Around 9am Adam is awoken by his land lady knocking at his door. There is a call for him. The caller advises Adam that his sister is missing. The caller proceeds to tell Adam that he is Professor Edward Bremer from the Iowa State University in Ames. Professor Bremer and his wife are friends of Jenny and her husband. Jenny's husband has been away overseas on field work. The Bremers noticed Jenny was missing on the Saturday and contacted the Police. The Police after a brief investigation believe Jenny had eloped to either New York or California. Adam states that Jenny was always level headed and wouldn't do such a thing. The Professor agrees from having known her, hence why he's called to tell Adam of the situation. Adam gets the professor's details and heads back upstairs to his apartment.
After throwing some clothes into a suitcase & dressing for travel, Adam heads over to his brother's apartment. Awakening Jimmy, Adam tells him about what happened to Jenny. There is also a brief exchange about Jimmy's art and how Adam doesn't understand as he did not go to the War.
Adam states he needs to call Geno as he was supposed to be doing some work for him today. He also mentions to Jimmy how Jimmy should be careful around Geno & shouldn't trust him as Geno is a bad person. Jimmy replies back that Geno saved his life in the war and he would trust Geno with his life.
They head downstairs to make use of the phone. Adam first calls Geno, telling him he won't be around for the next few days due to his sister having gone missing. Jimmy, realising he doesn't really know that much about looking for people then calls Rosalind and asks for her assistance. Rosalind agrees, saying she'll get Archie to assist as well.
After hanging up from Rosalind, the phone rings and it's Geno. He tells Jimmy that family is important & he'll help Adam and Jimmy find their missing sister. Nick overhearing one side of the conversation asks what is going on. After being filled in Nick says he'll help his old war buddy. Adam, just to be sure gives his sister Jenny's home a call, but receives no answer.
The part meet up together for the first time as one group at the train station. Besides the standard suit cases & travelling trunk in Rosalind's case, Gene has several additional crates loaded. Nick has a hamper of various food stuffs packed buy his mother for the party so they don't go hungry on the initial part of the journey. The group get 2nd class tickets for Ames, Iowa and board the train.
Wednesday, 27th April 1921
The party arrive in Ames, Iowa around seven in the morning. They hire several cabs which Geno pays for and head straight to the residence of Jenny and her husband. After a brief look around the front, finding no key, Geno announces he can work the lock & proceeds to do so. While he is doing that several of the others start walking around the house checking the windows and back door.
Archie finds one of the windows unlocked and slides to open it. He also notices a nick on the window hinge. After some effort trying to get in, Rosalind finally manages to climb in with Archie's assistance. About this time Geno also manages to get the front door open.
The group make their way in and determine the following
- Archie confirms with Geno that it looks like someone has recently slide a blade or other thin object up between the panes and opened the lock
- Adam notices an item he knows means great sentimental value to Jenny left behind
- Jimmy can see that clothes & toiletries of Jenny's are missing as well as the car, hence why the police may have believed that she up and left but it's not like his sister so he asks Rosalind to look over whats missing and left behind. To Rosalind's eyes there are things left behind and she suspects things taken which makes her believe the packing wasn't done by a woman.
- Nick looking over the age of the food in the kitchen believes it's been at least 5 days since anyone has been there
- Archie has a look around outside for any tracks, especially by the opened window, but due to the party tramping around, any tracks that may have once been there are now gone.
Notes: I was pretty happy with how the character creation (which occurred on the same night before the start of the first session) and the actual play went. The players established some good connections between the characters, which I had put in as part of character creation. I believed that if the players came up with the connections themselves as opposed to me forcing something on them, it would make them think more about their characters' background and give them more depth. This looked to have worked as planned. The idea for connections between PCs was something Phill had introduced in some of the earlier games. He'd taken the idea from the FATE system. I just expanded upon what he had introduced to encourage the players to form larger group connections.
At the end of the session one of the players made a comment, something along the lines of, "...I'd forgotten how much I enjoy playing Call of Cthulhu". That in itself made it all worth it.
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The connections idea actually came from Mongoose Traveller. FATE's guest star connections came to my attention later but did help to reinforce the usefulness of having the players create their connections.
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