Ch 0: The Doom Train
This is part of my campaign report for Horror on the Orient Express.
As recommended on Reddit, I made this into yet another prequel to the main campaign. This mainly helps establish the characters and their connection with Smith and Beddows, which is important for later emotional payoffs. Beddows is especially important to introduce now so that he appears trustworthy once Smith is kidnapped. It also lets you introduce Makryat at his antique shop before the triple murder and the rest of the plot kicks off, which is fun. You’ll need to modify London Handout #6 to remove the triple murder reference since that hasn’t happened yet.
Ensure you portray Makryat as odd, but not necessarily dangerous. After the first meeting, have him disappear, foreshadowing the triple murder. If your players make the connection with the Blood Red Fez (which you should have already run as a prequel), Mehmet can truthfully explain that he was estranged from Selim and had to leave Constantinople many years ago under bad circumstances.
Cutting out most of the Challenger Banquet speech and allowing the investigators to contribute their Doom Train experience make the scene much more fun. I also ensured that someone spotted the “disappeared” Makryat in the audience, only for him to disappear again. Without this, the main plot point of Makryat deceiving the investigators simply has way too much going on off screen. You need to at least hint to how Makryat became interested in the investigators (and Smith) so that the later reveal has some sense of logic to it.