For the last few months I have been running Call of Cthulhu D20 set in the 1920s of my little fictional universe. Its been going really well, the players are super enthused (literally dressing for the occasion... seriously, suits and fedoras!) there have been 3 full game scenarios that are formatted in cases for 2 investigators that have been relatively dark, with the last being a pretty grim dark/ shit just got real! game based on the Pendelton massacre from Caleb's Preemptive Revenge, so I decided to run a less grimdark game for the next one to give the guys a calm in the storm.
For some reason or another, I was really reminiscing on the classic movies about intelligent animals (the secret of NIMH, Watership Down, etc.) and decided that I wanted to do up a scenario involving intelligent animals. (I have for a while been tinkering with some short stories about groups of small animals gaining sentience and trying to survive in a world ruled by man and populated by non intelligent animals alike).
And now that the back story of that is out of the way...
For the scenario, I decided to get some inspiration for this type of game from Pastoral Manor, obviously tweaking it to fit my stories. and ran the first part a few days ago. Set up clues and a setting akin to that in Pastoral Manor, threw a lumber mill/deforestation spin on it and stated out character animal and human alike accordingly. I had it set up to have the investigators uncover the mystery of this lumber mills strange occurrences/ deterrents to cutting down the woods, red herringed a ghost angle with the animals attempting to scare the lumber jacks off. And then my investigators proceeded to leave the mill and all its lingering clues, go through the woods to check out a murder sight, find the pastoral manor (named Arcadia Farms in my game) and after an investigative section where they talked to the farm kid about the woods and rolled really well, they discovered the intelligent animals in no time flat!
So now I'm going to run the next part after a few days between the first and Ive added/expanded the content to accommodate this quick reveal and well see what happens...
But yeah, that was the time I ran Pastoral Manor in Call of Cthulhu... D20.