• Item. Chicago. March, 1977. When “Boss” Richard J. Daley died December 20, Michael A. Bilandic was appointed acting mayor until a special election could be held, promising not to run himself.
• Item. He’s now the front-runner.
• Item. A few months ago, the driver of an El train plowed into the train ahead, throwing El cars into rush hour traffic and killing eleven people.

None of this, of course, matters to Carl Kolchak. He’s much more interested in the obscure and forgotten death of the El motorman’s girlfriend in an indigent hospital on the west side. Out beyond Greektown, beyond Little Italy, the ethnicities blend and mix, and it’s hard to tell who you might meet in the dark of night.

It was the Ides of March, and a woman was the author of the deed—or was she? It was a classic locked room mystery. A witness claimed to see a woman walking away just after the death… beyond the window of the fourth floor. The events of March, 1977, were impossible. Impossible, and yet, they happened.

Welcome to my fifth annual Kolchak: The Night Stalker adventure (PDF File, 4.6 MB), using the Daredevils rules. As you read this I may very well be running the sixth.

Of interest to Blues Brothers fans, the National Socialist Party of America has not yet won their lawsuit to march in Chicago, but the lawsuit is on and making news. You can use any or none of this if you run this adventure, depending on how complicated or how long you want it to run. That plus Bilandic is all background. It’s what the rest of Chicago is doing while the player characters are plunging into unverifiable things that cannot happen here.

I ran the adventure as a four-hour convention game at North Texas in 2025, so I included only the minimum around the mystery itself, culminating in a fight with a vampire… but not that kind… in a storage facility at dusk.

As is my habit for these adventures, the adventure is mostly a locale and a group of Night Stalker stringers doing their own thing.

As is also my habit, much of this is real Chicago history. The El crash happened; it’s difficult to say who was really at fault. But I have to say, while the adventure has its own reason for the accident I tend toward the Chicago Transit Authority. In the hearings after the crash, driver Steven Andrews claimed that he kept the train moving because a flashing red light signal “means the train should proceed at no more than fifteen miles per hour.”

I especially like the author’s calling out the Freddie Krueger-like nails.

The CTA said that a flashing red light signal used to mean proceed at less than fifteen miles per hour, but we recently changed that. “A directive posted on a main bulletin board in December 1976 changed the meaning of the flashing red signal from a 15 m.p.h. warning to an immediate stop.”

Ignoring the basic bureaucratic insanity of changing a signal that means “move” to a signal that means “stop”, that sounds to me like a change that requires more than a main bulletin board posting.

Walter William Skeat’s Malay Magic is a real book, and filled with wonderful gaming ideas and wonderfully eerie doll-like artifacts.

And the Mary Harris Thompson Hospital for Women and Children is a real place, founded in 1865 to care for indigent women and children—an idea that itself could generate wonderful Night Stalker ideas. It also was founded specifically to provide opportunities for women in medicine. The hospital closed in 1988, probably partly because the integration of the workforce meant that female physicians had more opportunities than a hospital catering to patients who by definition can’t pay their bills.

I sometimes include ideas that I don’t think I’m going to use but that add both character and the potential for integration depending on what the players do.

There is a bronze statue of a young boy, known colloquially as “Donny Boy”, standing over a fountain at the lobby entrance. It is believed that the sculptor of the statue had previously been an ill child named Donny, who was taken to the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children by his widowed mother, received care throughout the duration of his illness, and later sculpted the statue in thanks for his care.

I did not, in fact, use it. But there are ideas all over this hospital’s history that could inspire Night Stalker adventures, and that’s one of them. While Carl did run into statue-adjacent “monsters”, I don’t think he ever ran into actual statuary that needed to be avoided or countered.

The handouts (Zip file, 8.7 MB) include the standard Kolchak monologues—I ask whoever is playing Carl Kolchak to read them at the appropriate points in the adventure. There are also the obligatory newspaper clippings, mostly unmodified; some airline ephemera; and various possible artifacts.

There’s also a “UFO Weekly” article cobbled together from a real article in the November, 1979, Beyond Reality. Roberta Floyd Kresse’s “Strange Enigma of Nature Spirits” begins with something that could have come straight out of one of the books Carl used to read from:

Throughout history, man has recorded meetings with strange, intelligent creatures—creatures often linked to nature, who had great mystical power and loved to harass mankind.

• CARL: “Strange, intelligent creatures, Tony. Who love to harass mankind. That’s us, Tony. You and me!”
• TONY: “The only strange creature harassing me is you, Kolchak.”

Most of my Kolchak adventures so far have been plot adventures: there’s something going on, and while it involves strange creatures or races it is the plot that must be countered. The Tall Sister (PDF File, 4.6 MB) is a monster adventure. There is a monster, and it is the monster that must be countered. Whether they track down the monster through its victims, through its actions, or through its journey to Chicago—evidence for each path are provided—it’s the monster that matters.

This is more like Horror in the Heights than The Devil’s Platform, in other words. More, in fact, than you might guess. Horror in the Heights inspired Dungeons & Dragons. This particular monster has fascinated me since I first encountered it in a D&D sourcebook back in about 1983. It is weird, with the potential for both horror and comedy, and would have been exactly the sort of creature the original writers would have used in the series.

More in the adventure. (PDF File, 4.6 MB)