Cthulhu Hack: Boston 1973 (part three)

Continued from here.

With Al in hospital recovering from hundreds of spider bites, Eva Angel, Danny's sister and owner of the agency, joined the investigation. The next day the investigators stocked up on cans of kerosene and went back to the Sister of Mercy house to search for survivors and, if necessary, burn the place to the ground. All was quiet and much as they'd left it the day before, except now an unoccupied Boston Police patrol car was parked outside.

They decided to enter via the back garden this time and head upstairs to the unexplored first floor. There they found a series of hospital rooms -- the Sisters were a charitable organisation that as well as helping the needy, provided medical training for young Catholic women -- and in each an exsanguinated corpse. Also on the first floor were the Sisters' rooms, all but two empty; in the first a spider attacked the group and was quickly squashed; in the second the investigators found a lone surviving Sister, driven insane by her experiences. The group tried to talk to the woman, to calm her and perhaps get some insight into what had happened at the house, but their efforts seemed to make the Sister's condition worse, and they were forced to sedate her.

They took the unconscious Sister to Al's car, and returning to the house, gave the ground floor rooms they had already explored a quick check. No further spiders were encountered, but to their surprise the investigators found that all the bodies had been removed!

All, that is, except the cocoon in the chapel. Frank, looking over his broad shoulder for spiders the whole time, cut the cocoon open and found the body of Wesley Brooks, covered in bites and drained of blood.

They could put it off no longer; it was time to enter the cellar where Al had almost met his doom, and face whatever dwelt there. No spiders assaulted them this time but heading further into the cellar they encountered a police officer, stumbling around as if drugged. As the investigators approached, he lurched towards them, arms outstretched, eyes bloodshot, and face all bloated and grey.

And then they saw the spider.

A couple of hairy arachnid legs emerged from the officer's mouth and eight malevolent eyes gleamed within as the creature attempted to grapple with Frank. Bullets seemed to do very little to the thing but fire slowed it down and a gunshot to the back of the head forced the spider to emerge, where it burned in the kerosene-fuelled flames the investigators were splashing about.

Another spider-puppet emerged from the deeper cellars but waited at the edge of the flames, further suggesting that these arachnids were not just simple animals, but the investigators killed this one off too, with the clever and patient application of fire.

Once the flames had died down the group explored further, finding no more hostile entities, but instead a vast web stretched across one cellar wall, with hundreds of tiny spiders crawling and weaving, adding to it as the investigators watched. Worse, the web was a deep, dark red, and pulsed as if it had, um, a pulse. As Frank looked on he was sure he could spy a passage in the wall behind the web but the investigators decided this was horror enough and sprayed the creepy construction with fuel before setting it alight.

The tiny spiders fled into cracks in the wall and floor and the web burned away, leaving -- to Frank's shock -- an unmarked and very solid brick wall...

Finding no other survivors, the investigators retreated, soaking the house in fuel as they went. They stayed just long enough to make sure that the house caught alight and then drove away into the fog to try and forget the terrors they had experienced.

---

The adventure was "Dance of Death" by JB Hill from Challenge magazine #73, with some of my own additions and modifications, and of course conversion to Cthulhu Hack. I've had the adventure for years and have never had a chance to get it to the table, but with a Halloween gap in our Vaesen campaign and an itch to get one of my unplayed role-playing games to the table, I thought I had a perfect opportunity to give it a try at long last.

Cthulhu Hack: Boston 1973 (part two)

Continued from here.

The next day, the investigators went to visit the Sisters of Mercy, where the apparently revenant Pat Bibby had been buried. On the way they remembered that the priest O'Brian was going to visit the Sisters so turned around and headed for his church, with the intent to travel together. Upon arrival they were informed that father O'Brian had already left, so they turned around again and went back to the Sisters' house.

Upon arrival they found all the curtains drawn and the front door unlocked. Inside they found two corpses in the entrance hall, one a woman hanging by her neck and another, O'Brian, slumped on the ground. Frank tried to get the woman down, hoping that she was still alive, and a spider the size of his hand crawled down her leg and leaped at him! The big bruiser dodged the spider, pulled out his handgun, and blasted the thing into goo.

All of this was too much for Danny and he blacked out.

The others examined O'Brian, finding puncture wounds in his neck and blood around his mouth and on his fingers, as if he'd been digging around in his own mouth...

Al splashed some whisky down Danny's gullet, bringing him back from unconsciousness, and the investigators, um, investigated further. They entered a chapel with what appeared to be a human body cocooned in webs on the altar. Frank crept in while the others held back and prodded the body, expecting a horde of spider to emerge. Which is exactly what happened.

They shot at and stomped on the spiders, but more appeared from under chairs and behind curtains, so the group retreated, shutting the door behind them. Within seconds, tens of tiny spider feet could be heard tapping at the door.

Moving on, the investigators went out the back door into the garden and found some graves, including that of Pat Bibby; her grave had been dug up and the coffin was empty. They then went into the kitchen and found two more hanging corpses, and two more spiders! Al and Frank killed the arachnids, but the shock broke Muriel's mind and she became confused, forgetting anything from waking up that morning. Why was she here? Where was here? What was going on? While the others attended to Muriel, Al searched the kitchen for anything useful and found a small can of kerosene.

They found the Sisters' office and found evidence that someone had stood on the desk in muddy shoes, and that a rope tied to a ceiling beam had been cut. They also discovered that somehow the spiders had got out of the chapel! How did they open the door? Surely they couldn't be intelligent?

(Yes and don't call me Shirley, etc.)

The investigators shut the office door and barricaded it with the heavy desk, and then went next door into a visitor's room, where they found the exsanguinated corpse of a male toddler and an open door, through which spiders poured! The investigators backed into the office, with Frank blocking the door and Al splashing kerosene over the approaching arachnids then setting them aflame. But there were too many spiders and Al was bitten, the venom causing his limbs to stiffen.

Danny grabbed the confused Muriel and got her out of the house, with Frank following, but Al instead headed down into the cellar, where he was swarmed by even more spiders and bitten multiple times. Danny shoved his aunt into Frank's arms, told his old friend to look after her, then ran back into the house to rescue Al. In the chaos, Danny also was bitten a number of times, while Al's condition worsened; he was unable to fight off the spider attacks, shuddering with seizures as the venom ravaged his nervous system. Frank returned to the house to drag them both out. Muriel, alone and confused, wandered off into the fog.

Frank shoved Al and Danny into Al's car and drove off. Danny used his Scrounger ability to find a small vial in his jacket pocket; he remembered picking it up on one of his travels and was pretty sure it was spider antivenom.

Probably.

Ish.

Danny burned a couple of investigation dice to leverage this cosmic coincidence to halt the venom killing Al, leaving him alive but on 2 CON! The three men drove off and soon passed Muriel wandering about. Stopping to pick up Danny's baffled aunt, the investigators drove away to lick their wounds.

Cthulhu Hack: Boston 1973 (part one)

I thought I'd give Stuart a break from running games, celebrate the "spooky season", and also cross off one of my many unplayed games, and so I put together a Cthulhu Hack investigation for the group.

The adventure is set in Boston in 1973, a city simmering with cultural tensions, carved up between rival organised crime groups, and which is unusually cold and foggy, even for a Massachusetts October.

The characters are all associated with or employed by Angel Investigations, a private detective agency formed by Eva Angel to give back to the community. Angel Investigations is run at a loss, mostly because of a lot of pro bono work, and is propped up by Eva's personal fortune, a sizeable inheritance.

The investigators are:

• Danny Angel, Eva's brother, a world traveller, estranged from the Angel family, and recently returned home in search of direction.
• Frank Armstrong, Danny's old school friend and occasional agency muscle. There are some suggestions that he has a shady past, which in a city like Boston, could mean all sorts of horrible things.
• Al Chinard, Eva's on/off boyfriend, occasional heavy, and specialist in getting into places in which he's not supposed to be.
• Muriel Shepherd, Danny and Eva's aunt, a struggling actor who helps out the agency between acting jobs.

26/10/1973:

Angel Investigations was hired by Tara Brooks to find her brother Wesley, a freelance journalist with a particular interest in stories of the occult and supernatural. She had not spoken to Wesley since the 19th.

The investigators clambered into Al's messy car and went to Wesley's apartment. There they found notes on stories on which he had been working, including a ghost sighting and household pets drained of blood by a "vampire"; these two events took place close to each other. They also found a number for the Falcon Hotel; they rang and the desk clerk -- Robert -- told them that Wesley had not been seen since the 21st and owed payment for the room. They were also holding some of Wesley's belongings until payment was made.

The group went to the hotel and paid the fee. They received a book bag full of notes and research materials, indicating an interest in dancing ghosts, mention of a "priest", and an intention to visit Mary Wilson, the person who reported the ghost sighting.

The investigators then visited Wilson, who told them that her neighbour Pat Bibby received a parcel on Saturday the 13th and was later seen dancing a "strange jig" in her living room. Police visited the house on Monday the 15th and found Bibby hanged. Bibby had a funeral service at Our Lady of Grace on Thursday the 18th, and on the evening of the 18th, Wilson saw Bibby return to her home, enter for about 20 minutes, then leave again, vanishing into the fog. Wilson also reported that Wesley had interviewed her and seemed most interested in the dancing aspect.

They pondered investigating Bibby's house as it was just across the road, but decided to return after dark. Instead they visited Our Lady of Grace and spoke to Father O'Brian, who seemed preoccupied. The priest was caught a bit off-guard by their disconnected, scattershot lines of questioning but he revealed that Bibby was a good Catholic, knew that suicide was a mortal sin, and seemed relatively happy, so her death came as a considerable shock. He confirmed that Bibby was not buried on church grounds -- because of the suicide -- but that a local charitable organisation, the Sisters of Mercy, had offered to have her buried on the grounds of their building.

O'Brian dismissed the stories of exsanguinated pets, considering them to be idle gossip, and didn't have much time for tales of Pat Bibby returning from the grave; he was unimpressed when Al pointed out that Jesus Christ had done the same.

Aunt Muriel prodded O'Brian until he revealed that he was concerned because his parishioners John and Lauren O'Connor's toddler Julian had gone missing the night before. The police were involved, of course, but it was still a concern. The priest was unwilling to involve the investigators as the O'Connors had enough to worry about already, but again Muriel prodded until he agreed to telephone the family and ask if they would be willing to speak to the people from Angel.

(While O'Brian disappeared to make the phone call, the investigators had a quick sniff around the church for anything suspicious and found nothing.)

The priest returned to say that the O'Connors had agreed to see the investigators and gave them the address. There, they ran into some openly hostile Boston PD officers and learned that a Detective Jordan was on the case. They searched the house, finding nothing unusual beyond a suggestion that the boy's window had been forced, and some cobweb strands on the outside of the window and in the garden below. The cobwebs seemed normal enough, just out of place. Al took a sample.

Promising to return with any news, the investigators then went back to Pat Bibby's house, which had been boarded up by the police. Al scouted around the back and found that the boards had been carefully removed from the back door. Entering they found signs of Bibby's suicide, and a mysterious box that had been posted to Bibby from Italy on the 3rd. Inside was a mass of webbing in which was a small spherical depression. They also found some tiny crystals, about the size of rice grains.

In the cellar they noted that one wall was newer than the others, and had been put up in a hurry. Big Frank bashed this sloppy construction down in about an hour and in the cavity beyond the investigators found a beheaded and bound naked corpse of a man. Frank noted that the neck wound was clean, probably from a very sharp implement, and that the body had almost mummified, probably from the warm and dry conditions behind the wall. Al pondered how Frank knew so much about corpses...

Finding nothing else of interest, they decided to clean up and then call in the discovery of the body, anonymously. Then they decamped to a grotty late night diner to go over their findings and plan their next moves.

Continued here.