The Island of Doctor OBEY

The GM: Jon

The Characters:

Game System: Call of Cthulhu

Game Type: One-Shot

Synopsis:

A one-shot game that was run at GenCon, Con of the North and a few home games.

The characters wake up on the beach of a tropical island. They have only very vague memories of what happened and how they got here. As they explore the island (and bicker with each other -- or hook up with each other) they discover a large, dumb man (and his club) who tells them he works for the Doctor. He also tells them disturbing stories of how Jezebel got locked up in the cellars for wanting to have relations out of marriage, which is evil and a sin. In general, he acts very strangely around them, and find the fact that two are a couple terribly amusing.

GM Notes:: I wrote this game for one specific reason. To disturb players. Since we all know that players are jaded, cynical bastards that will never trust a single plot point or character you throw at them ("What? He's trying to help us? He'll only betray us in the end! Get him!"). And we all know that players are just not disturbed by anything (GM: "You walk in to a blood soaked room with a thousand mutilated bodies! It's the most horrible thing you've ever seen!" Player: "I search for treasure.") I worked long and hard to come up with something that would disturb the players. I've run this story 5 or 6 times (and once it was run by Brian and Dan at Con of the North). I've seen it not work to it's full impact and I've seen it work better then anything I've ever done (all three GenCon games ended with players in hysterical disgust!). I came up with the idea for my story after reading a comment by Steven Speilberg who said, "It's easy to get audiences to hate your villain and it has nothing to do with how many people he kills. Just have him kill a cat or a dog." Well I took that to heart. I designed an entire game around fooling the players (not the characters, THE PLAYERS) into raping a puppy to death. Not only did I fool the players, they didn't find out what they had done until about 15 minutes after they had done it and talked about it in character, with the other players. So there is this big discussion about the blood and the strange sex and then...they realize what they had done.

It was my finest hour.