Up in the ballroom of the Milton, where their slow methodical dispensation of floor-cleaning vinegar had taken them, the party (now down Leon and Wilbur who were off attending to something else) talked to the Providence PD that had been posted at the top of the stairs.
Tom was wishing they’d brought some honey, having started to piece together a few of the clues, but fell back on thumbing his trusty rosary beads.
Inside the ballroom, the mess that had been caused by the stampede and bungled raid had left glass and furniture all over the floor. The bodies had been removed and evidence looked at as much as it was going to get looked at. Larry Crosswell, the folklorist and Walt Resnick, the archaeology student, were shuffling through the broken glass, slowly searching the floor. Carlton Frazer, the expert Egyptologist, was standing talking to his brother Gerald who sat on the small stage, his head in his hands. There was a strange piping noise barely audible in the room.
Terence approached Larry and found him muttering, glassy-eyed as he he shuffled through the broken glass and blood.
“He asked to find it. He asked us to search.” said Larry when asked what he was doing and then he went back to muttering. “….the key is the lock is the gate is the key is the lock is the gate is the key is the lock is the gate…” again and again.
Ernst noticed the shiny parquet of the ballroom had been gouged? It was a strange kind of damage, far beyond simple scrape, but a three inch wide pulverization of the wood in deliberate lines. Stepping back, he could see that they were large hieroglyphs, carved in a sinuous line across the ballroom’s central dancefloor.
Terence tried shoving Larry out of the ballroom, and the flatfoots detained them for a bit while they tried to calm things down, because Larry did not want to leave his task.
They managed to get out of Walt (and Larry, I think) that they were searching for the Scarab amulet. Shea remembered exactly where that had been displayed and directed her and Tom’s search discretely over that way. Tom spotted that, wedged behind a pulley for the heavy screen-curtains and went over to pick it up, again discretely. It was as he remembered, but could now see the runes carved in its underside, along with the inverted ankh, which – against all odds – Tom knew was a symbol of true death. Not the cool kind with an afterlife and all the toys you could stuff in a pyramid, but annihilation.
Carlton Frazer turned and clapped, capturing everyone’s attention and declared “It has been found. Bring the amulet here.” Where Gerald Frazer had been sitting stood a tall, brown skinned man with his hair elaborately beaded.
Shea dashed forward with her floor-vinegar puffer and covered Carlton and the newcomer with a cloud of vinegar. It made Carlton’s eyes sting. That’s about it, because it was vinegar. In return, the tall man raised a finger at Shea and she was surrounded by terrible painful energies that sapped her lifeforce, turning her skin frostbite-black and desiccating.
Bradford, entrusted with the Torbernite chunk, hurled it towards the figure… but this was one of those skill checks that Greg failed. *checks notes* I.E. All of them, he failed every single improvable skill roll and only ever succeeded at Credit Rating. If that isn’t the true power of the dilettante though, I’m not sure what is.
At this point several people decided to beat feet, Terence cracked off his last shot before fleeing, Tom and Shea turned and fled while they still had their wits. Bradford and Ernst faced the tall man as his form ballooned and split, a gelatinous black mass spilling out from the cracks. Eyes glowed in the dark depths and bubbled to the surface of the thing as fanged mouths and flexible limbs formed. Alongside these, fluted tubes were extruded and began a piercing chorus of piping and whistles.
Bradford hit the deck, curled in a ball as his mind struggled to comprehend the possibility of a horror like this. Ernst was not so lucky, he briefly but fully comprehended what this meant and had a glimpse into the nature of the creature and the reality beyond the dimensions that we currently understand. The key is the lock is the gate is the key! His perception expanded beyond human capacity his mind, evolved to dwell in this humble reality, snapped.
From their panicked rush down this hallway, they heard a huge window shatter. Whatever the tall man had been on the inside, was now outside and at large in Providence. They had failed to contain it, but survived the encounter.
That was, functionally, the scenario over. It was time to find out which skills improved and which stayed as they were. So the summary of the next few months was done in pretty broad strokes.
- I never mentioned what happened to Carlton, Larry and Walt: Carlton is essentially fine as he was blinded by vinegar, Walt and Larry are not so fine, but are also able to go home and try to forget this ever happened.
- Gerald was never upstairs, he was downstairs the whole time, contacting his dead wife’s family to break the bad news and making sure everyone who needed to would be able to get back to Boston because he’s a people pleasing trouper. He and Drummond probably helped Clarence the Assistant Hotel Manager figure out a cover story for this whole thing.
- Back to Boston everyone went, after Drummond checked in on them and thanked them for their assistance. Anyway the bus ride was a lot less fun on the way back.
- Bradford recovered from his temporary bout of insanity, but Mr Ernst was placed in the care of a physician for about three months while he recovered. It was an expensive level of care, but Gerald Frazer came through for Emil and paid for the care out of his own pocket, preventing too great a hit to the explorer’s Credit Rating.
- The party was haunted by the increasing number of grim stories out of Providence: missing persons reports abounded, weird deaths had been appeared in the newspapers and a general nervous pall had settled on the city. As the months went on, Rhode Island bootleggers gained a reputation for being a step more brutal than their local counterparts and rumours of a swell of strange congregations and fringe churches filtered through to Boston.
- The widowed Gerald was done with the Society of the Friends of Abydos. He had a kitty (substantial!) set aside for the upcoming few months of meetings, catering and entertainment. His bank owns the building that they were using. It has a meeting hall, a kitchen and and few offices and it was theirs to use if they wanted to keep the Society going. He handed access to the kitty to Bradford and made Tom’s appointment as building caretaker as permanent as Tom wanted it to be.
- One of the first things the party did was to ensure that the office in the Society building had a safe and they filled it with their artifacts: the scarab amulet, the tyet necklace, the radioactive Torbernite, and whatever Leon wants to part with as he still had the magical shabti and the canopic jar.
By the spring of 1924 the Society is actually still alive. Some of the survivors of the day out in Providence find relief in banding together with others who survived and the interest in Egypt has not entirely dimmed for most. But the Society definitely takes a turn towards the mystical, occult aspects of Ancient Egypt. Membership stalled and attendance isn’t as consistent as it used to be, but the general consensus is that that there are enough people to make it worth still meeting.
One morning in March (I think) Tom received a telephone call from the law firm of Palmer and Pickering, a prestigious and venerable Boston legal outfit. Would they be willing to meet to discuss an unusual request?
I’ll save that recap for another entry as they enter… The House of Memphis.
I have a few grumbles with the scenario – although I thought it was good enough to be used to kickstart this stretch of CoC, so take them with a grain of salt. I have more grumbles with my own memory: trying to remember fighting maneuver rules and the sanity (temp vs indefinite) is taxing and one of the times I would think about using a GM screen (which I usually don’t like). The book has some good flowcharts for its more in-depth rules so I’ll check those out and try to get better at that.
I also have to remember that I’m not on the player’s side. GMing Numenera is often like being a tour guide: I want the players to see the next wonder! I want them to have this fun experience! But with CoC I have to be okay with them failing, them not getting something, them not checking behind a particular door or reading a particular book. I actually feel better about this with the evidence board in use: I can see I’ve given the players a clue, if they ignore it (OR PUT SOMETHING ON TOP OF IT!), fuck it, that’s on them. I’ve got to let go of my natural inclination to hope that my friends do well. I must learn to hope they get what’s coming to them.
My own (many) personal failings aside, the layout of CoC scenarios is okay. They have a tendency to put interesting additional material in it’s own box (so far so good) but then to drop that box right in the middle of text that would be much better all on one page (boo). I could understand why they would edit for the physical book (i.e. two pages visible ) but that’s not how I’m using a pdf, either printed off or on an ipad/laptop. Again this is a small problem that can be overcome with planning on my part. Still, House of Memphis is even worse in this regards with sidebars on stage magic that are genuinely interesting and well researched but plopped right in among the adventure text. That kind of stuff can go at the end, ffs and I can’t imagine anyone wouldn’t thank them for putting it there.
There are a few things in SoP that I think could have been better explained:
– If the three interesting people that they’re encouraged to meet before the presentation (Coleman Reese, Vittorio Deodato, Celia Shepherd) but only one has any plot significance, are the others red herrings? And if so… how? What do they do that might get players to suspect them? The characters are interesting and given motivations, but there is no guidance for how that might manifest itself? So I mostly glazed over them because that was extra work for me. And I’m lazy.
– Caitlin seemed pretty anachronistic for a woman of her class and time, so Dr Bronson became Catherine.
– The way to contain Imhotep was only latterly explored by Matt’s Timely Tom, even though they had all the clues and all the materials excepting some honey. The ways to damage Imhotep were less clear to me: how on earth would they find out radiation would affect him? The materials were there, but not the way of finding out. Acid may be used just because… it destroys most stuff. But radioactivity and the specific WAY radioactivity could be used against him… I can’t imagine how to set that up well and I don’t think the scenario ever details it. I ended up giving the players small pieces of the reconstituting Imhotep to experiment with – they watched some of it dissolve quickly in the weak acids used in Flo Bishop’s darkroom after it was done killing her. Observing how it responded over time and in the presence of other things let them figure some stuff out (sort of… they still went up against it with a vinegar spray and a lobbed radioactive rock). But none of that is written into the scenario, that was just me throwing a bone. It’s possible that they’ll meet Imhotep again, so I’m not going to get too much into this. But yeah, if you give a monster weaknesses, write in how the weaknesses can be discovered!