How I made Kane's Tone
I wrote "Kane’s Tone" to say goodbye to a player and good friend of mine. He was moving back to Portugal and had been part of my Call/Trail of Cthulhu group since I restarted running games. With him, I ran Tatters of the King and Eternal Lies, along with many one-shots and a Night’s Black Agents campaign. I wanted something special for his last game session. It had to run in a single session, as it was his last day in the Netherlands, so there was no chance to continue after that. It had to be an amazing, unique experience.
I spent the whole week reading scenarios and couldn’t find anything as awesome as I wanted that session to be. So, on the day of the session, I went to my room and napped on it. The idea of the scenario came to me very clearly, based on pieces of stuff I had read or seen recently. After one hour of brainstorming in bed, I got up, picked up my iPad, and wrote the whole thing down.
I ran it that evening, and yes, it was an awesome session. One of the players insisted that I had to get this scenario published because, he said, he had never played anything that awesome.
The Inspiration
The inspiration came from my disappointment with the "In Media Res" scenario by John Tynes: a fantastic starting scene leads to little more than the characters walking around a house and finally remembering that they are criminally insane people.
But I loved the idea of characters who don’t know where they are and have a limited area to explore to figure out who they are and what happened before. There were a couple of other details I took from "In Media Res," like the police car with the dead policeman in the trunk.
Moreover, I had recently watched "The Invitation" and liked it a lot, so I used a similar setup where a couple invites some friends to their villa for a dinner party and stuff gets progressively strange. Except that, unlike the movie, the "Kane’s Tone" scenario happens after hell breaks loose (as in "In Media Res," the main inspiration).
Then I combined this with an old idea I wanted to try: having the investigators suffer from mental conditions without the players being aware of them, such that each character has a different belief about what is happening. So I progressed with the idea that each character had to have a unique derangement that distorted their perception of reality in a unique way.
Furthermore, I wanted to somehow include something like the psychic storms caused by Professor Xavier in "Logan," another movie I had recently watched.
The idea of different lights associated with stasis/growth phases came from the simple fact I had just received some Philips Hue lamps as a wedding present and wanted to use them in play.
The usage of a Shepard's tone emerged from a search on YouTube and Apple Music for a sound that would feel like the world is melting away, to go with the growth phases (the ones inspired by Xavier’s psychic storms in "Logan").
The monster grows in a Fibonacci sequence because I wanted the growth factor to be deducible from a graphic representation, and it was improvised during play. Having the summoning circle be made of concentric circles with radii based on the Fibonacci sequence gave me an indirect way of conveying to the players (most of the girls and boys I play with are computer or electrical engineers) that the growth of the creature would be close to exponential.
The Star Vampire was added first because I think Star Vampires are awesome, and second because an invisible monster goes very well with the theme of the scenario: the investigators cannot trust their senses; they may be imagining things.
Originally, I wrote six characters for the scenario, but after a lot of playtesting, I decided the scenario works better with four players. The discarded characters were a surgeon and one of the children of Saul Kane.
Saul Kane was, of course, named in honor of both Stephen King and Sutter Kane, a character in another favorite horror movie of mine, "In the Mouth of Madness."
As for the player characters, the “fake” personality of Emma was modeled after a mix of two “monsters” I like: the alien in "Species" and, of course, The Terminator.
You can get Kane's Tone at drivethrurpg:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/476571/Kanes-Tone
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