[Channel Teaser]
When Old Man Henderson, The Craziest Character Wins Call Of Cthulhu
Hi everyone.
All Things DnD is back with another story.
Can you actually beat a tabletop RPG?
What are the conditions for “winning”?
Beating the BBEG?
Your heroes retiring to live out the rest of their lives in peace?
Or this amazing alternative.
Listen to the story and you decide if Old Man Henderson “won”.
And tell us your stories about how you “won”.
To begin, the game itself was not actually, technically Call of Cthulhu, but Trail of
Cthulhu, a similar game with some different systems that can be useful to an investigative
role-playing game.
ONTO THE STORY:
Part 1: The Origin of Old Man Henderson
Alright then, I'd like to start by saying that the GM was a bastard that had it coming.
Bullshit tactics to make everyone go crazy like a d6 with only 5 sides.
No story, no reason; lose 10 sanity.
The others continued to allow this crap.
We were playing a modern-day setting, with the other players being a college professor
who found a couple of stray pages of a copy of the Necronomicon and wanted to find out
just what the hell it was, a detective who was investigating a missing persons case connected
to the local cult and a local athlete (I think it was football) trying to find out why some
of his friends seemed so distant lately.
And then...there was Old Man Henderson, who was never given a first name.
Old Man Henderson was already a little crazy and blamed his life's misfortunes on Vietnam.
He never went to Vietnam, he was 12 in 74.
(And I will be amazed if anyone gets that reference.)
Old Man Henderson wore combat boots, cargo shorts, and an open-front Hawaiian shirt with
a wife-beater underneath.
He was dyslexic and had a lesser case of Schizophrenia.
allowing him to assume that the reason he saw crazy shit was because he WAS a little
bit crazy.
He had a Grizzly Adams beard and wore his hair in a mohawk.
He never took off his aviator shades, for any reason.
He had a stuffed parrot on his shoulder named Rupert that he constantly asked for advice,
while ignoring the other party members as convenient, assuming they were hallucinations.
He had an Automatic combat shot-gun he knew how to use.
He also had MEMORIZED the anarchist's cookbook.
He started the game with a pre-existing hatred of religion, cutlery, and books.
His motivation was that he thought that the cult had stolen his lawn gnomes; while he
had actually donated them to a charity auction, got high, and forgot about it.
Most importantly, he had a 320-page backstory that justified EVERYTHING, from his casual
knowledge of physics to his ability to speak Portuguese flawlessly.
You can just imagine the sort of Shenanigans that character was involved in.
The point of having such a long backstory was three-fold.
- To ensure the GM would never actually read it and
- Since he would never read it except for in excerpts I pointed out to justify things,
I could rewrite and change things around completely at random without anyone noticing and MOST
IMPORTANTLY -Convince everyone that I was serious about
this character and that it wasn't simply the game wrecking bullshit that it was.
Dickish yes, but he really did have it coming.
First outing of the group.
The Detective was spying on the building of the cultists with a camera.
The Jock was parked nearby, waiting for the group to let out so he could snoop it out
The Professor had joined the cult to try and gain information.
Old Man Henderson very calmly parked his car, got out holding the shotgun in clear view
of anyone who happened to be looking (in this case, the detective and the Jock), strolled
up to the front door and kicked it in.
While everyone just kind of stopped in shocked silence for a moment, he leveled his shotgun
on the lead priest/cultist guy and yelled "MUCKLE DAMRED CULTI 'AIR EH NAMBLIES BE KEEPIN'
ME WEE MEN!?!?"
Did I mention that he had a nigh-incomprehensible Scottish accent that came and went as he drank
and/or as amused me?
The leader couldn't understand my simple request to return my lawn gnomes, he assumed I was
trying to cast a spell at him in an elder tongue and summoned a shoggoth by murdering
one of his fellows.
One Molotov and about 20 rounds later, the Shoggoth is dead, as is the cult leader, the
Professor (he made the mistake of trying to make peace-maker mid murderous rampage) and
about 10 assorted cultists.
Old Man Henderson then pissed on the Shoggoth's corpse, got back in his battered '92 Buick
Century, and went home.
The whole event was over in about ten minutes of game time and nobody thought to get the
Buick's plates.
The building burned down shortly, along with about half the written plot, and every lead
either of the other surviving players had.
The GM called a break then to figure out how to fix and/or work around what I just did.
It only got crazier from there.
Part 2: THE Tanker Truck Incident
Now, time for what will forever be known as 'THE Tanker Truck Incident'.
No matter what incidents in the future may involve tanker trucks, this is the definitive
one.
It started out innocently enough.
Old Man Henderson left the stakeout in a van outside the evil cult's meeting place to go
get some hooch.
The only people left there were the Detective and James Fink (the professor's second character).
Jimmy was gone because it was a school night (Old Man Henderson was a bad influence, but
damned if he didn't have the kid's best interests at heart.)
The cultists see me leaving --I had a very distinct appearance, after all.
(VERY USEFUL in scoring TPKs.)-- and discover my friends spying on them.
The detective gets a pretty GAR death, and James dies like a bitch.
But not yet.
I'm on my way back, walking along.
The Detective and James had been brought inside as part of a ritual to give Hastur an avatar
in our world (he had been banished, and the only way he could come here is via a loophole).
He could only use as hosts people who knew he existed and had thwarted him thrice, and
then he had to make them drink the life-blood of their closest friend to make the binding
permanent.
In case you're wondering, permanent binding = GAME OVER.
The first part of the ritual was completed, but before Hastur could take control, the
detective broke James's shackles and he tried to run.
He made it as far as the street, when the detective (now Hastur) caught up with him,
part demon-form.
Now where this church (for lack of a better term) was located, was at the end of the road
on a T-shaped intersection.
There was a gas station about three blocks away, which is where Old Man Henderson was
while this was going down.
Old Man Henderson sees the shit hit the fan, and steals a half-full tanker truck that WAS
refilling the station's holding tank.
While I bring the truck up to ramming speed, I toss a 12 lb block of C4 in the passenger
seat and rig the detonator to the airbags.
Old Man Henderson then took a bracing shot of whiskey, jammed a knife through the gas
pedal, then jumped out of the truck onto his heelies.
Yes, he modified his combat boots to have heelies.
I swear to god I had not planned this to happen, the heelies just sounded like something ridiculous
and in character.
He watched the truck ram the detective into the church, then blow him and all the cultists
to Kingdom Come.
The truck also killed James by running him over.
That's when the back-trail ignited, fire going all the way back to the gas-station and destroying
it; continuing my streak of accidentally destroying anything that might lead people back to Old
Man Henderson.
I took a moment to call Jimmy.
"Henderson here.
Figured out what the nasties are weak against."
"What's that, Mr. Henderson?"
"Point blank annihilation."
'click'
Part 3: Dropping the Yacht
Old Man Henderson, with his erstwhile companion Jimmy (the Jock) and his Friends William Brocklaw,
a once humble bartender (The now dead Detective's player.
Old Man Henderson burned down his bar by accident and blamed it on the cultists.
One bluff check later and he in the Posse.), and Simon Breckenridge, British Spy (the Professor's
player, now six characters in.
And yes, they were more or less all killed by Old Man Henderson).
Old Man Henderson had discovered that there was not one cult to the Elder Gods, but several.
This complicated his search for his gnomes/crusade.
He decided to enlist help in making the problem solve itself.
Using his contacts, Simon discovered that an Influential Cultist of Hastur was coming
to town to try and figure out how an Avatar of his god was killed.
He also located the exact dock on which he would be landing his boat.
Jimmy, meanwhile discovered the home of the head of the local Cthulhu cults was at a penthouse
suite downtown.
A plan was hatched.
Old Man Henderson used all of his cunning to steal a Military Cargo Helicopter (read:
Shoryuken'd the pilot and flew off), and hid it in an abandoned warehouse.
Jimmy, and Will set up a VERY EXPENSIVE surround sound speaker system at the docks, while Simon
made and planted a lot of smoke bombs.
That night, the Yacht pulled in, and we made our move.
Right as Simon maneuvered the Helicopter over the docks, we set off the Smoke bombs and
activated the Speakers.
On one side: A fifty piece marching band playing 'God Save the Queen' at max volume, and on
the other the audio from the beach scene from Saving Private Ryan.
Imagine, for a moment, what being on the dock would have been like.
Utter.
Freaking.
CHAOS.
I jumped down from the Helicopter onto the boat, and rigged it to lift out of there.
During the course of which I ran into the cultist guy and Ninja Kicked him in the head,
knocking him tail-over-teakettle and off the boat.
I later learned that he broke his neck in the fall.
Damned convenient, otherwise he might have been able to ID me.
We then lifted the boat out of there, switched to our secondary audio on all sides (My Heart
Will Go On - by Celine Dion.
I was in a vengeful mood, gnome stealing bastards.)
So when the cultists finally got the smoke to clear their Yacht was gone, their leader
dead.
And Celine Dion was stuck in their heads.
Not the best of days.
Then we went across town, in a stolen Military Cargo chopper, carrying a 40 foot yacht, and
'parked' the helicopter above the penthouse, with the yacht about 80 feet above it.
Then we cut the line, jumped out with our parachutes, and watched the yacht ruin a dinner
party while placing bets on whether the military would save the chopper, blow it up, or if
it would just hover there until it ran out of fuel.
Part 4: Hell on Ice
Okie-doke.
We were in the endgame, with zombies and Shoggoths chasing us.
I managed to get Jimmy disappeared, so it was Old Man Henderson, Simon and Will going
to the final strong-point we had in an abandoned hockey stadium.
On the way there, we had rammed through a small home-and-garden store in our truck.
And when we arrived, we started barring the doors and windows, when I noticed something.
Our trip through the store had netted us a passenger- a single lawn gnome.
Somehow, I knew right then that this was it.
No lucky turn of fate, no Deus Ex Machina...
Old Man Henderson was going to die.
But I'd be damned if it wouldn't be the best last stand ever.
I then revealed to the GM that Henderson was a world champion figure skater, hockey player,
and golfer.
The Backstory of Doom got one final use.
We had almost all of the doors barricaded, but the zombie/shoggoth army kicked in the
last door and got Simon.
Will was pulled off the Zamboni after he managed to throw the Crate onto the ice.
The crate full of exploding hockey pucks.
The pucks lasted a couple of minutes while blasting Bust A Move (Young MC) before the
situation resolved into totally boned.
I switched to the next track as I yelled "HASTUR HASTUR HASTUR!"
The next track came on, it was the Canadian national anthem, which Old Man Henderson began
to sing proudly, at the top of his lungs.
I then threw out the three pieces of knowledge that marked Old Man Henderson's Blaze Of Glory.
Calling Hastur's name 3 times will summon him, but only if the one who is his truest
foe at the time calls it.
(Guess who.)
When an elder god is summoned from beyond, they suffer a sort of summoning sickness.
They're still unbelievably strong, but can be killed FOREVER if you hit them hard enough.
The resulting explosion was so massive and incredible that Michael Bay has wet dreams
about it.
And that my friends, is the tale of how Old Man Henderson won Call of Cthulhu.
Thus ends the story of Old Man Henderson!
Well I would absolutely consider that a win.
Taking down an elder god and going out in a blaze of glory.
This one is for the history books.
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