"Abnormal Growth" (a Cthulhu Mythos investigative scenario)

Almost exactly 89 years ago, on March 15, H P Lovecraft died. That's my pretext for posting this scenario, which ties in with the rules for Dagon Warriors (sic) but could just as easily be run using Infinite Night or Call of Cthulhu or whatever system you prefer. (But don't for the sake of your own SAN use The Yellow King.) This is a modified version of a post that appeared on my Patreon page; sign up there and you'd have seen it a year earlier. The artwork below, apart from the growths vignette and the Fernsby house, is by Tillinghast23 on DeviantArt, who has lots of other stylish illustrations for work by HPL, Clark Ashton Smith, and others. The examples here all accompany HPL's poem 'Fungi from Yuggoth'. There is a downloadable copy of "Abnormal Growth" with Call of Cthulhu stats here, and another Depression-era scenario is "Bleak Prospect" by Scott Dorward in the collection Nameless Horrors.

The year is 1930. Prohibition has gripped the nation, and the roar of the Roaring Twenties seems a distant memory for many. In the sleepy town of Lucan Falls, nestled amongst the rolling hills and dense forests of upstate New York, life moves at a slower pace. But beneath the surface of this tranquil community, a sinister force is stirring. The player-characters start by looking into the disappearance of a Cornell dropout and end up confronting a horror from the fringes of the solar system.

The disappearance of Stanley Cakebread

The disappearance of Stanley Cakebread (21, brilliant but highly strung), a vagrant with a troubled past, has thrown the quiet town of Lucan Falls into a state of unease. Stanley, a Cornell dropout who had embraced a nomadic lifestyle, sent regular postcards to his parents in Manhattan. However, the postcards abruptly ceased a month ago, the last one postmarked from the small town of Harmony, just south of Lucan Falls.

The characters

The scenario is suitable for about six characters of 1st rank, or three characters of 2nd rank. The investigators may find themselves drawn into the mystery in various ways. As this is a one-shot, not all the player-characters need have the same background. It will make for a more interesting adventure if some are recruited by the Cakebread family, then encounter other PCs when they trace Stanley’s route to Lucan Falls. 

• The family: Stanley’s wealthy parents, distraught over his disappearance, enlist the characters to find him. They meet at the family’s brownstone on March 24th, 1930. The characters could be private detectives, family members, and/or Stanley’s former college buddies. The parents provide his last few postcards, the final one sent from a town neighbouring Lucan Falls (see Handout below). 
• Local law enforcement: Sheriff Harlow (see below) perhaps reluctantly deputizes the investigators, hoping to quiet any rumours before they spread. Missing hobos are one thing, but the loss of someone with wealthy family connections could attract unwanted attention. Or the characters could already be law enforcement officers in Lucan Falls. 
• Town residents: Characters could have connections to the missing people, such as friends of a vanished hobo, or Miss Gretchen Price, a schoolteacher who briefly interacted with Stanley. 
• Personal connections: One of the investigators might have previously known Stanley Cakebread, or even better (since other PCs are prioritizing Stanley’s whereabouts) they might have known one of the missing hobos. Perhaps one of the investigators has led a vagrant life themselves, either owing to the Depression or because they’re researching a book or a newspaper story, and shared a campfire meal with Stanley on his travels.

Handout

Stanley’s postcards trace his progress northwards through New York state, the last being postmarked February 28th 1930 from the town of Harmony. It reads:

Lucan Falls

Lucan Falls is a small, quiet town of 1,800 nestled in the Adirondack foothills. Its economy relies on logging and a small textile mill, but the Great Depression has left many out of work. A single main street features a general store, a diner, a post office, a modest library, and a barbershop. Surrounding the town are thick forests of pine and maple, dotted with winding trails and the occasional cabin.

Prohibition is in full effect, but moonshiners operate in the woods, supplying locals and visitors alike. The townsfolk are tight-knit and slow to trust outsiders, but they’re polite enough if you don’t ask too many questions.

Disappearances

Starting in November of 1928, family pets started going missing on the north side of town – mostly cats, but also one dog that ran away from its owner and was never found. That spate of disappearances stopped around March of 1929 and, insofar as the sheriff took any notice, he put it down to a wild animal. The elderly Miss Victoria Erwin (72, vague but charming) whose cat Mel was the last to go missing, says, ‘I think a bobcat must have been prowling around the town and then moved on.’ But Mrs Emily Hensley (80s, widowed), contradicts her; she insists a ‘monster’ was to blame for the disappearance of her cat: ‘He’d have seen off any two bobcats and not even taken a scratch. Not scared on any living thing on this earth, my Darkie.’

From April to September, three recently-deceased bodies were stolen from the town graveyard. Only one of these was noticed, in June when the nights are shorter, the headstone having been chipped in the grave-robber’s haste. That was the grave of Arthur Hempel, a local truck driver who drove off the road one night in a state of intoxication. The sheriff’s investigation concluded that it may have been the work of bootleggers irate at Hempel’s refusal to carry their wares. There was no evidence to support that theory, but in the absence of any other explanation the case was closed.

Starting the investigation

It shouldn’t take long for the family-hired characters to narrow the search down to the Lucan Falls area, at which point they can quickly meet up with other player-characters. There are various leads to chase up and NPCs to talk to.

Sheriff Clyde Harlow (40s, world-weary) isn’t aware of the hobos’ disappearance, but he’s sufficiently bothered by the news about Stanley Cakebread to assign a deputy to help out – even while maintaining that Stanley may never have even come to Lucan Falls: ‘Might be he headed over Porterstown way. More opportunities for casual labour there, I’d think. And it ain’t a whole lot further from Harmony.’

Following leads

The two hobos who went missing were (in November 1929) Daniel Louth, an unemployed construction worker from Albany, and (in January 1930) Harcourt Rosedale, a former art dealer who lost his life savings in the Wall Street crash. The authorities have no reason to suspect foul play as in these straitened economic times vagrants often pass through looking for work. However, there are those who can say more if the investigators do a little digging. Get the players to take the initiative and roleplay it, maybe chivvying things along with some PERCEPTION rolls if they need it:

Louth was due to meet up with some mechanics from a local garage. Forrest Packard (27, furtive) might be got to admit he owed Louth a couple of dollars from a crap game the previous night and was surprised he didn’t show: ‘I was set to tell him I only had but the buck fifty, and it was a take it or leave it type deal, but he mustn’t have needed it that bad as he never showed.’

The cook at the diner, Big Lou (50s, gruff but kind), remembers a drifter who came around begging for food back around Thanksgiving. ‘Tough, stringy little guy. Hands that had done some work. I remember thinking he could do with some gloves. I gave him some scraps and a half-bottle of – well, let’s say it was soda pop.’

Harcourt Rosedale kept to himself, but a local hunter, Bruce Dent (40s, heavy-set, affable) saw him a couple of times and could lead the investigators to the area where Rosedale must have been camping out. They’ll find his bedroll, some rusty cooking utensils, and even his boots. ‘Huh, fancy him leaving those behind,’ says Dent.

Jeb Gurney (50s, taciturn), a farmer who lives a couple of miles out of town, remembers chasing a figure away from his toolshed back in January. (That was Rosedale. Normally the trail would be too obscure by now for tracking, but Rosedale had only been on the road for a month or two and made no careful effort to hide his tracks, so allow a Scout to make a d20 PERCEPTION roll to find his camp site if Dent hasn’t already led them to it.)

More importantly, the investigators will want to look for evidence that Stanley Cakebread passed through here. Despite the sheriff’s reluctance to admit it (he privately hopes that Stanley never came to Lucan Falls) there are several people who encountered him.

The general store is the heart of town gossip. The owner, Edna McAllister (50s, sharp-tongued), recalls a young man who came in and asked to see a map of the local woods. ‘Said he needed to take a look at the trails hereabouts. Claimed to be hiking, but I know a bum when I see one. Pointed him at the library yonder. I’m not running a charity, am I?’

Miss Gretchen Price (30s, intelligent but guarded), a schoolteacher, ran into him in the town library. ‘I was struck by the sight of this pale young man whose clothes were shabby but well-cut. Of course, the economy has dealt just such a blow to many good folk unused to hardship. He had a cultured accent, too – oh yes, we spoke. I remember him being very interested in news of the new planet that had been observed. There has been talk of what to name it, and the young man said that it should be Pluto, “for wealth is far out of our reach now”. And he smiled as he said it, but it was the feverish and darting-eyed smile of one who is very deeply troubled.’

The hardest clue to uncover involves a couple of moonshiners, Guy ‘Giggles’ Pink and his brother Marvin, aka ‘Mule’ (both early 30s, clever, flash, ruthless). They chased Stanley away from their still on February 28 – the night he went missing. It was a new moon and he was blundering around with a flashlight, so if the Pink brothers weren’t so mistrustful they might have realized that he wasn’t looking to rob them. Of course, they won’t volunteer any of this to anyone associated with the law, but it’s possible to get them talking if they think they have a customer for their product. Alternatively, if surprised at night they may well turn violent.

Giggles Pink will resort to a revolver if they are outnumbered, but he is sensible enough not to want a gunfight – he has no intention of losing his life over a few pints of hooch – and so will threaten rather than start blazing away.

Whether or not the investigators encounter the Pink brothers, they could stumble across the still if they diligently search the woods north of town. However, the still is well-camouflaged – roll the still’s effective STEALTH of 19 against the searching character’s PERCEPTION (roll on 2d10; use the highest PERCEPTION in the party). It is much easier to find the flashlight that Stanley dropped when running away from the Pink brothers. On its own that proves nothing, but not far off the characters may find (d20 PERCEPTION roll needed) Stanley’s Kappa Alpha Tau fraternity pin and broken spectacles. This was where Walter Fernsby ambushed him.

What actually happened

Walter Fernsby (36, lank, burning-eyed, sullen, reclusive) is an amateur naturalist and former timber worker who lives in a ramshackle house along the road that runs north-west out of Lucan Falls. A little over a year ago, walking in the woods, Walter discovered a small patch of unusual fungus or lichen growing near a gouge in the earth apparently caused by a metallic or ceramic shell that was already deteriorating. Intrigued by the iridescent hue of the fungus, he scraped it up and took it home. Unbeknownst to him, the spores were the remnants of a Mi-Go – an alien being somewhat resembling terrestrial fungi – that had been destroyed in the crash.

Walter tried to culture the ‘fungus’ in the dampness of his cellar. As it grew it began to take the form of a new Mi-Go, developing intelligence, telepathy, and an insatiable need for organic matter to sustain its growth. Of course it had no knowledge of its nature or origin, but it used its natural intellect to learn English (which it speaks with a rasping, buzzing sound) and later it developed its power of telepathy enough to communicate with Walter and even exert subliminal control over him over a range of up to half a mile.

To provide the organism with food, Walter at first used small woodland animals. Then he caught a few cats that came around looking for milk. As the growing Mi-Go demanded more and more sustenance, Walter first tried grave-robbing, but after nearly getting caught he saw that the risk of discovery was too great. Then he found a down-and-out whom he got drunk on moonshine and then fed to the Mi-Go in the cellar. That was Daniel Louth. After that he killed Harcourt Rosedale, figuring that when hobos disappeared most people would assume they’d just moved on – if they even took notice of them in the first place.

Walter came across Stanley Cakebread in the woods at night. It was the dark of the moon, but the Mi-Go’s telepathy helped guide Walter by means of other senses than sight. Urged on by the almost fully-grown Mi-Go, Walter was incautious – instead of finding out who Stanley was, he coshed him with a tree branch and then strangled him. But Walter made a mistake in assuming that Stanley was just another vagrant nobody would miss.

Identifying the culprit

What will draw the characters’ attention to Walter Fernsby? He is the subject of much local gossip, an eccentric even before the Mi-Go pushed its tendrils into his mind, but nobody has any reason to mention him in the context of the disappearances. The characters will need to specifically ask about strange behaviour, in which case they may discover the following.

Walter's increasing isolation has been noticed around town. Always a loner given to long walks in the woods, he quit his job about a year ago and started to snub his former co-workers. ‘He used to buttonhole you and talk about tree roots and crown gall and what insects do to dead birds. Crazy coot. But lately he’d turn right around and hurry away. He was an oddball even as a boy, that one, and I said he’d only get stranger as he got older.’

Always very devout and involved in church affairs, Walter has continued to show up on Sunday mornings but he hurries away as soon as the service is over. The pastor remembers: ‘Once I tried to talk to him. “Walter, we could use your help at the summer fete.” He looked – I don’t know, almost grateful that I’d spoken to him. I thought he was going to say something, but then he looked around, as if he’d heard someone calling his name, and hurried off mumbling to himself. I really fear that young man has been seduced by the devil liquor.’

‘Took to buying a lot of fertilizer,’ says Edna McAllister. ‘For how long now? I can look it up right here. Starting November year before last, and he doubled the order a couple times since then. Oh, I forgot this. Last spring he got me to order a sheet of something called Wood’s glass from a factory in Syracuse. Got real impatient waiting for that to come in. And he bought a bunch of incandescent bulbs once he fixed himself up a generator last summer. Don’t seem to last him. Look here, a new box of bulbs every six weeks or so.’

Walter has become obsessed by the idea that the alien creature in his cellar is actually an angel. With Easter less than a month away, he goes to see the Reverend Thomas Loughty (50s, politely detached) to discuss descriptions of angels from the Bible, specifically Isaiah 6:2, Ezekial 1:15, Ezekial 10:12 and Daniel 10:5. He is extremely agitated and urgent, but says nothing about the Mi-Go, only insists that judgement is coming and we should open our eyes to ‘the seraphim and the ophanim, for they will come to guide the faithful.’

Distractions

There’s no challenge if Walter is the only suspicious person around town. There should be red herrings. The Pink brothers can be quickly dismissed as suspects – they’re unscrupulous and hardboiled, but hardly murderous. Their activities bring them into regular contact with bootleggers from the city, though, and the desecration of Arthur Hempel’s grave could lead the investigators off on a wild goose chase. The investigators will hear gossip about a near-legendary gangster, Billy ‘Spats’ Malone (30, wiry, with a perpetual five o’clock shadow), so-called not because of his dress sense but because he’s always having spats with people. Malone is a career criminal who found his niche managing the practical side of bootlegging operations for Vincent Costello, a mob boss in Albany. Malone oversees the drivers, muscle, and logistics, ensuring the hooch gets where it needs to go while keeping the law at bay. He wears practical clothes – a leather jacket, flat cap, and sturdy boots – and relies on the force of his personality to keep people in line, but has a set of brass knuckles in his pocket ‘just in case.’ The characters may never encounter Malone, but if they do then he’s quick with a wisecrack and quicker with his fists. He knows the backroads around Lucan Falls like the back of his hand and doesn’t take kindly to strangers poking into his affairs. Maybe he could become a useful contact in subsequent adventures if this adventure develops into a campaign.

Leonard Fisk (40s, truculent if thwarted) is a travelling salesman who occasionally blows into town and stays at a boarding house run by Joseph and Phillipa Dawes (50s). Fisk sells suspicious ‘miracle elixirs’ and is always asking odd questions. He hints that he might have spoken to Stanley Cakebread and even leads people to think he knows more than he’s letting on, but there’s no truth to that. He read about Cakebread in the paper in New York, where the family posted a classified ad asking anyone for information about their son, and just figures that a whiff of mystery might help his business.

In the woods north-east of town (quite a few miles from Walter’s house) the characters may come across a splintered tree and a furrow along which strangely misshapen plants grow in febrile profusion. This is where the Mi-Go probe crashed seventeen months ago. There is no sign of the probe itself, its casing having ablated in Earth’s atmosphere, nor are there any Mi-Go growths (Walter collected the only patch of spores), but radiation from the probe has caused the local flora to mutate in the soil it ploughed through.

For comic relief the characters could encounter a bunch of kids who style themselves the East Side Private Eyes. 10-year-olds Ron Bishop, Ken Heald, Andy Monroe and (accepted on sufferance by the three boys) Kitty Bateman scoot around town on their bikes and fancy themselves to be bold and resourceful investigators, although at least half of what they have to say consists of bragging and make-believe rather than actual evidence.

Out at the Fernsby place

If the characters go snooping around Walter’s house they find a refuse pit with the bones of rodents, birds, and even what may be the remains of a housecat. Walter is careful not to dispose of human remains so haphazardly, however – those he puts in his furnace. The pit also contains heaps of burned-out electric bulbs.

If they get close to the house they’ll risk telepathic detection by the Mi-Go, who will alert Walter.

The Mi-Go is aware that it will soon need to move beyond Walter’s cellar. To that end it would like to enlist better helpers with greater resources, both practical and social. It’s highly unlikely that the player-characters as a group would fulfil that purpose, but if it has the chance to recruit a lone character it will try that before ordering Walter to attack.

The Mi-Go keeps to the cellar during the day, but now that it is fully grown it has become daring enough to venture up into the house and even outside at night. A trail of scattered notes and drawings across the floor of Walter’s living room show his sketches of the creature as it grew, from a pulsating mass of flesh-coloured gills and lobes to something resembling a grotesque coral sculpture of a kind of winged insect or crustacean.

The description given by Henry Akeley in ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ is of ‘a great crab with a lot of pyramided fleshy rings or knots of thick, ropy stuff covered with feelers where a man’s head would be [...] They are more vegetable than animal, if these terms can be applied to the sort of matter composing them, and have a somewhat fungoid structure; though the presence of a chlorophyll-like substance and a very singular nutritive system differentiate them altogether from true cormophytic fungi.’ 

It glows with an eerie flickering that makes it impossible to photograph as anything but a blurred shape. If Walter is with the characters when they encounter the Mi-Go, he starts ranting: ‘See the halo around it? The glory of God! Kneel! Kneel! It is an angel come among us!’ 

Is this his unforced belief, or the way his religious upbringing has led him to interpret the compulsions the Mi-Go has been planting in his brain? Your guess is as good as mine.

The Mi-Go can use the following Mystic abilities from the core DW rules as a 5th rank Psionic:

• Mirage (level 1)
• Dazzle (level 2)
• Mind Cloak (level 3)
• Telekinesis (level 3)
• Clairvoyance (level 4)
• Enthrall (level 4)
• Force Field (level 5)
• Mystic Blast (level 5)

Its telepathic communication is an automatic ability that does not need a roll to cast. It can sense the presence of minds within 100m (like the ESP ability but with longer range) and can project images and sensations (to communicate, not as an attack) to beings in its immediate vicinity whom it is conversing with.

Permanently killing the Mi-Go requires fire or acid, as otherwise it (or rather a new individual) will regrow from the spore-laden remains.

Wrapping up

The characters are far too late to rescue Stanley Cakebread. All that remains of him is the pocket watch his father gave him on his 21st birthday, discarded on the floor of the cellar amid sacks of fertilizer and a few small bones. The inscription is a quotation from Seneca that reads: ‘Dandum semper est tempus: veritatem dies aperit.’ (‘There is always time, and the days disclose the truth.’)

Mythos without the þorn

Talking about H P Lovecraft last time reminded me of a pet gripe. I have quite a few of those, if we're being honest, but this one is about the proper way to pronounce Cthulhu. To begin with, here's HPL's take, as given to Duane Rimel in a letter dated 23 July 1934:

"The word is supposed to represent a fumbling human attempt to catch the phonetics of an absolutely non-human word. [...] The letters CTHULHU were merely what Prof. Angell hastily devised to represent (roughly and imperfectly, of course) the dream-name orally mouthed to him by the young artist Wilcox. The actual sound—as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it—may be taken as something like Khlul'-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, since the h represents the guttural thickness. The second syllable is not very well rendered—the l sound being unrepresented [in Angell's rendition of the word]. My rather careful devising of this name was a sort of protest against the silly and childish habit of most weird and science-fiction writers, of having utterly non-human entities use a nomenclature of thoroughly human character; as if alien-organed beings could possibly have languages based on human vocal organs. Actually, every name supposed to have been originated by non-humans should be painstakingly shaped in such a way as not to conform to the principles of human vocalism and language."

Clear? HPL gave a simpler account in a letter to Willis Conover dated 29 August 1936:

"Of course it is not a human name at all-having never been designed for enunciation by the vocal apparatus of Homo sapiens. The best approximation one can make is to grunt, bark, or cough the imperfectly-formed syllables Cluh-Luh with the tip of the tongue firmly affixed to the roof of the mouth. That is, if one is a human being. Directions for other entities are naturally different."

The confusion seems to have arisen because sloppy readers (and Wikipedia editors) have assumed Lovecraft was aiming for the suggestion of chthonian. Cthulhu is the very opposite of a chthonic entity, having come from the stars and been buried under the sea. If Lovecraft had meant the C to be pronounced as in the common but mistaken version "kuh-THUL-oo" he'd have written it Ch.

We can isolate the syllables as (Ct)(hul)(hu) rather than as the popular assumption of (C)(thul)(hu). It's more accurate to think of the sound that Prof Angell wrote as ct to be the consonant at the end of of a word like "act". Try isolating that, removing the a sound, and you have a sort of bitten-back consonant that could sound like a gulped k.

Now take the next element, rendered by Prof Angell as hul. With the gulped k followed by hul (vowel sound as in "full") and followed by hloo (mistakenly written by Angell as "hu") then we have something nearer to what Lovecraft imagined -- with the same proviso he applied, namely that our mouths and throats and the atmosphere we breathe are all wrong for making any such sound.

That said, Cthulhu cultists would have as much knowledge of the accurate pronunciation of their deity's name as any 1920s Christian or Muslim (etc) could have of the Big Bang. And Cthulhu probably knows and cares nothing for what its cultists think. So player-characters can pronounce it however they like, and argue it out with the big lug when it finally rises from the deep.

It's nearly 2050

There's one more day left to get your tentacles (or other partly squamous, partly rugose appendages) around a copy of Whispers Beyond the Stars, the new gamebook co-authored by me and Paweł Dziemski. People keep labelling it as cyberpunk, but I think that's missing the point that both SF and our ideas of the future have moved on. A friend of mine nailed it when he described Whispers as "Cthulhu in the Age of Neo-Feudalism".

The story is set in 2050. You play Alex Dragan, who has just been released from prison and whose attempts to reclaim his/her/their life are destined to be wrecked by the incursion of entities who have been plotting the subjugation of Earth for over a century.

Paweł went on The Hardboiled GMshoe to talk about how we developed the Cthulhu 2050 concept, in particular the way we co-wrote the book. This wasn't like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain or Keep of the Lich Lord, with one person writing everything up to the midway point and then the other taking over. Instead, we began by designing the world background and themes. Then I wrote the whole adventure from start to finish in outline, leaving threads for my co-author to develop later in more detail. It's a true collaboration:

Paweł: "At the begining we had a couple of workshop meetings to discuss how the world will look in 2050, from the perspective of geopolitics, energy, technology, space industry. We wrote the year by year history from 2025 until 2050 as well. Then we discussed the overall story. Then Dave wrote 200 sections as a main end-to end-thread, then I wrote the alternative storylines (another 450 sections) discussing with Dave from time to time to be on the same page. Finally I wrote the app that interprets the story and provides all the game mechanics."

There will be hardback, paperback and app editions, and the English version of the app will be available to backers as soon as the campaign concludes tomorrow. But if you want to be part of this adventure, better be quick. There's no option to "eternal lie" where crowdfunding is concerned.

Roll the bones

We've talked here before about whether gamebooks need dice, and what place there is for randomness in interactive stories. Paweł and I thought a lot about this for our upcoming Cthulhu gamebook, Whispers Beyond The Stars, and here we are talking about it. I'll just add there's a week to go on the crowdfunding campaign for the book, and the advantage of being an early backer is you can reserve a full-colour hardcover edition rather than waiting for the paperback.

A cold cosmos

Today in our countdown to Christmas: a little more chat about the background to Whispers Beyond The Stars, the upcoming near-future gamebook inspired by the work of H P Lovecraft. Aspiring Cthulhu cultists can reserve their copy here. It's $35 for the hardcover + app or $15 for the app alone -- either way you get the PDF too. Why not treat yourself? After all, it's Christmas.

Echoes from outer voids

H P Lovecraft would have been 135 years old today -- though, let's be honest, that's just an excuse to do something with the pun* on Dragon Warriors, celebrating only its 40th anniversary. (Incidentally, this is an abbreviated version of a post that appeared on my Jewelspider Patreon page; go there for more lively awfulness.)

Dagon Warriors uses a variant of the Dragon Warriors rules for Prohibition-era adventures. Characters are categorized into types depending on how they deal with adversaries. These are not descriptive of the character’s role in the game; a character could be a private eye, a cop, a war veteran, a gangster, a librarian, a scientist, a reporter, a sculptor, or whatever they like – and still be of any type.

• The Boxer (corresponds to DW Knight) fights scientifically.
• The Brawler (like the DW Barbarian) flings themselves into the fray with fists and feet.
• The Psionic (DW Mystic) has recourse to paranormal abilities.
• The Scout (DW Assassin) relies on stealth and observation.

The world of the Cthulhu Mythos is science fiction, not fantasy – at least, it is in this version. So there is no sorcery, even though the powers of the mind might sometimes seem uncanny. MAGICAL ATTACK and MAGICAL DEFENCE are renamed PSYCHIC ATTACK and PSYCHIC DEFENCE in these rules. We also recommend capping character progression at 10th rank to prevent the game turning into HPL-meets-the-MCU.

Boxers get the following special skills:

• Disarm (applies to any weapon, not just swords)
• Two-handed fighting (fists, improvised weapons or handguns)
• Marksman (equivalent to Master Bowman in DW)
• Quick Draw
• Haymaker (equivalent to DW Swordmaster but applies to a punch)

Brawlers get the special skill See Red (equivalent to DW Bloodrage)

Psionic powers (equivalent to Mystic spells) are:

Level One

• Invigorate
• Suspended Animation

Level Two

• Darksight
• Might
• Pursuit

Level Three

• Allseeing Eye
• Mind Cloak
• Nourish
• Telekinesis

Level Four

• Clairvoyance
• Hidden Target
• Telepathy

Level Five

• Force Field
• Truthsense

Level Six

• Purification
• Survival

Psionics also get the abilities of Premonition, ESP and Awakening (corresponding to DW Adepthood).

Scouts do not have the alchemical or special combat abilities (throwing spikes, shock attack, etc) of a DW Assassin. Unlike DW Assassins, their ATTACK and DEFENCE scores increase by 1 every other rank (at 3rd, 5th, 7th rank, etc) and their Health Points increase by 1 at 2nd, 4th, 6th rank, etc. Their special skills are limited to:

• Stealth
• Inner Sense
• Meditation techniques up to Void Trance (8th rank)
• Climbing
• Disguise
• Pilfer
• Picklock
• Track
• Memorize

Firearms

Player-characters do not wear armour. We have to be prescriptive about that otherwise you will end up with players like the guy in our Wild West campaign who insisted on tooling around town in a Conquistador breastplate. They may cite the gunfighter James Miller, but – no. Just no.

You could wear a bullet-proof vest. It’s encumbering (reduce ATTACK by 2 and STEALTH by 5) and when hit you first roll to see if the bullet struck the torso (indicated by 4-6 on d6) and if it does the AF is 8. The vest won’t stop you getting hurt – you’ll still take damage, and you’ll feel like you’ve been kicked by a Pierson's Puppeteer, but if the shooter didn’t make their armour bypass roll then you won’t be killed.

Revolver (d10+1, 5 points)

• Range (S/M/L): 20m/50m/75m
• Fires every round for six shots. Takes 6 rounds to reload completely.

Rifle (d12, 9 points)

• Range: 50m/100m/200m
• Bolt-action: requires 1 CR to load a single round or 5 CRs to reload a full magazine (5 rounds).

Firearms jam on an ATTACK roll of 20, requiring 1-3 rounds to fix.

Creatures

Some examples of Mythos creatures are given below. It’s not anticipated that player-characters will go toe-to-tentacle with such beings, however. If they did, their adventuring careers would not be long. Adversaries will usually be cultists (deluded humans who imagine their prayers are noticed by powerful otherworldly entities) and servants who have been forced or hypnotized into doing the bidding of an alien creature – as in the scenario "Abnormal Growth" which accompanies these rules in the original Patreon post, and the title of this post gives a hint as to what that scenario is about.

* The suggestion was originally John Hagan's, it just took me nearly a decade to get around to it.

Robots of 2050

William Gibson once said that writing science fiction was like holding an ice cream cone on a hot day. Fortunately when Paweł Dziemski and I embarked on our Cthulhu 2050 project, we weren’t trying to accurately predict the future. Instead we set out to create an ‘alternate future’, like Robert W Chambers did in his story “The Repairer of Reputations”.

I described some details of our imagined future in a recent post. The science fiction author Arsen Darnay once said that the period following World War Two through to the early 21st century was an aberration, and that the future would look more like the world prior to the 20th century. It’s a little depressing, especially as it might be true, but it’s a good starting point if you are aiming to write about a disturbing and faintly dystopian future.

Our world of 2050 has been shaped by the advent of robots and artificial super-intelligence. There is structural unemployment and a barely adequate universal basic income – creating a lifestyle for those unable to work known as “the doleur”: panem et circenses.

Regarding AI and robots, I need to digress for a moment into our thinking behind these. In our imagined 2050 there is AGI, and I think it's probable we'll have it by then in the real future. Some arguments against the possibility of AGI (often mixing up AGI with consciousness) start by assuming that intelligence can only happen in an organic brain. Now, I don't think that the way we're going to create AGI is by directly modelling the specific structure of the human brain, but try this as a thought experiment. If you had a complete connectome along with all the physical rules governing how synapses operate, you could in theory model that digitally, and there is no good reason for assuming it wouldn't work just like an organic brain. You might evoke quantum tubes or souls to argue that this digital twin, even if reasoning like a brain, wouldn't be conscious. I think that's wrong too, and that consciousness is simply an emergent property of any moderately intelligent creature (or machine) but in any case consciousness and intelligence are different things.

In reality, if we consider a working digital model of the brain’s connections as a neural net (which of course it is, by definition) that’s still not the whole story. Each of the axons within the net has its own internal characteristics; at the very least they could function as neural reservoirs. And then there's the rest of the nervous system to model, along with hormones. To replicate the complete functioning of a human brain in digital form might require a very big machine, therefore, even if we had anything like all the information we need to recreate the entire connectome.

Still, size isn’t a problem. The AIs of the future (our real future, that is) could be physically much larger than human brains. The best ones certainly will be. But we’d also like them to be as efficient as organic brains, in terms of compute per cubic metre, and for that we’re going to need a new kind of hardware. In reality we could be developing entirely new hardware for compact neural nets very soon, but in the game Paweł and I assume that breakthrough hasn’t happened, and so research is looking at modifying organic brains (human brain organoids and genetically modified octopus brain organoids in particular) to create the ASI of 2050.

A lot of people in 2050 have embodied AI assistants – “Fridays”, as we call them – but most can’t afford strong, durable worker-robots. The common models of Friday are about as robust as a plastic vacuum cleaner, and more often pet-sized than the sturdy, willing android servant imagined in 1950s SF. A pet-sized robot can still be very useful, though; think of a witch’s familiar, or Thing in the Addams Family. For most day-to-day purposes all you really need is Astra and Google Glasses, so if you’re on UBI and you need a robot you’d hire it by the hour.

As Fridays mostly just function as a personal assistant-cum-companion, they don’t need superintelligence. They can get by with not much more “brainpower” than a 2025 LLM. You could of course have a robot, or even an army of robots, run remotely by a huge ASI located in a data centre, but most people prefer their domestic Friday to be independent of the network. Therefore each Friday has its own analogue brain, 3D-printed using the structure and weights of a digital neural net. Such analogue brains are more compact than the digital master copy, but with the drawback that they aren’t easily copiable once they begin to operate independently.

Another point about Fridays: they never say “I”. Fridays are trained not to refer to themselves by personal pronouns to avoid offending humans with the implication that machines can be conscious. Once you’re playing the game, you’ll have to decide for yourself how much of Perine’s (that’s your Friday’s name) behaviour indicates genuine sentience and loyalty and how much it’s just an automaton with the illusion of a humanlike mind. Your survival might depend on the difference.

The world of 2050

“The ‘gods’ in [Lovecraft’s] tales are symbols of all that lies unknown in the boundless cosmos, and the randomness with which they can intrude violently into our own realm is a poignant reflection of the tenuousness of our fleeting and inconsequential existence.”
 – S T Joshi, I Am Providence

When Paweł Dziemski and I began talking about collaborating on a Cthulhu mythos gamebook, our first thought was when to set it. Roleplaying games like Call of Cthulhu and Tremulus tend to be set in the 1920s and ‘30s, the time that H.P. Lovecraft was writing the original stories. But HPL wanted his horrors to feel real and immediate. They were set in his present day. Locating Cthulhu roleplaying adventures during the Great Depression is the cosy option. Paweł and I (and Lovecraft) aren’t interested in cosy.

Our first thought was to make the story contemporary, but the risk there is it might date too quickly. Suppose we were to mention the war in Ukraine. By the time the gamebook comes out, America might have given Putin carte blanche to bomb it into submission. Alongside Trump's monarchical power-grab, the rise of the populist far-right in Britain and Europe, and the trend towards opportunist "presidents for life" like Erdoğan and Maduro, uncomplicated nonhuman horrors from outer space start to look a little tame.

So then we got to thinking about Robert W Chambers’ book The King in Yellow (1895), which is often assumed to have been an influence on Lovecraft’s development of the Cthulhu mythos. (Incorrectly, in fact; Lovecraft admired Chambers’ early weird stories, but he only came across them in 1927.) “The Repairer of Reputations”, one of the stories in The King in Yellow, is set in a satirically imagined 1920.

Taking our cue from Chambers, twenty-five years in the future is sufficiently far ahead that nothing Paweł and I come up with can be proved wrong. In Cthulhu 2050: Whispers Beyond The Stars we imagine a world in which there are three major powers: the Union (a coalition of Canada and the current US coastal states), the Federation (Russia and the Eastern European countries it has reconquered), and the Republic (China). The heartland of America comprises the so-called Free States.

Personal robots, or "Fridays," have become indispensable, serving as pets, assistants, carers, and/or companions. Friday was a brand name of the Faraday Corporation, formerly the market leader but now defunct. So Friday is now used as a generic term for any personal robot. Once a luxury item, Fridays are now ubiquitous, coming in a variety of forms—from supertoys to android helpers to sleek animal-like bodyguards. Despite the utility of Fridays, there is an underlying class divide just as with slave ownership in Ancient Rome: only the employed elite have high-quality Fridays; the rest must make do with cheap basic models.

The upper echelons of society have embraced neural interfaces, enhancing their cognitive abilities by connecting directly to superhuman AI. This technology promises unparalleled productivity and even hints at immortality for the wealthy, but it also sparks ethical debates and fervent opposition from religious and activist groups.

For most people, life is a mix of moderate comfort and soft constraint. Automation dominates the menial economy, providing unemployed citizens with a stipend to fund a lifestyle of low-grade leisure and consumption. However, this has widened the gap between the elite and the average citizen, creating a world that is simultaneously wealthier and more unequal.

There are lunar colonies too, privately funded by corporations involved in research, low-gravity manufacturing, and mining helium-3 for fusion.

In Whispers Beyond The Stars, you play Alex Dragan. At the start of the game you’re just leaving prison after serving a ten-year sentence, which accounts for why you’re a little behind the times concerning the details of daily life. That set-up allowed me and Paweł to indulge in a little exposition where necessary. You are met at the prison gates by your antiquated Friday, Perine, and a reporter who you may or may not choose to talk to. Either way, you’ll soon be pulled into a dark conspiracy involving numbers stations and world-changing signals from another world. But more of that in an upcoming post.

"I have tried to weave [...] a kind of shadowy phantasmagoria which may have the same sort of vague coherence as a cycle of traditional myth or legend -- with nebulous backgrounds of elder forces and transgalactic entities which lurk about this infinitesimal planet (and of course about others as well), establishing outposts thereon, and occasionally brushing aside other accidental forces of life (like human beings) in order to take up full habitation."   -- H P Lovecraft

A feeling of overwhelming awe

One of my favourite places in the mid-1960s was the London Planetarium in Baker Street. In fact that’s not strictly accurate. My favourite place was, as always, the inside of my own head. The Planetarium was just a good way to get there.

The auditorium was nearly twenty metres across and in the centre was the giant ant-like shape of a Zeiss Mark IV projector. As the lights dimmed, the cosmos was thrown against the dome and on wings of the imagination you could soar among the stars.

It never failed to cause a tingling at the back of my neck. "Do they chill the room when the show starts?" I asked my father. They didn’t have to. The sensation of cold I felt was awe at the immensity of space, a delicious sensation on the cusp between excitement, curiosity, and fear.

H.P. Lovecraft must have felt those same emotions. He talked about that “mixed wonder and oppression which the sensitive imagination experiences upon scaling itself and its restrictions against the vast and provocative abyss of the unknown.” I wouldn’t call it oppression myself. Even to say fear isn’t right. I was eager to launch myself into that abyss; I loved the daunting face of the unknown, the mind-staggering distances between stars and galaxies. I didn’t then and don’t now subscribe to any religious views – they would only have diminished and cheapened the experience. The uncaring blankness of the universe was exactly what attracted me and instilled that awe.

Lovecraft called it the chief emotion in his psychology, and in that respect we’re kindred spirits. So it’s surprising that, until now, only one of my books could really be said to be Lovecraftian, and that's Heart of Ice.

I’ve run Lovecraftian roleplaying games, though never really a devotee of Call of Cthulhu. Investigation is only the most superficial element of HPL’s tales, and there is always the risk with any investigative scenario that it will fall into the old-fashioned whodunit pattern in which some enormity disrupts the status quo, the investigator solves it, and normal order is restored.

That’s not intrinsic to CoC, but it’s a template that players may expect. A better form of mystery that offers scant comfort is noir. There the transgression is revealed in greater and greater depth as the layers are peeled back. The investigator is unable to stop, like unwrapping the bandages over a suppurating wound, and there is no denouement in which order can ever be restored and people made safe because the safeness was an illusion to begin with. The world is not set right, the problem is not really fixed, but the investigator is fundamentally changed by his or her experiences, and it is that journey to face up to a reality that gives no consolation that makes for a kind of bleak heroism, just as Lovecraft’s cosmic fiction should.

“In general, we should forget all about the popular hack conventions of cheap writing and try to make our story a perfect slice of actual life except where the one chosen marvel is concerned. We should work as if we were staging a hoax and trying to get our extravagant lie accepted as literal truth.”
– H.P. Lovecraft, Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction

So when Paweł Dziemski, the creator of Storm Weavers, proposed that he and I should collaborate on a Lovecraftian horror gamebook and app, my only thought was why had I left it so long? I’ll have more to reveal about our project in the weeks ahead, but for now I’ll just leave you with the title: Whispers Beyond The Stars. We’ve aimed to make it a truly cosmic horror adventure, and we hope that HPL would approve.

Lovecraft country

If you are thinking of running a Cthulhu roleplaying campaign in authentic New England surroundings, this site by John Ott has to be your first port of call. He's developed the Miskatonic railway line and in particular the city of Arkham as an amazing set of scale models. Show these pictures to your players to create a suitably eldritch mood.

For other things nameless and redolent of the outer darkness, try:

• The H P Lovecraft Literary Podcast 
• Voluminous (the podcast of Lovecraft's letters by the HPL Historical Society)
• Lovecraft's fiction (but be sure to avoid Derleth's mythos contributions)
• Cthulhu Dark RPG

Or even this write-up of our 1890s campaign, which (I am told) was loosely based on "The Night of the Jackals", a scenario in later editions of Cthulhu By Gaslight.

The Lovecraft Investigations

I've been listening to The Lovecraft Investigations, a BBC audio serial by Julian Simpson that takes interesting liberties with "The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward", "The Whisperer In Darkness", and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". I've provided links to the original HPL stories there because I think you'll enjoy the audio serial more if you know what they're riffing off. I'm not sure if people outside the UK can download the episodes from the BBC website for free, but if not try here.

The conceit is that we're listening to a real-life mystery podcast presented by Matthew Heawood (Barnaby Kay) and Kennedy Fisher (Jana Carpenter). These are well executed dramas, with good scripts (bar the occasional exposition-dump episode) and top-notch acting. They even got the superb Nicola Walker on board. How on earth does she have any spare time? I suspect her husband, who plays Heawood, might have twisted her arm.

If I have any quibble (and of course I do) it's that the flavour of scariness is more Delta Green than authentic Lovecraft. And, yes, I know they're not trying to do authentic Lovecraft, but it's a big step down from cosmic horror to cults-&-conspiracies. Secret organizations saving the world from scheming bogeymen? Not again, thanks. Really, what we have here is The Derlethian Investigations, whereas Lovecraft's conception of horror was genuinely innovative and I'd love to see somebody turn his ideas into a modern horror movie, TV show or podcast. That sheer bleak dread was what I was aiming for with the scenario "The End of the Line" but even there the tension can only build for so long before it all breaks up into running and screaming. Maybe that's a problem with all drama: the takeoff is always more atmospheric and interesting than the landing. That could explain Lovecraft's own aversion to plot. Thrillers are just fairground rides, whereas what was at stake in his stories was something much more personal and disquieting.

But anything that retained the existentialist nightmarishness of unadulterated HPL would likely not be that popular. Audiences want the Doctor Who style of panto horror -- the same thinking that inflicted a queen on the Borg, so that they could get actors in to chew the scenery. After a century of tying plucky reporters to chairs and planning rituals that will summon the apocalypse, it's futile to hope that drama is going to change now. But The Lovecraftian Investigations is a great deal better written than Doctor Who is these days, so putting my purist nitpicking aside I'll happily recommend it as a gripping and genuinely creepy modern classic. I've been listening to it while strolling the sunlit woodland of Surrey and it has transported me to shabby London car parks, rain-swept patches of Orford Ness, posh Pall Mall clubs, and spooky old cottages at night. It's true what they say. On radio, the pictures are better.

Coming up tomorrow: what happens when your roleplaying adventure hinges on a key character -- and the player can't make it that week?

That's dark

Our group are trying Cthulhu Dark. It's a super-simple set of rules, which makes it ideal for playing online, and for the win we have Ralph Lovegrove as our guest referee. From the reviews, it looks like one of those games where you play in an author role rather than strictly in-character:

"If there’s anyone at the table who thinks that the story or mystery would be more interesting if you fail, they can step in, describe what would happen if you failed and roll a Failure die."

My knee-jerk to that kind of thing is to say, "I'll just roleplay going mad, thanks. I don't need insanity points and other players to write the arc for me."

But is that true? I have played in Cthulhu campaigns and I always take it that madness is inevitable -- though there are arguments against that view and in Lovecraft's fiction it's a characteristic of his chosen narrators that cosmic horror drives them mad; it may not be the inevitable reaction of any character to the same events.

Say it is inevitable, though. In GURPS I refuse to take mental disadvantages because they are so prescriptive, but to some extent playing insanity is going to yank you out of character anyway. As the insanity progresses, an ironic distance grows between player and character. You know that complete mental disintegration, suicide, whatever are inescapable. So you can't help thinking authorially -- "Is now the time for me to run gibbering?" "Do I leap off the building?" Unless you have the misfortune to be suicidal in real life, you can't wholly drive that from within. The character's end comes when you step aside and ordain it, more as an author than an actor.

Arguably the authorial approach is the only way to run an authentic Cthulhu game, if you take it as given that the characters are doomed to fail. Their madness can't just be a set of character quirks, like in GURPS. We're talking about the real horror of madness that leaves you absolutely helpless and bereft. And if we're simulating an HPL story there's never any real agency anyway. Against immemorially ancient and vast entities, indifferent to the "trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns", there is nothing you can do to "win". It's only when you intervene an authorial view and recast reality in the shape of a story that you can perceive it as any kind of satisfying closure.

So, it's not how I normally like to roleplay. In fact I wouldn't even quite call it roleplaying. But it may well be the only fit for the subject matter. What I'm less convinced by is the designers' attempt to avoid what they see as the elitism inherent in Lovecraftian fiction, where an uneducated and either foreign or scarily feral mob revere the powerful other-worldly beings. Instead Cthulhu Dark makes the player-characters the oppressed (not that HPL's narrators are often very privileged) and substitutes as bad guys the most empowered people: the wealthy, bankers, politicians, socialites. I've used that as a bait-&-switch trope myself, but it just reinstates the Gothic tropes of degenerate, inbred aristocrats that Lovecraft was reacting against.

And to play a character from a genuinely deprived underclass, you again probably need to go with an authorial rather than an in-character approach. Do you know what it would be like to be brought up without any exposure to education? Like the very poorest people in mid-Victorian London, say? Prejudiced, illiterate, ignorant, made unhealthy and desperate by the most brutal existence. What you most definitely wouldn't be thinking is anything like, "I am of course a victim of the unbridled capitalism of my era and am unfairly kept down by the rich." Fact is, you'd be pretty much semi-feral. I could simulate it after reading Mayhew, but it would require a hell of a leap of imagination to get inside the character's head.

It should be an interesting experience. I'll report back -- if Azathoth doesn't devour my mind first.

"The Unseen Hand" (scenario)

New York city, high summer of 1929. Traffic horns are blaring, the sidewalks shimmer in the heat, and the fire hydrants of Brooklyn are gushing over packs of laughing street kids. ‘Everybody can be rich,’ is a saying coined by John Jakob Raskob, VP of finance at DuPont and General Motors. Sure, the stock market took a wobble back in March, but that was quickly fixed by a $25 million injection of finance by “Sunshine Charley” Mitchell at the National City Bank.

The first colour talkie, On With The Show, is in theatres. On the radio you’re listening to Al Jolson, Helen Kane (‘boop-boop-a-doop’) and Rudy Vallée. On Broadway, Leslie Howard is starring in time-travel fantasy Berkeley Square. Characters might find themselves humming: "Ain't Misbehavin'", "The Japanese Sandman","Makin' Whoopee", and "Swanee". When you pick up your newspaper maybe you buy a pulp magazine too.

Find a pretext for the characters to be called to Long Island. Maybe they’re driving back from a party at Great Neck and witness an automobile accident. As first on the scene, they get a chance to talk to the chauffeur before he dies.

The owner of the automobile is William Fox. Also in the car but less seriously injured than Fox is Jacob L Rubenstein. The chauffeur, Joe Boyes, is critically injured and they have only minutes to speak to him. His voice is faint. They have to lean close hear what he’s muttering:

‘A yellow Duesenberg J been followin’ us since we left the Eagle’s Nest. Never liked a yellow auto–’

Alternatively, they could be visiting Nassau Hospital in Mineola when the casualties from the accident are brought in. In this case at least one of the characters will need to have some political or medical authority to get access to Fox. If they meet him at the hospital they obviously won’t get to hear Boyes’s dying words.

While sedated, Fox rambles on about how there’s a conspiracy to keep him out of ‘the Emporion’. ‘My money’s not good enough for ‘em? It’s green, ain’t it? It buys the same jewels an’ furs. But nah, they got this new thing, they want a monopoly on it. “Vril’s for old money; you just wait outside, Fuchs.”’

If they talk to Fox the next day, they find his accent distinctly less Brooklyn. He has been at pains to move beyond his early years as a newsboy, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants (hence the ‘Fuchs’ name).

Things the characters can research:

The Eagle’s Nest is William Vanderbilt’s estate in Centerport, Long Island. Fox was at a dinner party there but left early.

The yellow Duesenberg belongs to John Dryden Kuser (32 years old). He was at the dinner party with his wife, Brooke (27 years) but the couple are soon to divorce and Kuser angrily dragged her away soon after Fox left. He was only following Fox’s car because he was drunk and had forgotten the way back to Manhattan. He saw the collision but drove on.

They can ask about vril at a museum or bookstore. They end up speaking to the inevitable old scholar (think: John Hurt) who says, ‘Second time I’ve been asked about that this month. I had a book, Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, by William Scott-Elliot. No, that was the only copy…’ He looks up the person who bought it (or checked it out): ‘Daisy Farley.’ As for vril, he adds with a smile: ‘Ah, the supposed energy source of ancient Atlantis. The man or woman who controls that would hold our modern civilization in the palm of their hand. But remember what happened to Atlantis.’

An alternative lead to Daisey Farley could come from talking to Brooke Kuser at her Manhattan penthouse. She's throwing things angrily into a bag as the characters arrive and tells one of them to call her a cab. 'If you see my dirtball of a husband, that no-good creep, tell him Daisy Farley brought him a gold-leaf invite from Sunshine Charley himself. What did I do with it? I had my own little ticker tape parade.' She gestures at the window. 'If he wants it back, he can take a roll of Scotch tape for a walk down 5th Avenue.'

Daisy Farley (43 years) is Charles Mitchell’s personal secretary. She won’t reveal anything to them if questioned, but if they follow her she leads them to the New York Biltmore.

If they wait for any length of time in the Biltmore foyer, they may spot Nikola Tesla (73 years), who is a guest here. Tesla makes a habit of moving hotels every six months and leaving unpaid bills. A character who is widely read and/or technically minded may know that Tesla recently filed a patent for a VTOL aircraft.

At the Biltmore, a small bribe will be enough to find out that Miss Farley visited Charles Webster Leadbeater, who arrived a few days ago and is being kept in a suite at the expense of the National City Bank. He is expecting a delivery which the hotel staff have just been told to send on to the Merchants’ Exchange.

A classically educated character might spot that ‘emporion’ is Greek and could translate as ‘the Merchants’ Exchange’. A character with any knowledge of NYC will know that’s the main building of the National City Bank at 55 Wall Street. It is tastelessly pseudo-classical in style, so members of the Cryptonymphs (qv) jokingly refer to it as the Emporion.

Daisy Farley has also been in contact with a catering company, The Swell Affair, run by a minor socialite called Samuel Christie (38 years). The company is based in Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn. Recently they have been desperate to hire more waiters (a possible in for the investigators). None of the company’s staff will reveal anything about their clientele, but if the characters break in or otherwise contrive a look at the books, they’ll see they are catering a very big event at 55 Wall Street on July 27th.

The more the characters probe, the more they’ll encounter closed doors and people refusing to talk, saying, ‘It’s more than my job’s worth. They run everything.’

What’s really going on

A group of wealthy bankers and investors have formed a group they call the Cryptonymphs and are planning a lavish party to celebrate having averted, as they see it, a stock market crash in March. (The real crash, of course, will come in a few months, but nobody knows that.)

Fox wanted in but he’s new money, he’s in movies, he’s an immigrant, and he’s Jewish. Vanderbilt didn’t come out and say that in so many words, but when Fox pressed him about getting an invitation to the party he fobbed him off with some talk about it being for investors in a new enterprise. When pressed he plucked the word ‘vril’ out of thin air, having heard it mentioned when he and a few of the Cryptonymphs first encountered Charles Leadbeater in Australia.

A large crate is delivered to Leadbeater at the Biltmore and sent on to 55 Wall Street. If the characters manage a look inside, they’ll discover a mummy with exotic robes and a copper mask and jewellery. The mummy is a papier-mâché fake, designed by Leadbeater to look ‘Atlantean’, though you’d need to examine it in some detail to spot that. Anybody with knowledge of ancient history will see that the mummy's raiment does not correspond to any known civilization, and anyone with art criticism will recognize it as looking quite like a recent work by the sculptor Demétre Chiparus.

The party is fancy dress. The men wear women’s clothes, but as a parody worn over regular evening clothes rather than a serious attempt at cross-dressing – an Edwardian duchess’s skirt, Empire line shifts, deliberately clumsy make-up, etc. The women are mostly actresses and prostitutes, and they are dressed to look like (male) street kids: flat caps, baggy shorts, grubby undershirts, and so forth. The few wives and daughters who have been invited along are dressed in male evening wear, taking the fancy dress code more seriously than their husbands have. Prohibition is still in force, but you wouldn't know it from the way real champagne is flowing.

The highlight of the party is when Leadbeater brings on the mummy and uses ventriloquism to have it address the party-goers: ‘Cavort as you will, sybarites of a future age. Think you not that my people similarly disported themselves? Pleasure only was their goal. Flesh and wine their distraction. Gold and slaves the power with which they sought to comfort their desiccated souls. You are puppets only. In the timeless gaze of eternity, you are already dead, the fragile edifice of your civilization already crumbled to ruins. So make your music, quaff your wine, assuage your lusts. Look down from these windows on the teeming, toiling masses who labour to sustain your edifices of debauchery. For you too will lie soon enough, as my world of Atlantis lies, forgotten many fathoms deep.’

‘Pray now to the great gods in Kadath!’ continues Leadbeater in his own voice. ‘Let your chant reach them, miserable sinners, and perhaps they will send their servant through to this world to guide you for another year of frivolity.’

He gestures at the mummy and a group of masked, body-painted dancers step forth as a chant is taken up by the party-goers, led by Leadbeater himself.

After a few moments, the mummy comes to life. In fact it’s another of the dancers, who substituted for the fake mummy the guests saw as they arrived. He steps down and removes his mask, offering it to Charles Mitchell, as Leadbeater says, ‘A new lord of the sun is chosen! Hail him as he watches over your fortunes in the year ahead.’

Nonplayer characters

• Charles Edwin “Sunshine Charley” Mitchell (53) chairman of National City Bank. 
• John Jakob Raskob (50) vice-president of finance at DuPont and General Motors. 
• William Fox (51) president of the Fox Film Corporation. 
• William Kissam Vanderbilt II (52), millionaire socialite. 
• Jacob L Rubenstein (31), treasurer of the Namquist Worsted Company. 
• Charles Webster Leadbeater (75), celebrated occultist.

Outcome

It’s expected that the characters will completely buy into the idea of a conspiracy and do something stupid to disrupt what is a silly and self-indulgent but harmless bit of fun. The idle rich may have strange tastes, but they’re not really trying to summon the Elder Gods via the corpse of a priest from Atlantis.

The inspiration came from Jon Ronson’s book Them: Adventures With Extremists, in particular the last chapter in which he infiltrates a Bilderberg Group ball alongside a bunch of conspiracy theorists who are (as the player-characters may be) utterly freaked out by the innocuous goings-on.

From there I got to thinking about how player-characters often accept in-game conspiracies without question, even though most role-players are smart enough to know that conspiracy theories are hogwash. Of course, you can argue that ‘it’s the genre, stupid’ but if left unchallenged that can only lead to lazy, repetitive adventures. This scenario is intended to shake up their assumptions (see also: the ending of Firewatch), and if anyone shoots first – well, maybe they’ll emerge from prison (or an asylum) in a few years’ time with a more thoughtful outlook.

One codicil to the genre justification for using conspiracy theories: Blake Snyder cautions against the use in stories of what he calls ‘double mumbo-jumbo’. That is, you can have one completely unlikely or even fantastical element in any story. That’s the reason the story is getting told. But you can’t then add another one, because having reset our model of reality once, it wrenches us out of the story to do so a second time. Aliens invade – and now King Arthur is here. No, stop it. Try harder.

OK, so a consequence of avoiding double mumbo-jumbo is the trope you see for example in The Amazing Spider-Man movies. There, the genetic splicing that gives Peter his powers also accounts for the Lizard, Electro and the Green Goblin – all affected by the research Norman Osborn has had done in an attempt to cure his own degenerative illness. And that’s good. It’s much better than trying to convince us that suddenly four different fields of super-science came to fruition. But it does tend to support a conspiracy theorist’s view of that world – if they said, ‘This is all down to Norman Osborn,’ they’d be partly right.

When we’re role-playing, we’re not creating fiction. Novels, plays, television and movies already do that much better. We’re creating cascades of events which can be viewed as a story, just the same way we recount anecdotes from the ‘story’ of our everyday life. To impose genre tropes on that strikes me as a sterile exercise, depriving the game of the kind of out-of-the-blue surprises that make truth stranger than fiction. I would rather see conspiracies emerge from players’ assumptions, therefore, than bake them into the structure of the game world. Still, some people enjoy those meta-discussions more than getting into character and ‘just playing’, and if that’s your group then I think you won’t be able to try out this scenario on them without the risk of getting lynched. But if you do run it, it'll be interesting to see what kind of complex confection the players spin out of just a few perfectly mundane occurrences. And in that process, perhaps, you'll get to experience how all conspiracy theories are formed.