How a frustrating game module became pretty fun

Usually in our game of 'Call of Cthulhu', which is based off HP Lovecraft's fiction and in our case is expanded to include things from other game systems, the campaigns (which take up a whole book) are the hard ones. But we were playing a seemingly normal module out of one of the books, just a single adventure, that seemed to be a straightforward missing persons/serial killer thing with a twist of evil, but it rapidly became horrific in many ways. In fact, last week's session was so terribly frustrating (we were totally brain dead, and being beaten by an evil bug thing that was possessing people and making them do truly horrible things) that Brenda and I begged to stop and have a week to think about our next move.

This week's session did better, although we wound up with five gravely hurt comrades put into a stasis so they wouldn't just die, plus one comatose and without a face. The evil bug thing had jumped from the evil cultist into three of our non-player characters in succession, doing such mayhem as slicing throats, causing arms to wither magically, and striking people mad. It jumped into one of our people, a necromancer with powerful telekinetic power (I know, those may not make sense if you don't follow sci-fi or horror genres, but trust me, it's bad), who then ran into a frat house. Carnage ensued. We were there, trying to get the bug out of him, and he was crushing each of the player characters telekinetically. In desperation my character, who can create fire psychically, set him on it, making him let us go and driving the bug out of our friend (who was horribly burning in a column of fire), used the magical net gun to capture the bug, skewered it with the sword, extinguished the fire with a thought (didn't know I could do that, or the column thing, having just thrown fireballs before), put the burnt necromancer and my companion, who was minus three on hit points into stasis, and then stacked everybody up like cordwood and took them to somewhere I could heal them over several days.

More happened, of course, but that was probably my shining moment, where I was forced to make some decisions that are going to have impact, and maybe will be for the worst, but in the end, we lived another day. Welcome to the exhilarating world of role-playing games (and not those things on the computer). Granted, most of the adventure was investigation. But the climax was quite good. Yes, we had a lot of missteps, but in the end, we triumphed. Of course, there is a swarm of these bugs in the fictional Goastwood across in England, so we may have to deal with those bugs again. And somewhere, there is a queen....