Humble Bundle for Cthulhu 7th ... and Stake Thy Neighbor

This popped up on one of my feeds over the weekend, and wow, I had to grab it.  It says 26 books for a recommended $25 or pay-what-you-like, but most of the "books" are multiple volumes of content.

The Humble Bundle Call of Cthulhu Pack should keep me reading for months.  I don't have any players I could run through these eldritch horrors, but I have always enjoyed reading sourcebooks and scenarios as if they were their own genre of fiction, which in many ways is true.

This deal ends in 5 days, so I'm not sure if any readers will see it in time, but it's worth noting on my stream of events in my gaming life.  I still have some of the CoC first edition books, and ran some pretty scary nights of fun back in the day.  Which reminds me of this true story ...

"Stake Thy Neighbor"

I don't know if you remember that old Salem's Lot miniseries from about 1980 where dead Danny Glick floats up to that kid's second story window and starts tapping with his little vampire knuckles.

Well, that almost really happened to us.

It was 1982, Long Island, New York.  We were about 16 and I was running a role-playing game of supernatural mayhem called Call of Cthulhu for a few friends, and as the game master I had gotten them into a very "Salem's Lot" scenario where they were trapped in an old house surrounded by spirits.  The gamemaster has to keep the pressure up to get the most bang for the buck.  I turned to one of the players and said, "What are you going to do next?"

There was a feeble rapping on the outside of the window.  We fell dead silent.  Instant chills.

WTF?  Again, there was a scratching/knocking from outside of the SECOND STORY window.

Someone whispered, "Maybe if we stay quiet, it will go away."  

One of the guys (call him Ted), got up and grabbed the baseball bat from the corner.  It was his room, after all.  He pulled back the heavy curtain and there was someone outside the window, visible from the chest up, looking pale and ghastly, his hand paused in mid-knock.  Ted feinted with the bat, and the guy fell backward from the window with a faint crash.

We were still too scared to move.  This was before there were cell phones or easy ways to get a hold of people.  It turned out that Ted's little sister had been locked out but knew we were playing "some stupid game" in Ted's room, so she got a neighbor to come over and make some noise.  The neighbor pulled over a table, put a chair on the table and climbed on that.  His descent was some acrobatic mess with the chair and the bushes.

I remember someone clearly saying, "Next time, just throw pebbles."

Nobody got staked or even injured.  But the neighbor never did prove that he wasn't a vampire, and showed up in many subsequent nightmares.

#

I wrote up this story a few months ago to send to the ladies at My Favorite Murder, but it's not really their cup of joe.  So here it is.  Enjoy.

Anyway, I love the whole idea of bundles like these and have invested in about 8 of them over the years.  This time, there were about 50 Download buttons to click, and the machine in my office is officially stuffed with gifts from the Elder Gods of gaming.  Easily 1000 pages of lore.

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