Last week we gathered for the final session of our epic Call of Cthulhu campaign. The game’s been going on for more than 4 years—sometimes only once a year or so—under the command of the Keeper, James Jacobs. We’re running a fairly by-the-book version of Chaosium’s classic Shadows of Yog-Sothoth campaign, which begins with an invitation to a secret society and ends with a fight against Cthulhu himself.
Oh. Spoiler alert. Consider yourself warned.
After several aborted attempts to get the gang together (something that shouldn’t be as difficult as it is when all but two of the players work in the same office, but always seems particularly tricky for this game), it came as a surprise when James announced that everyone could make it to one final session in December that was sure to tie up everything by the end of 2010. “One way or the other,” he hinted ominously.
The email session invitation didn’t really need any special warning. Last time we played (I think some time in early October), James gaveled the session just as we had arrived via tramp steamer from Easter Island to the risen isle of R’lyeh. At the top of a central mountain upon the isle we saw two giant cyclopean doors slowly begin to open. “And that’s where we’ll stop it for tonight,” he said, his eyes shining with a devilish glee I’ve seen all too many times before.
I’ve read pretty much every story H. P. Lovecraft ever wrote, and more to the point I’d even looked at some of the covers of his books. I knew that those cyclopean doors spelled trouble (really, is anything in the Cthulhuverse defined as “cyclopean” ever going to help you out?), and it was agonizing waiting for the final session to know the fates of our beloved explorers.
I had reason to be concerned. As dedicated readers of this column no doubt remember, James senselessly murdered my beloved character, Whitley “Whitt” Whittaker, a chicken-fried southern lawyer and con artist, about two thirds of the way through the campaign. Shot down in his prime by some sort of lizard man holding something called a “moon gun” in one of those meaningless “I rolled a d6 and you just happened to be number 4, so you’re dead” kind of moments that make Call of Cthulhu the awesomest game in the world for some people but that make me want to throw a temper tantrum, burn down the office, and wonder aloud whether a game that is fundamentally about solving mysteries but regularly churns through characters—and thus the plot knowledge they have accumulated—is really all that good of a game.
Instead of doing this, however, I just wiped my ass with the copious notes I’d taken throughout the game as Whit Whittaker, stopped paying very close attention to the storyline, and coasted along to the end, reacting to things as they happened and wondering how long it would be before my replacement scab character met a similar fate.
That replacement character was Inspector Roderick Smythe, Scotland Yard, an occult crime investigator who glommed on to the group just before they left the UK for a return trip to the United States. Specifically, to Hollywood. So I threw out the idea of my guy being a super-capable occult investigator and made him a Brit obsessed with American movies, basically a fan-boy who wanted to get into the motion picture business. That was all kinds of fun as we crawled around desert-choked movie sets and watched mythos-infected reels of raw footage of a movie called The Prince of Bhagdad, and my rotten attitude about the loss of Whit soon gave way to genuine fun with a new character.
I didn’t care about Roderick Smythe as much as I cared about poor old Whit (I may never so love a character again, may he rest in peace), but after a few sessions I definitely wanted to see how long I could make him last.
And when I got James’s email proposing that final December session, I knew I only had to last through one more session in order to survive the entire campaign! Or the last third of it, anyway. But doing that would mean three things: 1) Survive the island of R’lyeh without accidentally stepping into a non-Euclidean space; 2) Defeat the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight bastards who had set this whole horrible plan into motion; and… oh, yeah: 3) Survive an encounter with dread Cthulhu himself!
Aside from all of the terror-inducing lore gleaned from Lovecraft’s original stories, I knew the following about Cthulhu’s powers in the Call of Cthulhu game: his melee damage rating was 1d4 investigators per round (brrrrrr!), and that just looking at him made you lose d100 SAN. Since most of the party was hovering between 50 and 70 Sanity points at the end of the prior session, I figured things on R'lyeh were going to get real ugly, real fast.
But before I tell you what happened, here’s the cast of characters (I’m sure I’m spelling some of these names wrong, but all my “good” notes for the campaign were buried with Whit when the group used dynamite to collapse the mine on the lizardmen—and his corpse):
THE KEEPER: James Jacobs. Dead eyes. Heartless. Keeping his “special” death-dealing d6 in his sweaty hand “just in case”.
JASON: Doktor Viktor Trapovinski. Czarist master of “etheric science” who fled Russia to make weird technological devices for himself. Drinks a lot. At this point he has a fake foot after his real one was cut off by a crazy mi-go scientist. A barrel of laughs whose pockets are filled with equal parts vodka and live dynamite.
ERIC: Arthur Rossum. A drug dealer we picked up in California after his previous two characters (married occult publishers) died in Whit’s mine or went insane later after looking into the eyes of a terrible mythos beast.
STEVE: Doctor James Gilbert Mason. Civil War sharpshooter. Something like 90 years old, but a hearty old bastard whose medical knowledge kept many of us alive throughout the campaign. At this point his torso is home to some sort of hungry alien organ implanted by the same mi-go who got Trapovinski’s foot.
ROB: Celestine Temple. I’m honestly not too sure what the deal with this character was. Rob (who works with us at Paizo and is a great gamer) joined the campaign fairly recently, and we were still figuring out his character, whom we rescued from a cave on Easter Island only a few sessions before. She was beautiful, and she was hiding something. That’s pretty much it at this point.
WES: Brenden Lindburgh (no relation). Along with the Doctors Mason and Trapavinski, one of only three surviving characters from the first session. A photographer by trade.
ME: Roderick Smythe, Scotland Yard. An occult investigator with the aforementioned interest in making it big in the movies. As a result, I came into this adventure with a fully loaded portable motion picture camera, and had hired Brenden to be my lensman.
So here we are off the coast of R’lyeh and Cthulhu’s cyclopean doors are opening and we are well and truly screwed. We manage to commandeer a smaller boat to make it to the island proper, and Viktor offers the captain of the steamer $20,000 to remain where he is for two days. I leave most of my film on board, knowing that all of the great location shots of Easter Island will be worth thousands upon my return, and eager to see what Brandon can capture here on this mysterious island filled with jagged towers and weird energies.
Our little boat gets dashed into a cliff, and a bunch of us almost drown before even setting foot on the island, but somehow we manage to clamber onto land without any fatalities. At this point James hands us a “player’s map” of the island with a bunch of elevation markers and asks us to trace our path as we travel to our destination. We follow up on some clues from early in the campaign to determine that we need the vantage of a blue-tinged hill opposite Cthulhu’s slowly opening doors, so we make haste to that location. James later explained that our traced path miraculously avoided any non-Euclidean patches, which meant that we escaped the horror of accidentally stepping into some sort of space that does not exist and presumably losing our characters. I know how much he must have wanted to bring that d6 back into action, so with retrospect I almost feel sorry for the poor guy. Almost.
So we get up to the top of the mountain without too much difficulty only to discover a sort of weird pagoda-like temple with a huge ramp winding around it to the top. Also present: some sort of amorphous blob monster that was clearly the temple’s guardian. At this point, Eric had his character say something I don’t think I’ve ever heard before in a Call of Cthulhu campaign, and with good reason: “Let’s see how the monster works!”
So Rossum runs up the ramp and right past the monster. Or rather, he tries to, only to be grabbed by a psuedopod and devoured instantly. The first member of our party died less than an hour after we got on the island, and it was pretty clear from the reaction around the table that none of us expected him to be the last.
I should note here that Eric took his character’s death in stride and didn’t seem bothered by it in the least. I’ve now seen him cycle through three characters in this manner, and none of them bothered him particularly. Eric is what you call a Call of Cthulhu veteran, and I can only assume that he sleeps on a mattress stuffed with the paper corpses of his former heroes, and that they whisper sweet reassurance in his ears every night. Or something. Clearly I have much to learn—and much mattress to fill—before I can be so nonchalant about character death.
And boy, howdy. On R’lyeh I knew my character’s death would be coming along shortly.
First, we needed to kill that blob monster. Rob’s character, Miss Temple, owned a special magical gem we’d found earlier in the campaign that we knew from experience could damage mythos creatures (and, we presumed, us, should it ever fall into the wrong hands). She held the gem aloft, burned a bit of Power, and the creature fried to a crisp. I’m fairly certain we put about a thousand bullets into it as well, but it seemed like the crystal really did the trick.
So with the monster out of the way we all rush up the ramp and take a look at the cyclopean doors. And things up there were NOT going well. The doors had all opened now, and bilious black smoke was pouring out. Worse, we saw a huge shape looming in the darkness within. A huge shape with glowing red eyes, giant wings, and a very prehensile beard of tentacles.
About this time, Doctor Mason started the ritual that would close the cyclopean doors and sink the island before dread Cthulhu could initiate a new age of hell on earth. I can’t recall exactly how, but we also managed to erect a magical wall of force around the entire pagoda temple, which really came in handy when the Order of the Silver Twilight (i.e. the campaign villains) came up to the pagoda for a final confrontation. Try as they might, they couldn’t penetrate our magical barrier, and for a moment we felt very good about our chances.
Then, Cthulhu emerged from his house on R’lyeh, and things took a decided turn for the worse. First, James gave us that dreaded request that no Call of Cthulhu player ever wants to hear. “Why don’t you all roll d100 and see how many Sanity points you lose?”
I had the lowest Sanity at the table (too much watching the Prince of Baghdad, I guess), and had real reason to be concerned. I rolled.
37
Ha ha! Roderick Smythe still lived! Ditto Viktor Trapovinski and Doctor Mason.
Wes wasn’t so lucky. He rolled a 79, which was more Sanity than he had left. With a fluid motion, Brendan Lindburgh took out a flask of whiskey and drank it down. He said “At least I won’t go with a dry mouth,” and then blew his brains out with a shotgun.
Not good. (Not least of which because I now needed a new cameraman.)
But something bad was happening on the other side of the table. Rob’s character, Miss Temple, was walking down the ramp and toward our enemies on the other side of the barrier. As she approached our arch enemy, she held up the magical crystal as some sort of offering, and it became clear that Rob had been no luckier than Wes with his Sanity roll.
So we shot her in the back of the head.
Hey, it’s Call of Cthulhu, man. Sometimes it’s the moon gun that gets you. Other times, it’s your fellow investigators.
That left Roderick, Viktor, and Doctor Mason.
And the evil cultists.
And Cthulhu.
At about this point in time, the island starts heaving and breaking apart, and our loyal tramp steamer (with my priceless footage) turns on its tail and starts to abandon us. “No worries,” says Trapovinski. He pulls out some sort of “etheric” wireless device, pushes a button, and about 200 sticks of dynamite he hid in the ship’s hull go up at once. The ship explodes, destroying my beloved film and murdering about a dozen crewmen. Oh, well. A deal’s a deal, and those guys were abandoning us. A guilty conscience is about the last thing we’re worried about, at this point.
I should mention, at this point, that the boat was not truly our only possible escape from the island. Since the early days of the campaign we’ve owned two large trunks that have some sort of magic connection, so that items placed in one smoosh through the dimensions to be transported to the other. This works for all kinds of stuff, including us. So ship or no ship, we were going to have to jump into the trunk we brought with to make it to its partner safe in a storage unit back in Boston, where the campaign started. Heck, it’d be easy.
If we survived our encounter with Cthulhu.
So Doctor Mason keeps casting this spell, and keeps failing his rolls to finish off the island and send Cthulhu back to his house on the mountain at the island’s center. As he approaches, the Big C does us a huge favor by scooping up his cultists and eating them right in front of us before he starts bashing at our magical hemisphere. All of us are pretty confident that the barrier will not hold up long, and this is the point where time seemed to slow down and each die roll meant life or death.
Mason successfully concluded the spell, rolling whatever it was he had to roll to ensure that a new era of mind-warping darkness did not cloak the Earth of 1926. Cthulhu drew back into his house with a fluid motion, and the cyclopean doors slammed shut, presumably until the next time the stars were right.
Then the island started collapsing and water rushed in everywhere. The murderous Viktor Trapovinski was first into the trunk. Then the alien-organed Doctor Mason. That left Roderick Smythe, who leapt into the trunk just as the barrier collapsed and the ocean rushed in to drown us.
Back in Boston, the Doctors Mason and Trapovinski eagerly watched their trunk to see if Roderick had survived. And with a gush of water like a geyser, out he shot into the safety of the storage unit.
I had survived! Somehow, against all odds, we actually managed to “win” a Call of Cthulhu campaign, and one that featured Cthulhu himself, no less!
Sure, our magic trunks were ruined, my film was destroyed, and three of our companions were dead, but the three of us survived! James thanked us all for a fun time, we thanked him for a brilliant campaign, and talk shifted immediately to what we planned to do for the next session.
“I want to run Masks of Nyarlathotep,” James said, citing one of the most highly regarded campaigns ever to be published for any tabletop RPG. All of us wanted in on the action. Heck, Eric had been working on his character ever since he had found out how the monster worked.
As pleased as I was to survive, I’ve decided not to use Roderick Smythe for our next campaign. I enjoyed playing up his star-struck fanboyism and speaking in his cartoonish accent, but my deliberate lack of attention to the fine points of the plot in the last third of the campaign meant that I didn’t have a particularly strong connection to him.
So I’m completely ignoring the lesson of the moon gun and I’m going to put a bunch of effort into my new character for the new Call of Cthulhu campaign. I’ve already done a bunch of research, and I’ve made several major decisions about his persona.
Masks of Nyarlathotep will see me playing Smedley Tolliver, a fez-wearing member of the Theosophical Society’s Order of the Star in the East, an occult organization designed to discover and care for the next reincarnation of Christ. He will be investigating reports of weird cults and strange magic in hopes of discovering this being, and I’m fairly certain that as he looses more and more Sanity as the campaign progresses, he will come to believe that he himself is that reincarnation. I plan to take copious notes, and I’m going to be really, really sad when he dies.
Some people never learn.
But sometimes, every once in a while, when the stars are right, they kick Cthulhu’s ugly green ass.
—Erik Mona
December 22, 2010
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Oh. Spoiler alert. Consider yourself warned.
After several aborted attempts to get the gang together (something that shouldn’t be as difficult as it is when all but two of the players work in the same office, but always seems particularly tricky for this game), it came as a surprise when James announced that everyone could make it to one final session in December that was sure to tie up everything by the end of 2010. “One way or the other,” he hinted ominously.
The email session invitation didn’t really need any special warning. Last time we played (I think some time in early October), James gaveled the session just as we had arrived via tramp steamer from Easter Island to the risen isle of R’lyeh. At the top of a central mountain upon the isle we saw two giant cyclopean doors slowly begin to open. “And that’s where we’ll stop it for tonight,” he said, his eyes shining with a devilish glee I’ve seen all too many times before.
I’ve read pretty much every story H. P. Lovecraft ever wrote, and more to the point I’d even looked at some of the covers of his books. I knew that those cyclopean doors spelled trouble (really, is anything in the Cthulhuverse defined as “cyclopean” ever going to help you out?), and it was agonizing waiting for the final session to know the fates of our beloved explorers.
I had reason to be concerned. As dedicated readers of this column no doubt remember, James senselessly murdered my beloved character, Whitley “Whitt” Whittaker, a chicken-fried southern lawyer and con artist, about two thirds of the way through the campaign. Shot down in his prime by some sort of lizard man holding something called a “moon gun” in one of those meaningless “I rolled a d6 and you just happened to be number 4, so you’re dead” kind of moments that make Call of Cthulhu the awesomest game in the world for some people but that make me want to throw a temper tantrum, burn down the office, and wonder aloud whether a game that is fundamentally about solving mysteries but regularly churns through characters—and thus the plot knowledge they have accumulated—is really all that good of a game.
Instead of doing this, however, I just wiped my ass with the copious notes I’d taken throughout the game as Whit Whittaker, stopped paying very close attention to the storyline, and coasted along to the end, reacting to things as they happened and wondering how long it would be before my replacement scab character met a similar fate.
That replacement character was Inspector Roderick Smythe, Scotland Yard, an occult crime investigator who glommed on to the group just before they left the UK for a return trip to the United States. Specifically, to Hollywood. So I threw out the idea of my guy being a super-capable occult investigator and made him a Brit obsessed with American movies, basically a fan-boy who wanted to get into the motion picture business. That was all kinds of fun as we crawled around desert-choked movie sets and watched mythos-infected reels of raw footage of a movie called The Prince of Bhagdad, and my rotten attitude about the loss of Whit soon gave way to genuine fun with a new character.
I didn’t care about Roderick Smythe as much as I cared about poor old Whit (I may never so love a character again, may he rest in peace), but after a few sessions I definitely wanted to see how long I could make him last.
And when I got James’s email proposing that final December session, I knew I only had to last through one more session in order to survive the entire campaign! Or the last third of it, anyway. But doing that would mean three things: 1) Survive the island of R’lyeh without accidentally stepping into a non-Euclidean space; 2) Defeat the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight bastards who had set this whole horrible plan into motion; and… oh, yeah: 3) Survive an encounter with dread Cthulhu himself!
Aside from all of the terror-inducing lore gleaned from Lovecraft’s original stories, I knew the following about Cthulhu’s powers in the Call of Cthulhu game: his melee damage rating was 1d4 investigators per round (brrrrrr!), and that just looking at him made you lose d100 SAN. Since most of the party was hovering between 50 and 70 Sanity points at the end of the prior session, I figured things on R'lyeh were going to get real ugly, real fast.
But before I tell you what happened, here’s the cast of characters (I’m sure I’m spelling some of these names wrong, but all my “good” notes for the campaign were buried with Whit when the group used dynamite to collapse the mine on the lizardmen—and his corpse):
THE KEEPER: James Jacobs. Dead eyes. Heartless. Keeping his “special” death-dealing d6 in his sweaty hand “just in case”.
JASON: Doktor Viktor Trapovinski. Czarist master of “etheric science” who fled Russia to make weird technological devices for himself. Drinks a lot. At this point he has a fake foot after his real one was cut off by a crazy mi-go scientist. A barrel of laughs whose pockets are filled with equal parts vodka and live dynamite.
ERIC: Arthur Rossum. A drug dealer we picked up in California after his previous two characters (married occult publishers) died in Whit’s mine or went insane later after looking into the eyes of a terrible mythos beast.
STEVE: Doctor James Gilbert Mason. Civil War sharpshooter. Something like 90 years old, but a hearty old bastard whose medical knowledge kept many of us alive throughout the campaign. At this point his torso is home to some sort of hungry alien organ implanted by the same mi-go who got Trapovinski’s foot.
ROB: Celestine Temple. I’m honestly not too sure what the deal with this character was. Rob (who works with us at Paizo and is a great gamer) joined the campaign fairly recently, and we were still figuring out his character, whom we rescued from a cave on Easter Island only a few sessions before. She was beautiful, and she was hiding something. That’s pretty much it at this point.
WES: Brenden Lindburgh (no relation). Along with the Doctors Mason and Trapavinski, one of only three surviving characters from the first session. A photographer by trade.
ME: Roderick Smythe, Scotland Yard. An occult investigator with the aforementioned interest in making it big in the movies. As a result, I came into this adventure with a fully loaded portable motion picture camera, and had hired Brenden to be my lensman.
So here we are off the coast of R’lyeh and Cthulhu’s cyclopean doors are opening and we are well and truly screwed. We manage to commandeer a smaller boat to make it to the island proper, and Viktor offers the captain of the steamer $20,000 to remain where he is for two days. I leave most of my film on board, knowing that all of the great location shots of Easter Island will be worth thousands upon my return, and eager to see what Brandon can capture here on this mysterious island filled with jagged towers and weird energies.
Our little boat gets dashed into a cliff, and a bunch of us almost drown before even setting foot on the island, but somehow we manage to clamber onto land without any fatalities. At this point James hands us a “player’s map” of the island with a bunch of elevation markers and asks us to trace our path as we travel to our destination. We follow up on some clues from early in the campaign to determine that we need the vantage of a blue-tinged hill opposite Cthulhu’s slowly opening doors, so we make haste to that location. James later explained that our traced path miraculously avoided any non-Euclidean patches, which meant that we escaped the horror of accidentally stepping into some sort of space that does not exist and presumably losing our characters. I know how much he must have wanted to bring that d6 back into action, so with retrospect I almost feel sorry for the poor guy. Almost.
So we get up to the top of the mountain without too much difficulty only to discover a sort of weird pagoda-like temple with a huge ramp winding around it to the top. Also present: some sort of amorphous blob monster that was clearly the temple’s guardian. At this point, Eric had his character say something I don’t think I’ve ever heard before in a Call of Cthulhu campaign, and with good reason: “Let’s see how the monster works!”
So Rossum runs up the ramp and right past the monster. Or rather, he tries to, only to be grabbed by a psuedopod and devoured instantly. The first member of our party died less than an hour after we got on the island, and it was pretty clear from the reaction around the table that none of us expected him to be the last.
I should note here that Eric took his character’s death in stride and didn’t seem bothered by it in the least. I’ve now seen him cycle through three characters in this manner, and none of them bothered him particularly. Eric is what you call a Call of Cthulhu veteran, and I can only assume that he sleeps on a mattress stuffed with the paper corpses of his former heroes, and that they whisper sweet reassurance in his ears every night. Or something. Clearly I have much to learn—and much mattress to fill—before I can be so nonchalant about character death.
And boy, howdy. On R’lyeh I knew my character’s death would be coming along shortly.
First, we needed to kill that blob monster. Rob’s character, Miss Temple, owned a special magical gem we’d found earlier in the campaign that we knew from experience could damage mythos creatures (and, we presumed, us, should it ever fall into the wrong hands). She held the gem aloft, burned a bit of Power, and the creature fried to a crisp. I’m fairly certain we put about a thousand bullets into it as well, but it seemed like the crystal really did the trick.
So with the monster out of the way we all rush up the ramp and take a look at the cyclopean doors. And things up there were NOT going well. The doors had all opened now, and bilious black smoke was pouring out. Worse, we saw a huge shape looming in the darkness within. A huge shape with glowing red eyes, giant wings, and a very prehensile beard of tentacles.
About this time, Doctor Mason started the ritual that would close the cyclopean doors and sink the island before dread Cthulhu could initiate a new age of hell on earth. I can’t recall exactly how, but we also managed to erect a magical wall of force around the entire pagoda temple, which really came in handy when the Order of the Silver Twilight (i.e. the campaign villains) came up to the pagoda for a final confrontation. Try as they might, they couldn’t penetrate our magical barrier, and for a moment we felt very good about our chances.
Then, Cthulhu emerged from his house on R’lyeh, and things took a decided turn for the worse. First, James gave us that dreaded request that no Call of Cthulhu player ever wants to hear. “Why don’t you all roll d100 and see how many Sanity points you lose?”
I had the lowest Sanity at the table (too much watching the Prince of Baghdad, I guess), and had real reason to be concerned. I rolled.
37
Ha ha! Roderick Smythe still lived! Ditto Viktor Trapovinski and Doctor Mason.
Wes wasn’t so lucky. He rolled a 79, which was more Sanity than he had left. With a fluid motion, Brendan Lindburgh took out a flask of whiskey and drank it down. He said “At least I won’t go with a dry mouth,” and then blew his brains out with a shotgun.
Not good. (Not least of which because I now needed a new cameraman.)
But something bad was happening on the other side of the table. Rob’s character, Miss Temple, was walking down the ramp and toward our enemies on the other side of the barrier. As she approached our arch enemy, she held up the magical crystal as some sort of offering, and it became clear that Rob had been no luckier than Wes with his Sanity roll.
So we shot her in the back of the head.
Hey, it’s Call of Cthulhu, man. Sometimes it’s the moon gun that gets you. Other times, it’s your fellow investigators.
That left Roderick, Viktor, and Doctor Mason.
And the evil cultists.
And Cthulhu.
At about this point in time, the island starts heaving and breaking apart, and our loyal tramp steamer (with my priceless footage) turns on its tail and starts to abandon us. “No worries,” says Trapovinski. He pulls out some sort of “etheric” wireless device, pushes a button, and about 200 sticks of dynamite he hid in the ship’s hull go up at once. The ship explodes, destroying my beloved film and murdering about a dozen crewmen. Oh, well. A deal’s a deal, and those guys were abandoning us. A guilty conscience is about the last thing we’re worried about, at this point.
I should mention, at this point, that the boat was not truly our only possible escape from the island. Since the early days of the campaign we’ve owned two large trunks that have some sort of magic connection, so that items placed in one smoosh through the dimensions to be transported to the other. This works for all kinds of stuff, including us. So ship or no ship, we were going to have to jump into the trunk we brought with to make it to its partner safe in a storage unit back in Boston, where the campaign started. Heck, it’d be easy.
If we survived our encounter with Cthulhu.
So Doctor Mason keeps casting this spell, and keeps failing his rolls to finish off the island and send Cthulhu back to his house on the mountain at the island’s center. As he approaches, the Big C does us a huge favor by scooping up his cultists and eating them right in front of us before he starts bashing at our magical hemisphere. All of us are pretty confident that the barrier will not hold up long, and this is the point where time seemed to slow down and each die roll meant life or death.
Mason successfully concluded the spell, rolling whatever it was he had to roll to ensure that a new era of mind-warping darkness did not cloak the Earth of 1926. Cthulhu drew back into his house with a fluid motion, and the cyclopean doors slammed shut, presumably until the next time the stars were right.
Then the island started collapsing and water rushed in everywhere. The murderous Viktor Trapovinski was first into the trunk. Then the alien-organed Doctor Mason. That left Roderick Smythe, who leapt into the trunk just as the barrier collapsed and the ocean rushed in to drown us.
Back in Boston, the Doctors Mason and Trapovinski eagerly watched their trunk to see if Roderick had survived. And with a gush of water like a geyser, out he shot into the safety of the storage unit.
I had survived! Somehow, against all odds, we actually managed to “win” a Call of Cthulhu campaign, and one that featured Cthulhu himself, no less!
Sure, our magic trunks were ruined, my film was destroyed, and three of our companions were dead, but the three of us survived! James thanked us all for a fun time, we thanked him for a brilliant campaign, and talk shifted immediately to what we planned to do for the next session.
“I want to run Masks of Nyarlathotep,” James said, citing one of the most highly regarded campaigns ever to be published for any tabletop RPG. All of us wanted in on the action. Heck, Eric had been working on his character ever since he had found out how the monster worked.
As pleased as I was to survive, I’ve decided not to use Roderick Smythe for our next campaign. I enjoyed playing up his star-struck fanboyism and speaking in his cartoonish accent, but my deliberate lack of attention to the fine points of the plot in the last third of the campaign meant that I didn’t have a particularly strong connection to him.
So I’m completely ignoring the lesson of the moon gun and I’m going to put a bunch of effort into my new character for the new Call of Cthulhu campaign. I’ve already done a bunch of research, and I’ve made several major decisions about his persona.
Masks of Nyarlathotep will see me playing Smedley Tolliver, a fez-wearing member of the Theosophical Society’s Order of the Star in the East, an occult organization designed to discover and care for the next reincarnation of Christ. He will be investigating reports of weird cults and strange magic in hopes of discovering this being, and I’m fairly certain that as he looses more and more Sanity as the campaign progresses, he will come to believe that he himself is that reincarnation. I plan to take copious notes, and I’m going to be really, really sad when he dies.
Some people never learn.
But sometimes, every once in a while, when the stars are right, they kick Cthulhu’s ugly green ass.
—Erik Mona
December 22, 2010
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