This Will Not Only Be Spoiler Heavy, but Will Make Little Or No Sense to Anyone Who Hasn’T Read Or Played the Campaign

This will not only be spoiler heavy, but will make little or no sense to anyone who hasn’t read or played the campaign. We used a conversion of the campaign for the Trail of Cthulhu system and I think that for the most part it worked great. I had a lot of fun and I hope everyone else playing did too. With that out of the way, the (initial) dramatis personae: Wallace “Wally” Waits - Ace Pilot (Me) Jack Hensel - Polar Explorer Nikolay Yegorovich - Trotskyite Engineer Robert “Bob” Howard - Oil Baron Everything up to the Elder Pharos itself went pretty much according to the book. There are plenty of other superb campaign journals you can read if you want a description of the voyage over, and for the most part we played everything pretty close to the way the scenario assumed we would. With that in mind, I’ll jump straight to the moment when The Construct selected Wally as the Mute Witness. I took the description of my understanding of the God Trap to mean that I should not only prevent people from removing parts of the Construct, but add as many as possible, which apparently wasn’t exactly what was intended but would have interesting implications later on. Lexington took Starkweather’s head down as described in the book, which Wally allowed because I assumed she would be caught by the guardian shoggoth and incorporated into the construct (I misunderstood how the process worked). Instead she was able to escape easily, as was Meyer and the rest of the party. Running out of the room, Wally got his ability to speak back, and immediately explained the nature of the construct and why it was critical that Starkweather’s head be replaced. Priestly was incredulous, and, thinking quickly, Wally shot him (the module suggests that if anyone threatens Priestly he puts a gun to his own head - good thing we didn’t bother to threaten him, I guess). Jack dispatched Priestly with a followup shot and inquired just what the fuck Wally thought he was doing. Wally shouted to ‘go get Lexington and the German’ while he and Nikolai hauled the rapidly exsanguinating Priestly upstairs to the shoggoth table. Unfortunately Priestly was dead by the time they reached the room. Wally tricked Nikolai into bending over the paralyzing sacrificial slab and pushed him onto it, but the Russian’s indomitable proletarian willpower allowed him to break free and draw his gun at the same moment as Wally. The two discussed their options, revolvers leveled at one another, while outside Bob and Jack managed to locate Lexington and Meyer. Nikolai declared that, as a collectivist, he was more than willing to be interred in the construct if it meant the salvation of humanity. Wally watched, stunned, as the Trotskyite selflessly placed himself on the slab and allowed the shoggoth to consume all of him but his head. The rest of the party arrived just in time to witness Wally scooping up the Russian’s head and nervous system in a bowl. Not bothering to explain, he hurried past them to deliver the grisly prize to the shoggoth maintaining the construct, which relieved him of it and shepherded him out of the room. Figuring three heads were better than one, Wally and Jack easily dispatched Lexington and Meyer, prompting Bob Howard to flee back to the aircraft rather than be a part of the gruesome rite. Jack shot Wally on his return from delivering the final brain, thinking to ‘process’ him as well, and to avenge the Trotskyite, but the pilot quickly dispatched himself with a bullet to the brain. Bob frantically instructed the crazed Doug Halperin to take off in the Lexington expedition’s aircraft (the Germans having made off with his Boeing), leaving Jack behind at the Construct. The end result of this was that everyone who understood the exact purpose of the construct and had any reason to cover up its existence was either dead or left behind. Two PCs were dead and one was essentially removed from the game (it’s a long walk back to the City from the Pharos). The GM began next session by handing Nikolai’s player and I new character sheets. He was to become the eponymous Doctor Moore of the Starkweather Moore Expedition, while I was to become Pierce Albemarle, an otherwise unremarkable NPC who rose to prominence due to his ongoing feud with Jack over a trivial incident earlier in the expedition. Halperin landed the plane in the Elder City. Moore and Pierce listened to Bob Howard’s explanation of the incident at the Pharos. Albemarle was quick to dismiss the killings as ‘Ice Madness’ on the part of his hated rival, while Moore was shocked with grief upon Howard’s presentation of Starkweather’s severed head, which he had thoughtfully brought back with him. Pierce decided in favor of leaving immediately, before any other ‘Ice Crazy’ expedition members tried to put a bullet in him, but when he began loading crates of artefacts aboard the plane he was warned away by Halperin, who brandished his pistol and readied the airplane for takeoff. A short firefight later and Halperin too was dead. Gutshot and very irritated by his present circumstances, but otherwise unperturbed by shooting a man and throwing him out of a plane, Professor Abermarle angrily summoned the mechanics to repair the damage he had inadvertently caused to the plane’s controls with a stray rifle bullet. His insistence that they leave immediately was only reinforced by Danforth’s subsequent consumption by a hungry shoggoth, and soon enough the plane was loaded with the surviving expedition members and as many artefacts as they could fit on board. A short flight through the pass later (Moore was the only surviving member of the expedition with any piloting skill) and the group was back at the Lake Camp. Lexington did not survive to suggest that the group film the empty plateau, so the follow up trip to the Elder City never happened. The GM allowed Jack a brief vignette to describe his attempts to hike back to the Elder City, and ultimately to the Lake Camp. A little ways out from the Construct he was accosted by a trio of Elder Things. Thankfully he was the only PC who understood their system of writing, and was equipped with Meyer’s notebook to aid himself in communicating with them. A short conversation of dots traced in snow later, and Jack had managed to communicate that A: He understood the purpose of the construct B: He was capable of procuring more heads for them For the moment, his story ended there. Jack’s player was given Jack’s brother, Dr. Phillip Hensel, whose player had dropped out earlier in the campaign due to schedule troubles. He was very unhappy to discover that Jack had been left behind (OH, SURE, BRING BACK THE HEAD, THAT’S WAY MORE IMPORTANT THAN MY BROTHER!). The survivors were very unhappy to discover that the camp’s radio equipment was damaged, compromising their ability to broadcast their findings to the world (remember that at this point Bob was the only one left who had seen the Construct, and he didn’t see any reason to cover anything up). Luckily, one of the Germans in the hospital at the camp (which had been razed by a destructive fire) was able to pinpoint the location of a secret supply cache. The party hopped back in the plane and Moore ferried them out to the German supply cache. This is the part of the adventure where the players are expected to murder the two surviving Germans as part of the cover up. Instead Phillip went inside the tent to tend to the injured man, while Moore and the others negotiated the return of the Boeing and put the finishing touches on their speech. After the arrangements were made for the return of both aeroplanes to the Lake Camp (the Germans were to be picked up by their expedition’s Zeppelin) Moore and company made their speech and flew back to base. At this point everyone decided it was high time they left the ice, and they began loading up for departure. Many of the severely wounded expedition members were evacuated to the superior medical facilities at the German camp. The Gabrielle departed on schedule and, after weathering a particularly unpleasant storm, was on its way back to New Zealand. The ‘Boss Fight’ with the animalcules went pretty much as described in the book, save for the fact that the expedition members were able to be totally open about the monster being something brought back from an alien city at the roof of the world. Pierce thought the creature was a shoggoth, having never seen one close up, but was distressed to find that it was nourished by the heat from his blowtorch rather than being repelled by it (Wally, my first PC, immediately jury rigged a flamethrower from one of his blowtorches after reading the Dyer text, on the assumption that ‘blob-things are always weak to fire in those stories I read’). After some confused running around and the final form of the thing eating a few of the ship’s crew in the boiler room, they were able to corral it into a barrel using streams of liquid oxygen from some of the expedition’s leftover tanks, weld it shut, and dump it into the ocean with attached instructions that it never be opened. The expedition was met by an enormous crowd of reporters upon their arrival at New Zealand.

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