It's Cthulhutastic

Every year on Hallowe'en, I run a one-night game of Call of Cthulhu; this has been going on for about 5 years, and attendence varies from 2 - 8 people. I pull out the folder of characters who've been killed in other adventures over my GMing career, and since it's Hallowe'en, the dead can walk again (ie, players can play any dead character they fancy for the evening.) Some years it's been great, some years it's been kind of chaotic and ridiculous. (MORE ridiculous than my usual Cthulhu games. I just don't get how anyone could take this game too seriously...)

Ordinarily I think of myself as a GM who requires a very precise script--my improvisation skills are considerable, but I'm not good at developing what I'd consider a really worthwhile plot from scratch. I'd rather riff off someone else's ideas. But the problem is, there's a limited number of good published adventures for the game which can be run in a single 3-4 hour session. This year I was expecting a small crowd, and decided to leap into the unknown and run a session based solely on a single paragraph written during my lunch break at work, as follows:

Where: train.
Who: Dr. Langstrom, mad scientist, has developed zombie midgets a purple blob that eats people.
The monster 1) eats people. 2) zaps people with electricity. 3) makes the lights in the train car go off when it enters. 4) leaves a trail of purple ooze 5) travels almost undetectably on the roofs of train cars.
Others on train include: Mr and Mrs. Thorn, an arguing married couple; Mr. Morton, a dull guy reading a newspaper; Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny, 4 kids on their way to boarding school; Larry the conductor and Porgy the porter.

That was it, no stats, no complex plot other than that the monster is brought to life in Dr. Langstrom's luggage by a lightning strike on the baggage car. Now, here is the shocking (ahem) part--this was arguably one of the best Hallowe'en game sessions I've ever run. Probably this was partly due to the limited # of players, but also partly due to the fact that I didn't have to spend forever trying to keep them on track. (Dammit, another unintended pun!) I set up a closed environment--the train--and a finite set of people they could talk to and things they could do, and then I let them run the adventure completely. I'd envisioned all 4 of the children being eaten right off the bat, as sort of an appetizer course for the monster, but this didn't happen at all. Poor Harry was the inciting incident to get things rolling, but the other three were fiercely protected by Player #1, who spent considerable time trying to draw out of the children more information about "He Who Is Not To Be Named," who one of them mentioned in a random aside early in the game. Of course, this had nothing to do with anything, but it was funny watching Player #1 try in-game to find out Harry's Big Secret. Player #2's big moment came when he climbed up to the roof of the train to check on Porgy the Porter--like all 1920's NPC's, a horrible ethnic stereotype--and found Porgy valiently fighting off a giant sanity-shattering purple blob of goo. "I'll save you!" shouts Player #2, and then proceeds to accidentally shoot Porgy instead, killing him instantly. Player #2 was genuinely horrified, but recovered sufficiently enough to come back down the ladder and tell his fellow heroes, "The monster got him, it was terrible."

This makes me think that despite my love of having everything written down for me in an intricate and complex manner, it's entirely possible for my players (and me!) to have fun without worrying about whether the physics of the monster's powers make sense, or exactly what is contained in every single passenger's luggage in case the players decide to toss the baggage car. This is both liberating and scary for me as a GM, and I think my skills will improve as a result of this little adventure...