Pharos Investigations (UK): Black Sheep - Episode 1

A lifetime ago (2000 to 2003, three years before I came across & joined Second Life in November 2006) I started a Play By Email (or PBeM) Call of Cthulhu game set in Manchester in 1930. It was, even if I do say so myself, quite successful and was followed by a small number of seriously talented CoC writers. Alas a new job and a bout of ill health in 2003 saw the game drift into an eternal slumber about half way through its run (that’s right, this baby would have taken about 6 years to play out). My last act was to wrap up each turn into a PDF for archiving and these file have been with me ever since. I’ve been meaning to publish them here for a while but never really found the time – well that’s about to change.

Ladies and gentlemumps, I humbly present to you (typos and all, I’m not re-editing 20plus PDFs for anyone!) all 21 turns of “Black Sheep”, a Pharos Investigations (UK) Call of Cthulhu tale as it was played over on the old Yahoo Groups. The PDFs contain the post I sent out to the players along with their (slightly) edited replies and then any further communications & posts in that turn. The writing varies greatly, some players were more experienced than others, some players left and new ones took over their characters, I even ejected one player (actually, two!) if I recall – what I’m trying to say is don’t expect to read a novel here, it’s really just series of tarted up emails and therefore can feel a little disjointed at times. Still, I had a blast playing and I think you’ll enjoy reading

You can read Black Sheep – Turn 1 here. In turn 1 the investigators meet for the first time and are almost immediately plunged into danger – I did this deliberately to both start the tale off with an exciting bang and enable me to judge the quality of the players who’d signed up.

I’ll post the rest of the turns over the next few weeks – you can find them using the category search terms “Pharos Investigations” or “Black Sheep” or by visiting the page I’ve set up here.

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