Posts tagged Horror RPG

7 of My Most Successful Campaigns (part two)

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7 of My Most Successful Campaigns

And here’s the rest of the list of the seven most successful campaigns I have run…you can find part one here.

The Final Revelation (Trail of Cthulhu) – 2020

  • The pitch: In 1930s London, a group of strangers are drawn together by shared, ominous experiences. They form a group to try to understand a pattern that soon reveals itself to by a threat to the nature of humanity. This frame leads to a series of interlinked scenarios. Spoilers: the world ends when the story does.
  • Context: Another pandemic favorite. The otherworldly cosmic horror made for a fine, distanced counterpoint to the realities of 2020—probably drawn from equal parts escapism and catharsis.
  • The verdict: As investigative games go, Trail of Cthulhu is hard to beat, and the vision of both Graham Walmsley and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan gave me a really compelling and disturbing game world to share with my players. Given the horror anthology setup, each player juggled 5 total PCs! What a weird, awesome experience.

Masks – 2022-2024

  • The pitch: PCs are teenaged heroes in historically super-powered Halcyon City. They struggle against evil, their own emotions, and the expectations of an older generation of super-heroes. Meanwhile, their various foes plot and scheme for world domination. Will they be able to rise above it all and save the world?
  • Context: I ran this game longer than any other. (Maybe longer than games in the past as well—it’s hard to remember.) Admittedly, there were two lengthy breaks, but all 5 players stayed in the game until the very end.
  • The verdict: This game was really one for the ages. It was mostly improvised, and as the story spun out, we wound up with a very large cast, and an epically drawn world. We wielded comic book tropes left and right—sometimes in a satirical way, but more often in a straightforwardly earnest way. It was a very emotional game with epic battles, as well as intense teenaged angst and romance.
Campaigns

CyBorg – 2023-2024

  • The pitch: Cy is a nightmarish corporate hellscape, whose citizens are all jacked in and constantly bombarded by advertisements and/or propaganda. The PCs travel into realities both virtual and concrete, taking on jobs for however many creds are offered. Everyone has debts to pay and bullets to spare as their desperation drives them ever deeper into danger and dystopian conspiracies.
  • Context: Potato Falls for the post-pandemic era—another very successful pickup game for our public group. As you might expect, it was a little grittier, but, as before, the game brought in new players and gave existing players something to look forward to.
  • The Verdict: This game was enormously fun. The many battles were explosively comedic. The weird locales and set pieces stood out against a sea of neon sludge. The pathologies of the various PCs were as difficult to fathom as they are to forget. And once again, the world ended when the story did. (Or did it? End simulation.)

The Detroit Campaign (Kult) – 2025

  • The pitch: In Detroit, in 1977, 5 strangers are drawn together by a shared nightmare. Gradually they discover a dark secret: that the American automobile industry was actually a decades long ritual that has allowed Hell to manifest in southeastern Michigan.
  • Context: I am from Flint, Michigan, and this was sort of a perverse tribute to my childhood home. It was also a chance to try a Powered by the Apocalypse horror game in a non-Cthulhu setting.
  • The verdict: We went really deep with this one, embracing the occult, transgressive sexuality at the heart of Kult. We also made room for Detroit style rock n’ roll, cameo appearances by the evil Henry Ford, and one of the most memorable PCs I’ve encountered—a Flint, Michigan empty-nester housewife, who sort of grew her own sub-mythos.

The Port of the West Wind (Hearts of Wulin) – 2025

  • The pitch: In a fantastic version of ancient China, the Port of the West Wind is a small and prosperous city, surrounded by magic and spirits. When a strange curse spreads across the land, the dead rise as puppets for demonic forces. The PCs are formidable warriors who go in search of the cause of these dark events.
  • Context: I ran this game in tandem with Kult, and, despite the demons, and the groundings of both rulesets in Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics, the moods involved were very different. It was very fun shifting my perspective as I moved back and forth between these games.
  • The verdict: Hearts of Wulin is just an amazing game. There are other systems if you want to bring wuxia storytelling to your table, but this one really sings, especially if you want to know about the inner lives of the characters. The group of players was awesome and really good about absorbing the somewhat eccentric—but effective—rules for combat, and each one of them brought a strong character to the table, all ready to undergo physical and emotional strife.

War Games—Thoughts after Recent Play-throughs of Never Going Home and Carry (part 2)

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Part 1

Carry and Never Going Home both have unusual systems—especially for games set in the midst of a war. There is no detailed tactical combat, though each has specialized rules for fighting. Never Going Home takes a more traditional approach, offering skills, attributes, even spells. (The latter are evocatively named Whispers, which is nice and creepy and suits the game’s foreboding portrayal of magic.) Still, it allows for a pip-shifting D6 pool that is meant, I think, to weigh training and expertise against decision-making that is necessarily urgent and impulsive.

The game also makes use of playing cards in a way that bridge the distance between selfless soldiering and personaI contemplation. Cards can be used for basic mechanical boosts, but they also feed and are drawn from a separate part of the game that is called The Journey. Through them, we can learn about a soldier’s life before the war or about his inner life. It’s really fascinating and pushes the game close toward moments that play almost like a story game. These moments can make the chaos of battle all the more meaningful for your players.

If Never Going Home approaches story game territory, Carry steps deliberately into it. Here is a game that is all about framing scenes, in the dramatic sense. It is a game about interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts during a war, and some of the most brutal experiences will probably play out between American soldiers. (Civilians and enemy combatants remain elliptical.) Each PC is featured in specific moments, as the game tracks individual story arcs, just as it tracks complex knotting that comes from interaction, especially in conflict.

I do not mean to say that battle plays no part in this game. On the contrary, when it comes up, it blots out everything else, though, even here, conflicts within a squad are just as dangerous as enemy gunfire. In fact, they may actualize enemy gunfire, by putting more dice into the hands of the GM or those of the player who controls the ranking officer. What’s important here is not so much whether the PCs follow the orders that are given by the ranking officer, but whether they agree with these orders. In the end, the GM benefits from dissent to a potentially lethal extent.

As with Never Going Home, Carry also creates opportunities to learn the personal lives of individual PCs. As they confront their personal burdens, (the things they carry as Tim O’Brien would say,) they change mechanically—including, potentially, what die types they are rolling. Action and contemplation become linked, as they are in Never Going Home.

While I’m just offering impressions—not conclusions (sorry)—I guess the above says something about why I enjoyed bringing Carry and Never Going Home to my gaming table. Both games made me think. Their mechanics are unusual, and open up narrative approaches to what it means to be an individual stuck in a relentlessly conformist setting—one in which you are surrounded by death and inhumanity—and in which you are doing whatever you can to avoid both. I will say again that neither game is going to appeal to every player, but if you give them a chance, they may lead you to fulfilling experiences, albeit uneasy ones. But then, after all, they are games about war and humanity. Uneasiness, at least, should go with the territory.

War Games—Thoughts after Recent Play-throughs of Never Going Home and Carry (part 1)

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War Games—Thoughts after Recent Play-throughs of Never Going Home and Carry (part 1)

This year I was lucky enough to be able to pull together player groups for two separate Never Going Home scenarios, as well as a one-shot of Carry. It’s challenging enough to sell groups of players on two different sets of unusual mechanics. I also had to convince them that it would be entertaining to play games about war. To be clear: I wasn’t hawking traditional war games, which allow the player considerable distance, by way of detailed maps and mathematics. The classic sort of war game often puts you in the general’s chair, far removed from the humanity of a soldier out there, on the ground, who is faced with the prospect of taking a life, losing their own, or just witnessing, immediately, the death of others.

Traditional war games do not offer the chaotic and subjective experience that games like Never Going Home—a Weird World War I game—and Carry—a gritty Vietnam War game—try to bring to the table. They are concerned with the psychological effects of war on the individual. Each game does an exemplary job of bringing very difficult subject matter to your table. Neither game is exactly easy to run, especially on a first outing, and even less so with a group of players that is not well-aligned to the games’ style.

It’s worth noting at the outset that both games are very specific in their approach. Not everyone is going to like them. (What’s more—even though I am linking them up here—a group that likes Never Going Home might not be enthusiastic about Carry and vice versa.) When I ran them, my players gave these games a chance, but some were upfront about not wanting to return to one—or both—in the future.

I am fortunate enough to have players who are curious and open-minded, but who also offer honest feedback. Out of the gate, I will say that Carry was received less favorably than Never Going Home. My players felt disconnected from both facts about the Vietnam War and related media tropes. So they weren’t easily drawn into the intense emotions the game is looking to channel. (For the record, I suggested media sources in advance.) My oldest player is in his early 40s, so maybe that accounts for the lack of immediacy. Also it could be that my GMing may not have engaged them. (No one said so, and so I can’t speak to it.) 

In a way it seems odd that my players did not mention any distance from Never Going Home. I think that it may be true that the extended chronological gulf may actually help though. World War I feels almost fantastical, as does the inclusion of supernatural elements that are absent from Carry. It could play sort of like D&D, but with gas masks, although I really hope that it did not. I believe that the game’s designers want the Great War to feel deadly serious and not at all whimsical.

That said, whether you’re talking about Carry or Never Going Home, the sense of history comes mostly from style and esthetics. Neither game insists on veracity, because they want to tell emotional stories first and foremost. In running these games—and no doubt in designing them—you have to find a playable space that is suggestive of history but not immersed in it. You don’t want to bury the players in historic minutia, but you also don’t the conflicts involved to feel interchangeable.It’s a difficult balance to strike.

Part 2 coming soon…

What I Do

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If you’ve wound up at this blog, I thought it might be worth laying out where my thoughts about TTRPGs are coming from. I’m not suggesting that I’m especially interesting, but if you’re going to take the time to consider my opinions about games, you might want some context. So…

What I don’t Do: First of all, I don’t look at social media anymore than I have to. I have a lot of trouble expressing myself or connecting in that setting. I also don’t spend much time looking at reddit or anything like that. I’m largely ignorant of a lot of things that are happening, outside of what I hear from my players, people I meet at conventions, or what I read on creator or crowdfunding websites. I am not quite a luddite, but am often out of the loop. 

What I Do: I spend a lot of time preparing and running games. Nowadays, I run about 2 games a week, but I’ve pared back from a heavier load only in the last year or so. I used to run about 3 games a week, but I began to feel that the quality of some of these games suffered—though I’ve been told otherwise—and that I was enjoying the whole endeavor less. I have not gotten rich running games, so if I’m not enjoying them, there seems to be little reason to continue. So I cut back. Sometimes I have to fight the urge to start up another game, and sometimes I lose that fight and find myself taking on another game. It really is an issue sometimes, but I tell myself that I’m managing it. It bothers me most of all that my compulsion keeps me from game design, scenario design, and matters that are unrelated to games.

The bulletin board from my Delta Green “God’s Teeth campaign

Still, I am fascinated by TTRPGs in general and enjoy time spent prepping and running them. I mix up genres and systems a lot. I also shuffle longer campaigns with mini-campaigns and with one-shots or two-shots. My favorite genre is horror, but I’ve run a lot of super hero, cozy, sci-fi, heroic fantasy, gritty drama, etc., with tones ranging from deeply sill to very bleak; cerebral to visceral; immersive to detached. My favorite campaign game ever was a recent run-though of the Delta Green campaign of God’s Teeth, even though it was heavy, and at times difficult. My favorite mini-campaign was a 3-arc/24 session game of Masks: A New Generation (which, overall, ran about as long as God’s Teeth). Close runners-up for mini-campaigns would be Tales from the Loop, City of Mist, and Velvet Glove. My favorite one-shot is harder to locate, because there have been so many, but I can think of standout sessions of Ten Candles, Bluebeard’s Bride, Kult, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast (technically GMless), Dialect (also GMless), World Wide Wrestling. I’ve had a few really good public pickup games, including runs of Dark Places & Demogorgons, Hypertellurians, and CyBorg—D20 systems all 3.

There are two broad types of TTRPG that I tend to avoid. One is tactical combat. I get antsy, and I like fast, brutal combat, if you’re gonna focus on combat at all. I lean way left, politically, but I’m also not a fan of power fantasy games that are self-consciously focused on fighting against “the government” or “capitalism,” because, for me, they lead to a sort of closed-circuit anger, and then I have to go off and decompress somewhere or just wander around feeling really bad. It is a weakness that I have, and I don’t believe it reflects at all on the validity of the games or the personalities of the people who do like them in any negative sort of way. (Also, for the record, I am not talking about something over the top and pulpy like, say, Eat the Reich, which I did enjoy a great deal.)

I mentioned above that I have interest in game and scenario design. Of necessity, I’ve had to do some of both—as I imagine most GMs have to, if they run a lot of games of different types. It is often necessary to fill in some element or other to keep a game moving. Most of those things are improvised and/or fragmentary, but at other times, you want or need something more deliberate—so you end up manufacturing weird little props, calculating situational mechanics, drawing maps, (badly,) outlining biographical details for an NPC, defining lore, etc. Sometimes you go even farther, and you wind up with a scenario, a setting, and/or a game system.

Inspo board in my office

Necessity aside, if you GM a lot, you’ve probably read a lot of games and scenarios and have developed opinions, notions, and theories about what you think works or might work. For me, sometimes, I’m inspired by a fascination with everything that games can do. At other times, I’m acting out of frustration—a feeling (no doubt driven by hubris) that whatever I’m reading could be better. Eventually, I found myself writing stuff and thinking about unleashing it into the wild. (Maybe then other people can recognize how I could have done better—if I’m lucky.) I have one scenario on itch already, which is a quickie one-shot for Dread. It was something I put together for a charity event in Chicago. (Money was raised to help stop the practice of shark-finning.) I ran it along with another scenario that I’m finishing for a limited print run soon. The players are lifeguards, who are rescuing people from a sharknami. It’s Powered by the Apocalypse. I also have a Cthulhu scenario upcoming, in which all of the PCs are nuns at a rural convent in the early 1960s.

So if you’ve read this far, you know what I do. Here’s hoping that provides some context for the other stuff I’ve written here.

Kult Musings – Part 2

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I should mention that, while I have GMed Kult several times, I’ve always been ambivalent about the system. Generally, I love games that are Powered by the Apocalypse and run them quite often. I think I’m pretty good at separating good hacks from bad ones, and, well, Kult isn’t pretty, mechanically. Among other issues, it suffers from a flaw that is common to PbtA knockoffs—the designers don’t seem to have given much thought to really exploiting what a PbtA setup can do for the kinds of stories that they want to tell. You won’t find anything as interesting or well-suited as the mechanics for Influence in Masks or for Momentum in World Wide Wrestling, and there are no Moves here that are as clever as those found in Pasión de las Pasiones or The Warren. Kult stays safe, with only the most basic rules for combat, diplomacy, psychological stress, etc. The only basic Move that really feels like Kult is nothing new—See through the Illusion—and in practice, it often seems redundant, considering the fact that after a few sessions from most Kult campaigns, the GM may be cutting through whole swaths of the Illusion. (Obviously, you’re mileage may vary, depending on the story and the style of GMing involved. On a related note, I think that I should have made the PCs start with Aware archetypes, rather than Sleepers, but I’m not sure how much of a difference it would have made to the pacing.)

I suppose there’s one other place where the game does do something with PBtA rules that is sort of individuated: Advantages and Disadvantages. Akin to what other PbtA games might designate as Playbook Moves, Advantages vary wildly in scale and usefulness. They’re OK. Disadvantages mostly amount to inducements to extra GM Moves. (The worst one might be the nadir of the entire game—the consent-breaking “Sexual Neurosis.” I can’t imagine ever allowing it in a game that I would run.) I have no idea who wants dice rolls to prescribe this stuff—but it makes a pretty good case for all those people who say that PbtA places too much control on what a GM can do and when. Under normal circumstances, I’d say that they just don’t get it, but when I look at Kult’s Disadvantages, I’m really not sure.

In truth, the real problem with Disadvantages that I discovered was that they push you to do too much. If you followed them strictly, I think it would lead the game to feel like a never-ending river of melodrama, with one PC’s stalker showing up, just as another’s demonic curse spikes. If you GM it by the rules, you may find that you have little room for the story ideas that you do like, because you’re always hurrying to spend Hold on ideas that you don’t like.

I would almost go so far as to say that Kult shouldn’t be PbtA at all. The only open acknowledgement of the game engine is buried on the bottom of p. 369 of the rulebook. (Predictably, it makes no mention whatsoever of Meguey Baker, though I have to acknowledge that, however egregious that omission may be, it is not unique to Kult.) What’s more, Kult’s designers have shifted the dice involved from d6s to d10s, skewing stats and bonuses into atypical arrangements. In Kult, rolling dice is like playing power ballads on a ukulele: you can do it, but the results don’t feel appropriate. 

Regardless, gameplay is generally so straightforwardly task-oriented that you might do just as well with a solid d20 or d100 system. I know: Kult doesn’t want to be D&D or (especially?) Call of Cthulhu. It doesn’t even want to be Vampire: The Masquerade, however familiar the goth-BDSM trappings may seem. It wants to share its own vision. Unfortunately, this vision is muddled, at best.

At worst, it’s just  unpleasant—and maybe it says something about my taste in horror that I’m not really into reflexive cynicism and bad Beat-influenced flavor text—for example, the way in which the first person plural musings of Kult—wherein “we/us/our” seem to refer to humanity in general. The trouble is: “we/etc.” also seems to refer to a bunch of rich assholes, who are hustling past some creepy, possibly unhoused guy ignoring the prophecies he calls out while we stare at pornography on our cell phones. I’m uncertain of demographics, but, in terms of point-of-view, I think something may be askew here.

I would look up more examples to quote from the core rulebook, but the truth is that I had to psyche myself up to look at the book every single week when I was running the campaign, and I’m not sure I’m ready to face it again. I might trigger some horrible break within myself. To be clear, any reheated trauma would have very little to do with the art found in the rulebook. It features sexual images that are suggestive enough that you have to verify your age to view it on Drivethru RPG. Still, if you have an iota of imagination, you probably won’t be too shocked by Kult’s visuals, especially if you’ve seen Hellraiser recently. It’s strictly BDSM for prudes and cosplayers. 

Anyway, I did my time with the rulebook. Every week, when it came time to prep my game, there I would be: wincing as I walked over to pick up this bloated, battered “rulebook,” with a bland-out image of a chained angel on its cover (dark, “urban fantasy” skyscrapers in the background, naturally). Once more, beyond the Illusion…The game was good, the players were better.

Closing thoughts: a warning about Gnosticism…by virtue of its preoccupation with the idea of the illusory nature of our world, and given its terminology, (archons, demiurge, etc.,) Kult is, evidently, a little bit Gnostic. When I was in college, I took a course called “Medieval Sources of Modern Culture.” In it, we read excerpts from early Christian and Christian-adjacent stuff that included bits of Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, etc. The teacher’s written evaluation of me mentioned how my comments were “rare, but germane” and how I was often asleep during class. (What do you want? I had a 40 credit hour course load, as well as a part time job.) So maybe it’s understandable that I remember next to nothing about Gnosticism, but the good news is that about 75% of my players are Gnostic scholars, apparently. I have learned from them that it’s sort of like “if Christianity were cool.” Apparently Kult is “Gnostic,” so if you’re looking to GM your own campaign, may I recommend appropriate glossings of wikipedia. Don’t admit to knowing nothing about Gnosticism, or you’ll never hear the end of it from your players!

And if you’re running a Kult one-shot, just don’t worry about it at all. Nobody seems to notice.

Good luck, and may the Demiurge help us all!

A Certain Tendency in Investigative Horror Scenario Design

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So…remember that last blog post, in which I threw aspersions and praise on Arc Dream? (Me neither, but let’s pretend!) It occurs to me that my entire take on the published investigative horror scenario might seem negative. It’s one thing to go poking at scenarios in hopes of exposing their decrepit foundations. It’s something else altogether to have anything constructive to say about what you discover.

Here is a hypothesis: the more complex a mystery is, the more simply it must be laid out for anyone other than its contriver to understand it. And yet, the tradition of classic Cthulhu-type scenarios is baroque on every level, especially in the presentation of information. It’s probably got something to do with all the flapper girls, Model T’s and other Roaring 20s semantic elements that Chaosium used to colonize our consciousness. Cthulhu games often feel like they are shooting for qualities like excess and decadence. (In fact, I’m half-tempted to get into another lecture about why investigative scenarios so disproportionately seem to happen to rich, stylish characters…certainly not to anyone who’s truly poor—unless you’re playing Cthulhu Dark or something like that—and let’s face it, not enough of you are.)

Everything in mainstream investigative horror scenarios is rich and overstuffed, especially the copy! Content may be limited by all important trigger warnings, but few ideas, characters, or words are—even extra letters are left in…outside of investigative horror scenario writers, wtf says “amongst?” (If you just indignantly said “I do!” but don’t write horror scenarios, then may I suggest that you have just found your true calling.)

Most investigative horror scenarios seem to proceed from a notion that mystery is equivalent to complexity. In terms of a good, solid investigative scenario, I would, in fact, argue for simplicity since, the GM and players will certainly complicate any mystery just by playing through it. So there’s often little justification for lengthy NPC bios, elaborate bits of cosmic lore that have no chance of coming up, or dense descriptions of places the PCs may never visit. I think that most of these ideas about mystery and complexity are derived from mystery fiction, wherein the Twist is often the thing, (just ask Chubby Checker) and the accrual of narrative material adds gravity and an air of unpredictability to the mystery.

But the GM who bought your scenario wasn’t shelling out for a collection of your short stories. They’re shelling out for a scenario that they can run at their table, and to expect them to do a lot of work to translate your short story into an RPG scenario isn’t necessarily unconscionable, but, well, I think you should feel pretty bad about it.

If I sound like I’m being that one asshole in your novel writing workshop, I apologize—because the writing is not the only thing about these scenarios that is overly busy. The graphic design often lines right up, with redundant sidebars, stat blocks, and props. The unfortunately predominant state of mind seems to be: this scenario is good, therefore it can’t be short.

As a GM, I want my scenario to be short, but deep. Give me a good clear summary of a situation and some evocative possibilities about where it might go. If you sketch it well, the GM will gratefully unroll your scenario in front of their players, and then, it is likely that everyone will have fun. But here’s the thing, in my opinion: sketch. Leave room for all of it to breathe— the players, scenario, and especially the poor GM who shelled out for your work. Your name will be sung gratefully in these parts!

As to what that sketching might look like…well, I‘ll try to get to that soon, but I am pretty certain that it will involve a magical concept known as bullet points…

The La Brea Tar Pit of Investigative Horror Scenario Design

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I thought it would be a real fun idea to run the 96-page Delta Green scenario Jack Frost at a local bar. So I set out to prep it for about 3 weeks. To be blunt, it was a  headache. I run this kind of mystery/horror scenario quite frequently, but have gotten out of the habit a bit just recently. Jack Frost is an excellent reminder of why I got tired of prepping these things. First of all, working with a scenario like Jack Frost feels more like excavation than preparation. The story concepts are very compelling, and if you focus on them in isolation, then you may find yourself pedal to the metal, making arrangements to get some players, print out sheafs of props and cheat sheets and whatnot—most of which are thoughtfully provided by Arc Dream Publishing—and get that monster rolling at your table. 

And it is a monster—make no mistake. In fact there are several of them, ranging from predatory reanimated animals to the the most lethal of men in black. It all ends in a show-stopping full blown manifestation of the Great Old One, Ithaqua, the Walker on the Winds, that is beautifully set up throughout the scenario, so that when it lands, it is with dreadful impact. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s the best full blown confrontation with Ithaqua I have seen in an RPG scenario.

That said, remember my reference to excavation above? Here is the problem with Jack Frost, from my very practical perspective: in order to have the scenario ready to actually run, I had to first perform an autopsy on it. Not just read it and take notes and prepare a cheat sheet or two—I had to scoop out its narrative innards and then set them aside from loads of what I felt was superfluous data about mission command structure, and folkloric background material that was so anonymous as to be irrelevant. Given the volume of material, it was hard not to become impatient. I briefly considered chucking most of it, and just suturing the good parts into my own unrelated scenario, but so much time had been invested in Jack Frost already—and, as I said, the basic concepts are so good that I hated to let any of them go. So I waded through badly presented story elements, with far too many sidebars interrupting blocks of text. I flipped pages and fumbled about trying to follow the line of text I was reading, and just made due. (By the way, I bought print and PDF, and found the print scenario easier to deal with, but only just barely.)

So my verdict for Jack Frost is 5 stars for imagery, set pieces, and concepts (including some fantastically researched scientific material); 1 star for layout, organization, and textual restraint. It is an amazing scenario, but I can’t recommend it. I have powerful feelings about it…I am inspired. At the same time, it reminds me why I am sick of the standards of organization and presentation in published investigative scenarios. It’s time for somebody to just really take a blow torch to the whole form. Maybe if we melt and reshape it enough, it can evolve out of the 1990s and into something that feels less like a sloppy short story and more like a playable RPG scenario. In the meantime, I am going to think twice before I shell out for another scenario that’s going to take me weeks to process—not because of the scope of the ideas therein, but because there are such low standards for the editing and presentation of scenarios.

Eternal Lies – Session 25

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JANUARY 1, 1935, TUESDAY: Amid the bloody chaos at the Mercy Hill Mental Institution, the Investigators convinced their former guide ABAI to travel to London. Once there, he would wait for them to get him out of the country. James “Tick Tock” Cohan expressed hope for and disappointment in Abai.

At the hotel, Dorothy perused the comic she purchased at Yellowtree Books and was drawn into a state of heightened arousal. Chantelle Perreault kept watch over Dorothy, while Luke Davis and James meditated in their room. In the morning, the group met PROFESSOR ORWELL SANGSTER at Brichester University. They headed into the countryside to find Deepfall Lake, the center of a dense body of local legend. The lake was lined with trees, and on one side, six houses stood. These were built in the 18th century by the followers of a strange pastor named THOMAS LEE. They came seeking something called GLA’AKI, which they venerated, but they soon disappeared. The houses were also the site of a series of disappearances happened in the area in the 1890s, and the houses have been abandoned ever since. Their last owner, GILBERT CELESTE, was accused of murdering the missing people. He was dubbed “The Ripper of the Lake,” and was executed in 1893.

As they approached, Sangster lectured them about the history of the area. He and James parked the car up the road from the houses and kept watch, as the party had noted strange, human-shaped forms moving in the trees across the lake. James noticed the water stirring and smelled a terrible odor coming from the lake. Beneath its surface, he saw the outlines of strange buildings, but these disappeared. Later, a large eye stalk emerged from the water to look at him. The human-shaped figures moved closer. One of them appeared to be missing archaeologist HUSAIN SOLIMAN still strangely transformed.Orwell Sangster fired his gun at Soliman, who appeared to catch a bullet and flick it aside. Soliman told them to leave.

Meanwhile, Dorothy, Luke, and Chantelle went about exploring the derelict houses. Aside from dust and an air of abandonment, they found a scrap of paper wedged between some floorboards. It mentioned “the green decay” and warned its reader to leave. The group also found the remnants of a base camp, probably belong to the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities. It appeared that a scene of violence had occurred, leaving an outer wall and one of the bedrooms badly damaged. Strange writing lined the walls and stairs. Words had been spread around in a strange green and silver medium: THEY HAVE STOLEN THE BOOKS LAUGHTON SAW THE HELIX TRUTH. In another house, new furnishings had been installed, but peculiarly organized. A neatly made bed was in the kitchen, while an unplugged refrigerator with rotting food rested in a bath tub.

Hearing gunshots, Dorothy, Luke, and Chantelle emerged to find Sangster and James engaged with Soliman and the other strange forms. Terrified, the group got to their car and fled. Suddenly they found themselves driving in a different area, near Brichester and several miles away from Deepfall Lake.

Eternal Lies – The Alexandrian Remix

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Eternal Lies – Session 24

RPG Life

DECEMBER 31, 1934, MONDAY: The Investigators returned to Brichester University to meet PROFESSOR ORWELL SANGSTER of the Classical Languages Department. As an expert in the ancient Roman presence in the area, Sangster is also an authority concerning local folklore. He described the Severn Valley as a nexus of sorts for bizarre pagan beliefs and noted.

Sangster also confirmed that archaeologist HUSAIN SOLIMAN had questioned him concerning several locally mythologized landmarks, among them remote, wooded Deepfall Lake. The Investigators believe this is the lake which appeared in the dream of Chantelle Perreault and in warnings they received at Mercy Hill Institution for the Mentally Disturbed. A 18th century cult believed it to be a site of significance to the entity known as GLA’AKI. It is a godlike being that may be related to the 1924 ritual that took the life of VINCE STACK and possibly the mind or soul of WALTER WINSTON. Sangster agreed to travel with the Investigators to Deepfall Lake on New Years Day.

The Investigators returned to Mercy Hill in hopes of speaking with ABAI, their guide from Axum. He had been traveling with Hussain Soliman, and they were hoping to question him about the recent activities of the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities, the mysterious organization they crossed paths with in Axum. The Investigators suspect these activities are linked to whatever has caused Abai to be institutionalized and has led to the transformation of Soliman into the strange mossy figure they have seen following them in both their dreams and waking lives.

On arrival, the Investigators found Mercy Hill in a state of chaos. Terrified staff members told them that a madman was running loose with a knife. Several corpses lay in the halls of the asylum. They had been stabbed repeatedly. The Investigators eventually found Abai and convinced him to hand over his knife. Before he gave it up, he cut the corners of his mouth open with its tip.

Eternal Lies – The Alexandrian Remix

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Eternal Lies – Session 23

RPG Life

DECEMBER 30, 1934, SUNDAY: While visiting the small English city of Brichester, the Investigators received a letter from a woman they’d never met named TRICIA PIPER. In it, she claimed to have psychically glimpsed them. She referred to dangers around them and asked them to come visit her so that she might speak more clearly to them. The Investigators went to find Tricia at her address—a room at the Mercy Hill Mental Institution. The desk staff were not surprised by the Investigators’ arrival. Tricia had said they would be arrive that day.

Ward Attendant TOBY WEAVER escorted the Investigators through the pale green linoleum halls of Mercy Hill’s “new building.” Tricia was waiting for them inter private room. She was a young, pretty woman, serious and preoccupied. She spoke of an intelligence that was using her to communicate with the world. She said it had led her to write down a part of its living testament, but she said that another powerful intelligence was attempting to mislead her. She spoke of how its feral hunger had obscured the hard, clear voice she had heard perviously. She warned the Investigators about the dangers of “the lake.” The Investigators believed that she was most likely referring to Deepfall Lake—a local landmark known to be of interest to the archaeologist HUSAIN SOLIMAN and the EMPORIUM OF BANGKOK ANTIQUITIES, the shadowy institution for which he works. The lake is also rumored to be home to the mythic, inhuman entity known as GLA’AKI. (Presumably related to The Prisoner of Gla’aki—a mysterious force the Investigators have tracked since their stay in Los Angeles.)

The conversation with Tricia was cut short when the injury on James “Tick Tock” Cohan’s finger opened up, revealing a small mouth. The mouth shouted threats and obscenities at Tricia. James and Chantelle Perreault left the room, so Dorothy Howard and Luke Davis could continue the interview, but not much more information was forthcoming. In the hall, James was not himself. His finger was now silent, and to Chantelle, he appeared badly shaken, but otherwise stable. Inwardly, the stress of the last month, combined with the intimate, inexplicable horror he had just experienced, and he seemed, briefly, to lose himself.

Toby Weaver took the Investigators to meet a couple of inmates in the old building as well—one American and one Abyssinian. Both had been committed under strange circumstances. The American was an older, Black woman from Louisiana. Half her hand had been raggedly torn off, and she claimed to be writing a volume under the direction of Gla’aki as well. She expressed contempt for Tricia Piper and warned the Investigators of the dangers seen to be found at the lake. The Abyssinian turned out to be ABAI, the guide the Investigators had hired to take them to Axum. He appealed to James to save him from dark forces, which he said had attacked himself and his employers, members of The Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities.

Eternal Lies – The Alexandrian Remix

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