Sample file I s s u e 2 3 , A u g u s t 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: 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 , 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. 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, : Strange Authorities 71 USA; [email protected]; the Eye of Light &

WEBSITE: www.theunspeakableoath.com Darkness Sample file 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 heavilySample on the mundane horrors Lovecraft and so many horror writers terrible conceptionfile 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. That’s the theme that Call the aeons-old monster Tsathoggua, cosmic terror. My favorite instance has of Cthulhu is particularly well built to hungering in the black pits of the Earth; always been the final passage of Thomas explore—if we remember to explore it. or maybe a demon-god called Yog- Harris’ novel Red Dragon. I don’t think You don’t have to hammer it home Sothoth that infests, in certain times a spoiler warning is needed, though or spell it out explicitly in every session. and circumstances, every point in this you can avoid the following excerpt But that’s the sense that players ought cosmos and every cosmos. if you’re worried. It has nothing to to get from their glimpses of infinity Better yet, leave the ultimate source do with the plot. A character who has and all their moments of struggling, of the evil vague, or give it a new name been savaged by violence remembers abject helplessness. that the players have never heard. Why a long-ago visit to the Tennessee park Cthulhu and all the other Great go straight to Tsatthaghua or Yog- that memorializes the brutal Battle of Old Ones aren’t out to get us. Sothoth (“Quick! The Dismiss spell!”) Shiloh. He remembers thinking it had Cthulhu doesn’t care. when you can have Corbitt’s diaries been haunted by the ghosts of dead rave about Those Who Hunger In soldiers in their thousands. the Void? Push the players’ fear of the unknown. Have you ever suffered from “Now, drifting between memory and an ailment that defied diagnosis? Putting narcotic sleep, he saw that Shiloh a name to a threat gives you a sense of was not sinister; it was indifferent. understanding it, and understanding Beautiful Shiloh could witness helps you confront it. As Keeper, your anything. Its unforgivable beauty goal is to not let the players recognize simply underscored the indifference and quantify what they’re up against. of nature, the Green Machine. The Don’t give them that much ground to loveliness of Shiloh mocked our Samplestand on. Give them instead the vertigo plight.… file of boundless inimical possibilities.

Issue 23 3 Tale of Terror: HANSEN Code Adam by Paul Stefko

Late at night, modern Investigators are at a big-box store of the sort that offers low-cost, low- quality goods 24 hours a day.

Perhaps they are investigating matching the missing child’s description the Investigators aside and questions another mystery, or maybe they find stands there, a sad look on her face. them about what happened, but they themselves there on mundane business. When she sees the investigators, she are content to accept whatever story Play up the purposeful dissociation of puts a finger to her lips and whispers, they are given. this kind of store: endless aisles of half- “Don’t let it get me.” She seems fine, empty shelves or rows of clothes racks; but an Investigator looking closely can Option 1: Premonition the high warehouse ceiling with hanging see drops of blood on the floor behind fluorescent lights that buzz at the edge her. Anyone who gets behind the girl If the Investigators are watchful of hearing; tired customers shuffling can see two bloody holes in her t-shirt as the girl and her mother leave the along, pushing their squeaking carts. and the flesh of her back, below the store, they notice a man getting into an Once the scene is set, there is a shoulder blades. SUV with a bike rack mounted low on crackle of static from the store’s PA If startled, the girl runs. She is agile its rear—at the level of the young girl’s system. A woman frantically reads the and quick but cannot hope to outrun back, perhaps. If the Investigators do following message: an adult. If an Investigator grabs her, not see or say nothing, the SUV backs “Code Adam. White female, seven they feel pulp under her clothes. She into the girl at high speed, impaling her years old. Brown hair in a ponytail, quickly wriggles free, leaving only a and leaving the wounds they saw earlier. green eyes. Wearing a denim skirt and handful of blood and flesh. purple t-shirt with a unicorn. Last seen If the Investigators play it cool and Option 2: Propagation in the home entertainment section. don’t startle her, the girl quietly turns Code Adam.” and walks away. The wounds on her Combine a child’s nightmares There is a moment as everyone back are clear to everyone then. The with latent telepathic ability and the in the store freezes. Customers look characters are free to follow her. result is a sentient meme capable of around, confused or worried. The few The girl leads the Investigators spreading itself to others whose mental employees around then spring into to a closed fitting room in the men’s defenses are compromised by panic action. Investigators near an exit see apparel section. The girl touches the or lack of sleep. Perhaps because of security lock the doors and stand in door and her body folds itself through their past exposure to the Mythos, the front of them, arms crossed in front of the wooden slots, leaving a smear of Investigators are the only ones aware their bodies. Other employees go aisle blood behind. of the experience. by aisle, searching the store. Inside the fitting room, Investigators If asked, the staff explain that Code find the little girl curled under the Option 3: Apparition Adam is a security procedure to locate changing bench, asleep, with no sign a missing child. The Investigators may of injury. Any previous blood or viscera The girl has telepathic powers, want to help. Employees politely but has also disappeared. but there is no independent meme at firmly ask them to remain where they A saleswoman arrives quickly and work. Her ability to read minds has are. However, they are too few to watch sees the girl. She rushes to a phone warped her, and she happily uses her everyone,Sample and the characters will soon and cancels the Code Adam alert. gifts to terrorize file others. She has found be left alone. The girl’s mother, in tears, thanks the her newest targets in the Investigators An Investigator glimpses movement Investigators before bundling the girl and may return to plague them in the in a far corner of the store. A girl up and going home. Store security takes future.

4 Sample file

Issue 23 5 the Eye of Light & Darkness

By various cultists

Reviewed items are rated on a scale of one to ten phobias:

1-3: Not worth purchasing.

4-6: An average item with notable flaws; at 6 it’s worth buying.

7-10: Degrees of excellence.

Dark Adventure Radio Theatre: The Call of Cthulhu Produced by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society Reviewed by Brian M. Sammons

The mad geniuses at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society are at it again. By ‘it’ I mean unleashing a whole new batch of radio Lovecraftian plays, starting with “The Call of Cthulhu.” This is a radio play, not an audio book. While I’ve got nothing against books on tape (yep, showing my age with that one), one narrator can’t hold a candle to a solid cast of actors with music and sound effects. Such shows are almost Troy Sterling Nies’ great music sets the mood, whether creepy, completely a thing of the past, considered to be quaint little action-packed, or, dare I say, even whimsical. The sound curiosities in this digital age. Thankfully there are still a effects are as good as anything Hollywood uses today. And few folks keeping this form of entertainment alive, and few, yes, in this audio production you can hear the actual Call of if any, do it better than the HPLHS. Cthulhu. That alone is almost worth the price of admission. This radio play version remains faithful to Lovecraft’s In the download you get props from the “Call of Cthulhu” famous story, but it does add a few bits, namely two characters story that would be perfect for anyone’s Call of Cthulhu game. that were not in the original. Some purists may gnash their There’s a page from Henry Wilcox’s dream journal, newspaper teeth and wring their hands, but let me save you some high clippings, a photo of the strange tupilak artifact, and New blood pressure; the two new guys only serve as a framing Orleans police booking papers of the Cthulhu cultist, Old device to make Lovecraft’s tale more radio friendly. They Castro. The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society didn’t have also add a little humor. They don’t make fun of the source to include these knickknacks to make the product great. A material but provide a few welcome nods and winks for fans clearer sign of their devotion to the fans and the Great Old of the story. Ones would be hard to come by. TheSample quality of the production is top notch. This play Their Dark Adventure Radio Theatrefile presentation of wasn’t done by a few fans using funny voices in someone’s “The Call of Cthulhu” is, in a word, wonderful. Every fan basement. The leads here are honest-to-Cthulhu actors and of the gentleman from Providence should get it. Download their quality shows throughout. One or two of the extras it now at www.cthulhulives.org. Great Cthulhu commands sounded a bit hinky, but such missteps were minor and rare. it! Ten phobias.

6