I ran the one-shot At the Monogahelas of Madness by Matt and Rob of the DM of None podcast a few months ago. I ran the adventure for three players–my spouse, a coworker, and his spouse. ATMOM begins as a murder investigation in Appalachia and turns when the party uncovers a cultist’s plot to summon a Great Old One. Last post I discussed how I simplified 5E mechanics to fit the adventure and shared my character options and props. The session went very well and I’m writing this reflection to help me identify what I can carry forward to future games.
If you want to discuss running one-shots with me, find me on Mastodon @[email protected]
My players and their characters
My players and I are middle-aged adults with careers and responsibilities and precious little time for TTRPGs. A week before the session I sent my players an email with the character creation packet and the premade characters (find those in the previous post) and gave the simple explanation that the game world worked according to “X-Files rules.” That is, the world is largely mundane but weird and inexplicable stuff happens at the margins.
My players came to the table excited to talk about their characters, so we took a few minutes to introduce their characters as we got settled. I made notes on a 3×5 card for each character.
My spouse took a shine to the pre-gen character Jasper Bootrattle and decided to gender swap the character to be Jiffy Bootrattle the Urban Cowgirl. Jiffy is a colorful character with skills that encourage interesting encounters, like rope tricks. My spouse is new to TTRPGs and tends to limit herself to actions that are on her character sheet. Jiffy gave my spouse some fun options (like, lasso the fleeing cultist) that allowed the party to overcome obstacles in unexpected ways.
My coworker picked the troublemaker background to start. He told us his character raised hell as a youth before joining the army and then became a truck driver once he was out. He said that part way through character creation he realized that he was sort of describing Kurt Russel’s character in Big Trouble in Little China. In tribute he named his character Jack Burton. Jack has high dexterity and is a dead eye with a thrown knife. Jack fumbled his way into solving a celebrity murder, earning him the Lucky feat and the notice of the WV Special Investigations Unit.
My coworker’s spouse seemed to have put the most thought into her character of the group. She riffed on the Academic background and “you uncovered a cult” accomplishment. Her character, Anna Blackstein, taught anthropology at a prestigious eastern university. She gained the trust of a new religious movement and conducted field observations with them for her research. During her field observations, Dr. Blackstein saw the members of the group perform magic rituals which she detailed in subsequent talks and articles. Her peers ridiculed her for believing in magic and ostracized her from academic high society. Anna ended up teaching community college in Huntington and the WV Special Investigations Unit recruited her.
So, we have Jiffy, Jack, and Anna. Anna took charge early and became the de facto leader of the group. The skill breakdown worked well. Jiffy and Jack had higher perception scores and tended to find clues while Anna could make History or Arcane checks to put the clues in context.
Defining the WVSIU and getting the call
During my session prep I decided my players would define the role of the West Virginia Special Investigation Unit. I wanted the world to fit the characters so that my players would engage more with the story. My players decided that they were part-time specialists who the regular police called when a case baffled them. They had good working relations with law enforcement that let them make recommendations, however they couldn’t outright give police orders.
To move character introductions seamlessly into action, I planned to ask what each character was doing at 2am when the police called them to the crime scene. My co-worker went first. 2am meant the bars were just closing and Jack was outside one such establishment taking in the cool night air after a long night of karaoke. He climbed into the cab of his big rig and drove to the WVSIU building where he transferred to the van their team uses. My co-worker’s spouse went next. Anna’s a night owl and was up working on an academic article that she hoped to submit to a journal. She’s in her home office that is piled high with books and loose papers. After talking to dispatch, she puts on a pot of coffee and waits for Jack to pick her up in the WVSIU team van. My spouse went last. Jiffy was already close to the crime scene because she was camping in the mountains. Jiffy saddled Genuine and rode down to the abandoned mine where a social media content creator had discovered a body.
Act 1: Finding the Body
The opening scene of At the Monongahelas of Madness is loaded with clues. Matt and Rob clearly know that if the party doesn’t get some idea of what’s going on here, the one shot is going to get off to a bad start. Pretty much no matter what, the party will discover the Student ID and partially burned flyer for the revival service. (My versions of both props are available in the prep notes post.) Those clues on their own can keep the investigation on track.
The party spent a lot of time questioning the social media content creator and searching his van. I had to throw in a “you feel you’ve learned all you can from him,” to keep things moving.
The party missed their checks to discover Wendell’s tracks outside the mine entrance. However, they were very careful not to disturb tracks once they entered the mine. Because of the new environment I allowed a second check which they made. Jack could tell that one person wearing large boots dragged the body in the sleeping bag into the mine and left. The body itself didn’t yield too many clues because no one had medicine proficiency. As expected, they found the ID and the flyer. Anna recognized the ancient Egyptian artifacts and knew someone who could translate the hieroglyphs scratched into the wall. Right as the party was about to leave the mine, Jiffy decided to take a final look for clues. With a very high roll on a perception check, I said some marks on the ceiling caught Jiffy’s notice and she thought to turn off her flashlight for a moment. The darkness revealed the glow-in-the-dark paint above the body depicting the night sky. It was a good eerie note on which to end the scene.
Act 2: Investigating the College
The party decided they had access to a field office in nearby Fayetteville from which to coordinate their efforts. They made inquiries into the college which turned up some information about Dr. Bommas and his history as a disgraced archeologist. They investigated Rosalyn Brewer’s background and found out she was an orphan but nothing else. The party piled into the WVSIU van and drove to Monongahela Bible College.
I gave the college and everyone at it heavy religious overtones. For starters, MBC was on “Easter Break,” not spring break. Everyone they spoke to had a “God bless you” at hand and peppered their speech with biblical aphorisms. I wanted the MBC people to contrast sharply with the Yog-Sothoth cultists they would meet down the line. I felt the contrast would increase the cult’s eeriness. The college is lightly written in the adventure and I improvised pretty freely to set the tone I wanted.
The party spoke to Dean Ron Ostdiek and got Rosalyn’s transcript. The dean also put them in touch with Rosalyn’s roommate who told them about a creepy guy with a pickup truck (Wendell) who took Rosalyn to a weird church. Jiffy went to the campus chapel and spoke to the pastor who told her that Rosalyn stopped attending services after returning from Christmas break. Even though the dean offered, the party never investigated Rosalyn’s dorm room.
The party tuned their attention to the Egyptology department. I described the Purnell Building as stark concrete and dark tinted glass that stood out from the college’s colonial style. The adventure says the building is locked but that the party can convince the Dean Ostdiek to have it opened. To make the Purnell Building more foreboding I decided that Dean Ostdiek wasn’t allowed a key to the building. A special agreement with the college stipulated that only Dr. Bommas and Miranda Purnell had keys to the building. The party worried that they might be observed breaking in. I reminded them the college was on break, but they decided on an elaborate plan to enter that turned out to be more fun than whatever simple lock picking check I had in mind.
Jiffy located a pipe sticking up on the roof and lassoed it from the backside of the building. Jiffy and Jack scaled the building and crawled across the roof to a roof access stairwell door. On their way across, I gave them a peek at the empty lecture hall through a skylight. Jiffy was about to shoot the lock off the door–and ruin their efforts at subtlety–when Jack jumped in to pick the lock. The two descended the stairs and opened a side door for Anna.
Once inside they explored the entire building before going into the lecture hall. I added an office for Miranda Purnell that was full of artifacts like the ones they found on Rosalyn’s body. Despite dropping in clues like this one, my players never really nibbled at the Purnell family occult angle.
The party found Bommas’s clue filled office and began rolling investigation checked to discover more of the props I prepared for the session. They encountered a couple jump scares before Dr. Bommas jumped them. Bommas missed with his shiv and was quickly lassoed and hog-tied. The party tried to question him but he just he babbled incoherently about Great Old One stuff. Exasperated, Jiffy pulled her pearl handled revolver a blew away a random piece of Egyptian cultural heritage to get his attention. She got Bommas to quiet down to muffled sobs but didn’t get any more information out of him. On their way out, the party called state troopers to come collect Dr. Bommas who they left hog-tied in his office.
Act 3: Showdown at the Whiteley Estate
The party found a map of the burials in Dr. Bommas’s office along with an aerial photograph of the valley of the kings marked with burials in the same configuration around a temple of Aten. Jack used Google Maps to see what was at the center of the circle of burials. An easy investigation check revealed the Whitley Estate in the hills above Falls View. The party decided to head there straight away.
At this point, they knew a cult leader had used Bommas to collect victims for a summoning ritual. They also knew the cult needed the Book of the Dead to complete the summoning ritual. Jack sent the map of the burials to the WV state police. Throughout the rest of the session, I’d have Jack’s phone buzz with a text that the police found another body.
At Dr. Bommas’s lab there’s no clue directly linking to the Yog-Sothoth cult’s church and the party never went to Rosalyn’s dormitory, so I improvised. On the drive over I had the party spot the church flyer stapled to a phone pole. They stopped at the church and Jack went in alone to scout it out. He arrived towards the end of a service and watched Wendell’s militia leave. The party interrogated Pastor Saylor and finally learned Wendell’s name. Saylor boasted that the cult’s plan to return Yog-Sothoth was too far advanced for them to stop. The party found another copy of the museum map at the church. In retrospect this turned out to be a forced digression. The party was already headed to the Whiteley Estate and I could have used the time on the rest of the adventure.
At the Whiteley Estate they scuffled comically with Wendell’s sister. After a few bad rolls, Lavinia wrestled Jack to the floor and tripped Jiffy with her own lasso before Anna finally stepped in and whacked her with something heavy. After the fight, Anna found some spell books in Wendell’s bedroom. I dipped into Anna’s background to connect the character to the scene. I said that while reading Wendell’s spells she felt a presence lurking in her mind and that she had felt the same presence when she snuck a look at the spell book of the magic-using cult she observed. My co-worker’s spouse didn’t roll well enough for Anna to be able to use the spells–which was probably best for her sanity.
Jack discovered the embalming equipment in the basement, the kiln used to make canopic jars, and put together Rosalyn’s murder. Jack also found a small shed that I added to the adventure where Wendell kept pictures and personal effects of all his murder victims. I added the trophy shed to give Wendell serial killer vibes.
Jiffy investigated the barn. She looked through cracks in the barn wall but couldn’t see the Spawn of Yog-Sothoth because of invisibility. My spouse rolled well on Jiffy’s perception check. I tried to convey that Jiffy could tell a large creature was moving around in the barn, but she just couldn’t see it. I think I should have said, “it’s like it is invisible.” Anna and Jack stopped Jiffy from opening the chained barn door and suggested burning down the barn.
The party concluded that Wendell and the militia went to rob the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. They alerted the Pittsburg police and gave descriptions of the militia members and their vehicles. After ensuring the creature in the barn perished in the flames, they called the WV state police to the Whiteley estate to book Lavinia.
Epilogue
Around my table, the evening had grown late and our guests needed to go. The party didn’t feel they needed to go stop Wendell in person. So, I ended the adventure at the Whiteley estate. As night fell, squad cars and emergency vehicles pulled into the Whiteley estate. Firefighters picked through the smoldering wreck of the barn and remarked that the fire seemed set intentionally. The party brushed off the implied accusation. They handed over evidence that put Wendell at the center of a decade long plot to murder people for his own demented reasons. The phone rang and they learned that the Pittsburg police surrounded the militia when they arrived at the museum and killed Wendell during the ensuring standoff.
Overall, it was a fitting X-Files style ending. The proof of the supernatural–the spawn of Yog-Sothoth–perished before normies could learn of its terrifying existence. The Purnell family remained lurking in the background, waiting for another opportunity to summon their Eldritch God and plunge the world into darkness.
Takeaways
Kicking off the session by having each player describe what their character is doing moved us seamlessly from introductions to action. Asking my players what their characters were doing when dispatch called them at 2am avoided exposition from me and put the spotlight squarely on each character.
Making character options (pre-gen or otherwise) that seem off-type for the adventure makes for unexpected solutions. This may be particularly good for a new player who would struggle to assert their voice at the table. Let the new player be the one who can do the thing that’s “just crazy enough it might work.” My spouse’s character Jiffy didn’t have skill proficiencies besides perception from the adventure as written but she got a lot of use out of her lasso.
I need to be ready to drop whole scenes from a written adventure if my players aren’t interested. Looking back, the digression to visit the cultists’ church just wasn’t worth it. My players weren’t particularly engaged through that scene. I gave them clues about Rosalyn attending weird church services, but they focused on other leads. Those other leads had the party going in the right direction.
Along similar lines, connecting parts of the adventure to my character’s backstories engaged my players. In a one-shot making those connections is obviously harder to do than in a multi-session campaign because the characters aren’t usually a known commodity at the outset. I was able to weave in Anna’s backstory through the magic-using cult connection. I probably could have worked similar connections for Jack and Jiffy into the scenes by being a little more mentally flexible or making specific notes during character introductions.
When simplifying, keep it simple. I simplified 5E mechanics for the adventure but left a feat in the character options. My coworker’s character Jack took the lucky feat but never used it. Each player also earned inspiration during the adventure but never used it. And speaking of inspiration… My next post is going to be all about that mechanic. I feel like it’s the 5E mechanic that is most likely homebrewed at any given table.
If you want to discuss ways to tailor one-shots to your players on the fly or tell me how you use inspiration in 5E, message me on Mastodon @[email protected]
Feature Image “Slayer’s Cleaver” by Daniel Ljunggren copyright 2016 Wizards of the Coast