Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
The Systemless Horror
In 1992 I'd been playing a lot of Cthulhu and I had a problem with it - people had a tendency to make disposable 'formula' characters. Generally they would create a character as some kind of scholar (professor, librarian etc.) and then for no apparent reason give him gun skills and have him go around armed all the time.

I wanted to run 1920s horror, but I knew that as soon as people thought of Cthulhu they got into this mindset. I was quite keen on systemless games at the time (there are no rules but the GM simply decides on the probability of something and then makes a D100 roll to see if it happens) so I wrote a systemless 1920s horror campaign, stressing that this was not Cthulhu and the old Cthulhu concepts should not be carried over. It was good for me because I wanted to write a game with my own ideas of the supernatural, not the stuff that occurs in CoC.

The player characters were a bunch of friends who were interested in the occult, and wanted (from intellectual curiosity) to find out what was real and what was bullshit. Some of them were believers and others were skeptics, and they had argued about it so many times that they decided to find some evidence. That was the basis of the campaign.

A player, Dan, was playing a character (I can't remember the name) who was some kind of mystic (a medium or something). He got a parcel from an NPC medium/spiritualist type friend containing a small idol and a letter.

The first paragraph of the letter said that the friend didn't know exactly what the idol was, but it was powerful, and to find out more about it he had consulted a Voodoo priestess called Madame Atou.

The rest of the letter described how someone was trying to kill him, and he thought the attacker was after the idol, so he was sending it to Dan's character for safe-keeping. A particularly prominent sentence in the letter was 'For God's sake, don't let it fall into the wrong hands!'

The sharp-witted may already have guessed that Madame Atou was the one who wanted to steal the idol. Dan did not. Instead, without contacting any of the other player characters, he went straight to Madame Atou with the idol. She asked him for it. He give it to her. She refused to give it back. Then her five heavily-built sons removed Dan's character from the premises.

I expressed some disbelief at Dan's actions. He said, 'Well the letter mentioned Madame Atou.' I pointed out the line about not letting it fall into the wrong hands.

Dan said, 'Oh, I didn't bother reading that far. I only read the first paragraph.'

I was gobsmacked to say the least. The scenario was supposed to be about Madame Atou trying to get the idol off the PCs by afflicting them with supernatural horrors. Instead, Dan just handed it over, so the rest of the scenario was about the PCs trying to steal this precious artifact from a bunch of murderous cultists who were prepared to kill over it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they failed to recover it.