Tension is a game of hunting ghosts. Once you start, you're committed because ghosts can hunt you too. The pressure keeps rising until you're finished or until you're finished.
Get it here.
Blackie Powells is a pirate who committed a series of daring but inexplicable crimes. He kidnapped a theatre troupe. He burned a logging camp. He smashed a dam. He was the puzzle and the laughing stock of the kingdom until his master plan came together and he made off with a good portion of the royal treasury."He kidnapped the actors so he could dress his men in their town guard costumes... he burned out the loggers so the river would be choked with logs and the ferry couldn't operate.. he smashed the dam to lower the water level and expose the old ford. It's genius!"
That was a generation ago. Blackie's reputation has grown and grown because since that time, people have been blaming their failures on him. No, I didn't fall asleep and let the flock wander off -- Blackie took them! Of course I made all the pots you ordered -- but I watched Blackie himself throw them all down the well! Blackie held me at knifepoint just to let the loaves overcook!
What crime did Blackie commit here (2d12)?
The truth, if the characters manage to discover it, is a bit different. Blackie Powells retired and lived a quiet life after his big heist. Now he's an old man in a house too big for him, being gently bullied by his three adult daughters. They won't let him have strong drink, or red meat or salty cheese! They want him to drink spring water and eat leafy greens and walk outside in the sunshine for an hour every day! In fact, if the characters can help with his scheme to get away from them, he'll give them a share of the remaining gold. He just needs them to commit a small list of inexplicable minor crimes...
Because when the cop cars are burning, bullets are flying and you hear choppers closing in, you really want to know if you can put a hole in the durak with the smart sight using the garbage truck as cover before he puts one in you, ya prav, druz'ya?
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| Not that sort of caravan. |
Read part one of this article here.
The world is freezing. Ithaqua is spreading his influence from the poles, extending great sheets of ice down across North America and up through Australia. The seas are beginning to ice over. Greenland and Siberia are uninhabitable. Scandinavia is gone. Maybe Ithaqua is taking revenge for Cthulhu, maybe he just sees an opportunity to take over now that we're enforcing Cthulhu's sleep.
It isn't normal cold. The UN has tried to reverse the cooling by launching giant orbital mirrors to collect more sunlight, and pumping heat-retaining chemicals into the atmosphere. They made no difference. Every year the ice walls eat away another hundred kilometres of arable land.
November
The most immediate threat to the world is the people given the job of protecting it. Stolid and unimaginative as they are, November agents get repeatedly exposed to influences the human mind isn't built to tolerate. Counselling, drugs, working in pairs and in some cases specialised forms of brain surgery aren't always enough to keep them stable. Some go independent, striking out on their own to fight the mythos without government backing or approved methods. Some go rogue and sell their skills to organised crime. Some go mad and turn cultist. Those are the most dangerous, using their knowledge and contacts to threaten the world instead of protecting it.
Despite November's suppression of mythos knowledge it leaks out, corroding human sanity wherever it comes in contact. Cults tend to fall into two distinct patterns. The first spring up when the right kind of mind reads the wrong kind of book and begins actively recruiting followers. Extremist, hysterical, violent, they burn out after a few months - destroyed by the authorities. The other sort of cult forms when someone with a plan begins searching out mythos knowledge. Patient and calculating, they often spread for years before November even becomes aware of them. These cults are more dangerous by far, because they're patient and work towards a goal without distraction. The leaders have made a cynical choice to gamble the fate of the whole species for personal gain.
With Cthulhu neutralised, the Deep Ones have broken into opposing factions. They worship Dagon, who is an avatar* of Cthulhu. One faction wants to restore Cthulhu, as their god's god. Another wants to elevate Dagon to take his place. The third (and currently largest) faction wants to keep the status quo, using human breeding stock to revitalise their race. The human hybrids make up the largest percentage of the zealot factions, and are far more active.
So far no one faction wants to break with the others and go it alone, so there's a veneer of unity. In secret, all three are taking action to further their own goals. Both zealot factions want access to the human accumulation of mythos knowledge, and with shoggoths at their command they're a formidable force. After losing several archive buildings, it became necessary to shift the others into low Earth orbit. The authorities don't want open war with the Deep Ones if it can be avoided, but the shifting balance of power between their factions makes negotiation difficult.
Ghroth has changed course and is now heading directly for Earth. What it intends to do when it gets here is anyone's guess. Even if it does nothing and simply passes through the solar system, the results will be catastrophic. The passage of a planet-sized creature will disrupt planetary orbits and cause hurricanes, tidal waves and volcanic eruptions the likes of which the world has never seen before. Its speed isn't consistent, so estimates on its arrival vary between five and 20 years.
The beings of the plain of sound need very precisely-modulated matching sounds on this side of the dimensional divide to cross over, but it turns out the cracking of splitting ice sheets is close enough. They've been able to cross over on their own in the colder regions, and travel south by sticking to the hospitable areas of Earth's sound-scape.
What they want from us is the human vocal apparatus. Jaw, teeth, tongue, lips, some of the throat lining, vocal cords and a lung. Their technology can remove the organs without killing the 'donor'. So far all the victims have been displaced refugees without much in the way of documentation or community, so November investigation has been hampered.
My first idea would be to run a slightly more optimistic Call of Cthulhu game. You, the characters, are probably going to die horribly but the human race isn't necessarily doomed.
Or if grimdark is the mood for the game, it might be fun to say that the human race has been extraordinarily lucky for half a century but now it's over and the Great Old Ones are pissed at us.
* My personal interpretation. Your Mythos May Vary.
Part 2 of this article is now up here.
A campaign idea that starts from the point where we win the Cthulhu Mythos.
Mythos fiction is some of my favourite fiction, but you have to admit it's dark. The setting comes with the explicit knowledge that some day, probably sooner rather than later, the stars will be right and the Great Old Ones will rise. The human race will collectively go mad under Cthulhu's psychic influence and turn on each other in ecstatic slaughter. If we survive at all, it'll be as just another lowly servitor race to Big C. And with the Mi-Go interested in Earth's resources, shoggoths hating us for not being them, Lloigor malice, Nyarlathotep's games, etc.... that's probably the best outcome we can expect. Dark.
Something I enjoy is taking nihilistic settings like this one and extrapolating what they would be like if we solved all the existing problems. And introduced a few new ones so they're still interesting to play.
Your mythos may vary. There have been so many writers involved that you have to to pick and choose. Lovecraft gets in, obviously. Also Ramsey Campbell, Frank Belknap Long and August Derleth (although I don't give any credence to his shuffling of Great Old Ones into neat elemental associations).
