One of the ways in which this manifests itself is roleplaying games which I’ve been playing fairly constantly since a friend introduced me to playing Dungeons and Dragons outside the school library in 1981. I soon ditched this gateway drug for the hard stuff: Traveller, Call of Cthulhu and more recently Conspiracy X.

Why am I telling you this?

To remind you that since moving the Brisbane a little more than ten years ago, I’ve kept a kind of sub-website for most of the major rpg campaigns I’ve run. I’ve never been a fan of the open-ended, monster of the week, style of roleplaying so all my campaigns have had some end point in mind – either the player characters save the world or they do not. There is no what happens next. They start, run until the reach their end point, then they end. Some of them ran their course. Some ended abruptly through the unforeseen intervention of real life. (Dontcha just hate that!)

So, what’s on offer?

• How about a Manga-style re-interpretation of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy using the Feng Shui roleplaying game called 9mm Juliet?
• Two factions deep within the US government battle for control evidence that humanity was genetically engineered by aliens in the Conspiracy X campaign Shadows of the Past.
• You may enjoy playing spot-the-film-noir-movie when a 1940s detective agency is caught in the middle of a battle for control of the San Francisco underworld in The Damned Don’t Cry.
• See what happens when Church-appointed investigators fail to stop a supernatural serial killer from terrorising New York City in the Conspiracy X campaign Fallen is Babylon.
• Feed your mid-life crisis by tramping the spaceways on a shoestring in a classic Traveller campaign called Across the Spinward Main.
• Remain unfulfilled when the final session of the Elric!-based fantasy re-interpretation of Samuel Coleridge’s Xanadu is never played.

One of the throw away lines used to show just how wierd Chicago can be and to show just how blind the the ordinary folk are to it is the idea of the city disappearing for a period of at least on hour from satellite photos. Apparently, the ground was still there but instead of concrete and asphalt there was trees, grass and animals. Subtle questioning of the inhabitants shows that none of them have any memory of any thing odd happening at all during that period.

Wow! Here comes a Conspiracy X campaign! A misfit team of experts is gathered by the mundane government of the country to determine what has happened. The only clue they have comes from a comparision of the satellite photos taken immediately before and immediately after the disappearance. There are a couple of points of difference in the photos such as a building being in a slightly different location or a park having moved.

I can think of several possible backgrounds that have resulted in these events. (No, I’m not telling you what they are.)

Anyone iterested?

Wanky? Of course. Worthwhile? Maybe.

The problem is that I can never quite nail it. I’ve never been able to pin down exact what the world looks like, behaves like, who the characters could be or what they might be doing. So, in the interests of intarwebs collaborations, I’ll post the lyics here (without the band name or song titles – just to make it tricky) and throw the discussion open to whoever wants to add in his or her 20 cents worth.

Bonus points for whoever can guess the band and songs. No fair using Google or Wikipedia.

Song #1

We’re angels of light, we’re angels of death
We are born to blaze a nuclear way through space
A way out of the waste that held the human race

We’re angels of light, we’re angels of death
We are the dead who are never led
We are the warriors at the edge of time
We lurk inside your brain, we hide inside you mind.

Song #2

Armies stand so soon to fall
Sorcery is the tune they call
Pitting with against flesh and gall
Timeless search in timeless awe
Walking out to meet his death
To find that this was no release
Searching for some sort of ease
And denying these feeling that make him weak.

Song #3

They’re handing out the weapons
And your armour’s ready too.
But the most important item
Has been left up to you.
You must make a firm decision
And once it’s made you’ll find
That the mask that you have chosen
Will entirely fill your mind.

Song #4

Yet year on year the blood-red tide
Comes from the west unsatisfied
And ever with impatient fret
Gnaw at the human banquet.
The many with madness in their eyes
Stare gibbering at the white-hot skies
While foul birds circle overhead
Shadowing the living and the dead.

On seeing the corpses, we pass the buck and call in the Centre for Disease Control (CDC). They duly arrive and establish a quarrantine around the bay and erect their cool inflatable biohazard tents. Bellamy’s lads form a cordon to keep the local populace away. While the CDC are exploring the ship in pale blue biohazard suits, we start looking into the few scraps of information we have.

The ship’s name, Amazon, and type match a ship well-known to the Innsmouth area that is currently wrecked off Gibraltar in the Mediterranean. Harry wakes the owner of a SCUBA diving operation on that island to check that the boat is still there.

Harry checks with the curator of the local historical museum about the ship. Apparently, it’s a ghost ship that appears every now and then (with decreasing frequency, it seems). It’s a rumour, he’s told. Nothing more. When harry protests that the ship is in the bay the curator falls back on his insistance that it’s folk lore. (Hmmm. Sounds like mental self-preservation to me

It’s about this time that the CDC come back from their explorations and samnple collecting on the Amazon and announce some findings. First, the corpses that litter the deck show signs of diseases which haven’t been seen in a hundred years – small pox, polio, etc – all the diseases which modern vaccination programs have eradicated from civilisation. Second, the blood sample from one of the corpses exhibits a pearlescent glowing. Third, one of their team is missing, presumably still on board the ship.

Annabeth, through high powered binoculars, spots the missing CDC operative pursued by the shadow the size of a bear. He collapses on the deck screaming and sobbing into his comm link. Preston joins CDC team which motors over in a zodiac dinghy to collect him. He’s immediately isolated and given a thorough physical and mental examination.

Preston is more than happy to walk away from the whole situation. There’s no glory to be had here which could either further his career or impress the college babes. He sees this as nothing but downside. Let the CDC carry the can, he argues with the others.

The CDC isn’t sitting still while all this goes on. They call in the national guard who immediately take control of the situation and send a team on board looking for the threat.

Then things go down hill. There’s shooting, screaming and a fast retreat.

The army blames the CDC for the disaster who in turn blame us. We have no one to pass the blame to so Harry, Annabeth and Preston end up leading an army team onto the ship to recover the missing men and work out what’s happening. Annabeth picks up the ship captain’s logbook and hands it to Preston for safekeeping since there’s no way he’s risking his neck by going below deck. Harry unbolts the ship’s bell and gives it to Preston, who also gets the two magical tomes Annabeth finds in the captain’s cabin.

At the same moment that Harry and Annabeth discover in the hold a coke can attached to the mechanism of a music box, the phase-shifting shadow finds them and the military guys with them. There more shooting – completely ineffective against the creature’s vast incorporeal bulk.

The creature sniffs out the books and makes a grab for them. Preston, carrying the books, is beating a retreat over the side, down the ladder into and into the dinghy. Harry and Annabeth see it’s arm pass through the wooden hull and Preston feels it grab his ankle in its be-taloned paws. Harry and Annabeth pump enough lead into it to make it think twice about what it needs to do – rescue the books or protect itself. It drops Preston in the ocean and chases Harry and Annabeth who race up the stairs onto the deck and leap over the side. For some reason, the creature cannot follow.

As the escapees from the ship are being picked up in the zodiac, the ship slowly phases out of existence leaving nothing behind but bad memories and empty ocean.

Once back on dry land, the recriminations begin. “Where’s my men?,” screams the leader of the military team. “Don’t look at us,” rejoins Preston. “The CDC called you in.” When the sargeant starts on the leader of the CDC team, Preston, Harry and Annabeth slip away to the nearest coffee shop.

There was more madness from Rusty Carmichael, the hired killer who failed to murder 16 year old goth girl, Kate Gracie, and put his hands in an industrial deep fryer when she told him to, and from Fr Black, the knife-weilding official/unofficial church exorcist with Elder Signs tattooed on his eyelids.

We couldn’t find Kate anywhere until heard over the dispatch that she’d axed down two poilice officers, stolen a police car and was heading towards Arkham.

Then the fire alarm went off. Rusty Carmichael, speaking in tongues and singing Bruce Springstein in Latin, has somehow managed to spontaneously combust while strapped down to a guerney for his own good.

By the time we’d ushered everyone out of the police station and called the fire brigade, Kate turned up and started axing more people in her efforts to get to Fr Black and the still smouldering but alive Carmichael. Preston and Annabeth gunned her down.

While we completed the paperwork, Harry went home to his wife who had just seen the event on the news. Being British, they said nothing about it and went to look at a new appartment.

Carmichael now resides in the hospital wing of the local prison where he continues to amaze the doctors with his stamina and speed of recovery. Fr Black is consigned to the Arkham Asylum – we couldn’t think of or get a judge to agree to anything worse.

Remember Raymond Diaz, Kate Gracie’s goth/occultist boyfriend? He’s dead – murdered in his appartment. His body was found in a pentagram of salt on the living room floor. Moreover, there’s photos about the room of Kate and him indulging in some hot teen hanky-panky earlier that day. One of the photos also captures a figure silhouetted in the doorway who we believe is his murderer – more on him later.

In the safe under his bed are three books. One is the Diaz family bible brought to the New World by an ancestor who travelled with Cortez. It’s worth a fortune to a collector. There’s a standard and respected work of ritual magic and a book which can only be described as a joke. It’s much like, say, Lin Carter’s Necronomicon and all we can think about it is that Diaz used it only to get next to the goth girls. It intrigues us as completely out of place in the home of this serious occultist.

Annabeth and Preston also discovered that Kate Gracie’s parents tried three times to exorcise her and each priest involved was wackier than the next. The last of these, Fr Black, when we finally caught up with him in New Jersey, turns out to be clinically insane. He has Elder Signs tattooed on his eyelids so that demons cannot attack him while he’s asleep. He refused to talk to us and so we were obliged to arrest him as a material witness to the crimes confronting us.

Meanwhile, Harry is tracking the guy he’s spotted following him. He loses him, of course, because he’s a desk jockey data analyst, not a field agent. Several red herrings and dead ends later, Harry identifies the silhouette in the photos and the guy following him as the same man, Carmichael, a well-known New Jersey hitman. Now Carmichael wants Harry to arrest him and throw him in a cell. He says it’s safer in there. Question reveals that he was hired by a Fr Black to kill Kate Gracie. He tracked her to Diaz’ appartment, tried and failed. On the run with 16 year old Kate chasing him, he hid in a fast food store. Kate ordered him to put his hands in to the deep fryer which – for reasons even he can’t understand – he did.

Harry phone Annabeth and Preston who are on the road bringing Black back to Arkham. When Black and Carmicheal learn that they are destined to meet, all helll breaks loose. Black pulls a knife and begs to be allowed to find and kill Kate – Annabeth and Preston screech to a halt on the motorway. Carmichael starts throwing himself at the walls in order to kill himself to prevent Kate from tracking him down – Harry shoots at him and misses (but earns the respect of Sheriff Marsh (no, we haven’t forgotten about him either) for the attempt.

That’s about it for now. Doom is coming to Arkham in the form of a 16 year old goth girl and police procedure dictates that we gather all her accomplices and enemies in the one place ready for her.

There’s three main characters: Annabeth, a formidable woman and once a member of the local dog squad; Harry, an ex-Pentagon intelligence analyst being punished by his superiors; and Preston (me), a preppie big city Assistant District Attorney floundering in the backwaters of Arkham. Annabeth is the old hand. Harry and Preston are replacements for her previous partners who disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

That’s not the main story, though. We’re all much more concerned that Sheriff Marsh (yes, that Marsh family from Innsmouth) keeps assigning us the calls he doesn’t want to handle such as the one we have now.

We’re currently solving an arson and double murder. The parents of a fifteen year old girl, Katie Gracie, reckon she’s possessed because she does things fifteen year old girls do to annoy their parents. Now it looks like she’s murdered them, tried to burn the house down to hide the evidence and is on the run. Having to concern ourselves with justifying ourselves to a judge to get search warrants signed sure puts a dampener on the usual Cthulhu investigator trick of breaking into somewhere to ransack it for journals and other evidence. Proper police procedure (or a TV-inspired facsimile thereof) can be a real chore.

I can’t wait to see the Mythos acquitted of loitering with intent on a legal technicality.

Stay tuned…

The scenario is based on two Mythos stories. The Shadow Out of Time is one of the foundation tales of the genre and deals with scientist creatures who send their minds forward and back through time in order to study each era of existence. Most people are at least passingly familiar with this story. The second is more of an unknown factor. Till All The Seas by R. H. Barlow is one of Lovecraft’s more successful revisions. The story deals with the last man alive on a far-future earth baking in the glaring red light of a swollen sun. For me, the two ideas dovetailed quite nicely.

Imagine, if you will, an earth in the far future turned to desert baking in the orange light of the swollen sun. Humanity has retreated to the poles following the evaporating oceans as they retreat. Cities creep forward slowly to maintain contact with the drying seas leaving abandoned and decaying ruins behind. At the poles, of course, the sun does not set but revolve about the horizon.

The amnesia motif worked to about 80% of what I wanted. The character awoke surrounded by city-guard with know idea that five years had passed. A lot of player interaction and paranoia was centred on figuring out what happened during their missing time. The problem in running this motif soon became evident. The players did not understand what was normal for their characters in this setting and so had nothing to compare non-player characters reactions to them or who they could expect to trust. In hindsight, this could easily have been prevented by spending a session showing the characters’ lives were like before the missing time and giving them a few solidly established relationships with a small number of NPCs.

The second problem is solely my fault. Until we actually played through the adventure, I was not entirely sure of the plans of the villains of the piece. I knew that there were three possible or likely outcomes: the characters sacrifice themselves to defeat the villains and thereby doom humanity (this is what eventually happened), the characters save themselves to defeat the enemy and thereby dooms humanity, or the characters join forces with the villains (which to me was looking likely until the final session). Luckily, the villains actions were hidden from the public so it never became an issue.

I’m not sure whether it was an artefact of my current literary interests or the lack of preparation for the amnesia motif but the scenario devolved at times into pulp action fantasy – not that this is a bad thing in itself. It’s just not what I intended. (Part of me wants to run more adventures in the same world specifically as pulp action fantasy. I think that would be dead cool.) The issue that became apparent is something I reckon I always knew but had not been conscious of. Cthulhu doesn’t work unless you can establish all those little details of everyday life, deviation from which signals the approach of the Mythos.

Overall I was pretty happy with the campaign-ette. I achieved nearly everything I wanted to except Lovecraft’s ontological horror. I’ve made a bunch of notes and I’m sure I’ll run it again in the future – better, stronger, scarier.