I also suggested one player (McKeowan) take pilot skill. I wasn't sure if missing it would cause restrictions about what choices could be taken later.

Manifests: The players did not manage to find the problems with the radios and also missed noticing the aircraft tools were wrong. That'll be unfortunate.

Douglas' room: The players felt very conspicuous walking into the room beside the one with the police guard. Perhaps I read it wrongly, but it does not seem they could do it without attracting attention. They felt (and I agreed) that waiting in the room for the police to leave would fail, since they had been seen entering

The players noted that the typewritten madman's note was written using the same typewriter as the ship manifests (the fonts are the same!). I told them out of character that that was not actually the case.

Douglas' funeral: I advanced the date of this by a day, because the players wanted to visit the Lexington estate and the real-world time was 1:30 in the morning. Finishing the funeral rounds off the chapter nicely enough.

Lexington Estate: The players showed little interest in hanging around to spy on the house and possibly catch sight of Miss L. So I gave them a break and had them witness the abduction as they wrote her a note.

The Ship Voyage: Because of the long break before this session, I wanted to keep at the same fairly fast pace as the players had been going; I started a little early so as to give a good 5 hours gaming and get through at least chapter 5 and some of 6. The section on procuring supplies in Melbourne seemed a reprise of earlier activity, and I didn't really see the point of it, so I skipped it and glossed over the Melbourne visit. When we got to the Wallaroo section, it was getting late, so I polled the players and we skipped that part too. A pity - it looked very atmospheric, but we all wanted to puh on and finishing the session on the ice.

A general comment on the end of chapter 6: The disaster at the temporary camp is briefly described in terms that make it seem a narration rather than something the investigators can get involved with. I amplified this quite a lot and brought them into the action. I'd recommend this to other Keepers as otherwise the latter part of 6 is mainly Keeper narration.

The Benefits of Education: Seemed a little too hard to learn anything with the under INT roll. I know this is realistic, but if I think for players trying to pick up an entirely new skill, I'd ask for a roll under 2 x INT to make it easier to get, say, rudimentary polar survival.

Crossing the Line: I was going to play this out in an abbreviated form -- the players were getting quite concerned about the crew and contemplating serious action. Then Jakob went to Greene, with whom he had a good friendship and made successful Spot Hidden and Psychology rolls. When I said that he was unconcerned and amused and had glanced at the chart progress, the player immediately guessed the crossing ceremony. Fair enough.

Day of the Dogs: This section worked very well. The brutal descriptions were very affective and anyone who worked with the dogs I decided to give double SAN loss to, but they all made it. Bizzarely enough, Anderson had his gun with him and shot the rogue dogs on the command of Turlow and missed exactly once, just as in the text!

Onto the Ice: I have been reading "The White Continent", written by one of Byrd's proteges, and found it very useful for invoking some of the majesty and strangeness suggested in this chapter.

The last plane: If the player had failed their aeroplane roll, I decided that the plane would be unfliable after the attempted take-off, but still salvageable. They'd have lost supplies, been forced to wait for a tractor to take them out and Halperin would have been maimed or died.

A shock in the lightest night: Seemed a fairly short chapter. The investigators were very direct in helping with the Lexington expedition; a successful pyschology roll gave them the information that Williams/Danforth was deliberately feeding them information, but they didn't make much of it.

Guessing the right tent night: He was half-joking, but Weiss's player wanted to apply his psych ability to guess Lake's tent relative to Daniel's and Orrendorf. I told him (after a successful roll) that it was more likely to be closer to the mountains, and -- of course -- he guessed the right tent from the six possible closer ones!

The cave: I really wanted someone to find the locator stone, so I decided to make hints as necessary, but as it turned out, Anderson went right in and stated that he was digging all around the area. I asked him to make a luck roll, and he found the locator stone. Another luck roll and he found the bulb. He failed a third roll, so I told him "you find nothing else" and left him with the impression there was more there. ... yuck, yuck, yuck. It's so nice when these things work out.

Flying over mountains: Anderson managed a critical (under 1/5) Spot Hidden roll, combined with a successful Mechanical Repair roll when checking the planes, hence his success at finding the contaminated oxygen. The players in general felt little need to interact with either Lexington or the BFE leaders. I think they were ready for the city.

Gedney's body: The players made their SAN rolls, and when I stated that they lost a point because of the similarity with the way the Elder Things buried their dead, they said to me that the similarity actually cheered them up -- "they honor our dead like theirs". As the first sign of common ground between the Elder Things and Humans, they felt good about the discovery and so I let them off the 1 SAN.

Shoggoth: It was a Shoggoth, and they nearly slowed down enough to let it catch up with them. They were just one failed listen roll away from a truly nasty encounter.

About this time I realized I was a day out in my time-keeping (slaps forehead). I just started referring to the correct dates and no-one noticed, but I'd better be more accurate in later chapters!

Temperature?: The text says -5F (-37C) for the temperature, which is not a correct translation. Also -5F is not that cold, and the text on page 174 suggests that the next day is warmer at -30F, so I assume an over-zealous editor or someone saw the -37 temperature and somehow thought is was centigrade and then mistranslated it. Anyway, I told the players it was about -40F. Anyway, for this session I had a sound effects CD with blizzard noises on which i kept up pretty high until the wind died down. We started play at 7:15 and finished up around 1:00, with a 10 minute break to get OOC in the middle. It was an awesome session -- one of the best I've run. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed it. Kudos, Chas, Janyce!

Dr. Greene and Danforth: Nice coincidence that Dr. Weiss needed Greene at just the moment he was being grabbed. Danforth's attack (Anderson did 13 points after I took off 2 points armor for the arctic padding on Danforth (does that seem reasonable?). But since he had halved his kill to try a non-killing shot, I had Danforth left alive. He cannot walk, so his final fate will differ from the text. His insane speech went over very well. The dawning smiles as the players realized who he was were great!

The Tower: Went very well. Creepy, exciting, mysterious, dangerous, unearthly and yet not totally beyond comprehension. The tensions in the combined party made everyone uncertain as to what anyone would do in any situation. Three of us drank a half bottle of whiskey playing this part of the session (about four hours) and there was as absolute concentration as I've ever seen. They knew that death or insanity might be the result even of good play, with some bad luck .... I haven't detailed all the sanity losses, but each lost 20-30 points of sanity in total over the session, never fast enough for indefinite insanity - although rolling under a three on a d10 for McKeowan when seeing the gardner Shoggoth was necessary to avoi that fate.

Yes, McKeowan broke into the confrontation before Priestly had a chance to leak the info. He disliked Meyer and saw no reason not to let him know they knew how he was being so clever. That made Meyer considerably less friendly. I played him more aggressively and with Lexington withdrawing into fear, Priestly turned to Meyer for leadership, forming another sub-faction.

I let some knowledge of the construct leak into Weiss's mind with every successful POW roll (he made 5 of them, dammmit - more than I expected), to help keep him in it. He only succumbed as he was leaving, but he did a nice job of being the mute witness, and only lost a total of 8 sanity from it (what a lucky bloke)

I think Weiss's player has some kind of record with three bouts of temp. insanity in four fours, with no resultant indefinite insanity. I've never seen that before.....

Shoggoth in the Camp: From this point on, the investigators were done to 20-30 sanity points, so it was very easy for them to wig out. I had decided beforehand that if they all went insane and/or died, so be it. They've saved the earth, so they are just a detail. Anyway the critical rolls were when Carlisle saw the Shoggoth. Four more points and she'd have flown away. This Shoggoth was 1d10/1d20 sanity. She made the roll and I rolled a 2 for the sanity loss. She had to make both psych and persuade rolls (both under 30) to save Anderson, and made those too!

Boiler room: Maybe my players are brighter than average, but after coming up with good experiments and learning how the thing reacted, they came to the same conclusion the book did - it'll head to the boiler room. Saved a lot of time. Oh - they also lowered the heat in the rest of the ship. Clever, that. They only made one mistake, but it was a critical one.