The haunter of the dark

And we return, briefly, to the plots from Lovecraft's tales and how they could be twisted to hooks for other games. When I started this, I was aiming at picking ideas that would be useful for a WW2 Cthulhu rpg setting, but as time goes on it's become obvious that these (and most of the previous ones) would also work well as ideas for other games as well. Anyway...

The Haunter of the dark

In The Haunter of the Dark, a cult based on Rhode Island use an ancient artifact, the "Shining Trapezohedron" to summon a being from the depths of time and space (your usual Lovecraft nasty). The artifact had been discovered in Egypt by Professor Enoch Bowen before his return to the US in 1844. It was used by a cult in Providence who would stare into the glowing crystal and summon an avatar of Nyarlathotep called the Haunter in the Dark. The summoned creature demanded sacrifice in return for granting knowledge of forbidden places and information.

At the end of the story Dr Dexter, our would-be hero, throws the the artifact into Narragansett Bay in the hopes that it would permanently place it into the light of day and the stars, which keeps the Haunter at bay.

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There are a number of ways we could use this, so I'll break it down into some ideas for different eras and games

For systems like In Her Majesty's Name, Pulp Alley and possibly even Dead Man's Hand if you fancied adding some oddness, you could run a number of scenarios surrounding the original story:

• A secret cult has been guarding the trapezohedron, keeping the world safe for millenia, until this group of American archeologists come along and start digging up the burial site. Can the archeologists be stopped, or will the Haunter return from the darkness?
• The artifact is on it's return journey to America, along with a number of other items, but the team need to stop off in London. A rival archeologist, cult or somesuch group decides they want something that is in the shipment and must be fought off
• Upon reaching America, the cult in Providence needs to go and find some poor souls to sacrifice. Can they kidnap enough people from the foggy streets before the police catch up to them?

For a WW2 setting we're on shakier ground with the original story as the object is deep underwater by this time. However, it could have been recovered by divers looking for a shipwreck, or there could be a companion to it that wasn't uncovered by the original excavations. This companion could now be in the hands of Black Sun, a German occult group, and it's up to the investigators to retrieve the object before their plans can be finalised.

Kırşehir earthquake

On April 19th, 1938 the Kırşehir region of Turkey suffered a massive earthquake that killed 224 people. The epicentre is located near Kaman-Kalehöyük, an archeological site that has, since excavations in 1986, revealed artifacts from the Bronze, Iron and Ottoman eras. In 2005 archeologists discovered the world's earliest known example of steel manufacture in the form of a fragment of carbon steel.

We could go down the usual route of blaming the earthquake on a summoning, but there are other possible causes that have been covered up. The fact that we have this archeological treasure trove near by with items from multiple time periods makes me want to invoke some sort of time slip here that drags people into the wrong era. Alternatively we already have stories like The Tomb that create a link between current day (for the dreamer) and the past, allowing items and relationships to be formed. In either case, that carbon steel fragment may be a piece of world war 2 era equipment that had somehow made it's way back through the ages; whether it's wielder was also dragged back is another matter.

Anyway, back to the earthquake. The Tomb doesn't really give us a mythos cause for this as it's going to drive everyone mad. A gateway into a Dream realm however, could. Kaman-Kalehöyük would have also been on numerous caravan routes across Turkey and we all know how shifty some of those caravan owners were (well, they are in folk tales and holywood films, so that's enough right?). Some less scrupulous caravans may have either formed, or used, a gateway to a Dream realm in order to gain power over others, or strange artifacts to trade for profit. The gateway may have been covered over during some big storm in the past, only to be uncovered by a german archeological team in search of mystical powers. I can see this being another location for Walpurgen's experiments in breaching the veil between worlds.

Opening or closing the portal could have caused such a backlash as the fabric of reality is changed that it would cause the same effect as an earthquake.

The Piltdown Man

While reading up on the various Lovecraft stories, I came across a reference to the Piltdown Man. This is a real life example of something that could hide deeper, darker things.

In 1908 a skull and jawbone were dug up in a gravel pit in East Sussex in England. This discovery was, for many years, believed to be an early, unknown strain of man as it had a distorted lower jaw. Part of the skull had been unearthed by workmen, with the other fragments discovered in the spoil heaps later. A reconstruction was undertaken by experts at the British Museum and given it's own classification, Eoanthropus dawsoni. Additional pieces, including the lower jaw and ape like teeth were discovered over the course of various digs at the site and added to the reconstruction. A second skull and jaw were said to have been discovered at Sheffield Park in 1915, proving that it wasn't just a one off. In our world it took until the 1950s to debunk the hoax as just a human skull with an orangutang jawbone and chimpanzee teeth.

During the course of WW2 it would still have been a hot topic for debate amongst anthropologists; but what if the final conclusion  published in Time magazine were to cover up something far more sinister?

While the original digs are too early for our time period, it would certainly be possible to have similar remains uncovered elsewhere, along with eerie inscriptions; leading to our intrepid investigators being sent off to recover the bones and hide any proof that they actually exist. this would be especially viable as we approach the end of the war and all indication of the elder races and their spawn are being covered up.