Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="A Passing Maniac" data-source="post: 3946328" data-attributes="member: 57472">Call of CthulhuThe investigators are sent a letter by their old friend and colleague Alberich Monk begging them for help in an ambiguous manner and requesting that they come to his mansion in a relatively isolated area of New England immediately.Before reaching the mansion, they stop off in a small town called Ominouswood, where they learn that the nearby Monk mansion has been home to several disturbing incidents over the past few decades. They also meet a man named Finnaeus Winthrop, who offers to guide them to the Monk mansion. The party's professional psychologist realizes that Finnaeus seems a bit too eager to lead them on, but the party does nothing yet.When they reach the Monk mansion, Finnaeus suddenly transforms into a squamous monstrosity of cyclopean proportions with forty mouths. The ex-police officer who happens to be an Irish immigrant and the canny woodsman and lumberjack attempt to fight this creature, but bullets and axe do little against the creature, and the two are devoured. The psychologist and his two remaining companions, a professor of chemistry (and secretly an anarchist bomb-maker) and an attractive young widow and dilettante who is skilled in horseback riding, fencing, loopholes in the Massachusetts penal code, and knowledge of supernatural phenomena, flee into the mansion.Inside, in the living room, they are confronted by a single creature, a blend of fish, frog, and man that attacks them unarmed. The psychologist goes briefly mad and gibbers in fear in the corner, while the professor, who insists he came armed with a grenade, and the dilettante, who improvisationally uses a fire-poker to attack, manage to overcome the beast.After the psychologist recovers, the three begin to explore the mansion. They find a concealed door behind a bookcase that reveals an underground lair, in which an altar to some unnameable alien god-thing and a small, padlocked iron chest is discovered. The psychologist turns out to be an expert lock-picker, as well, and opens the box. Within is a tome that the professor picks up; he flips through a few pages, then immediately goes psychotically insane and murders the psychologist before taking his own life.The dilettante, still armed with a fire-poker, heads back upstairs, but is bludgeoned to death by the reanimated corpse of Alberich Monk.A week later, another group of five arrive at the Monk mansion: the ex-cop's old partner, the lumberjack's firefighting younger brother, the psychologist's daughter who insists she was abducted by UFOs in her youth, the professor's student aid who is also a radical socialist and arsonist, and the dilettante's older sister who happens to be an exotic dancer, amateur archaeologist, cat burglar, and speaker of Swahili and Yiddish.Coincidentally, all are expert marksmen and come armed with shotguns and explosives.Upon finding the mangled remains of the police officer and lumberjack outside, the group immediately agrees that all of their relatives and friends must in fact be dead; they burn the Monk mansion to the ground, and when the shambling mass that was once named Finnaeus appears, they throw sticks of dynamite at its feet and then blast them with a shotgun until a satisfactory explosion occurs.The group returns to town, completely unharmed thanks to their uncanny foresight in bringing along heavy weaponry, but none the wiser for the experience, since they burned all answers to the questions initially raised, as well as quite a few questions they never quite got to, when they torched the mansion.The Keeper sighs and privately wonders why he wasted his time writing forty pages of convoluted back story for this, then decides to run Dungeons & Dragons next week.</blockquote>

Verification