Eagle One Down

GM: Liam Jones (a good friend of Marcus)

Blurb: A transmission breaks the squelch on the radio at Forward Operating Base "Freedom". The operations officer picks up the hand set and waits
....., Static.........., “This is eagle one approaching LZ over”,
“This is zero alpha rodger over”,
“Eagle one, LZ in sight drop off in five miles over”,
“Zero alpha acknowledged over”,
“Eagle one approaching from the north, LZ looks clear, wait... Contact contact”,
[M60 Machinegun fire],
“Oh my god, were going down, oh my god, what is that!”, Static...........

System: Call of Cthulhu (BRP)

My Character: [something] Luong, Vietnamese Translator (ex Med Student). To almost no-one's surprise, he turned out to be a VC spy.

Review: After the first session this was, as expected, a far more gritty and serious follow-up. Although Liam described the style as 'Predator meets apocalyspe now', I found that the game had little of the the former's paranoia or feeling of entrapment, nor much of the latter's darkness of tone or eclecticness of character. Much of this was, I suppose, down to the way that players played their charcters (all of the soldiers were apparently *very* professional). When Marcus played in this game later in the con, I could tell from his report that the characters had shown a bit more colour and that the game had been all the better for it. I feel that a few red-herring threats could have added to the paranoia and fear, though. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese jungle made a great backdrop for a tale of alien terror and there was a lot of potential in the story of a group of US soldiers stumbling across an old Miskatonic University expedition and the ancient evil they were hunting. Liam was also well prepared for a number of different paths that could be taken by the characters - everything from hunting the mythos creatures throught the VC tunnels and back to the much older tunnels that they had unwittingly breached to cowering in the native village and calling for aid (our group was more the latter). I suggested to Liam that making the translator a traitor was a bit obvious and that having him be loyal and someone *else* be the traitor (perhaps doing his best to implicate the translator) would be *much* more interesting.

Personal Highlight: Being caught (because everyone had been awakened by an NPC screaming loudly before committing suicide) returning from the forest having used a secret radio to contact a VC patrol in the area and managing to deflect attention by pointing out that they were so incompetant that they had managed to get someone killed in the time it took me to take a crap.