A promising new writer and a few associates head to the depths of the Amazon Jungle, to see the front lines of the war between civilization and nature. A road is being carved through the savage wilderness and rumors of the decadence of the workers have reached all the way to America. So, a team of intrepid investigators journeys to the heart of the Amazon to see what happens when man tears down nature for his own purposes. Little does anyone suspect of the true horrors lying in the dark heart of the Amazon, least of all the Americans.
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I’ve been waiting for this AP since Caleb ran it as a backer reward as Lover Before The Ice. Made my day. Thanks RPPR Crew!
Interesting: I can’t download this: when I click “Download” it plays in a new window.
Ah, I got it. If anyone else is having the same issue I am: right click the audio control and select “save audio as.”
I have these senior moments…
Oh Aaron. You just attack bad luck! Blindness at the worst moment.
Aw, crap, is this the prequel to Lover in the Ice? Guess I know what I’m listening to tonight. Heroes of New Arcadia 6 is gonna have to wait.
You guys were all giving Aaron crap for mentioning using the natives as target practice, but massacring indigenous people to get them out of the way when you’re clearcutting forests for roads, mines, and ill-advised and unsustainable farming projects is pretty much SOP in a South American military dictatorship. I thought it was quite in-character.
Brilliant stuff. Thad’s Hunter S. Thompson impression is so good it should be illegal.
“WE’RE LOOKING FOR A MAN OF GOD”
Thad is my new favorite Hunter S Thompson.
About 15 minutes in I started to wonder about a connection to lover in the ice, and then the throat penis’ come out and I knew. Caleb you sick, brilliant bastard you.
Hah! I’d forgotten this hadn’t been posted yet.
I really enjoy this series of APs. Lover in the Ice is one of the best APs I’ve ever heard, and this is a worthy successor. Precursor. Whatever.
Listening right now. This is bloody hilarious. I love Thad’s impression of Johnny Depp playing Hunter S. Thompson! 😀
If you run these scenarios, is it better to do them in chronological order or in reverse?
I knew what this was about when I heard the “Mandingo” reference. Awesome stuff!
ugh the scene with el Jefe is just as creepy here as in the original game. Fridrik, I’d do Lover in the Ice first, cause it’s wayyy way darker. it’d be more jarring to go from the Hunter S Thompson expy to Delta Green frozen paranoia than the other way around, don’tcha think?
Thaddeus S. Thompson is my favorite S. Thompson, next to Mr. Duke of course. In fact, RPPR has a rich tradition of Hunter S. Thompson characters.
You guys need to play Everyone is John switched over to Everyone is Hunter S. Thompson. That certainly can’t hilariously backfire.
Going back and listening to Lover in the Ice, it makes me imagine Ross’ pathologist character, sometime later, cornered in a truck stop using his sample (if he got out of the truck carrying the bag) and a warm place (perhaps a big industrial-size coffee maker) to spread the infection as a last-minute way to make a distraction to get out of there; allowing a new Delta Green cell to go in and deal with that and with his character as the antagonist.
Hi,
First, let me say, Caleb I love your adventures as well has your GM’ing. Now, since this is a play test I thought I’d share my thoughts. I have a lot of thoughts about this one.
1. The Intro Is Too Long
The buildup at the start is very slow, while nothing much happens except for the players getting drunk and travelling to where they need to be. I think you could start later, maybe at the point where they’re dropped off the boat and come upon the soldiers watching the diesel / the line of statues in the woods.
2. The Foreshadowing Is a Bit One-Dimensional
There’s a lot of foreshadowing going on before the PCs reach the town, but all of it’s pretty much saying the same thing. The priest has an exorcism kit: some bad shit is going down. The guy piloting the boat doesn’t want to get too close to the town: bad shit is going down there. The soldiers at the diesel depot haven’t seen anyone in 3 days: something’s wrong. Until we get to the people who’ve been partying themselves to the brink of death, the hints do not get more concrete. I guess you could collapse them into one.
3. Little Player Agency
This comes down to two things: little problem solving, and little influence on the plot. Listening to the recording, it felt a little like everything that occurred just happened *to* the PCs, while there seemed to be no way for them to affect the outcome of the scenario. I’m not saying give them too much of a chance against the beasties (this being CoC after all), but maybe give them a bit more advance notice, and have it feel like they can affect their own destiny. (Of course that can turn out to be an illusion.) My feelings about the “little problem solving” part are due to the fact that the PCs main job seems to be to learn stuff about the monsters until it is time for them to appear. There’s not a lot of obstacles/puzzles for them to overcome until then, though.
4. El Hefe
What a cool, bad ass character. In almost every one of Caleb’s adventures there’s a point where I cringe in sympathy, and this was it. Wow. Maybe you could introduce el Hefe at the start of the adventure as a badass, which would make the scene at the end even more intense because the players already know him & are more attached.
Aaaaanyway. Sine I have no idea when this was recorded (Ross, you monster) I can’t really tell if any of this feedback has any chance of helping with the development of the scenario, but I thought I’d give it a shot.
I think playing this second works better since while the players will know what they’re up against, it won’t matter/isn’t what the game is about. In Lover in the Ice, figuring out what the things are/do is a much more important part.
As to the player agency thing. I think there’s a tradeoff going on, for me listening to this, it worked. The beginning was fun and the railroad went to all the stops on time. I think there’s a couple kinds of games here and this one is much more a one shot story than a sandbox or long form investigation.
the skype version of the game that got posted (I forget where?) actually had more of an investigative angle and more agency (…and I don’t remember if el Jefe showed up?). the severe man’s daughter showed up armed with some kind of powertool. it was more complex than this take on the scenario (or else the players just explored the scenario better?)
oh, here it is, on Drunk and the Ugly: http://drunkandugly.com/2012/09/21/call-of-cthulu-lover-before-the-ice/
I don’t really prefer one over the other, though! most CoC games fall into either the ‘investigation’ or ‘haunted house’ categories, and while investigations are more traditional and complex, haunted houses are inherently tighter and will tend to have better scripts. I think Caleb does both well. even Adam Scott Glancy runs haunted houses sometimes (Night Mission!).
About running this one first or second.
I’m of two minds about it. For me it breaks down to is it better for the players to know about the monster (From the other game) when they play lover in the ice or lover before the ice.
‘In lover before the ice’ the statues on the way to camp give up the game to early if you have played lover before the ice. Specially since they have seen the main monster in ‘Lover in the ice’.
‘In lover in the ice’ nothing gives up the monster until the players encounter superporn boy or the the amobox. If you can play it right those will show up at the same time and you realize what the monster is at the same time you encounter it, even if you have played lover before the ice. Specially if you didn’t actually encounter the monster then, only the infected.
So I would run Lover before… before Lover in…
Hope that made sense.
I was thrilled to see this and really enjoyed listening to it. FWIW, I agree with those who’d run this after “Lover In”, for just the reason Jorun-O-LST-3 says. As a prequel that’s experienced after the original, it gives a sense of doomed foreboding that’s usually hard to capture in RPGs.
But is anyone else slightly aggravated by “El Jefe” instead of “O Chefe”? 😉
Quite enjoyed the episode although honestly you pretty much could just have run a game with Thad’s character and his lawyer in a foreigner country with no or light mythos and it would be seriously entertaining. If I gumption I think it would be funny to dictate all of Thad’s notes on the article he was writing.
Outragious.
I was instantly reminded of the character “Bob McGraw” from the 1980’s BAAAAD movie “Up The Creek” walking around and Talking his book with Ross (hard to picture him in a dress) following him with a tape recorder to “Guide” his train wreck. Thanks Guys, you made my day.
this is the ne plus ultra for me of all the RPPR radio plays; listening to it was quite magical
(i’m now imagining a future radio play of yours called ‘Night of the Hunter’, where everyone plays Thompson…)