GM: Sam Tillis
Players: Adrienne Mueller, Dylan Arena, Sean Nittner, Sarah Terman, Matthew Fisher
System: Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition
Brother’s, I’ve brought you here because our associates in London have suffered a blow from the Fetid Normalcy, but something very valuable was left behind which could aid us in serving the Crawling Chaos. I’m sending you to London to recover the Mirror of Gal. Do not fail. – Mukunga M’Dari
Since we’ll have a gap in our Masks game and our investigators are on a boat to Kenya now, Sam opted to run and “interlude” game where we play…yep, cultists of the Bloody Tongue.
Character Creation
Sam laid out three rows of cards and asked us to pick a card from each row. This would determine our demeanor, background, and motivation (or in some cases secret). I drew…
A tactless bookkeeper who owes a massive debt. As Sam said, the cards were drawn by the people they were meant for. Instantaneously Terrance “Terry” Washington (name courtesy of my good friend Terri’s father Terry). He was a bookkeeper who knew how to handle everyone’s finances but his own. Partially loyal to the cult, in debt to Big Al Capone, and entirely self serving, Terry was all about finding this mirror as long as there was some moolah in it for him.
Utterly fittingly:
- Dylan created Reginald Jefferson, an unlicensed pharmacist who was fiercely devoted to the Crawling Chaos.
- Adrienne was Robbery “Bobby” the academic who previously dated Amos but then fell in with the wrong crowd (that would be us).
- Matt played Ellyham von Durdenwald, or Elly to her friends. Ellyham was a ballet aficionado, high society sorcerer who detested the Fetid Normality as vermin to be exterminated with all haste.
- Sarah made Jean Simon, the gal with the gun (and a big gun it was). Jean was our killer without remorse.
Steerage Class
As the booky in debt I was always paying attention to how much money was being spent (and sharing my opinions on the matter loudly…I was tactless too). While we we’re completely on our own, M’Dari ensured we had a low profile by sending us steerage class. At least we got three rooms among the six of us!
On the ship there we had several private conversations, that thanks to open portholes and failed Listen checks were mostly misheard and construed in the worst possible light. Ellyham asked Bobby what he wanted when the found the mirror, and when his answer fell short of cosmic power, the occultist encouraged him to aim higher. He could have anything he wanted…as long as what he served the Crawling Chaos.
Starting the “investigation” together
In London we started our search by going to the Empire Spice Shop. It was the last known location of Zahra Shafik and perhaps the mirror.
We found the location crawling with Bobbies (despite his tactlessness Terry prided himself in his knowledge of history and culture) and thick fog. Each of our brotherhood took different approaches (sneaking in, charming officers in to nearby florist shops before putting bullets in them, and playing the part of a business person that demands their attention).
[One of the fun mechanical things that Sam did for this game was to give us all much lower Sanity than an investigator would start with, but to also make us roll for different things. In this case coming face to face with a police officer (the enforcement arm of the fetid normalcy) required a sanity check and the incumbent involuntary actions when they were predictably failed. It was quite a delight!]
Our encounters inside included:
- A stash of spices that covered a blood splatter (normal for us) and haunting voices (also normal for us, but not something Terry and Bobby could figure out on their own).
- Ritually killing one of the officers that “escorted” Elly and RJ into the building. They thought the house haunted (which it wasn’t, but they probably should have just cordoned it off and never gone in)
- A very warded office (elder sign on the doorknob that Terry got smarted by when he smacked with a crowbar) including river stones in the corners, a wardrobe with secret compartments (including the accouterments of a sorcerers office and two sandstone files with contents we’d later learn were required to use the Mirror’s magic), and a very convincing but fake Mirror of Gal!
The party was split as we pursued different agendas:
- Ellyham began an incantation that would let her see the past reflections of the mirror while Jean watched over her. She saw (in reverse order) a lithe figure entering the room, determining that the mirror was a fake, and replacing the lock on the door with one of her own, a figure she didn’t recognize leaving after placing the mirror in the room, the mirror being unwrapped in the room, darkness in which she had the sense it was being transported, the mirror being wrapped in blankets, and eventually as far back as the mirror coming into being in an apartment near the London Tower Bridge.
- Bobby was grabbed by some unseen presence and woke back up downstairs in the “lair” of Shafik’s acolyte who had tried to continue her wishes in her absence but was clearly not stable enough to live on his own. Bobby tried to break free but the distressed young man was built of nothing but muscles, bulging veins, and sinew. He rambled, mostly incoherently about others visiting and the actions he took to protect this place (a dead and partially eaten bobby was on the ground, thankfully not our Bobby*)
- RJ ad Terry went looking for Bobby, eventually found him, and tried to do violence to set him free. It was messy and not going their way until Jean found them all and put a bullet in their captor’s head. Good timing.
Splitting up to continue our search
Once we shared what we found, we continued our investigation apart, each using our personal resources.
- RJ discovered that the two sandstone vials contained obra’an (red syrup) and gabeshgal (black powder) that were used in conjunction with the mirror to scry and kill respectively. He also did some light ritual sacrifice and took for himself a bloody tongue.
- Robert put out a call to meet with Nicolas, who, distraught after the spectacular catastrophe in Misr House, found a new path. A bit skeptical at first, Nicolas eventually believed that Bobby really did want break free of the Black Pharoah, and so he took Bobby to a posh hotel to meet Oei Tjong-Lan, a woman with greenish skin that offered Bobby a place in the order of Dagon, a much more pleasant god to serve than the Bloody Tongue.
- Terry reached out to Kinnery, his distant contact and when they met he found a broken man. Kinnery scarred on the inside and out. He drank three cups of hot coffee without slowing down before he finally realized that Terry was giving him another chance to serve the Bloody Tongue. He (very temporarily) shifted his allegiance from the dead Gavigan to Terry…and told him about the woman he had been following who left the Empire Spice Shop (and we’d later confirm was the same woman from Ellyham’s vision).
- Terry, believing RJ should probably be part of finding the woman Kinnery had been tracking, brought him up to speed. As soon as Kinnery met RJ his obsequiousness immediately shifted to him. Reginald was a true man of faith. The three of them went to a small bed and breakfast outside of town where he woman was staying. Kinnery, emboldened by his new companions agreed to sneak into her window and subdue her. Moments after he crawled in, we heard the sounds of his disembowelment and a woman stood in the window with a bloody knife “we should probably talk”. After a mostly pleasant conversation we learned her name was Diana Stanley, that she worked for the Order of the Silver Twilight, that that the river stoned in the room were likely placed by people who worshiped the Nodins, aka the Lord of the Abyss, aka the Lord of Waters. Finally we agreed that if we got the mirror, we would take it but she could use it (in our possession). The fact that she agreed to the terms to easily should have been the sign she was lying. Finally, she believed that everyone interested in the mirror was also spending a lot o time snooping around the British Museum.
- Ellyham and Jean used the visions from the fake mirror to locate the apartment it was made, eventually break into a heavily secured room and then find within it…a single fingernail (which Ellyham took). They waited for someone to return, but after many hours rejoined their brothers. They did however find a very menacing letter informing the recipient that though she couldn’t make it to the auction, she nevertheless presumed the mirror would be given to her, lest the recipient suffer her wrath. Signed one J. Spect. [Nice callback Sam!]
British Museum (in waking)
We poked around a bunch. Terry blundered his way into the meeting the Auctioneer and learned that the auction for the mirror would be that night at 10PM, with an entrance through a very specific door.
Bobby and Jean however talked to the patrons and eventually met a very handsome, very wealth Lawrence Vane, who as it turned out also wanted the mirror. With some charm we were all invited to have an audience with Lord Vane in his finely appointed hotel room.
Lawrence just wanted to find his sister so he could help her with her “affliction” (werewolf much?) and agreed to put forth the money for the mirror if we would help him use it to find her and help cure her as well.
He fitted us with finely appointed clothes befitting a high society event and together we made our way back to the Museum to enter the very special entrance at 10PM.
Side note, nothing important. RJ let us go on our own to do this while he attended to some other personal affairs. Nothing important or that we should worry about. Oh, but when he came back Elly saw that he was awash with power.
British Museum (in dreaming)
When we entered the museum that night we passed through a portal into a place that looked like the museum, at least at first, but that we eventually determined was part of dreaming. That included the impermanence of dream and it turned out the way we entered was disappearing behind us (not that we knew that at the time).
The assembled guests (and bidders) included:
- Lawrence Vane (and us, as his guests)
- Diana Stanley
- Oei Tjong-Lan and her entourage
- Tim and Edgar, two peculiar individuals who carried strange “cameras” (aka Yith lighting guns)
- Aleister Crowley, the foremost expert on all things occult (and an utter fraud)
After some mingling, veiled threats, hiding from people (poor Bobby), and a failed attempt to steal the mirror (Stanley came back with horrible claw marks but at least was still alive), the final auction of the night began…for the Mirror of Gal.
Aleister and Lawrence went toe-to-toe in a bidding war until Terry intimidated Aleister by threatening to reveal to everyone that he was a fake, and Lawrence won the bid. Great, we got everything we wanted and everything would be just fine from here…right? Of course not. Instead:
- Oei Tjong-Lan told everyone the ruse was over and she opened a portal that water and fish men poured out of attacking eveyrone.
- Terry and Bobby ran away.
- Ellyham grabbed the mirror to run with it, but was stabbed in the back by Stanley (we knew she wasn’t a team player)
- Tim and Edgar, who mentioned the experiment was a failure and that the “Catherine” must die [OMG I love this] stood mostly still in the chaos, until they eventually allowed their lightning gun to be used by Jean to blast Oei Tjong-Lan!
- Jean continued to cover Elly’s escape, but then was trapped in the room when…
- RJ (from an nearby room where he was carving his flesh) summoned THE BLOODY TONGUE to destroy everyone and everything in it’s path, including unfortunately Jean (so that’s what he had been up to).
Fleeing this scene of atrocities was harder than we thought, since it was dreaming an one room would be filled with Elgin Marbles, another with medieval knights in armor, but none of them with exits! We scrambled until eventually:
- Terry was crushed to death by a statue knocked over by the Bloody Tongue
- Elly, RJ, and Bobby found an entrance, fended off Stanley, and made their way out of the “museum” and out of dreaming.
Aftermath
In the end, Ellyham took Bobby to see Swan Lake (because of course Elly liked Swan Lake!) and then in a moment of humanity, let him slip away (yay, Bobby got free from the cult).
The rest is cult business that I’m sure none of us will ever remember or care about or have any scary consequences at all. For sure.
Things I loved:
- Adrienne’s depiction of Robert just trying so hard to get out of this cultist horror show and eventually slipping through the cracks. Especially when there was a short moment of thinking that serving Dagon would be the better option!
- The utter loathing that Ellyham held for Terry (he was a pretty terry-able* cultist) and her utter devotion to RJ (who summoned the actual Bloody Tongue after all). It was even better when Terry did things like find the Elder Sign, the vials, and knew about the Nodins!
- A chance to play characters who were just as callous about murder, betrayal and magic as we tend to be as players all the time! We’re all secretly cultists aren’t we?
- Very selfishly knowing that the Yith think about Catherine, even if that does mean they want to kill her.
- The absolute terror of RJ summoning the Bloody Tongue and the reverence Elly had for him vs. the horror Terry and Bobby felt.
- Jean just casually taking a cop into the flower shop and dropping him like a sack of potatoes on the ground (as she sort of did everyone she fought).
- The flight from dreaming using the deck of cards to randomize the paths was a fun mechanic that lent very well to the feeling of being lost!
- Terry at the end, giving up his cult affiliation (and being seen by RJ doing that) as he hurled a Elder Sign door knob at Oei Tjong-Lan and turned her to dust!
- So, so many delightfully terrible cultist things like barely noticing RJ’s sacrifice bleeding out in the floor of our hotel room!
* I apologize for nothing!
