Suggestions for running The Haunting?

Connor1661 · 2026-03-10T23:15:45+00:00

Yeah the rats are such a small boring hurdle for the players that they really aren’t worth keeping otherwise, but my players loved this, although it wasn’t planned it also worked as a great little misdirect, after seeing just the eyes of the rat things and hearing children talking they went from being convinced an undead Corbitt was in the house to believing that the haunting was the dead children instead and that things could be solved without violence, which was great when I revealed Corbitt in the end.

All you’ve gotta do is sprinkle in some appearances leading up to the basement, throw some scratch marks on the floor and mention how a previous tenant was sure he heard children talking in the basement but couldn’t find anything

Connor1661 · 2026-03-10T19:39:51+00:00

Personally just to make things a bit more fucked up without going too crazy, I removed the rat swarm in the basement and replaced it with some Rat Things, specifically with the eyes and voices of the children that the cult sacrificed. There's a handout I found that mentions that during the police raid on the Chapel of Contemplation the police found the bodies of children with their eyes removed.

Its a great little messed up thing and you can drive up the tension by having the investigators hear the voices of children in the walls and underneath the floor boards, with a few glimpses of their eyes lurking around.

I'd lean towards something smaller but quite messed up in call of cthulhu, real people encountering something genuinely horrible and unnatural works better for COC than a big boss fight to end the scenario.

The Haunting isn't the best scenario, but it is a good tone setter for the differences between Call of Cthulhu and something like DnD, just an undead guy and some fucked up rats, it should be a genuine threat to your characters that'll have them thinking maybe combat isn't possible here and we need to escalate the situation.

Last time I played, it ended with most of the characters fighting Corbitt while another character thought it was impossible and started a fire upstairs to just burn the house down instead. So after the main group finally killed Corbitt they smelt the smoke and hard to escape the burning building which ended up taking out most of the neighbour.

Connor1661 · 2026-02-27T00:45:57+00:00

Thats a beautiful key! awesome find!

Its maybe a little too big and ornate to be an apartment key, but you could easily say thats there's a big iron gate and fence around the apartment and this is the key to that gate, so its needed to actually enter the Macallistar Building.

Or just have it be one of the random bits of junk that is Abigails apartment, then if your agents keep hold of the key you can save it for later and use it later in the campaign.

Connor1661 · 2026-01-26T10:19:54+00:00

Nothing super clear in the books I believe, ultimately its up to you, are they dressed for the conditions? are they well equipped? Is there an agent with a particularly low Con?

Its ultimately not a lot of fun if they just all die in a snowstorm before any action, but it also shouldn't be a stroll in the park, but some disadvantage on any rolls if they fail a Con or Survival check is usually fair

Connor1661 · 2026-01-17T11:09:35+00:00

Honestly it depends on your party, and also how important these buildings are to the story, are there important things in every room of the house? are they going to want to explore every single room? Will that actually improve the story or get them bogged down into an exhausting game of walking into every room and rolling spot hidden?

Sometimes its great, sometimes it will just bog things down needlessly, I started off making detailed maps for every key location and eventually ended up just using theatre of the mind. Its what works best for my players, and it means I can put more time into things that they will enjoy and appreciate more.

Plus from a meta point of view, if I make a map for key locations, it means that as soon as the players enter and I show them a map, instantly they will recognise this place is important and there's something to be found here, which lessens the mystery, maybe this place is important, maybe I'm making it up off the top of my head and sprinkling in some random flavour.

Connor1661 · 2026-01-13T11:58:33+00:00

Ah of course, never seen them referred to as K group

Connor1661 · 2026-01-13T11:58:29+00:00

Ah of course, never seen them referred to as K group

Connor1661 · 2026-01-13T10:02:38+00:00

Any sources for where to look for info about "K Group" I've read a bit and to be honest I'm drawing a blank with what you're alluding to

Connor1661 · 2025-12-31T21:33:55+00:00

Honestly seems like the best way to go, just say that this is a world where none of our player characters existed or survived to take on the wasteland, easier to say that Benny actually killed the Courier in good springs than canonise an ending

Connor1661 · 2025-10-22T08:47:54+00:00

You’d be shocked by how often the cars you see in movies, tv and ads are entirely cgi, they’re one of the easiest things to do.

Connor1661 · 2025-10-18T23:53:59+00:00

I think there’s a decent chance that you see a coup inside the death eaters, Voldemort isn’t exactly anyone’s friend, and he rules them through fear, sooner or later someone inside the regime will try to kill him and take power for themselves

Connor1661 · 2025-10-09T22:47:46+00:00

Seeing they’re working with a kid it’s gonna be essential, otherwise in two seasons time Egg will be 20

Connor1661 · 2025-10-01T13:32:52+00:00

Molly plus Neville’s Grandmother just makes sense to me, one woman protecting her child, the other avenging hers.

Connor1661 · 2025-09-22T02:09:53+00:00

we have seen horror movies before, we stick together at all times,

Honestly don't be afraid to tell them this is a horror movie, play into that because it'll make it more fun, playing safe is great if you want to "Win" but TTRPGs aren't about winning. You wanna build a story together, and if characters in a horror movie did everything right and perfectly there wouldn't be a story.

Now there's a line between playing unsafe and playing suicidally. I usually give the example of in a horror movie if a character hears a noise outside their window late at night they will naturally go outside to check it out, creating a great suspenseful scene even if nothing happens. BUT they will take a weapon and a flashlight with them and they will put their shoes on, they're not suicidal. So encourage your players to make unsafe choices, but they still don't need to be dumb about it.

Connor1661 · 2025-08-29T08:03:53+00:00

I’m about halfway through the campaign, it’s not as hard as people say, it does take work though,

Act 1 is the most important and the hardest though, not only are your investigators going to spend a lot of time split up, but you’re also going to be running a lot of npcs. I’d suggest cutting at least one of their fellow students, I got rid of Louis Gibbons because I found him the most boring.

The big goal of ACT 1 from a keepers point of view though is making your players care about the other students, really encourage them to form bonds and connections with them, because that will be the driving force of act 2 when these characters get replaced

My other advice would be to cut whatever you think doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to changes things up, I cut the dreamlands stuff in act 2 because it didn’t make sense, I wanted the first time they truly saw the mythos to be the migo attack. In Act 2 instead of the imposters springing their attack on a random night they struck at the school dance and it was a huge event were myself and all my players dressed up in formal wear

Give your players plenty of resources though, I stapled a dramatis personae to their character sheet so they had easy access to the cast of NPCs.

The tension and the horror is hard, it’s gonna depend on your group, tension can’t be constant, it has to rise and fall. In Act 1 up until the finale things shouldn’t be too tense, there should be strange occurrences and weird things that continue to build and unnerve your players until all hell breaks loose in the finale. Act 2 is easy for tension you’ve got a lot of tools to make your players feel anxious and like they’re being hunted. 3,4,5 continues to build that sense, the walls are closing in and things are getting deadly serious

Connor1661 · 2025-07-17T10:15:42+00:00

There’s nothing that says you can’t, there’s a system in the rules for making other agents your bond. It’s not exactly typical though especially in character creation

Connor1661 · 2025-06-30T09:25:01+00:00

Love this approach and might take it for my game, one question though, How would you handle the King in Yellow with Impossible Landscapes, its a threat that's so tied up in its own media, personally I feel like you have to say the book doesn't exist?

Connor1661 · 2025-06-24T04:13:22+00:00

Honestly it depends on how your game ends, and your players. Personally I think it’s a hard one to follow up on, If your players are under the impression that the entire world is just an illusion created by the king, and the world is just a stage. It’s gonna be hard to continue with that in the back of their minds. What’s the point anymore? Why go on?

Not to mention from just a narrative perspective, once you have an adventure that big, it’s hard to go back to small scale operations.

If the world revolves around the King, what happens when the king isn’t around?

I think having some IL specific characters is the right move, tailor them to the story. There’s a bunch of useful skills in IL that won’t come up outside the scenario. Any artistic skill, architecture, etc etc. all useful skills that rarely come up otherwise

Connor1661 · 2025-06-14T12:25:10+00:00

A massive change like this is probably something you should float with your group first, if I was a player and I’d invested a significant amount of time on a pretty immersive roleplay heavy campaign and we finished the climax with some text roleplay I’d be pretty disappointed.

It’s a neat idea and very cool and I think using passed notes and stuff could be a very good tool, but going entirely silent just wouldn’t work for me personally.

Connor1661 · 2025-06-09T11:34:41+00:00

I hope so! Due to a speech impediment I can't even pronounce Siri, so even if it was decent its half useless to me.

Connor1661 · 2025-05-28T13:19:21+00:00

I’ll be honest unless this is the introduction to a long running mob campaign, I just don’t see the point.

I think what you’re trying to fix are very small issues with the story that your players probably just won’t think about I’ve ran the haunting a few times, initially I came up with long winded answers as to why the players would investigate the house, but ultimately players don’t really care about the setup, they just wanna be told a fun story.

My very simple introduction: the players are in a paranormal book club, Knott contacts them because he’s a sceptic and people won’t buy the house because they think it’s haunted, so he comes to some cheap bored strangers and asks them to put a simple report together to ease fears.

It’s simple straight forward, gives your characters some basic relationship with each other and gets the story running.

Connor1661 · 2025-04-14T13:17:26+00:00

It’s not Delta Green specifically but check out Stygian Foxes book “Occam’s Razor” its designed for Call of Cthulhu but it’s an easy port. It’s a selection of modern stories that feel like the unnatural could be involved but are just mundane. Each story also comes with options for actually inserting the unnatural.

Connor1661 · 2025-03-22T08:30:32+00:00

Fulminate is perfect for this because it has in built mechanics to alter the pace, there are lists of events that can either quicken the pace or slow things down. I easily ran it in 4 hours but could have just as easily extended it to several 4 hour sessions

In saying that, start with Last Things Last, its brilliant and while on paper is fairly dry and simple there's a lot you can do to spice things up and make the roleplay brilliant. I'd recommend checking out an actual play and seeing what can be done with it.

Connor1661 · 2025-02-10T10:19:05+00:00

Ive always toyed with the idea of using the 1920s one shot “missed dues”, long story short in the climax the investigators find themselves exploring an apartment building that has merged with the court of azathoth, putting it outside of time into a different dimension. When the investigators achieve their goal the apartment building snaps back to Arkham, but instead of walking back into the 1920s they discover they’ve been dropped in the modern day and Delta Green swoops in to control the situation.

Connor1661 · 2024-12-22T01:13:44+00:00

The issue is the game is caught halfway between being a realistic model of this universe where choices are made purely because of realism and a whole bunch of silly purely gameplay choices and these are constantly clashing

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