A Call of Cthulhu Scenario for Delta Green by Adam Scott Glancy
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I SSUE 2 3 , A UGUST 2 0 1 3 Writers: Chase W. Beck, Jamie Chambers, Bobby Derie, Adam Scott Contents Glancy, Daniel Harms, Shane Ivey, Ben Mund, Matthew Pook, Ben Riggs, Brian Sammons, Paul Stefko Columns ILLUSTRATORS: Matthew Hansen, Ben Mund, Todd Shearer; cover art THE DREad PAGE OF AZATHOTH 2 by Samuel Araya THE EYE OF LIGHT & DARKNESS 6 DIRECTIVES FROM A-CELL 67 ART DIRECTOR: Dennis Detwiller Tales of Terror PAGE DESIGNER: Daniel Solis CODE AdaM 4 THE FUNERAL 60 EDITORS: Daniel Harms, Shane Ivey, John Scott Tynes THE WATCHERS 61 Arcane Artifact FOUNDING EDITOR: John Scott Tynes THE LAST SELF-PORTRaiT EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Shane Ivey OF LARISSA DOLOKHOV 72 Scenario EDITORIAL BOARD: Brian Appleton, Monte Cook, Adam Crossingham, Dennis Detwiller, Adam Scott Glancy, Daniel Harms, Kenneth Hite, Shane Ivey, COLD DEad HAND 8 Greg Stolze, John Scott Tynes, Ray Winninger Features PLAYTEST GMs: Brennan Bishop, Stuart Dollar, Liam Jones, Andy Lilly, BUILdiNG AN ELDER GOD BONUS CARDS 59 Chris Malone, Ross Payton, Ed Possing, Harald Schindler, Ralph Shelton, Sean UNCONVENTIONAL FIREARMS 62 Whittaker; please see page 40 for the full list of players Message in a Bottle COPYRIGHT: All contents are © 2013 by their respective creators. The Yellow Sign design is © Kevin Ross and is used by permission. Call of Cthulhu is a trademark BEASTS 80 of Chaosium Inc. for their roleplaying game of horror and wonder and is used by Our Sponsors, their kind permission. The Unspeakable Oath is a trademark of Pagan Publishing for its magazine of horror roleplaying. The Unspeakable Oath is published four times per Contents Bringers of Strange Joy year (more or less) by Arc Dream Publishing under license from Pagan Publishing. The Dread Page of CTHULHU INVicTUS 5 Azathoth CLIFFOURD THE BIG RED GOD 12 SUBMISSIONS: Let our readers’ terror sustain you. Submission guidelines INNSMOUTH MAGAZINE 21 are at our website. 2 H.P. LOVECRAFT FILM FESTIVAL 32 NECRONOMICON PROVidENCE 38 PODCAST: “Unspeakable!” We talk Cthulhu until your ears bleed. Subscribe CTHULHU MYTHOS ENCYCLOPEdia 43 at iTunes or listen at our website for hours of interviews and actual play. Code Adam BUMPS IN THE NIGHT 49 4 BITS AND MORTAR 58 CONTACT: Arc Dream Publishing, 12215 Highway 11, Chelsea, AL, 35043, DELTA GREEN: STRANGE AUTHORITIES 71 USA; [email protected]; the Eye of Light & WEBSITE: www.theunspeakableoath.com Darkness 6 DARK ADVENTURE RadiO THEATER: THE CALL OF CTHULHU 6 Issue 23 1 The Dread Page of Azathoth BY SHANE IVEY In Call of Cthulhu and in fiction it’s easy to rely on the horror of gore and “The oldest and strongest emotion destruction. Wet bones and viscera, a knife in the dark—that kind of dread is of mankind is fear, and the easy. It’s certainly easier than instilling terror at the incomprehensibility of the oldest and strongest kind of cosmos. But it’s a crutch. Relying on it ultimately leaves the game weaker. fear is fear of the unknown.” Think of “The Haunting,” the most classic of Call of Cthulhu scenarios, — H.P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” featured in the rulebooks from the first edition to the sixth. (If you fear spoilers, skip this paragraph.) Diligent I have a bone to pick with Call of And that’s a shame. Only when it Investigators may find the diaries of Cthulhu. A bloody, broken bone. reaches beyond personal horror to true wicked old Walter Corbitt. Reading Call of Cthulhu is the first and cosmic terror does Call of Cthulhu reach them, we deduce, the Investigators still the greatest roleplaying game its greatest heights. could learn something of his loathsome dedicated to fear. Its player characters— practices and his transformation to an Investigators—deliberately seek to “This type of fear-literature must not undead horror. But we have to deduce uncover mysteries that will surely be confounded with a type externally it because it is never spelled out. The scar or destroy them. They are under similar but psychologically very scenario focuses on the violence of constant threat of mortal peril (12 or different; the literature of mere physical Corbitt’s assaults and the gruesomeness 13 hit points don’t go very far) and fear and the mundanely gruesome.” of confronting him. The assaults have their mental well-being deteriorates (H.P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural supernatural elements, sure, but the in an ever-tightening spiral of crisis Horror in Literature”) emphasis is on the personal risks to the and collapse. Investigators. It starts and ends with More importantly, their personal I’m borrowing the dichotomy personal horror. Cosmic terror—the vulnerability makes explicit the fragile between personal horror and cosmic awfulness into which Corbitt delved—is place of humanity itself in a hostile terror from hoary literary theory going only implied. cosmos. back centuries. And that’s where Call of Cthulhu That tradition considers “horror” to “The true weird tale has something games too often fail. be the sense of revulsion at atrocity. It’s a more than secret murder, bloody Too often the personal horror of sickening encounter with gore and death. bones, or a sheeted form clanking violence and madness becomes the It is the realization and confirmation chains according to rule. A goal in itself. We focus so heavily on of physical awfulness. “Terror” is the certain atmosphere of breathless personal horror that we lose a sense of anticipation of something monstrous and unexplainable dread of outer, the cosmic terror that was Lovecraft’s and awful that may be nearly present. unknown forces must be present; and entire purpose. Or maybe it’s better to Terror is portent, possibility and dread. there must be a hint, expressed with say that when we struggle to convey true In that sense, terror, not mere a seriousness and portentousness Lovecraftian cosmic terror, we lean physical horror, is the mood that becoming the subject, of that most too heavily on the mundane horrors Lovecraft and so many horror writers terrible conception of the human of gore and suspense. before and after him struggled to evoke. brain—a malign and particular 2 suspension or defeat of those fixed laws Of course, sometimes purely “Yes, he had been wrong about Shiloh. of Nature which are our only safeguard personal horror can show such a depth Shiloh isn’t haunted—men are against the assaults of chaos and the of human helplessness that it evokes haunted. daemons of unplumbed space.” (H.P. terror with cosmic implications. That Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror was the genius of “Convergence,” first “Shiloh doesn’t care.” in Literature”) seen in The Unspeakable Oath issue 7 and later in Delta Green. (Again, skip this It’s not enough to make your The personal horror of violence paragraph if you fear spoilers.) The players fear for their characters’ lives. and atrocity is useful. I defended it Investigators there come to suspect Knives in the dark, fangs and tentacles, in a recent Dread Page of Azathoth, some unseen influence corrupting and screams and blood, those are only tools and Nyarlathotep knows this issue’s harming a town and they learn it has a to drive the players and their characters Spetsnaz-centered scenario is loaded physical source or vector in loathsome, to fear for the nature of reality itself. with it. But always remember that it’s unnatural protomatter. Worst of all, they The truth of cosmic terror is not only a tool, not the ultimate goal. The learn that—but no, I won’t give it away that humans are victims of alien forces goal of a Call of Cthulhu game should be even with a spoiler warning. If you’ve that eye them with cruel intent. In their a deeper, more fundamental terror: a read it or played in it, you know. And if power and alienness, the Old Ones see sense of the failure of the laws of nature you’re like me, you’re shuddering with nothing in humanity to excite them to that we think we understand and on dread just thinking about it. One or two cruelty or anything else. Humanity is which we rely. scenes of the appalling vulnerability of a shadow flitting for an eyeblink—a In most Call of Cthulhu scenarios, the Investigators said everything about few hundred thousand years, maybe that can be as simple as letting the the flickering frailty of humanity itself. even a few million. Soon we’ll die out players glimpse what’s behind the And sometimes, personal horror or become something unrecognizable. horrors. If they survive all the knives that’s not supernatural at all can cross Great Cthulhu had slept two hundred and claws and tentacles and spells, the line into cosmic terror. What is million years before the first primates make sure they hear something about more ordinary and mundane than ever emerged. He will still be here long the eldritch monstrosity, the roiling death? There’s no magic in it, no alien after humanity has guttered out. hungry impossibility, at the root of it all. powers at play. Mere death defies us to The truth of cosmic terror is that If you’re running “The Haunting,” find any meaning at all in life. Is that our fate will be just as accidental and see to it that the Investigators come not our whole reason for reading and meaningless as our evolution. We won’t to understand that Corbitt has bound creating horror as a genre? even have the comfort of knowing that his existence up with forces that they But it takes a skilled hand to evoke Great Cthulhu hated us enough to can barely comprehend—perhaps existential despair with the power of destroy us.