Bullets over Arkham

It's no secret that there's a lot of overlap on the geek/gunnie venn diagram. So it shouldn't be a surprise that gun enthusiasts really like nerdy shooting sports that give them an excuse to dress up in costume and reenact the past. There's cowboy action shooting, obviously, but there are also the Zoot Shooters for noire-ey-er geeks, and even tongue in cheek proposals for pirate action shooting and steampunk action shooting. It's obvious, really: I can have a Renaissance fair where I get to shoot stuff? Awesome.

These are great games, and I wish all their devotees well. But you know what's missing.

Lovecraft action shooting.

...

Each competitor selects a Prohibition-era investigator persona and alias. The high-society flapper who once attended an unconventional party thrown by the Arkham Astronomical Association; the mousy student who started reseaching the wrong cuneiform tablets for her archaeology class; the dock worker who started taking too much interest in what he saw washing out of the city's stormdrains; the police detective who refused to end the missing person investigation when it got too close to that esoteric businessmen's club.

Weapons are restricted to firearms that were available in 1937 or earlier, and close reproductions of same. This was the year H.P. Lovecraft died, which seems like a handy cutoff, and it allows the Smith & Wesson model 27 and Browning Hi-Power to squeak by. Stage one requires a period-appropriate handgun of .32 caliber or greater. Stage two requires a period-appropriate shotgun of 20 gauge or larger. Stage three can use any period-appropriate firearm (excluding shotguns), but has a power requirement: the investigator must put 10,000 joules of energy into the target. This can be from both barrels of a .470 Nitro Express double rifle, four shots from a Springfield m1903, two and a half magazines from a 1911 pistol, or even a twenty-round burst from a Thompson. If an investigator feels like reloading his Colt Pocket Hammerless nine times, that's also acceptable, though it may hurt his time.

Stage One: At the signal, the investigator must draw his handgun from a holster, put one round each into the kill zones of four cultist targets, and put down his handgun.

Stage Two: The investigator must preset his shotgun on a provided surface. At the signal, he must pick up his shotgun, put two rounds each into the kill zones of two targets representing Mi-Go, and put down his shotgun.

Stage Three: The investigator must holster or preset his firearm on a provided surface. At the signal, he must draw or pick up his firearm, put 10,000 joules worth of projectiles into an old RV representing a shoggoth*, put down his firearm, and complete a 100-meter dash.

At the end of competition, the investigator with the slowest dash is eliminated regardless of prior performance.

[* - Alternately, 35,000 pounds of ballistics gel.**]
[** - The most fun part of this post was estimating the volume of a shoggoth. My geometry teacher should have used that to answer the inevitable "how does this apply to real life" questions.]