Suggestions welcome but I’m not asking for you to “fix my game.”

Took the first part of “Shadows of Yog-Sothoth” and tried to clean it up to do as a convention game. Modeled a lot of the information in clues on “The Haunting” and other older-style adventures. Came up with a “call to action” even.

I gave them too much in-game time to do background research before timed events started happening which they felt like they had to fill productively. Also, a number of the “library” clues needed the context of stuff found in the cult hide-out which they waited ‘til the last hour of real time to check out because there wasn’t a huge impetus to do otherwise (they were professors and nerds, not criminals). The clues didn’t point to enough other leads, so there was a lot of not being sure what to do next. I smooshed the ending together to help it all feel like the scenario had a climax, but it was clumsy and rushed. The characters were also all pre-gens, and many of them had high occupation-appropriate skills that they didn’t get to use and core skills that were, I realize now, weirdly low. Poor rolling didn’t help, but that also highlighted how much I was counting on good rolling to make progress.

I think I can fix all of this, but it was TERRIBLE.