Spine of the Saracen

Every now and then a book or tv show throws up a neat idea for a weird war artifact. This time it comes courtesy if Warehouse 13. I'm not quite sure what to do with it yet, but here it is...

In series 1 Mica and Pete come across an 11th century Saracen artifact called the Spine of the Saracen. This device attaches itself to a host and feeds off their bio-electricity, amplifying it in the process. The excess electricity is continuously discharged by the Spine and hosts body, which causes anybody that the host touches to be electrocuted. The host's rage is vastly increased and drives them to attack whatever they hate most. Once attached, the only way to remove it is for the host to die, or to seriously overload it with electricity.

So how can we use this neat little device?

For in-game situations this sounds like something that would have been created by the Saracens as a defense against the creeping darkness whenever it broke through; possibly some cult of warriors who could calm the rage.

I can imagine some of these surfacing in an excavation in the Middle East an ending up being harnessed by a Black Sun assault trooper, or a sacrificial experiment. Black Sun (or whoever) would probably want to send an escort with the Spine bearer in order to recover/reuse the device later. These individuals would be faster, stronger and tougher than normal infantry, but limited to close combat only due to the electricity. I can't imagine it working too well with explosives. Weaknesses would have to be overcharging the artifact with electricity.

Alternatively it would work quite well as an artifact bearing cultist for Strange Aeons or Kulten. 

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 Terrible Old Man

The Terrible Old Man returns to a similar theme to the case of Charles Dexter Ward. In this tale we hear about a man so old that no-one knows who he is, or how old he is... Just that he has lived in the house for a longer than anyone can remember Ad talks to some bottles as if they are long lost friends. Local rumours have him owning a mirage horde of treasure that is too good an opportunity to turn down for three burglars; unfortunately for them things don't quite go their way and they are found mutilated as if hacked apart by cutlasses and stomped by boots.

In the Charles Dexter Ward tale, Curwen is able to store and reanistores dead, who he stores in bottles. We can only assume that in his travels, this old man discovered how to keep s friends close in a similar manner; wether through malice, or loneliness we don't know. It does, however, raise an interesting idea that the Germans, Russians or Japanese may decide to follow similar experiments in order to drop large armies behind enemy lines more easily.... Just imagine dropping a crate of bottles and one person to animate the dust contained within? Invading a city would be easy... Who would suspect one man and a crate?

Charles Dexter Ward

The Charles Dexter Ward tale revolves around a young man who discovers a mysterious lineage to an ancient wizard who somehow managed to defy the aging process and who looks exceedingly like him. Charles becomes more and more frantic in his search modernise information about this ancestor, eventually discovering his connections to wizards in Eastern Europe and a mysterious bungalow in Pawtuxet. As the tale unfolds, we discover that Joseph, Charles' ancient relative is attempting to resurrect himself through Charles.

Most, if not all, of the manuscripts from the Curwen/Ward libraries will have either been destroyed, or moved to  Miskatonic university, but we don't know what happened to the notes created by Curwen's allies in Europe. It is not belond the realms of possibility that they have ended up in the hands of the Nachtwolf, or one of the other occult groups working inside Germany.

Some of Curwen's experiments lived on, entombed within the basements beneath the bungalow for years, so the investigators could be tasked to investigate an abandoned research facility in Eastern Europe or hunt down and prevent the nazis from creating the essential salts needed to keep a man alive forever... Fom what I can remember, the salts were created from the bodies of the recently dead; could this explain some of the mass cleansings that took place during the war?