Call of Cthulhu Adventure: Alone Against the Flames [Cthulhu] [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

In my first night in my new place in a new city, I dug out my Call of Cthulhu Starter Set and played the included solo adventure, Alone Against the Flames.  The adventure is also sold separately, but it's a great choice for a starter set adventure because character generation is embedded through the early stages of the adventure.  There are several solo adventures available for the game (I'm playing Alone Against the Dark at the moment), and they work like a Choose Your Own Adventure book but with the RPG game mechanics tied in--a really smart idea.  Anyway, my character for Alone Against the Flames was Hiram Goldberg, a young would-be journalist leaving small town Broken Bow, Nebraska, for a new job at the Arkham Gazette in Massachusetts.  Alas, things did not go exactly as planned for young Hiram (see below), but I definitely enjoyed the experience.

SPOILERS

In Alone Against the Flames, your character is headed for a job in the city (the precise nature of which changes depending on your choice of occupation) by taking a long bus journey.  At one point, though, you're the only person on the bus when the driver reports engine trouble and pulls over.  A small village named Emberhead is nearby, and as you find lodging for the night (hoping the bus is repaired by the morning), you learn that there's a big festival planned for the village in just a couple of days.  Well, long story short, the "festival" is marked by a ritual sacrificial immolation by the cult-oriented villagers, and *you're* about to get burnt at the stake!  As a journalist looking for a big story, I role-played Hiram's increasing suspicions about what was going on as leading him *toward* the danger rather than trying to run away from it.  I managed to uncover the truth, but still found myself bound to the pyre.  Thanks to befriending a local (who loosed the bounds slightly), my adventure all came down to one chance to break free by bursting the bonds with a Strength check.  I had coincidentally made Strength one of my highest stats and had a 70% chance of success.  But, this being Call of Cthulhu, the stars (and dice) decreed: failure!  Alas, poor Hiram Goldberg became just another in a long line of sacrifices, and the secret of Emberhead remained hidden.