Chaosium Digest Volume 8, Number 7 Date: Sunday, November 6, 1994 Number: 2 of 4 Contents: Porphyry and Asphodel, Part Two (Penelope Love) CALL OF CTHULHU -------------------- From: Penelope Love Subject: Prophyry and Asphodel, Part Two System: Call of Cthulhu VISITING MARY IN THE WAKING WORLD This section may not come into play, relying as it does on dreamers making the decision to wake and investigate in the waking world. Keepers should judge if their players need, or would enjoy, the investigation, and wake them if appropriate. Dreamers must make a Dreaming roll to recollect their dream on waking. This investigation is by tracing the waking world picture in the folio book. The folio book does not appear with the dreamers in the waking world as its waking world form already exists. Mills Gate Park, Arkham, Massachusetts This is in the heart of the poor, industrial district of Arkham, below Federal Hill. Streets are narrow and filled with a furtive, ragged crowd, both native poor and recent immigrants. A nasty, heathenish sort of church squats abandoned on the hill-top. Decaying houses overhang the sloping streets. Washing dirtying in the morbid haze flaps lethargically between their filthy facades. The winding Miskatonic takes on a sickly stench and nauseous hue, fed by streams of effluent from numerous pipes that jut from the dye-factories and knitting mills. Inquiry rapidly tracks down the two women pictured in the folio book. Mrs Doherty, Miss Hazelhurst, neighbors, the local doctor or the parish priest can inform the investigators of Mary's fate. A successful Credit Rating or Psychoanalysis roll, or a letter from Dr. Malkowski, admits them to the sanitorium. Mary Doherty Mary sits by day in a large, padded chair by an upstairs window. Mary's cat, a large ginger tom called Meggs, followed her to the sanitorium. The staff adopted this useful animal as a mascot and rodent-catcher. When not thus engaged, he waits besides Mary, causing much remark by visitors. Mary's mother visits on the weekends. Father Doherty passes by on his rounds on Sundays. Mary is twenty-five years old and dark haired, her young face placid and unlined but also expressionless. Her mouth is slack, her neck crooked, and her hands and feet clenched so tightly that they cannot be unwound. Her gaze is fixed on the window. If investigators succeed in communicating with her, her inward concentration is snapped. Mary, the real Mary, flares a moment in her heavy lidded gaze. As if propelled by a forward motion too great for her to resist, she springs from the chair, and grasps them, her hands unclenching to clutch them. "Help me," she screams, "Find the Silver Key. I AM the Castle Called Sleep. I am destroying me." Then she subsides back into her former stupor, her intense, watchful, absent, alertness. Mrs Doreen Doherty Mrs Doherty is a widow, and Mary her only surviving child. She dresses in black. She has prematurely white hair and a lined face that makes her forty years seem sixty. Her husband worked at the mill, but was killed in an industrial accident twelve years ago. If the investigators pose as gentlefolk making inquiries into the disposition of charitable funds they will have no trouble eliciting information from Mrs Doherty, who recommends distribution of alms to the Arkham Sanitorium. Mary was a quiet, introspective and imaginative child. She did not do well at school, and was often whipped for day-dreaming. However one of her teachers, Miss Hazelhurst, befriended her and encouraged her to sketch. Mrs Doherty could not afford to keep Mary in school after her husband died. Mary's sketches were of unusual source, her mother says proudly. She would just draw things "from dreams she said". Mrs Doherty lets the investigators look at her daughter's sketches, but refuses to let this precious memento out of her possession. The folio book of their dreams is a tattered, cheaply bound sketch pad, whose pages are already yellowing. The paintings are pencil-sketches drawn with real, although untutored, skill. The drawings are identical to the those in the folio, except that the last picture does not exist (SAN 1/1D2). Mary contracted the sleeping sickness when she was twenty. She complained for the week prior of bad dreams. The nightmares were of paralysis, of becoming stone and being torn apart by forces beyond her control. They terrified her. The last morning she could simply could not be roused. Dr. Malkowski said that it was catatonia. Mrs Doherty could not afford to care for Mary at home. Both the doctor and Father O'Brien, the parish priest, counselled that the Arkham Sanitorium was the best option. Mary was a loving daughter and a hard worker. She never complained about the blows life dealt her. Mrs Doherty's eyes fill with tears as she remembers her. Miss Hazelhurst Miss Hazelhurst lives in pleasant rooms on College Hill. She is a ferocious, nimble tongued, sprightly spinster who has devoted her life to cramming appreciation of Art into underprivileged children. She has a private, diminishing income to supplement her charitable works. Miss Hazelhurst recalls Mary as a bright girl who wanted to be a painter. This was an unattainable ambition "in her circumstances". Miss Hazelhurst sighs, and mentions that she tried to encourage her towards a more realistic ambition, to go to trade school. But Mary's talent lay more towards the fantastic. She asks rhetorically if the investigators can you see the artist of those sketches drawing the latest fashions for newspaper advertisements. Miss Hazelhurst would like to attribute the sketches to nothing more than a vivid talent for fancy, but has a dim suspicion (perhaps no more than wishful thinking) that something deep and fabled might underlie it. She was deeply saddened when Mary contracted sleeping sickness, but hopes that the inner life that carried the girl through life's trials sustains her still. Father O'Brien A stout, florid, black-headed and bull-necked Irishman, Father O'Brien visits Mary every Sunday, along with other of his parishioners at the hospital. He has known her since childhood and disapproves of her. He thinks Mary has a pagan imagination. She was a quiet girl, he agrees, but she often said things that disconcerted him, and laughed at him, even looking down at the Church of Rome from some fey, lofty perch of her own. He is concerned that beneath the mask of her disease, her irreligious imagination yet runs riot. He nightly prays for her soul. Dr. Malkowski This elderly, discreet and basically decent man wears a dusty, black frock-suit whose collar and cut bespeak an earlier era. He has a wispy, white beard and a strong Polish accent, despite arriving in America a decade before the Great War. Prejudice against him, as an immigrant and a Jew, bars him from any prosperous status, but he is content with his busy practice amongst the poor of Federal Hill. He is able to give inquirers general details about the sleeping sickness. It first appeared in Vienna in 1917, and is caused by a 'devastatingly infectious' microbe, 'Encephalitis lethargia'. It has a high mortality rate, and distressing after-effects - a form of 'paralysis agitans' known as 'Parkinsonism' which causes muscular rigidity and paralyzis. If convinced that the investigators have a genuine interest in Mary (Credit Rating or Oratory skills), he can be guided to talk of her. Her symptoms were from the first severe, and he now classes her as incurable. He notes that her sickness was prefigured by a week of nightmares, a oft-noted symptom of the disease, and mentions his theory about her (see the newspaper article). Dr. Malkowski has some unconventional notions about dreams and fevers, born of a one-time patient of his, the late Walter Gilman (see Lovecraft's 'Dreams in the Witch House'). He is tempted to talk about these with sympathetic listeners. He believes that rare dreamers can, intentionally or not, trespass into other realms of existence in their dreams, and that experience of these other realms is not good for the body or the soul. SLEEPING SICKNESS Sleeping sickness swept the world in the aftermath of the Great War, following in the track of the influenza pandemic. It started in Vienna in 1917, and disappeared in 1927. It was called 'sleepy sickness' in Britain and 'sleeping sickness' in the U.S.A. Influenza killed nineteen million, sleeping sickness roughly five million, world-wide. Most sufferers died during the initial onslaught of the disease, in a wakefulness no drug could end, or asleep in comas too deep to be revived. Those who survived had to wait forty years for L-DOPA, a drug which sometimes alleviated the worst symptoms, but was certainly not a cure. Probably the most frightening aspect of sleeping sickness is that it destroyed the control of the conscious "I" over the body, and disabled sense of time and reality. Modern survivors of sleeping sickness, and their reactions to L-DOPA, are depicted in Oliver Sack's haunting book, "Awakenings". Of particular note is the tragic story of Rosie R., whose nightmares inspired Mary Doherty's dreams. A second source for this scenario is Kipling's short story, 'The End of the Passage', concerning the fate of a dreamer who is hunted by 'a blind face that cries and cannot wipe its eyes, a blind face that chases him down corridors' until finally he can no longer escape its pursuit. THRAN AND SIMILAR PORTS Dreamers can only enter Thran if they tell the red-clad sentries three dreams beyond belief. If this proves a stumbling block, they can obtain their information, and embark for Ilek-Vad, from some other coastal port. Cheating the sentries is impossible, even if they are slain. Thran's alabaster walls simply loom taller and more threatening, blocking out the rays of the sun until they have blocked all, and the dreamer is rewarded for their duplicity by being returned unceremoniously to the waking world. What exactly comprises a dream 'beyond belief' is open to question, but can be taken as three successful 'Dream Lore' skill rolls if invention otherwise fails. Within are sun-gilded towers and antique houses. Cobbled streets wend pleasantly but firmly to a harbour where bearded sailors swop yarns of distant shores. Ships set out daily for ports whose names are a litany of the fantastic, to ill-omened Dylath Leen or vapor-builded Serannian, or even to fabled Cathuria, said to lie beyond the boundaries of the world. Inquiries about a porphyry shrine in the hills to Thran's east need to be forwarded with wine, for only the well-liquored dare talk about it. Best in this pursuit is the rare and heady chartreuse of Sarrub. Second best, but considerably cheaper, is the heavier vintage vended by merchants of Dylath Leen, purchased from hump-turbanned and wide-mouthed sailors who fail to give a name to the port from which their sinister, black galleys embark. Their informant, finally relenting, hiccups that the porphyry shrine is in a distant and untravelled part of the hills. It was built so long ago that its use and the god it honors have been forgotten. But the people of Thran are wary of it still, for they know that "all which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead". Strange reports have filtered down from the hills in past decades. Rumor says that the shrine has vanished and in its place has appeared the dreadful Castle Called Sleep. Informants fall silent on pronouncing this name. Eyes darting around as if in sudden terror of discovery, they decline any further answers and hurry away. The common people know nothing of the pilgrimage of the king of Ilek-Vad. Only Thran's priests are able to tell the dreamers of the centuries that have elapsed since Aubeg the Bald travelled along mountain passes to his temple of loveliness in the foothills of Kiran. Inquiries after a Silver Key draw blank looks from all except those from Ilek-Vad. Citizens and sailors of this city declare with certainty that it is in the possession of their king. Zoogs and their Malice The flitting Zoogs, who have their own paths into Thran, follow the dreamers, inspired by anger at their interference. The last time Zoogs followed a dreamer thus, it was into the town of Ulthar. This sparked the war between cats and Zoogs that ended in a humiliating defeat for the Zoogs. The Zoogs therefor limit their activities to setting free several tame magah birds. These flamboyantly colored birds have a hypnotic song which is of no danger if kept caged. If freed however, they sing to solitary people, and whilst they are hypnotized, the bird hastily steals a tasty morsel - an eye, or perhaps a snippet of tongue - and flies away. They cause a good deal of alarm in the hitherto placid alley-ways and tranquil taverns of Thran. Thran's cats become suddenly militant, patrolling in bands at night. Meggs is chief amongst these activities. However none in Thran speak the language of cats, so the exact cause of the alarm cannot be discovered. Thran's cats are less organized and numerous than the cats of Ulthar, and the Zoogs wary and exceedingly low of profile. The cats do not succeed in catching the Zoogs, who embark with the dreamers to Ilek-Vad. The Zoogs spy on the dreamers. Zoogs understand human language, but cannot speak it. If convinced the dreamers quest involves either the king of Ilek-Vad or meddling with the boundaries between sleep and waking, they spread gossip of this to the ghouls of the Underworld. Several ghouls, alarmed by their exaggerations, visit the dreamers by stealth and at night. Their intentions are basically friendly - which for these rubbery and loathsome creatures mean they will not devour the dreamers out-of-hand. The Zoogs in their spite told the ghouls that these dreamers were as great and as terrible as the king of Ilek-Vad. As the dreamers are unlikely even to understand the glibbering and meeping that passes for speech amongst ghouls, it becomes rapidly obvious to the ghouls that they have been had. If the dreamer's reaction to the ghouls is shrieks and immediate flight, the ghouls lose their heads and give chase in the excitement. If they come across the dreamer in a particularly isolated place, or the dreamer is particularly plump or otherwise succulent looking, they may decide that the opportunity is too great too miss. Otherwise, after their failed attempt at communication the ghouls - who are in any case wary, for the graveyards of the Upper Dreamlands are traditionally claimed by their rivals, the red-footed wamps - shake their heads in bafflement, and lope off. This communication should include an attempt at miming the identity their source of information, the Zoogs. Dreamers who repeat the names of "Pickman" and "Carter" earn the ghoul's respect (these names, and their importance to ghouls, can be recollected with a successful Cthulhu Mythos or Dream Lore roll). Repeating such names also ensures that the ghouls cease taking those liberties which even the best bred ghoul takes with human companions, such as nibbling their ears, speculatively pinching their meatier limbs, or stroking their hair as if in wistful contemplation of their toothsome brains. Zoogs and ghouls have no separate existence in the worlds of waking and dreaming. They cross from one realm to the other as the whim takes them. They are indifferent to Hypnos, and he is indifferent to them. Both Zoogs and ghouls therefor have certain advantages as allies, if they can be but persuaded to the task. Other Threats Dreamers whose inquiries are too long-winded, or too open, encounter several of those hump-turbanned merchants from the moon, who have heard of their quest and seek, out of pure hatred of Ilek-Vad's king, to thwart them. These merchants imply that they have travelled in many far lands, and seen many strange things, and that they may have the information the dreamers seek. This is a baseless promise. They seek only an excuse to draw out a ruby bottle of strong-scented, spiced, yellow wine, and in false camaraderie, encourage the dreamer to drink from it. Being inhuman these merchants can gulp this without harm. Any dreamer foolish enough to even sip this heady liquor, wakens strapped to the back of a zebra whom the tittering merchants are goading across country towards Dylath Leen. There they will board a sinister galley propelled forwards by ranks of oars too vast and mechanical of stroke to be handled by anything sane, and journey across the voids of space, to endure a brief and unscheduled tour of the city of the moon-beasts, on the dark side of the moon. Their folly costs their friends some trouble to rescue them. Dylath Leen knows of the proclivities of these merchants, but ignores them as long as their evil remains invisible, for this dark litten city loves the rubies the merchants bring, and the heady and potent moon-wine. However, if the dreamers bring an open charge before the city's rulers, they act, reluctantly. If they fail to recover their friend before the galley disembarks, the dreamers must hire their own bright-sailed sloop and follow (first ensuring the hull of the sloop is well daubed with Space Mead, else they will fall between the Basalt Pillars that mark the end of the world, instead of taking off into space as the galley of the moon-beasts does. The shock of the fall wakes them). If all else fails, they can rely on Meggs and his cohorts to gather them up in their packed, furry ranks, and leap for the moon. Such a journey arrives just outside the city of the moon-beasts, and involves a raid into the heart of the city whilst the moon-beasts are quiescent. The moon-beasts have learnt since last immuring a human dreamer within their walls, and no longer take such dreamers from their city to be sacrificed for fear of attack by an army of earth cats. They perform their ceremonies inside their own walls, in order to ensure success. But, as said previously, the cats of Thran are less organized and numerous than the cats of Ulthar. They are unable to muster an army, but only a raiding party. The party, be it solely human or accompanied by cats, must sneak through the city, rescue the prisoner from the lightless dungeon in which he or she is incarcerated, and return again, braving at least one moon-beast sentry. Further details of the city of the moon-beasts can be found in 'The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath", or in abbreviated format in the 'Dreamlands' source-book. The last journey through the country to either the boat, or the cats that promise their return, is dogged by a threat from the cats from Saturn, that also haunt the moon's dark side. The dreamer with the lowest Luck must succeed in a Luck roll, or the cats from Saturn make good their threat, leaping from crag to crag in pursuit. -------------------- The Chaosium Digest is an unofficial discussion forum for Chaosium's Games. To submit an article, subscribe or unsubscribe, mail to: appel@erzo.berkeley.edu. The old digests are archived on ftp.csua.berkeley.edu in the directory /pub/chaosium, and may be retrieved via FTP.