn't quite sure how it applied to this particular combat.
After the session, I described the combat to Josh, and he pointed out what was missing: Any mechanical effect of the ambusher's combat technique.
Josh: Okay, so this guy knows how to hit precisely and do a lot of pain. How does this affect the fight?
Me: Um... it doesn't.
Josh: What, not even a Stability test?
Me: Oh, yes, there was one for being attacked. She blew it and lost two points.
Josh: Okay, and how did that affect the fight?
Me: Er... she lost 2 Stability points?
In other words:
Mechanically, "great pain" does nothing. There's also the 2 point Stability test for being attacked, but again, mechanically, the effect on combat is nil. This makes the ambusher, intended to be a serious threat, feel less effective where it should make him feel more effective. I've queried the authors about how one runs a "rough up the investigators" combat mechanically, as opposed to narratively.
I'm also not quite sure of the logistics of holding a gun on someone you plan to beat up, even if one uses The Drop, given we're talking about a man who is trying not to leave marks or kill. And, he had good reason not to kill his victim, as Lillian's family has the resources to make a huge stink. If this guy's victim continues to fight back (and doesn't quickly take him out), would he actually shoot? For full damage, at point blank range? Or for just 1 point? Again, narratively, I get what's going on, but I'm not seeing mechanical support.
We also weren't sure whether switching weapons should take him to the end of the round. I think it does. This also makes him less effective in combat than I think he's intended to be.
That said, we liked the way the combat went. I'd debated whether Lillian or Martin would seem the easier target, and gave the guy a 50-50 shot on picking the right target, but the dice said he went for the wispy woman. An understandable, if unfortunate (for him) mistake.
Naturally, in play, I got a bit confused and made off the cuff rulings, and if those made Lillian more effective, that's no reflection on Eternal Lies.
Round 1: He hits Lillian for 1 point I rolled a 6, but he's only interested in doing 1 point. Lillian gets him for 4, despite being in pain, because, mechanically, that doesn't matter. Narratively, we agree that he probably hit her in the kidney. (Lillian's already going last, so I don't know if her pulling weapons should penalize her further, but I wasn't worrying about that at the time, which is just as well, as we wanted to see her go all River Tam on this guy.)
Round 2: He now goes for his gun, as Lillian has hit him with sticks, and I just cannot remember whether he automatically gets the gun out and gets to act before she can act, given he has to pull a weapon first, and Trail doesn't seem to have guidelines (or at least, none I could find without slowing things down). Given I'm not sure, one player says I can give Lillian an opportunity to make an Athletics spend / check to act first, which sounds good to me. So, she goes first, doing a whopping 6 points of damage. This sounds to us like hitting his wrist hard enough to make him drop the gun.
At this point, he's leaning against the wall panting, and Alden suggests that Lillian's got one stick jammed against his throat and another against his crotch, which sounds good to me, and, while the Lillian did not have Intimidation, I was willing to stretch a point given she'd taken him from 15 to 5 health and had him in a bad position. She was also willing to kick and poke him as necessary.
Lillain learned that her assailant was Jack Pizner, PI. He'd been hired by someone named Captain Walker, who had some connection to some guy named Trammel, in Pasadena to find out why folks were digging into the old business of 1924 now. He was clearly terrified of Walker. Lillian took his gun and, I think, his wallet. She asked him how much he was being paid. He lied and said $50, and that he'd already spent it. (Okay, the part about spending the $50 was true.) Lillian didn't really care that he was lying about the money. She recommended that he leave town, as neither Walker nor she and her friends were going to be very happy with him.
The players speculated that Pizner will lie to Walker, saying he was ambushed by at least three guys, rather than admiting that a slip of a girl beat him up and took away his gun.
Lillian returned to the bungalow.
Cecil: Are you all right?
Lillian: I'm going to be pissing blood for the next few days, but I'll be okay.
Cecil: Are you all right?
Lillian: I'm going to be pissing blood for the next few days, but --
Joyce: Oh, you're serious!
Martin: I'll make you coffee. (This is a bigger thing than it sounds, given he's something of a misogynist.)
Alden: She'd rather have tea, but wouldn't think to ask.
Lillian brought folks up to date, and Joyce made a point of stopping by the Sherrif's office and tossing Ohms the gun Lillian took off Pizner, and telling Ohms to whom it was registered and that Pizner had beaten up a young woman.
Flashing back to that evening, while she'd made light of her injuries, Lillian privately asked Cecil to look her over and make sure she was all right. Unsurprisingly, this became something of a Monsterhearts moment -- you know, a bit of erotic subtext wrapped around a healing sequence. Alden described Lillian as giving a small Summer Glau smile of delight as Cecil's hands moved near some intimate areas, while Alessandro described Cecil's sudden awkwardness as he realized just where his hands were.
To my delight and amusement, Joyce started to make a pin up map. I printed out the first few layers of Rickard Gudbrand's interactive map.
Quotes whose exact context I forget:
Cecil (as he's told about strange stuff): Shared Theatrical Hallucinations. Got it.
Joyce (scornfully, about Echevarria compared to other cult leaders she's known): He didn't even get his followers to rip their own skin off!
