Fly Me to the Moon

 With a Shapeways omniscale Battle Station in orbit:

The moon, planetoid or whatever is over 6 inches in diameter.

The Vanishing Conjuror

 Now that our initial series of interlinked scenarios is over (at least for the moment!) I'll try to post a bit more often in shorter bites. The three characters' ship, the Mauretania, docks at Southampton and is boarded by a group of police from Scotland Yard. They are led by the rather stolid and ineffably boring Inspector Henry Long, who insists on questioning them personally in private. In a monotone, he thanks the Captain for his time.

 Once inside, the Inspector throws off his external demeanor and turns out to be incredibly quick-witted and incisive. He says the Gorgon Sisters gave him advance warning to look out for the investigators, but he had no idea of the things they would end up doing on board the liner. A conversation ensues about Bolsheviks and cultists before he thanks them for doing their jobs and saving the three academics from Miskatonic University. He also says he will be their main contact in London from now on, giving them his card with direct telephone number. He then resumes his persona as the efficiently dull inspector and leads them out onto the deck. He tells them in trademark monotone to stay in London for a couple of weeks in case he has any further questions, but they are free to go. 

Once they have settled into their rather lovely hotel (courtesy of the Gorgons via the Inspector) they receive a handwritten note from the concierge. It's from Howard Horne, one of their favourite drinking companions from the trip. He is a theatrical agent and entrepreneur and his note is asking them to go to a performance that evening at the Mermaid Theatre; he will join them at the interval.

So off they troupe and boy is it dull: a series of mediocre conjuring acts topped off by the rather middling "Amazing Karl". Afterwards, Horne treats them to a visit to one of his well-known Soho haunts, a bar where another American is waiting for them. Horne introduces him as one of his acts, an up and coming stage magician named Will Crowther. He is from Boston and has been living in London for the last two years.

Horne asks the characters what they thought of the evening's entertainment and the consensus is not a good one. This pleases him because the one he really wanted them to see was Karl. One of his promising acts, Philip Leclair, mentioned to Horne that he was working with Karl on a new apparatus designed to revolutionize the vanishing act. However, on returning to London Horne has found that it is Leclair who has vanished and the police have found nothing. The thing is, there's quite a major charity gig at the same theatre in two nights' time and Karl is due to perform; Horne wants to know if he has stolen Leclair's ideas as well as finding out if the man is still alive.

This is where Crowther comes into the picture. Along with Karl and Leclair, he is a member of a gentleman magicians' club, rather a fine one run by a Chinese conjuror going by the name of Ching Lung Soo. The club is situated in the lower floors of a large townhouse owned by Ching Lung; the upper floor is his apartment. It's a big house for London, so Ching Lung must have made a lot of money abroad at one point. Crowther apologizes to Violet and Isobel and turns to Scott (Thomas' character), asking him if he has any sleight of hand tricks that he might be able to use to gain entry for himself to the club as a performer. Scott has a relatively high skill at throwing things, courtesy of his time in the ancient Roman army, so he shows Crowther a possible way to sleight his way through a performance of the throwing knives trick. His new found friend tells him to be at the clubhouse at 11.00 the next morning for an audition. If he fails, the group will just have to rely on Crowther to do some snooping on their behalf.

Scott gets in with no problem and is in fact complimented on his technique by one of the members of the admissions committee. He spends an amiable afternoon wandering around the place, although as a new first level member he is not entitled to go upstairs. He notes that all of the flunkies are Chinese members of Ching Lung's personal staff. They all wear a robe with a dragoon motif on the back, which is incidentally also inscribed on the plaque at the front door:

After a while, Crowther appears and falls into conversation almost naturally with the newcomer. Scott has found a storage room while wandering around the ground floor; it contains lockers for the use of members, one of which has Leclair's initials on it. He wasn't able to pick the padlock, though - could Crowther perhaps oblige? He does so surreptitiously and returns. The two of them converse for a while under the guise of Crowther showing Scott around the main library, then decide to go to the pub where they met the previous evening, which is going to be the rendezvous point while they are in London. Crowther passes Scott a notebook belonging to Leclair that includes more notes for his mechanism and mentions that he has been working on it with Karl. which makes the young German a possible accessory if indeed a crime has taken place.

In the meantime, Isobel and Violet have decided to pay a return visit to the theatre to see if they can find anything interesting or indeed incriminating in relation to Leclair's disappearance and/or the upcoming charity event. Isobel fails to pick the locks on the exits to a side alley, so Violet forces one of them. Unfortunately, this makes a lot of noise, so Isobel runs into the lobby of the theatre to warn the bored woman she meets there that she heard something at the side entrance. Violet slips inside while Isobel keeps their day manager talking and makes her way to the back of the stage and down into the large basement area under the stage. She finds an impressive dressing room with the name of one Ching Lung upon it, along with several smaller rooms, including one for Karl Weiss. 

Ching Lung's room is surprisingly empty, but Karl's contains three large packing crates. They are not locked or anything like that, so she lifts the lids to see what is inside: three stone components that will fit together to make an impressive archway (a gate), with a Chinese dragon sigil carved into the lintel. The room goes decidedly cold all of a sudden and this is what she sees:

Poor old Leclair is suspended in midair, surrounded by blue flames and in agony. He catches sight of her and manages to squeeze out a warning, something about releasing him by opening the gate and also needing to stop the Chinese man. He then fades from sight. This costs Violet a point of sanity.

She replaces everything and makes her way back upstairs. She definitely feels spooked by what she has just seen and makes quite a bit of noise on the way. Fortunately, though, Isobel covers for her with the manager until Violet has safely left the building. The two meet up again and head off to their rendezvous pub.

Everyone fills in everyone else on their various escapades that day. They have dinner in the pub and then head off to their hotel. Violet has no knowledge of gates from her Mythos knowledge, but starts to look through the various books she was given on the Mauretania. This is going to take a while, so she sets the morning aside to do more research while the other two head off to Leclair's lodgings (address obligingly supplied by Horne), but this turns out to be a bit of a dead end. Returning to the hotel, they find that Violet has enough information to realize that the archway she found is a very particular form of gate, one that is keyed to a specific place or creature and that requires a ritual to open correctly. This is completely unlike the gate they found under an abandoned house in America. Violet thinks that Leclair must have been shoved through the gateway without the ritual and so is stuck between worlds. This tallies with Scott's ideas about the magic circle he has just joined - it really does look like a front for a cult. Maybe Leclair found out something a bit too sensitive?

The implications are worrying - if the Chinese magician is really the leader of a cult, and if his summoning arch is at the theatre, then presumably his act is only going to become rather too real. They call Inspector Long and he agrees to infiltrate the theatre with armed police on the grounds of subversive activities. The plan is for his people to wait long enough for Leclair to materialize and then take out the magus; subordinates will apprehend the rest of the cultists and shepherd out the crowd. This is a rather well-known charity occasion, so there will be some of the aristocracy present, even perhaps minor royalty. The presence of armed police there will not be too unusual, even for Britain. It will be the job of the investigators to use their Elder Signs to stop whatever is coming through that gate.

In the event, it actually works. The Inspector and his two armed compatriots wait until the gate pulses ominously and then put three bullets neatly straight into Ching Lung's torso. He goes down and out. Panic breaks out but the players, whose seats are nearest the stage, manage to rush up the stairs and force back whatever that thing is. Leclair's smoldering yet strangely unburned body is lying in the middle of the floor, twitching, so at least he's alive. Something very large but, fortunately, as yet unseen, is trying to slurp its way through the gateway, tittering obscenely. However, all three characters make it in time to present a united front and whatever it was returns whence it came.

This is the second time in quick succession that the group has foiled a ritual summoning. They still don't know exactly what either thing was, and probably don't want to know. In her books, Violet manages to find an illustration of a blobby thing with lots of tentacles and mouths, about twice the size of a human, that can apparently only be seen once it starts to feed on the blood of its victims...

A campaign rationale

 An ongoing campaign of Call of Cthulhu can be rather an episodic affair, which makes it really good for running over the net. Published campaign supplements can of course be inserted as you like, but keeping player involvement and interest fresh (and I do mean the players, not the characters) requires something more than simply "This is what you're doing this week".

I remember a conversation with the dad of a prospective student at a university where I worked previously. His daughter had mentioned her love of tabletop roleplaying and we had a short conversation about our various games. We were joined part way through by her dad and it turned out he was a very experienced Cthulhu GM. He said something that stuck with me: "I've put a lot of effort into turning Cthulhu into a worldwide sandbox, where the players decide where to go." I was impressed - it sounded like a lot of work, and a whole load of fun. 

Ours is now becoming something like this, pretty much due to player choice. Following our fun time with "Dead Man's Stomp", I ran another one-shot, "A Mother's Love" from New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley, which they enjoyed immensely. It ended with Isobel (Beth's character) shooting the main bad guy in the arm; he spun around and fell into the water in Innsmouth, which he found most welcoming (I'm avoiding spoilers as much as I can!). Suffice to say, no body was ever found...

I then ran "The Pale God" from my old copy of The Great Old Ones. The hook was a certain Captain Harvey Walters (ret.), Scott's old commanding officer from the war. This started what has become something of a habit for me now: slipping character links into different scenarios in order to give the move from one to another a bit more coherence. Scott (Thomas' character) lost contact with the Captain after being reassigned to some R&R behind the lines along with the rest of what remained of his regiment. It turns out that Harvey and a group of soldiers had encountered something horrible in the basement of a bombed-out house and the few survivors formed a group against the Mythos that they call the "Wipers' Pals", which is based on some ideas from the 7th Edition Investigator Handbook. After seeing the rather spectacular death of one Harvey's men, the characters found out what was going on, but needed more research time to decide how to deal with it. 

Morris, Cate's character, contacted their rather ghoulish bookstore "friends" in Arkham to ask if they knew of a tome that might help. They were pointed in the direction of a certain Mr Corbitt, who had purchased an English translation of Nameless Cults. Normally the bookstore wouldn't give out the names of its rather peculiar "select" clientele, but this was one guy they really disliked. They had some acquaintances keep an eye out for Mr Corbitt in Boston, and these said the guy really stinks - as in, he's a sorcerer. 

In terms of the scenario, Corbitt has barricaded himself in his house and has hasn't been seen for days. Time to run "The Haunting". They managed to end the thing they encountered, snagging a rather nice dagger enchanted with an elder sign for their trouble, as well as the copy of Nameless Cults they were looking for in the first place. I deliberately enhanced the dagger; I reckoned an elder sign would be a very useful thing for them to have.

This led to some downtime for Morris to read the thing, so I had Dr Armitage introduce them to an old friend, Dr Henry Call, who has joined a gentleman's club with a sophisticated air of the occult: the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight in Boston. Dr Call met with the characters and said there was something odd about the place, especially the man leading the group, a certain John Scott, who "Looks as though he had a bad case of acne when he was a teenager". Being the only man in the group with high enough social status, Morris joined the Order, sponsored by Dr Call, with the idea of infiltrating it over the longer term. He'll need to use its library to improve his Occult skill in order to move up the ranks.

Morris was then disturbed by a separate development, a series of newspaper reports on the current New Orleans Mardi Gras season, with a feature on the rich sponsors of one particular "Krewe" - their chosen badge is the Yellow Sign, a symbol that flashed before his eyes when he previously encountered a dream version of Louis Armstrong with black, smoking eyes - the "person" laughed malevolently before disappearing. This happened in relation to the nasty trumpet from "Dead Man's Stomp", which Armitage has identified as associated with a certain entity called Nyarlathotep. Even he shuddered when he told this to Morris.

Off to New Orleans, then, for "Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?", another offering from The Great Old Ones. Again, I'll try to avoid spoilers, but in the course of their investigations they found a bookshop with an Elder Sign carved into a tree trunk outside its door. Morris spotted a copy of the dreaded King in Yellow with an especially malevolent Yellow Sign on its cover and went into a trance. Isobel waved her enchanted dagger over the sign, and all three of them ended up in a small town on the Bay of Naples in Roman times. They foiled the plan of a bunch of Hastur cultists here and were then whisked off to Norman England, where they saved an entire region from being sucked into Carcosa. After this, they woke up again back in the bookstore in New Orleans a second after they had blinked out; nobody else in the place had even noticed that something had happened. The two scenarios were from Tatters of the King. 

I had made the main protagonist of each time swap, or whatever it was, an absolute dead ringer for one of the sponsors of the Krewe being investigated, and strangely enough the characters had played themselves in the past - previous lives, or something. Except they remembered everything, including the skills they had at that time: they are all now very good at Latin, for example, and have also acquired some rather useful melee skills, especially Scott. He is very good with a pilum. They realized that Hastur's cultists were planning Attempt To Do Something Nasty number three, which they foiled. Their timeslip experience remains unexplained and slightly weird, which suits my idea of how Hastur does things.

This is where the players invented something I didn't foresee.  They assumed there must be some sort of link between their experiences, and sort of triangulated the locations on a map based on the whorls of the Yellow Sign. They pinpointed a location: the Azores, specifically Flores Island. Fully expecting to find something really nasty festering there, they reported back to Henry Armitage by telephone, asking him to find out more about Hastur and the Yellow Sign for them. He promised to do so, and also swung some first-class tickets for them on the Mauretania, due to leave New York City in a week's time for London, with a two-day layover in the Azores.

Dr Henry asked them to pick up a donation to the Orne Library from a family not far from New Orleans: scenario number three for them from The Great Old Ones, "Still Waters". It took them a while to investigate this one because they were being really careful, having realized very early that whatever the big nasty might be, it was seriously powerful. So they did not actually meet their enemy. They did, though, pick up the donation for the library as well as quite a lot of Mythos-related items. Morris had a weird vision of Great Cthulhu striding across the world in triumph, with a sort of Aztec-looking shining disc behind his head in place of the sun, a carved representation of a stylized phoenix surrounded by glyphs and sigils. And yes, this will matter later. They also come across a puzzling letter referring to the Silver Twilight as a powerful organization with great occult resources of their own.

Interrupt. The characters are interviewed by three brilliantly intelligent, no-nonsense women working for a shadowy part of the FBI called the "Unusual Incidents Unit" (Beth's idea!). Their codenames are Stheno, Medusa and Euryale, the names of the Gorgons (my idea; after all, why not?). Their group has only recently been formed, and they work by trying to play off elements of the Mythos against one another. For example, they know that Hastur's and Cthulhu's cultists don't exactly see tentacle-to-tentacle. The three agents are obviously very knowledgeable about the Mythos, and offer to cover up the aftermath of events in "Still Waters" for them. They tell the characters that their contacts will be Dr Armitage (surprise, surprise); their field agent will be their old friend Matt Peabody, an investigator who helped them in Innsmouth, taking out a gang member with a tommy gun by the simple expedient of shooting him in the head. Matt is now going out with Lucy Stone, another acquaintance from Arkham ("Red Letters"). The Gorgons give Scott and Isabel an Elder Sign each of their own. End of interrupt.

The characters finally made it back to Arkham and Dr Henry gave them their tickets for the Mauretania. He asked them to watch over a group of three academics from Miskatonic University: a professor and two of his graduate students who are on the run, funnily enough from the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight. It seems they stirred up a lot of trouble there and are now on the first part of a trip to Jerusalem to escape the organisation's clutches and to do some research into them in a special archive. 

This led to the scenario on the liner from The Asylum, with Morris as Violet this time so that she wouldn't be recognized - Morris might be a problem due to being a member of the Silver Twilight. This initially seemed mostly like a break from the Mythos, although the group met another occultist, a retired history professor from Harvard. He showed them an item he had found, leading to Isobel and Scott experiencing exactly the same vision of Cthulhu previously seen by Morris: the same vision for all three of them on two separate occasions. The professor was shocked into forswearing the occult ever again and gave Violet his paraphernalia and books.

The next event was their foiling an assassination attempt, which provided a distraction for the obligatory group of cultists to kidnap the academics from MU. The characters managed to intervene by the simple expedient of interrupting some sort of ritual summoning. The cult tried to swarm whatever thing was starting to come through the void, so the characters dragged the three academics out of the room and held the door shut from the outside. Various horrible screaming noises were heard from inside the room they had just vacated, but strangely enough whatever it was that was causing the grief made no sounds of its own. Opening the door after a sensible wait revealed the mangled bodies of the cultists, apart from their leader, who was nowhere to be seen; all that was left of him was a foul stench and the ritual dagger he was using in the summoning, which actually belonged to the professor on the scene - presumably he was going to be sacrificed first. This was the item they had taken from the Silver Twilight. The crime scene was very odd: all of the cultists had been killed by something very strong with unfeasibly sharp claws, but every single wound was inflicted from behind - on all six of them at pretty much the same time. The only casualty for the good guys turned out to be one of the graduate students who rolled 99 on SAN of 40, so he will be spending a bit of time in a nice quiet room in London with lots of rubber wallpaper. Good thing nobody actually saw that thing! The professor confided afterwards that the enigmatic John Scott talks like someone from 150 years ago or something; his English is definitely not in the contemporary idiom.

Flores Island provided more Hastur-related weirdness, which appropriately enough remains entirely unexplained. The characters experienced some extreme paranoia in and around a single tower in the middle of a clearing - exactly the one that Morris/Violet remembered seeing in their visions of Norman England. Passing through a feeling of great malevolence, they found a room at the top after encountering the squished remains of a Roman legionary and a medieval knight, reminders of their time in past. In the room was a pedestal holding a rather large, unadorned wooden box; Violet could see silver filigree filaments running down the pedestal from the box and disappearing into the floor. She was the only one who could perceive them, probably as a result of her earlier visions of this same tower. After a lot of deliberation, Violet opened the lid of the box and found a beautifully disturbing golden filigree ornament. A concave covering over two feet in diameter and around four inches deep. It has obviously been designed to go on top of something else and consisted of three interrelated sets of glyphs: a large, powerful Elder Sign intertwined with an equally impressive Yellow Sign, superimposed on a representation of the sun disk the characters remembered from their vision of Cthulhu triumphant. The whole thing was made of delicately unbreakable gold filigree. Violet shut the lid, grabbed the box and ran.

The characters fled the disintegrating tower, with Violet lagging behind (a spectacularly failed DEX roll). The other two trend around to see her emerge unscathed as the tower fell on top of her, disappearing block by block into nothingness as it did so. There was no sign the place had ever existed.

Any resemblance to a Fritz Leiber short story is purely intentional!

A useful map of Miskatonic Repository scenario locations