The Gaming Den

Thinking of expanding the old Ancient's Polygraph and taking a gander at what new material I've to add. Here's the stuff so far.

Keeper's Option: Hollywood Cthulhu

Inspirations: Ancient Images by Ramsey Campbell, Chiaroscuro (2000AD Prog 1507-1517), Flicker by Theodore Roszak, John Carpenter's Cigaratte Burns

The theatre was darker than a dead moon night, and warm as the breath on the back of your neck. Every heart in the room beat to the flicker of the reel as the curtain went up; an old man with a violin down front began a slow and keening draw as the title screen came into view, letters twenty feet tall that burned unnaturally for a few minutes as some lumbering shadow blotted them out, a grotesque hand or paw that almost seemd to reach through the screen...
Roll camera and...action.

The 1920s was the beginning of film making as we would recognize it today - feature length productions financed by studios, emerging technologies dynamically changing the way movies were filmed and seen, the young industry dominated by Los Angeles, and by the end of the decade the emergence of "talkies" replacing theatre organs and orchestra pits. But what happens if you point a camera at Cthulhu, or put Pickman behind a film camera in a graveyard at midnight? How do investigators react to the shoggoth on the screen, or the flickering after-image of Nyarlathotep that only has existence while the reel is running?
Keeper's Option: Hollywood Cthulhu is a collection of optional rules for incorporating early film into your campaign, offering narrative suggestions and mechanics for exposing player characters to the Mythos magic of the silver screen.

The Mythos on Film
Part of the impact of seeing a Mythos entity in real life is the sudden and terrifying knowledge that the thing is real; the horror and mind-rending revulsion is as much a result of the terrifying realization that the investigator's comfortable view of the world is fundamentally wrong. Images of Mythos entities and lore can capture only a fraction of this, though that fraction may be the straw that broke the investigator's brain. Actual films of horrific acts and creatures can do a better job - but will still somewhat pale to the real thing, no matter what the skill of the director or cameraman. At the same time, the storyline of a film can concentrate significant knowledge in its minutes or hours, and viewers may come away with a glimmering of greater understanding as well as the shakes. To reflect these attributes, Mythos Films may be given a similar set of attributes and presentation as Mythos tomes, reflecting both their educational and spine-tingling possibilities. The general format is given below, followed by more specific guidelines.

Film Title Year of Production, Director: Director's Name (Film Format; Running Time)
Film synopsis.
Sanity Loss 0/1; Skill Percentile Increase%, Time to Study, Spells: As Appropriate

Films without Mythos elements typically have no Sanity loss and no increase in Cthulhu Mythos skill percentiles. Keepers may chose to give particularly exceptional films sanity loss of 0/1 or 1/1d3; and very well made films made give a few percentiles (usually 1-3%) in the new skill Film Lore. An actual occult ritual captured on film might provide a few percentiles of Occult. The "study time" refers to the amount of time necessary to gain a complete understanding of the film - for a simple film, a single viewing or two may suffice, while for a deeper or more involved film multiple viewings and ancillary research and contemplation may be required. In some circumstances, an entire spell or ritual may be filmed - though given the restrictions of research and limitations of early technology, few of these spells are complete or accurate. An example of each is given below.

Under Arkham 1930, Director: Gracie Jones (35mm; 2 reels/45 minutes)
This early horror film is essentially an unauthorized treatment of Robert Harrison Blake's "The Stairs in the Crypt." Considered by many a daring experiment in horror, the combination of lighting and make-up produces effects that effect viewers even today.
Sanity Loss 0/1d2; Film Lore +2%, 3 hours to study and comprehend, Spells: none.

Beneath the Sands 1925, Director: Gracie Jones (35mm; 3 reels/67 minutes)
A shoe-string epic, Gracie Jones's first feature film has a skeleton crew out in the middle of the Mojave - for sets, he had cast and crew excavate a portion of De Mille's lost "City of the Pharaohs," which had been built for The Ten Commandments and then covered in sand. The plot is mostly taken from Jones' increasing obsession with Egyptian Masonry, and culminates with an actual Egyptian rite in a buried chamber made up like an Egyptian tomb. The culmination of the rite includes another of Jones' stunning effects, a nearly transparent figure of the recently deceased actor Joshua Moorhead.
Sanity Loss 0/1; Occult +1%, 5 hours to study and comprehend, Spells: Remortification

If a Mythos entity or ritual is captured on spell, the different rules apply. The appearance of a Mythos entity has no more than half the SAN loss of an equivalent real-life scene. For example, seeing a star-spawn of Cthulhu typically causes the loss of 1d6/1d20 SAN - a film of a star-spawn of Cthulhu would cost no more than 1d6÷2/1d20÷2 - less, depending on how much actually appears on screen. Barring extremely lengthy films (6 hours or more), Mythos films will not generally allow a Mythos percentile increase over 2 or 3 percentiles - and even that would require weeks of repeated viewings. For an example:

The Demon Star 1933, Director: Gracie Jones (75mm; 2 reels/43 minutes)
An early "lost" film, Gracie Jones' final offering proved too heinous and outre to be a commercial success; it was shown only once, for a limited engagement at the Piedmont Theatre in Boston in 1933, at the end of which thirty members of the audience and six out of seven staff - including one of the two projectionists were dead, the theater reduced to cinders and the only known copy of the third and final reel of the film ashes. The only sane survivor was Frei Kaliko, a reviewer for the Transcript who left during the changing of the reels. His abortive review describes the first half of the film as a boring, tepid and muddled affair influenced by scientifiction.
Sanity Loss 1d10÷2/1d100÷2; Cthulhu Mythos +3%, 8 weeks to study and comprehend, Spells: Call Azathoth

Captured by the Camera
A conceit or illusion of film is that it captures something ephemeral and transient - and, by some accounts, spiritual. Empirical rationalists may scoff at the idea, but certain superstitious individuals - or those deep in the dark sciences - are more wary and respectful of the ability of film to capture things - ideas, emotions, fragments of spirit. Certain entities that are more idea or concept may be captured - or summoned - in this fashion, the frozen image of the film their anchor on this plane, or their prison. Ghosts and wraiths are popular subjects, but Keepers might also consider a new mask of Nyarlathotep, a flickering black-and-white image that steps out of the silver screen but ceases to exist once the projector stops...of course, knowing the Black Pharaoh, the film may only end when he allows it to. Fire vampires and other creatures of light and darkness may also become ensnared by a sufficiently canny sorcerer using the Enchant Film spell.

New Spell: Enchant Film
This relatively recent spell is based on a much more ancient spell, Enchant Image, where wizards of old would capture certain Mythos entities within a painting or other work of art by means of a camera obscura. This older spell suffered from the imperfection of the process, and the entities were wont to escape before their designated release, but the film medium allows a nearly perfect capture of the creatures' image, and thus a better prison. The ritual requires proper lighting, a camera, and specially-crafted film, and three hours and 4 magic points to set up - then the sorcerer may cast a Summon or Call/Bind spell and attempt to bind the entity to the film; this requires the normal requirements for the summoning ritual, and a successful POW roll to bind it to the film. If the binding fails, the entity is free to do whatever it wishes. The magical processes make it impossible to create a print of a film without destroying the old one, though some sorcerers may do this if the old print is damaged or degraded - this requires another 4 magic points to transfer the bound entity to the new print.

A Mythos entity bound to a film appears only as images on the film itself, and re-appears as a flickering black-and-white version of itself whenever the film is played - but only while the reel is rolling. While the sorcerer is alive, they may issue the entity orders while in this state; others may play the film and release the creature, but none can command it. Further, the shadowy chiaroscuro Mythos entities gain a vulnerability to fire (fire attacks do double damage, no armor applies to fire attacks), no matter whether they had such a weakness before; film fire-vampires and the like typically combust a few moments after appearing on screen. The only way to permanently destroy a Mythos film monster is to destroy the film - if the creature is defeated but the film remains, it reappears at full hit points, magic points, POW, etc. when next the film is played.

Keeper's Option: The Source Text and One-Tome Campaign
The Shiatra Book of the Damned! Even the dread Necronomicon is derived from only part of its lore… (paraphrase of an old Dr. Strange comic)

Keeper’s Option: The Source Text and One-Tome Campaign
Occult knowledge tend to be taken with the idea of transmission from an ultimate source of knowledge, that all alchemy may be traced back to an emerald tablet, or that there existed at some point a perfect knowledge or understanding of hidden things which has since been lost, save for certain records – and those records in turn have been transmitted down the centuries in different forms, the lore dispersed, diluted, or just referring back ultimately to that one perfect source text from which all secret knowledge is derived.

The idea can be adapted for a CoC chronicle fairly easily – the idea being that the literary tradition of the Mythos tome traces back to certain fundamental source texts is not a far stretch. The Necronomicon already has popular appeal as “the” greatest source of Mythos-lore, it is not much of a stretch for it to be the literary forebear of the Nameless Cults and other works, which were written after the author consulted some version of the dreaded tome. Sorcerers and scholars could spend their entire lives and careers seeking out such grails…although if the Keeper/players are purists, the Necronomicon itself may be a little too common, its history too well known to be the mysterious and mythical source text.

The source text need not be an actual physical book, either – the Shining Trapazehedron, for example, could contain in crystalline form the entire knowledge of the Yithian culture, and everyone from Abdul Alhazred to Von Junzt learned their spells and damnable secrets by gazing into its depths, their human minds able to take away only a tiny fraction of their accumulated dark wisdom; or the Emerald Tablet could have been created as a secret research project at the Library of Alexandria, where all the diluted Mythos knowledge of the world was first collected and set down for all time...and then somebody accidentally summoned Cthugha and it was lost from human memory.
In any event, standard CoC statistics for a source text fall a bit flat because of the breadth and depth of its knowledge (can you remember the disappointment when the Necronomicon only gave +16% Cthulhu Mythos percentiles, or didn’t include a particular spell?) At the Keeper’s Option, the following rule may help represent such an ultimate text.

Keeper’s Option: The Source Text
As the source of all Mythos lore (or at least a sizable chunk of it) the Source Text has similar statistics to other Mythos tome: language, sanity cost, Cthulhu Mythos percentile modifier, and study time. The difference is that the last three factors are modified by a *, indicating that they are cumulative in effect. That is, for every study period in weeks that a character reads and reflects on the contents of the source book, their CM percentile goes up and their sanity goes down – this reflects continued study and attempted mastery of the source text. In this way, a character can progress relatively rapidly in Mythos knowledge (and descend into gibbering madness just as fast) by simple possession of the tome.
Spells are handled a little differently. Since the Source Text conceivably holds every spell, instead of increasing their Cthulhu Mythos percentile the character may choose to learn a number of spells of their choosing equal to the percentile points they would have gained; the study period still costs sanity however. At the Keeper’s discretion, characters may mix-and-match learning spells and gaining Cthulhu Mythos percentile points with each study session.

Sample Source Text:
The Tabula Sacer (Latin, c. 800 B.C., “The Etruscan”)
In Latin, the term “Sacer” – from which the word “sacred” was later derived – meant something set apart from the normal order of things, and included objects, places, and beings that were both blessed and accursed. The “sacred” or “accursed” tablet dates back to the early period of the Roman kingdom, around the time of the Law of the Twelve Tables, and their origin is semilegendary—supposedly they were the laws of the Old Ones, above or separate from the gods themselves, as recited to their sole priest, an accursed and outlaw Etruscan who preached blasphemy. Many men wished to end the Etruscan’s life, but he was the property of his strange gods and none dared touch him. The Etruscan circulated the tablets – actually a collection of thin marble sheets—in small groups, appearing in strange places at strange times to bestow them on certain patricians in the Po valley. Madness, sorcery, and death tended to follow them, until the leading men of Rome contrived to banish the Etruscan, collected his blasphemous tables, and entomb them. They did not stay buried for long, and fragments of their wisdom escaped through the Etruscan’s students and followers, down through the centuries. It is said Abdul Alhazred is the last human to have studied the complete collection, still inviolate in some Near East outpost of the Roman Empire, where they had been moved after the fall of the Western Empire. These tablets, they say, are the dark source of all lore of the elder things…and the seed, perhaps, of all the secret cults that honor the things from the dark between far stars, and beyond the angles of the world. Sanity Loss: 1d4/1d10*, Cthulhu Mythos +10%*, 20 weeks to study and comprehend*.

Added Option: Keepers concerned about unbalancing their campaign with a Source Text can keep the book cumulative but reduce the rate by which a character can gain lore, though this requires a bit of additional bookkeeping. For every study period beyond the first, the character requires one more week of study and gains one less Cthulhu Mythos percentile, to a minimum of 1. This “diminishing return” can still give rapid gain in CM knowledge, but lengthens the character life span.

Example
Squamous Smith, Mythos P.I. (San 80, Cthulhu Mythos 10%) has come across the legendary “thirteenth table” – the Tabula Sacer. He takes closes his business and emerges 20 weeks later, stubble-bearded and with a haunted look in his eyes (San 75, Cthulhu Mythos 20%). He drives into town to stock up on coffee and night light bulbs, checks his mail, then returns to his old cabin in the woods to continue. After 21 weeks, a gaunt Smith comes forth again (San 68, Cthulhu Mythos 29%), wiser and with a curious fear of spiders and a compulsion to eat flies. Townsfolk start to whisper as he loads up and retreats to his hermitage again – to emerge 22 weeks later (more than a year after he started!) with white streaks in his hair (San 60, Cthulhu Mythos 37%).

Alternate Option: Keepers may also balance a Source Text against general Mythos tomes by letting them only add points to Specialized Cthulhu Mythos Knowledge Skills instead. These specialized source texts go in-depth in only a single subject, but are comprehensive in their information. Spells are also limited to those related to the subject.

Sample Source Text:
The Severn Sheepskin (Cymric, c. 100 A.D., Gram son of Gram)
This large, tanned skin was discovered in Goatswood of the Severn Valley, the remains of some prehistoric and massive relative of the sheep family, now obviously extinct. It lays out in great detail the worship of the Black Goat of the Thousand Young, a nature deity worshipped by the native Celtic inhabitants of the Severn Valley before the coming of the Brythonic peoples, and according to the legendarium of the Severn Sheepskin itself those people in turn learned it from an older, pre-human race that inhabited the wood. It is currently located in Temphill, and not available to view to the general public as a matter of decency. Sanity Loss: 1d2/1d6*, Shub-Niggurath Cycle +20%*, 16 weeks to study and comprehend*.

The One Tome Campaign
A one tome campaign is a series of investigations in a setting, usually one limited by geography, where there is only or primarily only one Mythos tome (though multiple copies and editions, partial, complete, annotated, fragmentary, expurgated, etc. of that single tome may exist). Narrowing the literary field in this fashion has many advantages. By reducing the number of literary macguffins, the Keeper concentrates interest in one particular text (i.e. interest is not diffused in “gotta collect ‘em all” or “Oh drat, another copy of Mysteries of the Worm” syndromes). The tome can be tailored to the campaign, limiting the scope of options available to all characters to the contents of the book – thus, if a particular NPC sorcerer casts a curse, the only counterspell for that curse might be recorded in the same book that the curse itself comes from.

In many ways, the use of a unique and original Mythos book for a one tome campaign is both challenging and rewarding to Keeper and players, because it allows them to escape from the overly familiar bits of the Mythos and actually learn something new, or at least approach old Mythos monsters and mechanics from a fresh perspective. Source texts are a great tool for Keepers to help in populating the history of their campaign, by deciding not only what a character knows or can know, but how they know it and where they learned it. For geographically limited campaigns, the one tome may be the only Mythos book in the entirety of the area, with the attendant repercussions if it is lost, found again, or destroyed.

For example, consider a campaign set in a small, impossibly ancient town on the shore of an inland lake—all that remains of an ancient sea, compared to which the oceans of the world are still young puddles. Some years ago at the town founding was discovered a tablet with strange characters that a local scholar translated as the Apocalypse of Dagon—which told of an ancient race, kin to humanity, that lived beneath the sea in ancient times, and whose remnants exist still, until the day that they emerge from the briny deeps to reclaim the world. The tome may be lost for a time, but its discovery may coincide with the emergence of ancient, hulking Deep Ones from the ancient lake…and it is up to the investigators to piece together the clues and recover the book, whose spells may be the only thing that can stop the coming Apocalypse from destroying the town, and the entire world! Of course, if someone destroys the book, the PCs are then in a race against time to go find a substitute and return before the prophecy unfolds.

Useful Non-Mythos Tomes
Not every revelation needs to come from a big, leatherbound, ancient and crumbling tome of Mythos lore. Many of the best realizations are not told to the players at all, but ones that they arrive at themselves after working through the assorted data and clues they come across during the course of an investigation. To that end, some of the best tomes in a CoC game are not properly Mythos tomes at all even if they offer some slight percentile increase, or a spell or spell-fragment, but unusual collections of stuff that someone had diligently put together. In this thread, I'll discuss a few possibilities and offer some examples.

1) The Grail Diary
Inspiration: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

The Grail Diary is the journal of a scholarly quest, a compendium of every clue, fact, and legend the researcher has put together in pursuit of their goal. Often travel-stained, with many small bookmarks, missing or inserted pages, the Grail Diary is a working compendium, with information added and arranged or re-arranged as it suits the researcher's needs. A well-put-together Grail Diary provides the researcher with easy consultation to their discoveries, and a trail that others can follow to figure out where the researcher has been...or where they were going.

In creating a Grail Diary for a campaign, the Keeper really only needs two things - the "Grail," which may be a place, item, or entity, probably associated with the Mythos; and the diarist, the researcher who actually wrote the tome. The "Grail" is the object of the diary, and the diarist determines the format and scope of the work. For example, an eminent archeologist with little or no Cthulhu Mythos rating may seek out the Shining Trapazohedron, and his diary may be filled with implicit Mythos encounters and legends - but as the archeologist knows little to nothing of the Mythos, he will not have put these together and made terrible revelations from them.

Example:

The Alhazred Diary of Dr. Francis Morgan in short-hand and English, 1928
The bulk of this book began life as a five-inch college notebook, covered in closely-written writing - some short-hand notation, the rest regular English script. The cover and binding of the note-book are almost gone, and stitched and added to it are numerous additional pages, newspaper clippings, photostatic reproductions from books of Arabic art and archeology, and painfully hand-copied illustrations on on fine blue-lined graph paper in drafter's ink. The diary chronicles the history and legends of an artifact known as "The Lamp of Alhazred or Al-Hasjiid" down through the centuries, and finally notes that it was sold to someone in the Providence area near the turn of the century. Dr. Morgan appears to believe the legends about the lamp may hold a grain of truth, due to the strange mathematical and philosophical aspects of its construction, and certain herbs that may have been mixed in with the oil, or even the unique metallurgy of the lamp itself, but was never able to obtain the lamp itself to experiment with - though he did collect several fakes, forgeries, and lamps inspired by the bronze artifact.

Using the diary: The diary is an excellent excuse to crib notes on Abdul Alhazred to use in a campaign, such as the excellent William J. Hamblin's Notes on the Necronomicon. Characters researching the Necronomicon may run across the diary in a local library (the Miskatonic University Library for preference, but any local library in Lovecraft Country might have received it on Dr. Morgan's death), and thus provide impetus for a side-quest or more immediate goal in the form of the Lamp of Alhazred.

2) The Dream Journal
Inspiration: My Education: A Book of Dreams by William S. Burroughs

The Dream Journal is a record of nightmares, astral journeys, and strange impressions that come so clearly in certain stages of sleep, and fade quickly upon waking unless written down immediately. As an aid to memory, inspiration for creativity, or simple record, they are common devices kept by many people, and can be found among all walks of life in all countries. To most CoC players, the Dream Journal will seem an obvious place to look for lore about the Dreamlands - and while that is a possible area for a Dream Journal to address, it is not the main strength of this form of tome. Many Mythos entities and events leave their mark in dreams - there are simply some who are sensitive or intelligent enough to catch clairvoyant, precognitive, or telepathic flashes from some far-away Mythos entity straining against their bonds, such as with The Call of Cthulhu, terrible journeys such as The Dreams in the Witch-House, or dredging up memories of some terrible rite that occurred ages ago. These memories are dutifully recorded, and so the clues to an investigation may be placed in the unlikeliest of spots to reward the investigator that takes the time to go through every available tome.

Dream Journals need, as above, a dreamer and a Mythos subject. The dreamer's education and disposition determines their familiarity with the Mythos, and the subject determines what they dreamed about. Normally, only a few dreams concerning the Mythos on certain important dates are mixed in with the usual dross of the unconscious mind, but some particularly sensitive dreamers who dream regularly of Mythos-stuff go mad. Major dream journals of important dreamers like Randolph Carter are minor or major Mythos tomes in and of themselves, with comprehensive knowledge of the Dreamlands.

Example:

The Nephite Chronicle by Ephraim Gottlier, in English and Reformed Egyptian, 1841-44
Ephraim Gottlier was an obscure but devoutly faithful Mormon in Nauvoo, Missouri, following Joseph Smith. He bought a patch of land cheap because it contained a small Indian mount that was rumored to be haunted, and worked as a farmer. At night he dreamed of a land beneath the mound, of strange peoples and terrible treasures and books of golden plates. Gottlier couched his dreams in terms of the preachings of Smith, and believed he recalled the days of the Nephites who had once inhabited this country before the Indians. He recorded his dreams, but was caught up in the succession crisis after Joseph Smith's murder, and was found dead one day out by the mound.

3) The Book Catalog
Inspiration: Between Boards: New Thoughts On Old Books by Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine B. Stern

The Book Catalog is a list of books, typically covering such vital information as the title, author, year or era of printing, notes about the edition, sometimes some additional information on the book or its contents - and, for seller's catalogs, a price. For the dealer in rare and collectable books, the Book Catalog is their communication to the outside world, distributed through bookshops, bookfairs, and dealers, mailed in circulars to certain collectors, libraries, and other potential customers. A catalog also says something about the issuer - their tastes and areas of interest, the depth of their scholarship revealed in certain little snippets of obscure data that put the works in a more interesting light than title, author, age, and condition might suggest. Good catalogs also inform potential collectors about the various editions, whether or not they buy them, and may suggest additional titles in the same general area that they did not know before.

Catalogs of mainly or exclusively Mythos books are rare, unless they are predominantly false Mythos tomes or the library of a specific collector of Mythos-lore, but even the most mundane Book Catalog may contain a volume of Mythos interest. Keepers can seed a book catalog into an investigation in order to help characters track down a book, as a red herring, or to introduce the seller as an NPC. The important facets of a Book Catalog are the seller - who must be at least somewhat knowledgeable in the books he's trying to sell - the "theme" of the Catalog (a specific library collection, early Americana, the occult, etc.), and finally what Mythos details, if any, are mentioned or included in the catalog. Like all books-about-books, Book Catalogs allow players to gauge something of the contents of Mythos tomes before risking their sanity.
Example

Golden Goblin Press 1913 Catalog (issued by Golden Goblin Press, Winter 1912)
A small-print publisher of some of the most outre and authentic occult texts of the late 19th and early 20th century, Golden Goblin Press sent out a 6-page 1913 catalog to list their wares and try and reduce some of their overstock. The offerings for sale are not all Mythos tomes, but include the 1909 translation of Nameless Cults and preliminary orders for the 1913 translation of The Revelations of Hali by Bayrolles. Included is a selection of texts purchased in bulk from another small-press occult publisher in San Francisco which had gone bankrupt; the highlight of this section are fifty unbound copies of The Revelations of Glaaki.

4) The Book of Magick

Most Mythos magic in Call of Cthulhu games works on the idea that the Mythos, in all of its many-tentacled glory, is the "real" or true supernatural force or forces, and that the majority (if not all) of traditional and non-traditional occult practices are so much superstition and hokum. "Real" alchemy could never transmute lead into gold or distil the fifth essence, "real" conjurings do not summon demons, elementals, faeries or other spirits, "real" spells have no effect beyond whatever psychosomatic effects or ill chance those afflicted on them attest to such rituals. The lack of actual effect by such spells and stuff has not prevented the circulation or belief in those practices, however.

The Book of Magick then is a work of non-Mythos magick or parapsychology, purported manuals that include descriptions of other realms or cosmologies, recipes and spell formulae, lists of spirits, instructions for ritual purification, preparation, and tool crafting, the lore of fantastic animals, minerals, and plants, the stories of particular magicians and their deeds, prayers and much more besides - though it is a rare volume that contains all of the above, many books of magic, particularly those that belong to a certain tradition of hand-copied grimoires rather than prints and reproductions, have a certain hodge-podge quality to them. Few Call of Cthulhu characters are "real" occultists in the sense that they use or own Books of Magick, though some who cover their Mythos magick with a veneer of traditional occult practices may keep a few such books for show and the look of the thing, and most investigators disregard such books, unless they seek to increase their Occult skill percentile. And yet, the Book of Magick precisely because it is overlooked, because there are so many sources freely available such as at the Esoteric Archives and other sites, and because Lovecraftian Mythos magic has slowly been intertwined or adopted into certain magical processes, such as the Simon Necronomicon, present an underused resource available to many Keepers.

The Book of Magick, to differentiate it from a true Mythos tome, must be mostly bunk - the spells are ineffective, the theory unassociated with the actual cosmology of the Mythos, the actual Mythos information in there somewhat garbled and wrong...and yet, there must be a bit of effective or worthwhile material in there for an investigation. Just because a book is mostly false does not mean an NPC cannot believe it to be true, and thus a Book of Magick can provide insight into a character's level of Mythos knowledge and motivations. An NPC may, operating under false assumptions, deal with, attract, or release Mythos entities through the use of some poor-man's version of a Mythos spell. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, as the saying goes, and even a Book of Magick may occasionally include some important snippet or fact that sheds light on an investigation.

For Books of Magick, the author and their level of knowledge is less important than the theme of the book, the underlying Occult tradition that it relies on; in this the Keeper may be obliged to crib liberally from existing grimoires (woodcuts of occult squares and figures make great player hand-outs). The other bit is what Mythos lore is in the book - generally no more than a single spell or important detail should be present, or else the book is effectively a minor Mythos tome and should be stated as such. Some Books of Magick can increase the character's Occult percentile as well, commensurate with the length of time it takes to read and study the work.

Example

The Book of Dagon (purportedly 1321, actually c. 1866, by "Mozes de la Rosencruz," in English and Hebrew)
One of a number of medieval grimoires reportedly re-discovered and translated in the spiritual renaissance of the last half of the 19th century, the relatively obscure Book of Dagon uses a variation of the Kabala mixed with elements of Philistine worship to present a sort of Jewish idol-cult, an occult undercurrent to traditional Biblical theurgy roughly synonymous with many aspects of Satanism, in that it operates simultaneous to and below and counter to the main worship of God, with the fish-god Dagon as the "Devil Figure." The Kabala system presented includes garbled aspects of Mythos lore, particularly Deep One lore, and most of the occult system presented is similar to more traditional Kabala texts, only applied to purposes in praise of Dagon or personal ends - sexual satisfaction, locating hidden treasures, sending out "the spirits of the devil-bought" against enemies, etc. Among the dross are instructions that create an amulet that provides a weak form of protection against Deep Ones and related Mythos entities - the requirements are the same as for the Create Elder Sign spell, but the resulting fish-amulet only works against Deep Ones, and even then there is only a 50% chance of it working. "Mozes de la Rosencruz" was a pen-name for a minor Jewish occultist, Johnathan Finn or Finnigan living in London, who had a small congregation known as "the Worshipfull Society of Dagon." Finn eventually disappeared in the late 1890s, leaving behind six pregnant parishioners, a mountain of debts, and an invitation to lecture in Innsmouth, Massachusetts. His ship capsized in a storm during the crossing, and both Finn and the "original text" he supposedly based The Book of Dagon on was lost.

5) The Mythos Textbook
The Mythos Textbook is an academic treatment of some aspect of the Mythos, from a strictly (or at least mostly) orthodox viewpoint. A Mythos Textbook need not be a literal textbook, but can be a white paper, journal article, academic essay, pamphlet, or any similar such work that presents information on some aspect of the Mythos in as cogent and scientific a method as possible. The text is primarily dry and informative, and speculation or interpretation are generally within the normal limits for the exact form and field of the Mythos textbook - a scientist, given conflicting data, may be conservative in their theories and estimations, but before the comfortable "wild fringe" that many Call of Cthulhu players and Keepers are familiar with there is a middle ground of scientists open-minded enough to suggest the presence of certain races or civilizations currently unknown, or propose hypothetical solutions that may account for some of the erroneous features they come across. A biologist examining a fossilized bone from a Deep One, for example, may propose that it belongs to a new, undiscovered species, while an archeologist faced with a Deep One gold pectoral may declare it a clever modern fake.

The key to a Mythos Textbook is the disbelief that the author has in the Mythos, who does their damnedest to fit the Mythos myth-cycle or artifact they are studying into their world view. Keepers may choose to have such a tome provide bonus Cthulhuology percentiles rather than Cthulhu Mythos percentiles, and there are practically never complete spells in such publications. Investigators, who are familiar with the Mythos, can read between the lines of these text and perceive clues that may aid their investigation - taking the faithfully-recorded "anthropological" lore and sifting through it, taking as fact what most scientists would consider fantasy. Mythos Textbooks are also great for bringing the Mythos into a more urban or academic setting, as the key to start off an adventure, and as a means to flesh out an otherwise sparse Mythos library.

Example

The Miskatonic Prison Farm Recordings (1928, various artists, mostly English)
The Great Depression settled into the Miskatonic River Valley, and as one of the make-work projects Roosevelt passed folklorists and journalists were sent out to the backwoods in an effort to record the songs and folklore of the local people, to preserve this American heritage that was quickly fading away as people moved to cities and radios criss-crossed the nation. Prisons were a favorite location, as many of the inmates had been insulated from the newest productions, and pioneering folklorists went bravely into the prison farms with their recording gear to catch the songs of yesteryear. The Miskatonic Prison Farm served many local communities, and its long-term inhabitants were a curious and degenerate mix of local families from Dunwich, Arkham, Kingsport, Innsmouth, Aylesbury, and Black Bay. Their folk-songs and superstitions were dutifully recorded, and the curious record stored in both the Library of Congress and local Miskatonic University.

The Necronomicon Cipher and others
One of the great benefits of the prominence of eldritch tomes in Mythos gaming is that tomes lend themselves well to any plot or idea involving books in general, and any book-related scenario may be adapted to a Mythos game with minimum difficulty and often a few fun little twists thrown in. Keepers and players both have at their disposal a vast amount of material (fiction and non-fiction) related to books, literature, writing, art, and communication to draw on when engaging in their games.

The Necronomicon Cipher
Cryptography, for example, the art and science of hidden or secretive writing, has a long history both practical and occult (viz. alchemy, etc.) Lovecraft made some use of cryptography, notably in "The Dunwich Horror" with his Aklo letters, but there are other possibilities. A book cipher, or code, is a cryptographic scheme where messages are relayed according to certain words or letters present in a book. For example, the famous Beale ciphers used a particular version of the United States Declaration of Independence as its key; both encoding and decoding the message would require a copy of the exact same edition. Extending this to the Mythos suggests some interesting possibilities...

From 1850 to 1876, the chief librarians of the Miskatonic University Library and the University of Buenos Aires Library engaged in a cryptographic correspondence via telegraph, using their respective copies of the 1630 Spanish edition of the Necronomicon as the "key." The Miskatonic side of the correspondence was discovered amidst the collected records of the Arkham Telegraph Office, which was damaged by fire in 1891 and torn down to make way for the installation of a local telephone switch. The archive of old telegrams elicited some interest due to speculation of involvement with the Argintinean Civil War, but translation by a Miskatonic University graduate student John Leann Bishop proved they mostly concerned anthropological conversations between the two literary men, who shared similar interests in local witchcraft traditions in their respective territories, as well as an amateur enthusiasm in cryptography. The rarity of the Necronomicon and their exclusive access to it provided an excellent code book, and a convenient one for obscure words and terms such as "Cthulhu," "Yuggoth," and "R'lyeh." Bishop published the translation of the telegram transcripts as part of his master's thesis, and travelled to Argentina to find the other side of the conversation, but was never heard from again.

A key aspect of Bishop's thesis, titled The Necronomicon Cipher, were a series of fifty-two telegrams, sent biannually on May-Eve and Hallowe'en, which uses the same book code but references a page in the Necronomicon that does not exist in the Miskatonic copy - a blank facing leaf at the rear of the book. Bishop speculated that this might have referred to a "secret page" in the chief librarian's personal possession, or possibly was connected with the Black Goat Letters, though fellow student James Whateley disproved this after Bishop's disappearance.

In a setting that features "real" magic through grimoires like the Necronomicon, the lessons of illusion taught be real-world magicians are sometimes forgotten for the darker and more fantastic spells in the gamebooks. While players don't always appreciate it when an NPC is "faking it" with a Necronomicon, they seldom complain when their characters try it themselves to fool gullible cultists or marks later.

The Necronomicon "Force Book"
A "force book" is a prop or gimmicked book, often created in near-identical pairs, and designed to facilitate certain tricks of mental magic. With the proper construction and set-up, the illusionist can more or less control which page the mark turns to in the book, and guess which word they read on that page; additional tricks include presenting "missing" pages via sleight-of-hand, causing images or text to appear and disappear, and many other simple illusions. Not all of these illusions are typically accomplished with a single gimmicked book, any more than a magician who performs card tricks relies on a single deck of cards - part of the illusion is controlling what the player characters see and hear, what they perceive rather than the actual reality of the situation.

Jack "The Amazing Jaxon" Jackson was born in Arkham, the son of a half-black cleaning woman that worked at the university. A precocious child, Jackson's access to the library and his ability to pass for white allowed him a better education and socialization than he might have otherwise obtained, but the reality of his mother's precarious financial situation and his race ensured he would be denied many opportunities in his life, eventually becoming apprenticed to a bookbinder at age 12 to bring some money in - but in 1906 at the age of 16, Jackson ran away with a visiting circus. He worked as a magician's assistant and other odd jobs, eventually developing a talent for "psychic" games and fortune-telling, passing himself off as a gypsy or Italian sorcerer. Eventually, he got a girl in trouble and abandoned the circus to work the stages of Boston and New York as "The Amazing Jaxon." To distinguish his act, Jaxon drew on the witch-lore of his native Arkham and the fragmentary rumors of the Necronomicon he had picked up at Miskatonic University to craft several prop "Necronomicons" which were supposedly the source of his powers. The crowds enjoyed the novelty of the magic books, and Jaxon continued to develop new illusions and more elaborate versions of his force book.

The rise of spiritualism in the 1920s has seen Jaxon, now in his early thirties, transition from pure stage magic to running seances and demonstrations of occult rituals, still using his now elaborate "Necronomicon" as the central piece to his act. He was forced to leave Boston and New York after the police got to close to him for selling spurious antiquarian volumes of magic to gullible, rich eccentrics, and now at long last has returned to his old haunts at Arkham...but why, no one can say. Perhaps Jaxon has become involved with people who are too familiar with the actual Necronomicon, and will kill him to obtain it...which of course he does not have...or he plays a dangerous game trying to sell his prop books to these groups. Perhaps he simply wants to consult the actual book, to gain further material for his act before he takes it on the road, or material to create more authentic-seeming Fale Mythos Tomes. Or, just maybe, Jaxon is not a charlatan, but his stage magic and props are an act to hide the cunning and ageless intelligence that possessed him when the young Jaxon first caught a peek of the true Necronomicon...

I've been having collected letters on the brain lately - sorting through the correspondence of HPL, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Robert H. Barlow and others. There are a couple potential ways to play with this in your Call of Cthulhu game...the easiest would probably be:

Moonlight in Cemeteries: The Letters of Richard Upton Pickman and Justin Geoffrey, 1919-1926
This slim chapbook, issued in 1933 by Blackgate Press out of Natick, Massachusetts in a limited edition of 300 copies, collects for the first time the correspondence of transcendental artist of the macabre Richard Upton Pickman and the young, morbid poet Justin Geoffrey. The two had met in a small Boston bookstore in 1919, quarelling over a certain rare volume of Goya prints, and after they had settled the matter began an exchange of letters on an almost monthly basis, ranging over many topics of art, antiquity, and mysticism. The letters presented here are mostly unabridged, but complete save for a dozen or so letters that were lost during Geoffrey's trip in Europe and during the last few months before Pickman disappeared, as well as several postcards which were not collected in this volume; perhaps more regrettable is that the majority of Pickman's curious and horrible marginal illustrations and doodles were omitted from the printing. Boston censors were quick to ban the sale of the chapbook in decent bookstores, but seekers of the strange and terrible can still find it in a few bookstores in Arkham and Lowell. However, the failure of the chapbook to sell through in good time suggests that Blackgate Press will not seek to issue any further volumes, even though they have purchased the rights to several other collections of letters from these two great masters of the dark and fantastic.

Letters or excerpts from letters included in a volume such as that above are terrific handouts for players; and there are over a dozen volumes of letters from HPL, REH, CAS, et al. to use as basis or inspiration for contents. If you have access to an old typewriter and old paper, so much the better - copy out a good section of a letter, add in the hints for the latest CoC scenario, then pound out a quick copy on your machine. Terrific props, and good reading.

Looking at my carefully-arranged row and boxes of books - I haven't bought any shelves yet - I am reminded of that simplest and most fundamental of tools, oft neglected by investigators and Keepers, the barrister's bookcase.

The Thirteenth Shelf
Lawyers and clerks are occuptations noted not only for scholarship, but professions where books are pretty much mandatory to the entire process, and the need to transport relatively large quantities of books with some efficiency and without destroying said volumes - and let's be honest, moving books always risks their damage or destruction - and without the need for heavy, cumbersome, difficult-to-move bookshelves. The result was the simple barrister bookcase, a sectional cabinet where each shelf was a separate box that could be stacked together. Typically fronted with panes of glass or wooden doors, it was very common to quickly dissemble these cabinets and ship them fully loaded. Naturally, barrister bookcases are eminently practicable for both investigators (who may not entrust their collection of research materials to their home libraries, for fear of theft or because they will need to access them immediately), and for cultists (smart cultists are always ready to pick up and go, preferrably through the carefully prepared escape tunnel with a few key items).

A typical example is the twelve-shelf barrister bookcase of Evram Arkham, Esq., a successful country lawyer who works much of the Miskatonic Valley, though he occasionally goes as far afield as Boston or New Hampshire. An orphan, Evram was given the city's name in the orphanage where he grew up, read law at the county seat, and passed the bar. His practice is mainly in rural matters - contracts, land disputes, and wills - and he has had to move his chambers many times as needs present. Most prominent of his possessions is a twelve-shelf barrister's bookcase, with a heavy base, which he had personally commissioned with his first fee after passing the bar. What none except Arkham know, of course, is that the base is itself a hidden bookshelf - a sliding panel allows the top to be lifted away, revealing a small collection of ancient tomes, ledgers, and manuscripts which Arkham has been asked to keep or hold for certain of his clients. Arkham himself rarely glances at these materials, but he might be somewhat shocked if he did...

New England Mythos War Trophies
In similar vein to New England Mythos Marvels and New England Mythos Artifacts.

1) The Berber's Book
In 1784, William Bishop of Black Bay, Massachusetts was a cabin boy aboard the brigantine Betsey when that ship was captured by the Barbary Pirates in the openings of what would become the First Barbary War. Bishop was enslaved in Tripoli according to the local laws, and as printer's son, fluent in English, French and the pidgin dialect Sabir earned money as a scribe and librarian to one of the city's prominent astrologer, a hoary old Berber and reputed alchemist known as ibn Zirid who would row out into the dark harbor on moonless nights with his slave to study the stars. Bishop survived for in this state for eleven years as the United States struggled with the ransom demanded for the slaves. Bishop returned to his native Massachusetts with a Berber wife, who always went veiled, a young child, and with a parting gift stolen from his master - a vellum manuscript with a bone spine but without covers, stolen from his "master" ibn Zabib. Bishop and his family were alienated in Black Bay following his return, so he sold his father's press and moved his family elsewhere - genealogical records are unclear of where exactly they went. The Berber's Book was discovered recently in Black Bay, within the wall of the old building that had been his father's print shop.

Physical Description
The Berber's Book consists of thirty-six vellum sheets, thirteen inches tall by thirty-two inches wide, folded in half by a spine made from strips of whale bone to form a book of seventy-two pages, without covers. The majority of the book consists of astrological or astronomical drawings, insterspersed with Greek characters and short pasages in 9th-century Arabic. Modern scholarly analysis suggests it is an occult work, perhaps a contemporary of the Picatrix. It contains references to several mythical planets, stars, or bodies beyond those known in the solar system.

Powers
A character fluent in Arabic who makes a successful Astronomy check or Cthulhu Mythos check may use to Berber's Book to draw a horoscope for any date, provided they have a telescope and a very accurate timepiece, revealing which cosmic conjunctions will occur on that date - though not where in the world they will occur. For example, the character may learn that Xoth and Yuggoth will be in opposition, suggesting a portentuous time for invocations to Cthulhu. This may help cultists plan their ceremonies, or give investigators a clue as to when their enemies will be active.

2) The Yellow Stick
At the time of the Creek Civil War (1813), a rogue group of "Yellow Sticks" led by the dwarfish shaman Mannaqqah left - some say, were driven out - of the traditionalist "Red Stick" camp and made their way to the Thousand Islands on the border of the Untied States and Canada. On a certain islet they killed a pair of fur trappers, and the local authorities raised a small militia against them in a Revenue Cutter Service vessel. The militia found the now rocky, barren island denuded of trees and unseasonably locked with ice, which was thick enough for the men to descend from the ship and walk onto the shore in safety. The last to fall was Mannaqqah, who held his "Yellow Stick" high, chanting above a crude stone cairn in from of a small bubbling spring or puddle. On his death, the unseasonable ice quickly melted. The rogue Indians were scalped, the scalps turned in for a bounty, and the Yellow Stick was taken for a shilleagh by an Irish mechant marine that had fought alongside the militia. The stick has a small reputation of being haunted, and references to it can be found in many obscure books of parapsychology, superstition, and occultism in New England.

Appearance
At first glance, the "Yellow Stick" appears to be a weathered rifle stock of pale saffron-colored wood, a little over a meter high, with a flat, wide surface on one end narrowing to a point, so that the whole appears as a sort of crutch. Arborists who examine the piece however will decree it is not wood, but some similous fibrous vegetable matter with a high mineral content. When held in the correct light, the wood will seem to sparkle, from gold dust in the deep veins of the wood. It is unadorned except for a curious, cursive triskelion character, which is very rare in Native American art.

Powers
The Yellow Stick is a grounding rod, a passive device that acts as an outlet for unusual forces around it. When brought near the site of a ritual summoning, gateway, or other Mythos event it will tend to draw the effect into its immediate vicinity. Mechanically, when the Yellow Stick is within a mile of a Mythos spell being cast or going into affect, the caster must make a successful POW Test or the summoned entity/gateway/spell effect will manifest within 100 yards of the Yellow Stick. A spell directed specifically at the Yellow Stick or the one who carries it automatically affects the target, even if they normally are given an opportunity to dodge or resist.

3) The Aklo Cylinder
In 1903, graduate students at Miskatonic University's Department of Archeaology conducted an excavation of Blackman's Plot, a small slave cemetary in long disuse which had been the site of the sole Revolutionary War skirmish near Arkham (certain British troops had, it is true, been quartered in Arkham, Innsmouth, and Kingsport, but their presence precluded general armed resistance by the populace, save for those who left to join General Washington's army, or certain other militias). The Dunwich Massacre of 1775 had taken place when the local commander of British troops, Captain Thomas Whitehead, ambushed a meeting of revolutionaries from all over the Miskatonic Valley, who were alleged to meet at certain places at certain times of year; the death toll on both sides had been nearly complete, with only a handful of survivors fleeing into the night. The event was of some small importance, since the loss of commander and troops openly weakened the British hold on the Miskatonic, and eventually the troops were recalled to other areas. The results of the excavation were nearly fifty corpses or parts of corpses (which were eventually re-interred with military honors), hundreds of small Revolution-era artifacts in the ways of bone and metal buttons and the like, and most curious of all a metal code-cylinder, used to encipher and decipher messages. After some research, one James Whateley of Boston connected the curious symbols on the cylinder with those on the Black Goat Letters, and based his doctoral dissertation on it - which, while accepted by the university, was immediately removed from public access. The cylinder is currently in storage at the Miskatonic University Library, with the remainder of the artifacts from the dig.

Physical Description
A heavy metal cylinder, two inches in diameter and six inches long, with eight octagonal rings and two gear-like end-pieces, made of an uncommon alloy of silver and some other metals, which James Whateley tentatively identified with the exceptionally rare "tulu" alloy. Each of the eight faces on each ring contains a Latin alphabetical character, arabic numeral, or strange code-character that Whateley identified as part of the old "Aklo" cipher. Turning either of the gear-like end-pieces causes the eight rings to shift, aligning different faces and combinations of characters in a complex cryptographic system. The whole thing weighs nearly two pounds.

Powers
If used correctly (using James Whateley's dissertation or several hours of fiddling), the Aklo Cylinder allows a character to translate any Aklo message into an approximation of Latin characters or vice versa - though certain phonetic combinations do not translate well.

4) Arkham Scrip
Freed from British rule - and monies - the early colonies issued their own currencies to maintain their economy. The most famous of these are the unbacked paper dollars of the Continental Congress, but states, towns, and even banks issued rapidly depreciating paper money until the Coinage Act of 1792. The Miskatonic Valley suffered greatly for the lack of funds, since trade was disrupted throughout the region and hard coin needed to purchase goods outside the area. The solution, offered by the town fathers of Arkham, was a commodity scrip - paper money that could be used within Arkham and neighboring towns as a medium of exchange and for payment of taxes and fines. The exact commodity that Arkham Scrip was supposed to have been based on is still a matter of debate among scholars and economists, since most are in agreement that it was not tobacco, specie, wampum, corn or any of the other normal goods of the Miskatonic Valley. George Johann Bishop of Innsmouth insists the commodity was dried and salted cod, based on depictions of fish on some of the remaining scrip samples, but scholars believe these are actually forgeries produced by pro-British counterfeiters in Innsmouth to devalue the Arkham scrip. Whatever the case, the scrip remained in circulation for only a few years, eventually being replaced by Massachusetts state paper monies. Very few examples of the perishable scrip remain, though occasional hoards of coin sometimes contain some Arkham scrip.

Physical Description
The typical Arkham Scrip of 1778/9 - the most common issue of which good examples exist - is of good hemp or tobacco paper, about three inches square, and printed on one side with the value of the scrip in Spanish dollars (or, more commonly, 2, 3, 4, or 7 bits) "Which may be Redeemed for Years," with the other side bearing a woodcut, typically of some obscure astrological or occult symbol, rarely with a fish-scale pattern or illustration from an anatomy book. It has been suggested that these latter were added as a mark to help protect against counterfeiting, and were reused plates, but no printer's mark has been found on any surviving sample. The nature of the illustrations suggests that the scrip was printed as large sheets, then divided into individual bills, and that if an entire "sheet" were reassembled the backs would reveal a single printed picture.

Powers
Certain older residents of the Miskatonic took to keeping the Arkham Scrip as talismans against old age, and indeed those who hold them seem to live a little longer than their contemporaries...an average of one year per "bit" value on the scrip.

5) The Bell of Secession
Civil War divded the nation in 1861, and even the sons of Arkham and Dunwich mustered out as part of the volunteer regiments formed in Worcester and Boston. The sons of Innsmouth and Kingsport, however, more commonly served in the United States Navy. The most celebrated of these was Melchezidek Marsh, who enlisted in the Marine Corps. Melchezidek's father could have bought him out of the draft, but the young man insisted on serving, and served with distinction in several raids against the rebels in Florida and New Orleans during the course of the war. Marsh's ability was highly valued by his command, particularly his great strength and ability to swim long distances at night to inflitrate and scout out enemy camps and ships in darkness, and he rose up the non-comissioned ranks, keeping with him a squad of closely-related "Innsmouth Boys." Near the end of the war - properly speaking, it was 1865 and Lee had already surrendered - Marsh and his Innsmouth Boys led a raid against a holdout rebel stronghold in the swamps of Louisiana, set up in a ruined Spanish outpost built on top of a curious and ancient half-sunken mound or island that the local Indians avoided. Strange rumors had surrounded the Rebel unit and its commander, who was rumored to be a cannibal and necromancer escaped from the Union military prison of Elmira in New York, but despite his reputation Marsh and the Innsmouth Boys successfully infilitrated the camp by means of a sewer drain and killed the leader, upon which the remaining rebels surrendered. Marsh and the surviving Innsmouth Boys were mustered out of service and returned to Innsmouth, taking with his several souveneirs, including a curious bronze bell from his last assault.

Physical Appearance
The bell is an alloy of gold, silver, copper, and tin with copper predominating, making it a strange and valuable bronze. It weighs a good twenty pounds, and was cast as a piece, with a separate clapper held on by a cord of rope or leather, and bears a heavy greenish-purple patina, beneath which is just visible curious decoartions of an oceanic theme.

Powers
Ringing the bell within hearing of the ocean waves near a Deep One community causes (1d10 rounds later) an answering ring from deep beneath the waves; any Deep Ones who hear this second toll will immediately break off and return to the sea. There is a 10% chance that within 1d10 hours a devastating tidal wave or undersea earthquake will strike the area. If the bell is rung when Dagon or Mother Hydra is present, they will immediately seek to capture the bell and whoever rung it and take them beneath the waves. If used with the spell Call Dagon or Call Mother Hydra, the spell automatically succeeds.

6) Father Whateley's Breviary
Among the chaplains of the Civil War, few were as strange as Father Devil-Does-Not-Jest Whateley of Aylesbury, Massachusetts. Educated at Nashtoah House in Wisconsin, Father Whateley collected legends and lore among the native peoples of the Sac Prarie region for many years before the new of Fort Sumter called him to the War Department. Surviving records suggest Father Whateley was recruited for intelligence duties, frequently crossing Union and Confederate lines to minister to dying troops and then returning, but many of the official records were sealed, and later lost in a fire at the federal warehouse where they were stored. Soldiers stories, of course, depict Father Whateley as the left hand of many generals on both sides, fighting the ghouls and darker things that preyed on dying soldiers Yankee and Rebel. He is remembered for his breviary or prayer-book, a talisman he was want to consult from time to time, and which is reported to have had great powers against the fiends of the night. Several small dime-novels came out featuring an exaggerated literary account of "Father Whassely" in 1866, purportedly based on true accounts, but Father Whateley himself died relatively early in the war, while trying to give final rites to the massed dead after the Battle of Antietam in 1862. His body and effects were returned to his family in Aylesbury, but his corpse disappeared from the train en route, so that they only received an empty, broken coffin and his books and clothes.

Physical Description
A thin leather-backed booklet, three inches by six, with very thin, fine paper of about 76 pages, stained here and there with dirt, blood, and some other substances. The prayers and rites are drawn from a number of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and even Islamic sources, rendered into English (though the translation is sometimes very bad) by hand, and consist entirely of different formulas of exorcism. On several pages, the name of God or Jesus has been stricken out and replaced by a sequence of unknown characters.

Powers
The presence of the book against the skin of person repels ghouls; their noses crinkle and they whine as if the character emitted the most palpable and disgusting stench. Ghouls must make a successful POW test to remain within presence of the character, and few have the courage or desire to actually attack them. If a ghoul does attack a player drawing this book and draws blood, the blood eats at them like acid (1d4 HP damage per turn for as long as they remain within eyesight of the character). The spells and formulas within have no particular effect unless the Keeper decides otherwise.

Mundane Mythos Arcana
Great horror does not always lie in monsters vaster than the imagination, or contemplation of black infinities of time and space, the great emptiness between stars and beyond the known dimensions; sometimes it exists much closer to home, in the simple evidence of the mundane fantastic, inert and harmless save for its implication and meaning. For all their terror and majesty, many of the Mythos entities are not ethereal spirits, but creatures of some alien biology and society, with their own habits, needs, technologies and expressions. The detritus of their regular existence is at once mundane in aspect, but terrific in the dark history its very existence serves as evidence of. Sprinkled in a campaign, the mundane mythos arcana can provide small but poignant discoveries that contain no great revelations, but evoke small and shuddersome horrors to build suspense or break a dull relief in light of more cosmic horrors. Unlike more usual artifacts and items, mundane mythos arcana rarely, if ever, have unusual powers or properties that make them useful to the players...though inventive players may still make some use of them.

1) The Cat in the Cylinder
This contraption appears mainly as a cylinder of steel faced with tin, the outer layer slowly disintegrating to tin pest and the inner layer spotted with rust where the tin has disappeared. In construction it is crude, almost steampunkish, despite the high technology involved, and the base is a mess of electronic circuits, all verdigris-touched copper and tin wire, looping coils and blown-glass bulbs in strange sockets and the acid-scarred cylinders of crude but powerful batteries. A phonograph trumpet is attached to a speaker-box scavenged from somewhere, and from the brown wood funnel issues a plaintive mewling, like a hungry cat; if left undisturbed it will continue for three weeks growing slowly weaker as either the batteries or the nourishing flood run out.

2) The Child of the Deeps
A small lead coffin, two feet long and a foot and a half wide; whatever marks it once had have been eroded by time and tide, save for a single letter that might be a capital M scratched deeply in the lid. A few inches of seawater remain even after the vessel has been removed from the sea, so it sloshes gently, and tiny, pale yellow crabs creep and crawl from the cracks in the seals that letter the brine in. If opened, the coffin will contain what might be expected - the corpse of a child, no more than a year old, dressed in scraps of clothing from bygone days. It is mostly fleshless save for a horrible mask of flesh drawn against the face to expose the teeth, eye-sockets open and empty. Still, this is something of a relief, for the remaining bones are curiously deformed and twisted, the bulbuous child's skull with the queer flat forehead and bulbous eye-sockets resembling almost the skull of a gigantic frog, and the spine is twisted and splayed so that you know the child could never have walked upright like a man, for all that tattered leather booties still cling to its feet. Someone placed a simple wooden rattle in the coffin, and three wooden blocks incised with strange characters, faded from the time underwater but still bearing scraps of color to show they were brightly painted.

3) Twin Specimens
A large, heavy glass jar full of viscous, slightly yellow liquid - perhaps formaldahyde - containing two connected fleshy masses. One appears to be an almost perfectly formed and preserved piglet, save that where its rear trotters should be descends a mass of small, sucked tentacles from its haunches. An umbilical cord extends from the piglet to a placenta, and from that to a definitively non-porcine mass - a flap-like growth like a headless squid with webbed tentacles, a tiny snout poking up from the very center. A paper label, partially stained and ripped, reads "37 Dunwich" in faded pencil.[/b]

4) Fungus Cairn
A patch of brilliantly colored and healthy fungus, with wide flat caps in brown and gold, orange and red rills with pale stark-white stalks and root-structures, and here and there lines of greenish moss-like structures, blue and black spots of mold. The fungus is heaped and growing on each other, the roots and systems intermingled so it seems to be of a piece, symbiotic or at least parasitic. It is only when you stand back and look on it that it takes on a more macabre appearance - through the fungal blooms can just be discerned the shape of the mass underneath, a sort of hunched humanoid figure in a fetal position - except of course it is not human. Oh there appear to be four limbs, but where the head should be is a strange stump of oddly complex toadstools, and the body seems strange in proportion, like the shell of a great crab. If you look closer at the travesty of the head with its mockery of human features, you see thick-bodied ants crawling around the mushrooms, moving erratically, tiny grey strands attached to their heads.

5) Family Masks
The dinner table is set for four, the chairs pushed back and the linen somewhat askew, the plates and glasses laid out but empty and clean. Next to each plate is a pale waxen mask, and a pair of waxen hands, just to the left of the salad fork. The face and hands at the head of the table would belong to a man of middle age, those to his left a slightly younger woman. Across from the empty woman's plate, the masks of two children, almost identical, side-by-side. On the center dish is a carving knife, stained with some thick green slime.

6) The Horror in the Icebox
In the ice-chest or refridgerator is a wire basket, full of clear, ellipsoid things with dark yellow-grey centers visible through the translucent meat. No two are the same - in some, the whole is cloudy and almost opaque, like arrak in water; in some the dark splotch seems to have grown a long, sinous black tail, like a vast and foul picture of a sperm as shown in the anatomy textbooks at Miskatonic University's medical school. A very few are larger than hen's eggs, and here the tail has curled up on itself, and the dark thing inside looks like a huge tadpole, as big unfurled as a grown man's hand.

7) The Fourth Gift
A large, rectangular package, wrapped in newsprint - a copy of The Arkham Advertizer - and tied with a strip of red ribbon, tied in a bow. The package is nearly eighteen and a half square and perhaps four inches thick, heavy like a book, and through the thin paper can be felt raised ridges or marks. In the inch of clear grey space beneath a blurry black-and-white photograph of a bloodless cow carcass is a pencil inscription, in a heavy but not crude hand: "To my grandson, on the occasion of his eigth birthday."

8 ) The Cat of Tindalos
On the doorstep is a dead rat-thing, but stranger and more horrible than any rodent known to inhabit the hills and fields and forests of Dunwich and Arkham - the face, or what is left of it through the deep scratches and dried blood, is mostly bald, and scrunched up like a hideous caricature of a monkey, and the front paws are long and highly developed, like the hands of a raccoon. Wounds pockmark the body, including a deep, ragged and terrible bite on the back of the creature's neck, which flops terribly as if broken, and the lower half of the tail looks to have been freshly severed. The great sleek feline stands over her offering and fixes you with her great too-green eyes, mewing proudly, and occasionally licking her paws. Then her ears perk up and swivel, the cat's head following to stare at the corner, and with a sedate and graceful movement she walks directly into the edge made where the two walls meet at a right angle, tail swaying, and disappears from view.

Last two, for now. Now with tentacles, for some reason.

9) Blue Sketch
A largish sheet of paper, torn from an artist's sketch pad, and much damaged by water, but featuring a sketch in charcoal. The model is a female, a young woman in her early twenties, nude save for the cap and long string of beads popular with flappers. From the head and abdomen she is human, and the artist has captured in rough, dark strokes the terrible intensity of her slightly protuberant eyes, the long slim grace of her neck and limbs...but where her hips and legs should be extends a coiled mass, a dark squall of short, intense curlicues like the limbs of an octopus seen through a cloud of ink.

10) Kill, Mr. Fuzzy-Hop, Kill!
From the edge of the field hops a small, furred thing - at first glance, a rabbit. But there is something wrong with this creature, the head is curiously shaped, oddly tapering with low-lying bulges near the back. Six pupil-less black orbs are set in the curiously squashed face, the tiny pink nose and whiskers twitching as the furred creature creeps forward. Suddenly, twin pale furred tentacles shoot forward - as they struggle with something in the grass, you notice that the appendages were concealed within its mouth, which has opened to reveal a gaping, toothless pink maw. As you watch, the tentacles drag a field mouse into the rabbit-thing's hole, and is swallowed whole.

Mundane Mythos Lives
So the Mundane Mythos Arcana is concerned with evidence; the smoking guns and cold, congealed remains left from the passage of the Mythos - but the Mythos also leaves its traced on people and living things, people and creatures that have their own stories to tell or be revealed to the investigators.

Squamous Smith
Rain poured off the detective's trenchcoat, off the rim of his fedora. In the left hand was a pistol, the thin, hideous German automatic in his right hand, the empty sleeve of the left pinned up at his shoulder. He raised the gun up to shoulder level, taking aim, and fired. In the muzzle flash, a glimpse of his face - skin drawn tight against the skull, the pallor of a corpse, one blank, bulbous fish-eye gray and pale; and something wrong with the mouth...some small, finger-like things that seemed to be waving.

Richard "Squamous" Smith fought in the Great War - on which side, he won't say - and maybe stranger conflicts after that, in India, China, and Mongolia. How he came to settle in Boston, to set up his office as a private investigator, how he lost his arm - Smith has a hundred stories, none of which quite answer the question asked, all terrible if true. Smith drinks too much, knows more than he should on Oriental Studies and obscure histories, and has strange friends in low places; he specializes in finding items and people after they have been lost, or at least tried to lose themselves. More often than not, he finds them. More often than not, he comes to regret that, and then drinks some more.

The Paper Artist
He sits on the street corner, long, clean fingers sometimes folding and cutting, other times dipping down into a small bowl of black, oily ink, to draw strange heiroglyphs in precise spirals and angular strokes. The scrap of cheap newsprint transformed slowly, the print and cartoons seeming to pale against the heavy, dark sigils. Finally, he holds it in front of him, a fragile structure like a crab shell, dangling four coiled streamers, the pattern on its "back" like Rorschach blots, but more purposeful, almost hypnotic...

Artists do not create because they want to, it is simply what they are and what they do. The Paper Artist takes the world as his heritage; his ancestors plied the seas in the days of sail, and half-breed Englishmen brought home strange wives from distant ports. He grew up on the water, working the fishing boats, but his passion was for paper and ink. It is impossible to say what exactly his ethnicity is - there is something in his eyes that speaks of a Japanese grandmother, the shape of the face of some ancient Indian squaw, and other muddied features of Africa, Polynesia, and the Mediterranean. He works the docks and fishing boats, when he needs to, but his days are spent shaping paper to match his terrible visions.

In an effort for fairness, I'm going to try and keep these gender-balanced from this point on. Which is really just sort of an excuse, because I've been watching Dario Argento films and his female characters are always so much more awesome than his male ones. This first one is inspired from Suspiria:

The Failed Bride
She stalks down the alley, crippled by age but not bowed, her scrawny limbs surprisingly spry and strong as she moves, refusing any helping hand - or would, if any of the residents of this place dared lend one. Her clothing is dark, the fashions of yester-year, the color of mourning - but what strikes you is her face. There is something pinched and diseased and jaded there, like that of a century-old whore, who has passed through the fires of passion and been refined. Yet in her bright blue eyes, for just a moment, you perceived an infinite regret and sadness.

Many creatures in the Mythos seek human women to breed hybrid creatures - Yig, Yog-Sothoth, and the Deep Ones are perhaps the most known and memorable - but not all women succeed. Most of the failures die, their bodies or minds warped by the thing they coupled with, the childer their body could not bear. Some simply disappear. And some...fail. Perhaps the authorities interrupted the ceremony, perhaps they are simply barren. For whatever reason, these women survive their ordeal, but fail at their purpose - though they do not come away from the experience unchanged, enjoying some fragment of longevity or other minor supernatural benefit from the key event of their lives - but even this only embitters them, compared to the glory or position that should have been theirs. Some may seek to re-create the rite; but face the barrier of their ignorance and impotence - after all, if they had the knowledge or the power to call the Old Ones, they would not have been sacrifices in the first place.

The Girl Who Swallowed Yuggoth
With a shiver you watch the flapper girl, in her slim dress and wild swinging beads, dancing to the music. It was not so long ago when the only flesh you would see of a woman was her face and hands, perhaps a flash of graceful neck, and even an inch of ankle would have been deemed insane and improper. Now here she is, with bare arms covered in tawny down, the curve of the calf clear through the material of her dress, the slight bulge of her belly against narrow hips...and then she passes before a window, and for a moment she is limned in the light of an alien star, then laughs and spins away, leaving a card on the floor behind her...

The rise in spirituality at the end of the century, the belief in psychics and occultism, came together with the rebellious youth at the time: the flappers and Jazz Age heirs rebelled against their stolid churches and conformity, and indulged in ragtime, alcohol, and tarot cards. This young woman has fallen in to the secrets of the ages, and opened herself as a medium to celestial powers. So far she has enjoyed her reputation as a prophetess, speaking in ancient tongues, moving through the world on intuition one step ahead of the authorities, letting the invisible hands guide her from cult to cult, warlock to witch, gathering knowledge and power as she goes. The Girl Who Swallowed Yuggoth is a puppet of higher powers, and will cross paths with the investigators only briefly before being carried on...perhaps someday she will try to fight back, but then it will be too late.

Mythos Fragments
One of the hallmarks of the Lovecraft Mythos is that cosmic horror can hit you wherever you are; you need not travel to voodoo-haunted swamps, up perilous mountains to forbidden valleys, or access the opium-and-spice-scented ports of the Far East to find some ancient survival or terrible worship; the signs of the outer dark are all around us, if we but have yes to see. So this is sortof a spin off Mundane Mythos Arcana, and presents a number of extremely brief entries on the theme of Mythos Fragments rather than more fully-fleshed out items, individuals or encounters; suitable to be dropped into a scenario as dressing or as a lead-off to an investigation.

- a mouse-sized thing like a six-armed starfish with six tiny eyes radiating from the center looks up at you, then scuttles across the floor and behind the bookcase

- the corpses of three nearly identical, recently deer - by some accident of nature, they appear to have been fused together at the head and neck, so the dead thing stares at you from five partially fused eyes, one rack of antlers erupting from the neck, tongue muscles twisted together and emerging from a bifurcated muzzle as a three-pronged monstrosity

- a whipporwill caught in a web near the dead man's room; a large purple spider is wrapping it in silk

- a series of rough printed letters, as a child practicing writing the alphabet; the other side is a page torn from Nameless Cults

- a fossilized head, with features of both man and fish; the head has been sawed in two, with the joint and neck-stump polished to be used as bookends

- a broken metal cannister, partially shattered and melted, surrounded by metal wires; through the broken hole appears to be a large yellow-whitish mass like an omelet

- a tiny wooden casket containing a withered, tattooed white hand, clenched into a fist, the fingers bound together with leather thongs

- a strange dog is disturbed while burying something near the children's hospital; investigation uncovers a pit filled with the bones of a strange species of rat with curious small, monkey-like skulls

- A silver-and-crystal salt shaker, the blackened metal marked with a monogrammed 'M', full of a greyish, large-crystaled sea salt that never seems to require replenishing

- a blind blues guitarsman with three fingers on each hand sits in a particular cul-de-sac alley every night, before a window dark as intergalactic space, playing all through the morning hours

- the head of an ancient statue is unearthed, a queer greenish-yellow marble shot with metal veins, of a woman with slightly proturbent eyes and short wavy hair wearing a tiara; the detail is of the finest workmanship of a hundred years ago, but several people who have looked in its eyes have gone colorblind; glass seems to stop the effect and it has been placed on display in a museum

- a heavy ring of white gold, but fantastic and strange design, like an octopus whose tentacles interweave and blend to form a maze, inscribed in ancient Greek letters "to Hydra", and more recently in English "to Elizabeth"

- a pair of wire-frame spectacles, of a fairly modern vintage, but the lenses are ground gems - the left a slight reddish hue, the right aquamarine

- the well-preserved skull of a Neanderthal, though missing the jaw and several teeth, with scrapings and holes in the skull that indicate early efforts at surgery, such as to clean a head wound or relieve pressure on the brain; inside is the perfectly preserved exoskeleton of a large, unknown species of insect

- a lady's hosiery, custom made by a firm in Boston; in addition to the normal two leggings are at least a dozen other slightly smaller open sheathes

- a set of dentures, the teeth - most sharply-pointed canines - are obviously from some non-human animal; the base is soft rubber and wood, with iron springs

- as you page through the book, a large brown leaf pressed between two pages falls out; you catch a glimpse of writing on the pale inside, but the brittle plant-matter utterly collapses into bare fragments as it hits the floor

- you turn to the last page of the book; burned into the paper is the shadow of a hand holding a quill

- a largish patch of blue-black mold on the damp wall of the cellar, which by some curiosity of nature has arranged itself into a definite spiral pattern like the shell of a nautilus; closer examination reveals this pattern repeated, spirals upon spirals, down to the microcellular level

- what appears at first to be a gigantic snake or centipede, digging its way out of the grave, but turns out to be a mass of foot-long worms wrapped around and supporting a human spine

- the hose lifts the cover to reveal the orange-pink shell of a crab of great size; more curious is that the legs and head have already been removed, leaving only the great carapace and its delicious white meat inside for your forks

- crudely carved into the broken tombstone is a pentagram, and within the center of the pentagram a primitive eye; the name on the stone has been erased by time and neglect, but the inscription beneath reads "beloved son"

- suspended in the jar of corn-liquor is a thing like a tadpole, if a tadpole had no face but a single grey-green eyeball

Okay, I officially want to play CoC again.

That...is a huge amount of content. I'd love to actually read through it some time.

Yeah, I bore easily. CoC threads give me something to plug away at.

Very evocative as always. I don't know whether CoC seems to draw great writing from people, or whether really good writers are drawn to the material. Either way this was an enjoyable read, for some reason the Horror in the Icebox really sent a shiver down the spine.

Some of these shorter entries seem like SCP Foundation entries. Which is good.

Well, I admit to being familiar with the SCP wiki, and "A Corrupted Ritual" was highly influential in the "Family Masks" concept.

I have often thought that integrating SCP wiki material into a published setting would be a cool way for the CoC folks to get back a bit of market share.

That said, I really enjoyed skimming your content, but you have a few grammatical errors. Are you looking for corrections?

echo

Nah, dinnae bother unless you feel like it. 99% this stuff is off-the-cuff, y'know?

Moar!

The world of the 1920s and '30s were a time of great advances in pharmaceuticals and chemistry and relatively little regulation, when Bayer would market heroin as a miracle cure-all, and cocaine was in everything from toothpaste to Coca-Cola - and yet this was end of a boom period in elixirs, syrups, patent medicines, tinctures, and other products. While the science of chemistry progressed away from the assumptions of Medieval alchemy, laymen still placed their faith in miracle cures from strange powders and colored waters - and the foolish or unscrupulous supplied them, sometimes featuring powerful and dangerous chemicals in their quack medicines. Weird fiction has long understood that the allure of alchemy continued long after the overt practice was finished, and the trappings of chemistry are used to disguise fantastical substances - the eponymous stuff of Machen's "The Novel of the White Powder", the drug Aklo in Alan Moore's "The Courtyard", 'plutonium' and other planetary derivatives from Clark Ashton Smith's "The Plutonion Drug", and Liao from Frank Belknap Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos" to name just a few. Some of these substances alter consciousness and perception, others have more transformative effects, but all are exceptional chemicals, and gateways to personal horror.

Using Mythos-inspired drugs and chemicals in a game requires a bit of adjudication on the part of the Keeper, but offer considerable potential to push campaigns in different directions - from polished laboratories of contemporary chemists to opium dens, bootlegger stills, and the strange bubbling set-ups of Cthulhuvian alchemists. The following optional rules are suggested guidelines and additional material that Keepers may use to save time, or perhaps to inspire their own rules.

Keeper's Option: Mythos Receipts
For simplicity's sake, each individual Mythos-related chemical substance or drug is described by a receipt, written up in the exact same nature of a Mythos spell. The major distinction between a Mythos spell and a Mythos receipt is that a receipt costs no Magic points, and a character may choose either their Alchemy, Chemistry, Pharmacy, or Cthulhu Mythos skill when testing to see if the chemical process works. Success indicates that the Mythos drug or chemical is created; failure indicates the attempt has failed - and, at the Keeper's option, may have damaged equipment, or injured or poisoned the chemist. In any event, the attempt will use up any ingredients.

The main distinction between the Alchemy, Chemistry, and Pharmacy skills in Call of Cthulhu are a matter of approach - the alchemist uses outmoded and often mystical theories; the chemist and pharmacist work on more modern theories, with the latter specializing in drugs and medicines. In theory anyone can follow the directions of a receipt and successfully brew the resulting potion or drug, provided they have the right ingredients, but in practice the notation of the receipt and the underlying theories involved in the creation of the chemical substance. To reflect this, receipts have an additional notation reflecting the relative difficulty of the process, and the best skill to use.

Difficulty Levels: Some compounds may be accomplished with a pestle & mortar, others require elaborate glassware or distillation set-ups and precise timing; the difficulty of a receipt represents both the challenge of properly following the receipt instructions and the basic tools required.

Easy - The creation is simple, requiring only very basic tools as might be found in a household kitchen. Apply +10% to the character's skill when preparing this receipt. Cost of equipment is $25 (1920s/30s).

Average - The creation is straightforward but technical, and requires a minimum of chemical equipment - either purchased or custom-made. Character requires a basic lab or still; the cost is $250 (1920s/30s).

Hard - The creation is difficult, time-consuming, or precise; the theory behind the process may be obscure or poorly understood, and the equipment required may be substantial or unique. Apply -10% to the character's skill when preparing this receipt. Character requires a full lab or lots of specialized equipment, the cost is $2500 (1920s/30s).

The difficulty rating of the receipt determines what requirements in terms of equipment are necessary to prepare the material; not having adequate equipment applies a -20% modifier to the test when trying to make the Mythos material. The equipment is a one-time cost and can used repeatedly for different receipts; characters may also gain access to equipment and materials in other ways - for example, breaking in to a corner drug store at night, or getting permission to use any of Miskatonic University's chemical laboratories.

Preferred Skill: Because of the difference in notation and underlying theory, some receipts are better suited for some skills than others - the character may still use any of the relevant skills to attempt the receipt, but gets a +10% modifier to their skill roll when using the preferred skill.

Alchemy - Best suited to archaic receipts that are based on generally outmoded or discredited theories (which may or may not still work); alchemical ingredients tend to derive from natural substances such as plants, rocks, blood, feces, etc.

Chemistry - Best suited to contemporary receipts, based on the latest scientific theories and discoveries (which may or may not work); chemisty receipts tend to call for more precise amounts and types of ingredients and equipment.

Pharmacy - Related to chemistry, Pharmacy specializes in the creation of drugs, elixirs, medicines, and related substances designed to be applied to or ingested by the human body; pharmaceutical substances are often adulterated with other substances to make them more palatable.

Cthulhu Mythos - Best suited to non-human chemical receipts, using theories that are unknown and only vaguely understood by most humans, based on forces and processes that may be beyond human conception; these Mythos receipts combine the obscurity of alchemy and the precision of chemistry.

The difficulty and preferred skill are combined together in a form like (Easy, Pharmacy) or (Average, Chemistry).

Certain Mythos spells such as the Powder of Ibn-Ghazi are already effectively receipts, and at the Keeper's discretion may be counted as such. Any substance that requires Magic points to create, however, is more properly a spell and should be counted as such - though again, at the Keeper's option certain particularly rare or potent ingredients may replace the Magic point cost and allow a character with the Alchemy, Chemistry, or Pharmacy skill to successfully compound the substance. All Mythos spells-as-receipts default to (Average, Cthulhu Mythos). Receipts are thematically appropriate for inclusion in any Mythos book in place of a standard spell.

Mythos Ingredients
Fantastic chemicals tend to be derived from fantastic ingredients, and the various drugs and chemicals of the Mythos are no exception. In general, this means that every Mythos receipt requires certain ingredients, with the "active" material being derived from some Mythos source - blood of a Deep One, powdered Serpent-Man mummy, etc. - or at least something uncommon, such as material from a human corpse, extracts from a rare plant, or ore from a particular mine. For simplicity's sake, the "key" ingredient or ingredients is listed in every Mythos receipt.

Sample Receipts

Deep Blue (Easy, Pharmacy)
A dark blue, grainy, sticky substance, Deep Blue is typically smoked with opium or hashish. The user sinks into a senseless stupor and as the darkness closes in it assumes a deep blue hue. In the grip of the drug, mystics claim their astral forms are swept away on blood-warm tide to cold depths, where monsters sleep in the darkness where no sunlight has ever touched, and strange spired cities. Those with some occult knowledge can guide their forms to contact entities under the sea (Occult skill roll for ghosts of the drowned and the like, Cthulhu Mythos skill roll for Deep Ones or other Mythos entities), but few can handle such experiences with their minds intact (1d4/1d6 SAN loss per dose of Deep Blue - plus whatever SAN loss if the contact is successful). Still, the drug is hellishly addictive, and blue-tinged fingers and lips are the sign of the addict in certain parts of Innsmouth, Arkham, and Boston.
Key Ingredient: 6 ounces of bodily fluids from a Deep One or Deep One Hybrid

The Light of Xoth (Hard, Cthulhu Mythos)
The oily liquid in this strange, tightly stoppered glass vial gives off a terrible radiance that does not seem to illuminate as much as it gives texture and definition to the shadows. It is a beacon to the creatures of Xoth, and adds +10% to any Cthulhu Mythos roll for spells dealing with Cthulhu or his brood or minions. Should the liquid be exposed to air, it will immediately subliminate and form an odorless gass - everyone within 3 yards (or immediately downwind) gains 1d10 Corruption as vestigal tentacles begin to sprout in mouths, armpits, belly buttons and other such places.
Key Ingredient: 2 ounces of powdered star-stone

Suleiman's Stone (Hard, Alchemy)
It is written that when Mnar fell, the sorcerers quit that cursed place, and few dared return for the imperishable star-stones for the horrors that boarded there. So down the centuries they forged their substances with lesser stuff, and that which was closest was called Suleiman's Stone. By alchemical arts the body of a sorcerer is reduced to their essential saltes, and then those salts in turn are transmuted into a hard grey stone, dull as coal but hard as adamant, and much prized by sorcerers. While being made the stone may be shaped in almost any form, but once hardened it is nearly indestructable (Strength 50 to break).
Key Ingredient: The essential saltes of a sorcerer

Xytiminanine-9 (Average, Chemistry)
A super-vitamin being developed in secret by the Federal government, Xytiminanine-9 is part of a secret program looking toward perfecting the advancement of the human race. The program is being run at Miskatonic University, where unwitting college students agree to be test subjects. So far the results appear very promising - subjects report increased perceptions of time and phenomenal improvements in reaction for the hour that the chemical is in effects (the character always acts first in combat) - but many also report headaches, audible hallucinations of baying or sniffing, and a few have disappeared entirely (Xd6% chance of attracting the Hounds of Tindalos, where X is the number of times the drug has been taken).
Key Ingredient: One pound of fungal matter that grows up in the tailings of Mi-Go mines.

Lab Analysis
Analyzing a Mythos substance is also possible using Alchemy, Chemistry, Pharmacy, or the Cthulhu Mythos skills. If the substance is related to a receipt that the character knows, then on a successful roll of a skill the character will recognize that substance, or at least be able to conjecture its relation. If totally unknown, the character may be able to derive from information on its key ingredient and the difficulty of compounding it, which may provide clues as to its source.

Nyarlathotep: Behind the Masks
Nyarlathotep, the Black Man, the Mighty Messenger, the Black Pharoah, He-Of-A-Thousand-Masks - often the most direct contact that any human will have with the Great Old Ones, the one who most actively works to bring about their return, and a common foil in many Call of Cthulhu scenarios. Omnipresent, ambiguous, and an eminiently flexible shapechanger Nyarly is often overused, simply because it is so easy to use him in any given scenario. So over the next five days or so I'm going to present some alternative conceptions of Nyarlathotep, with ideas on how this may impact how Nyarly is used in your games.

The N-Construct
So much vastly little is known of the Great Old Ones, through what dimensions or depths of interstellar space they came from to this small, dull world, or why. Researches into their history and nature reveal little save how vastly different they are from the normal life on this planet, operating on profoundly different principles, forms of matter, and senses that it is a wonder they can perceive us at all. Perhaps it was for this purpose that they created Nyarlathotep - an artificial entity, crafted with the purpose to explore, interact, and manipulate. Perhaps the truth of Nyarlathotep's existence underlies the legend of the golem, the homunculus, the idea of artificial intelligence - or perhaps the superlative skill of Nyarlathotep's creators is simply enough to give the illusion of sentience and free will to an entity that is little more than a metastable energy-pattern in the cosmic matrix; certainly it is unlike anyone is going to give Nyarlathotep a Turing Test to find out, or if they would be able to interpret the results correctly.

There are several possible ramifications of an N-Construct, the most obvious is that it renders Nyarlathotep vulnerable - the essential "program" that is the artificial brain could be corrupted by some alien technology (purposeful, in the case of the Elder Gods, or unwitting in the case of human involvement), and these errors could be manifest as bizarre alterations of form or behavior, particularly being trapped in loops of action, the sudden disappearance of body parts from his avatars, repetitions of phrases, etc., or full-blown descent into artificial insanity - imagine a Nyarlathotep who believes the stars are ripe and attempts to trigger an atomic war decades earlier than planned. Another possibility is an upgraded or new version, created by the Great Old Ones to better facilitate their plans, and whose first task is the elimination of the old N-Construct; and the possibility of upgrade means that their may be earlier versions of Nyarlathotep running around - more limited, mechanical things; perhaps each mask is simply another iteration of the N-Construct series.

Keepers can utilize this idea in many ways, although perhaps the best is a scenario or set of scenarios that lends some insight into the nature of Nyarlathotep. Computer programming has a long history and could offer insight into the process, particularly if the eccentric scientist conflates the advanced mathematics of Mythos spells with the Medieval alchemical efforts at creating artificial life, and endeavors an experiment to test the "theory" - essentially creating a small, crippled version of Nyarlathotep that investigators will have to deal with, even if they are not able to destroy it. Paritcularly experienced investigators who have encountered more than one version of Nyarlathotep may be dragged into a conflict between different iterations of the N-construct, particularly if one "flawed" version that has taken on too much human understanding is being hunted down by another version.

Perhaps the best characterization of the N-construct, however, is that while it is designed specifically to be able to interact with organic life such as humans, it is still not human, it's logic alien and its emotions non-existent. It is at best a mirror which humans project their own traits on, but its actions are essentially mechanical and limited, constrained not just by the wards of the Elder Sign but also by the inherent limitations programmed into it by the Great Old Ones, and potentially vulnerable to commands issued in the right fashion (probably an individual and draining spell for each such "command" - perhaps the Necronomicon is no more than a user's manual for the N-construct, and all magic is accomplished by Nyarlathotep in accordance with the instructions of the "users.")

The Nonexistant Nyarlathotep
It may be that Nyarlathotep exists only as an idea, never as an actual force or entity. The world spins, the cultists chant their spells and write their books, but the Black Man never comes to the witches' covens, never spreads the lure of atomic weapons to the nations of the world, or corrals the gods of earth about the Dreamlands. So a million rumors and accounts exist of Nyarlathotep, all the stories of his masks and avatars is so much hokum, all the spells that try to contact or summon him automatically fail - because there is no Nyarlathotep. Sorcerers spend their lives in vain trying to figure out what they are doing wrong, authors of arcane literature dutifully write up their accounts based on what earlier occultists had claimed, never seeing the multifarious visage.

The nonexistence of Nyarlathotep robs the Mythos of its most human, diabolical face. There is no Mighty Messenger; why would there be? Humans are as less than ants or microbes to Them, and their return neither greatly aided nor hindered by human effort. Such a terrible truth is useful to Keepers as an ending point in a campaign, or to mark a negative climax - to fill the players with despair that all they have done and sought is mere vanity against the stark cosmic truth that there is no great scheme for them to defeat, only the pettier machinations of men - and deluded men at that, who work through their mummery and dark miracles seeking for a devil that neither exists, nor would care for them if it did exist.

On the other claw, the absence of Nyarlathotep in the narrative suggests some additional possibilities - cults may have figures or entities that "stand in" for Nyarlathotep, explaining his multiplicity of guises and agendas, and these sham Nyarlathoteps, while not cosmic in power or scope, may yet be formidable adversaries. Or perhaps only the player characters are aware of Nyarlathotep, when all other trace and record of that entity has vanished, and they must come to terms with the idea that Nyarlathotep may once have existed, but apparently no longer does - has Nyarlathotep been destroyed, or imprisoned? Has some rival power displaced Nyarlathotep? Can the cosmos operate without Nyarlathotep, or does his absence spell the doom of all without Nyarlathotep there to minister for Azathoth? Is it then up to the investigators to free/resurrect/replace the grim entity - or perhaps one of their rivals has assumed the position of Nyarlathotep, and now they are under siege by every coven and sorcerer in the world...

Your Personal Nyarlathotep
Humans exist in an unfathomed space, greater than the three dimensions we typically operate in, and though we are mostly ignorant of it some part of us lives on in higher dimensions that we cannot perceive. Typically, the forces and beings that operate in these higher realms do not perceive us, but when we meddle with the mechanics of the higher spheres and disturb the strange geometries of beyond they may turn the light of their countenance upon us - and the shadow it casts is Nyarlathotep.

In this scenario, each expression of Nyarlathotep is a personal reflection or caricature of a character, brought about by their use of Mythos magic, and it interacts predominantly with that character. Simply using Mythos magic, in other words, attracts the attention of cosmic Mythos entities; the character becomes an actor, however small, on the playing field of the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones, a pawn in their great game - and the sign of their interest and meddling is Nyarlathotep. Characters may mistake the machinations and actions of Nyarlathotep and conclude he is the agent of the Old Ones' will - but this is a misunderstanding of the situation brought about from a limited perspective. Each character's Nyarlathotep is a reflection of the Mythos entities' efforts to manipulate the character, and the form and actions of Nyarlathotep are a meter by which the characters can judge what they may become - if they have not become that already.

In play, this form of Nyarlathotep is a watcher and a revealer of subconcious hints that lead the investigators and NPCs towards the Mythos; the mere appearance of the Black Man may send the character running - straight where the entities of the Mythos wished them too. Ultimately, the character is being manipulated to further the goals of one Mythos entity or another, and sometimes the influence of two or more opposing forces will lead a character to their untimely doom - and their shadowy, eerily familiar Nyarlathotep will be there when it happens.

The Nyarlathotep Drug
The reduction of magic to science, as with the transition from alchemy to chemistry, has sometimes brought it a fundamental change in our understanding of the universe and our place in it. We know now, for example, that the hallucinogenic effects of ergot fungus on grain may well have been responsible for mass panics and hallucinations in the Middle Ages; in more modern times the critical substance of ergot was synthesized as LSD. This in turned helped spark a long-simmering trend of re-examing the sacred and magical and medicinal plants of many cultures and religions - psilocybin, hashish, opium, and more. So what does this imply for the Mythos? Might not Nyarlathotep is a consensual hallucination brought on by a chemical when it interacts with the nervous systems of sufficiently advanced organisms? A cult sacrament that spurs a different state of consciousness, or activates dormant and regressive areas of the brain. Might such a substance come from a fungus cairn, or perhaps spores from some strange world were carried in the wake of alien invasions in the distant past, and still linger in the ancient, pre-human ruins of R'lyeh and other legendary locales.

The idea of a drug-induced hallucination version of Nyarlathotep can be used by Keepers to add ambiguity and paranoia to their games - if the players are drugged, how can they trust their senses? How much of what they see and hear and experience at these cultish revels really happened? After all, the cults could have braziers of strange-smelling smoke burning, making eyes water and heads dizzy - certainly that could not be a fish-man-thing on top of the girl, certainly that was not a tentacle that escaped from beneath the high priest's clothing, certainly that was not a shoggoth... Keepers who use this option may allow lower Sanity loss while the character is under the effect of the drug, at least until they discover evidence that confirms their visions while sober.

Becoming Nyarlathotep
The Great Race, for all their accomplishments, are still mortal beings tied to organic forms - they may project and displace their minds, but they are not creatures of pure thought. That privilege is reserved for Nyarlathotep, the Mighty Messenger, a tiny, independent fragment of Azathoth devoid of physical form. To interact with material beings, even such strangely material creatures as Mighty Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep must impress himself on some chosen subject - overriding and suppressing their mind with his own, and typically taking on the characteristic black coloring. In this way, anyone and every living thing is a potential Nyarlathotep. A player may lose temporary control of their character as an investigator becomes the latest mask of Nyarlathotep, emerging from where they had hidden spying on the cult to lead the rite; NPCs may invite the possession, or make arcane preparations in a futile attempt to channel or control Nyarlathotep's manifestation, but Nyarlathotep is immune to such tricks. Only a rare few artifacts and spells, perhaps the fabled Elder Sign, offer any potential protection - and even then, only if the Keeper permits it.

The Becoming Nyarlathotep is fitting for a capricious and teasing entity, similar to the character of Azazel from the movie Fallen, and manipulates teeming humanity in accordance with his goals - but the Becoming Nyarlathotep operates under certain arcane restrictions that do not permit it from accomplishing these goals itself, for fear of whatever destruction awaits such an entity. The prisons of the Great Old Ones are beyond it's power to approach, even in borrowed flesh, and Elder Signs could wholly or partially force Nyarlathotep to flee from a host form.

Some Alternate Campaigns
A little while ago I posted a silly alternate setting idea - Cowthulhupunk - The Rustlers from Beyond - but lately I've been thinking of how else you could play CoC, without altering the basic rules and mechanics appreciably and keeping the general timeframe, and come up with a couple ideas.

The Doom that came to Arkham is essentially a post-apocalyptic campaign, set in the ruins of Arkham and surrounding communities after a disaster in the 1880s (for an 1890s campaign) or the 1920s (for a 1930s campaign). The obvious goal for the campaign is to try and figure out what happened - the damage is extensive, but not commensurate with tornados or earthquake, the few survivors in Arkham itself are mad, or refuse to speak of it. The scale of the destruction is key to the atmosphere of the piece - a trail of destruction from Dunwich to Innsmouth, more or less straight through Arkham, practically levelling Miskatonic University and the town center; many books in the special collections were looted or disappeared, strange blighted plants still grow from poisoned wells in the wake of the thing. What caused it? Was it the secretive government action around Innsmouth, that unleashed something even the military could not control? Or did it erupt from the hills past Dunwich, and make its way to Arkham? What part do the Rite of Dagon and the Starry Wisdom have to play in this, as those groups gain strength amid the survivors? Investigators will have to pick through weed-choked, rubble-strewn streets, past buildings that look half-crushed and half-melted and bodies that still lie unburied, into desolate cellars open to the sky now that the houses above them were ripped from their foundations, and spiders and mildew grow on the books that may hold the answers... Being a post-apocalyptic campaign, investigators will have to work to survive as well as discover the truth: clean water and food are scarce, the few surviving houses provide little shelter against the elements, phone and telegraph lines are down, police protection nonexistant, dogs and other animals gone feral...and then there are the twisted, inbred, half-mad survivors, some of whom are rumored to have resorted to cannibalism, or been twisted by drinking twisted water and plants, many succumbing to cancer and a strange wasting disease.

In The Shadow of Innsmouth is a campaign of existential horror. The once half-decayed port of Innsmouth prospers under the New Deal, the harbor re-built and full of ships, trade coming in and going out from all across the country, and the sea-side taverns serve beer and spirits to seamen from all across the world. Yet the town exists in the shadow of Dagon, the monstrous looming entity that broods on the cliff just outside the city, the leviathan's head hidden by the clouds, casting a dark shadow that keeps the town in perpetual half-twilight. No human force has managed to damage or dislodge the creature, nor has it moved or acted since it rose out of the depths to assume its vigil. Strange groups have sprung up based around it, and the many competing churches and sects of Dagon plot and preach against each other, none receiving any beneficial motion or acknowledgement from the unmoving titan. Aside from the looming eldritch horror, the campaign is fairly low-key in Mythos elements - investigators may solve murders and threats, deal with the clashes and intrigue between rival Dagon sects, etc. - all while under the unblinking gaze of that immense horror. It is one thing to believe in an all-powerful evil or entity in the abstract, out of sight, it is something else again for it to be on your doorstep. The arrival and presence of Dagon, along with the complete oblivousness of it to its worshippers or any human presence, would have a fractioning effect - the Marsh clan may reign as industrialists, the princes of the city, pockets filled with fat Navy contracts due to the nearby Devil's Reef Naval Weapons Testing Area and the far trade, but their fellow hybrid clans like the Gilmans and Phipps may have rival powers and Dagonic sects - gangsters controlling smuggling, or who turn to opposing theologies and powers as they attempt to thrive in what is still the Great Depression.

After Cthulhu is a campaign more of lost wonder than of horror; Cthulhu and all the earth-bound entities and minions of the Great Old Ones were persecuted and destroyed, their few remaining cities and hiding places ruined and lost. There are no inhuman monsters in this setting - no Deep Ones or Shoggoths, and even the Mi-Go will not venture here again after the great slaughter by more determined and bloodthirsty investigators. Instead the investigators probe the lost, drowned cities off the coast of Innsmouth and certain Pacific Islands, or in the dusty outback of Australia and the lonesome deserts of the Middle East, and seek to rout crude sorcerers that squabble over the relics and remnants of lost horrors. They may bury the final evidence of these ancient Mythos, or seek to collect and preserve them. Possible starting points include the Child of the Deeps. Of course, if set a generation of more after Cthulhu's destruction, the tone of the campaign may change as it appears Cthulhu may return...

The Living Necronomicon is a bit of a strange campaign, where the shoes is put on the other foot for the investigators. It begins as they are gathered together one night, and an old man bundled all over collapses in front of them - if his clothes are loosened, they discover his skin is covered with strange writings, which fade from view - only to reappear on the investigators gathered there. The PCs have each essentially become part of the Living Necronomicon, and they will not have to go looking far for the Mythos - because with such a prize bound into their very skin, it will come seek them out. This premise presents the investigators with an immediate "source" of Mythos knowledge and spells, should they choose to read their own (or each other's...) bodies, as well as a distinctive feature that they will have to conceal or utilize as needs must; the goal of the campaign could be a method to safely remove the Necronomicon from their skins - or else to keep it from being gathered together as a single volume by an unscrupulous wizard or cult leader. Alternately, there may be other "lost pages" from the Necronomicon about in the world, and it is up to the investigators to find and safeguard them.

Yuggoth Rising - In 1930, the dwarf planet Pluto was discovered. In 1932, astronomers noted what appeared to be eruptions from the surface - and in the weeks and months after that, it became apparent that there were objects heading from Pluto...to Earth. Now the newspaper headlines deliver the latest updates on the objects, only months away before they impact - or land - on earth. The atmosphere is tense; politicians, scientists, and the military prepare for the worst - a possible invasion from another planet. In Germany, the charismatic new leader is elected who begins a massive military build-up in preparation for the war of the worlds, further heightening tensions around the world. It is in this atmosphere that the investigators stumble upon evidence that the invaders from Pluto - known in the old mythology as Yuggoth - may already be here...

The Dunwich Cuckoos - Something is wrong with the children of the world. Beginning eight years ago, normal births in the Miskatonic River Valley ceased. Babies are born deformed, strange, almost creatures of myth and nightmare - frog-eyed things with webbed toes, dark-skinned infants with goatish faces that grow unnaturally swift, creatures with stunted fused tentacles in place of arms and legs, grey-furred ape-things, and more. Some rural communities have turned to infantcide, or sold their children to zoos and traveling sideshows - but others have been raised up by their parents, displaying unusual behaviors and strange knowledge, speaking languages they have never been taught...and preparing for something. In Dunwich, young Wilbur Whateley leads nightly processions of deformed children up the slope of Sentinel Hill, and in Innsmouth the Marsh Quintuplets swim naked to Devil's Reef under the moonlight. In this campaign, the 'Dunwich Cuckoos', the strange children touched by the Mythos, are neither villains nor innocents, but something of both. Investigators in this region know that some of them are up to something - but how far will they go to stop the children, if they can? What caused the births in the first place, and which still afflict local families? What will local investigators do if they have a Dunwich Cuckoo as a younger brother, sister, nephew, niece, or cousin? And what of the Miskatonic Orphanarium, which holds the greatest concentration of these cuckoos, abandoned by parents that did not want them?

Planetary Cthulhu - It is a 1950s as imagined by Hugo Gernsback, where the fat silver needles of spaceships carry men and women to Mars and Saturn and Venus as imagined by Clark Ashton Smith, strange worlds filled with alien life, and a new colonialism has taken hold with this new frontier. For all the technological progress of rockets and sky-ships, food pills and energy-crystals there has been little social progress; every nation in the world has its working class of toilers with its social movements, and without a World War there yet exists a Cold War between the superpowers of Soviet Russia and the United States, burgeoning solar empires run by room-sized computers and tedious pencil calculations. In his high tower, an aged Nikola Tesla stares into the depths of the Shining Trapozehedron, and orders the coils to full power for the experiment - even in this science-fiction age, he dreams of greater things than the closest worlds - he dreams of the distant stars, and the horrors that lurk there. But what is behind this technological innovation of the last thirty years? Could it be the Mi-Go, those strange creatures of distant Yuggoth allied with the communist forces behind the Iron Curtain? It is in such a world - what horrors yet lurk, behind closed doors and in old records, for investigators to discover?

Between Worlds - In Arkham, Randolph Carter wrote stories of H. P. Lovecraft, a dreamer among dreamers. In Providence, H. P. Lovecraft detailed the horrors of Carter's world. The investigators fall between these two worlds; they awaken during the day in one world, and when they fall asleep they wake up in the other - and find that the horrors both men wrote about exist in each. What clues can the investigators decipher from the stories of each man, to discover which world is real and which fiction - what insights can help them against he monstrous Starry Wisdom cult of Arkham and Salem - and will it be enough? For if they do not stop them, both worlds may be destroyed - and what other worlds may fall beyond that?

Court of Cthulhu - Even cultists get due process. Mythos crimes fall under a special jurisdiction, a secret court where those who dabble in the Mythos - or are, like the folks of Innsmouth, not entirely human - are subject to trial. Unlike most courts in the United States, this secret court is more interested in finding out the truth of the matter, and for this they employ investigators - agents with special warrants that supersede the local authorities, and charged with finding the evidence that can prove guilt or innocence. It's a fine line they must walk through the rules of the secret court, through the mire of moral and supernatural slime. Did Izaih Marsh shoot his business partner? Did Miss Jenkins intentionally read the passage from the Necronomicon aloud? It is up to you to find out.

CT&T, and other Communication Oddities
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the telephone and telegraph to the development of modern life, the innovation and inventiveness that went in - and continues to go in - to their development, use, and manufacture, and the supernatural and scientifiction associated with them as they were introduced and spread. Lovecraft understood something of the intangible, distancing effect of the telephone, the prospect of speaking into the unknown void at the end of the wire and hearing it come back ...you fool, Loveman is dead! in "The Statement of Randolph Carter." In the "The Dunwich Horror", the old party-line in Dunwich becomes a matter of critical importance as friends and neighbors hear the last screams by wire, powerless to do anything; in Brian Lumley's "The Caller of the Black" the occultist makes use of a telephone to deliver a critical incantation. There are, however, many more purposes that a telephone or telegraph can be put to in a Call of Cthulhu game, and this thread will give some of them.

The Necrophone
Source: Necronauts, Hellboy the Conqueror Worm, Atomic Robo the Shadow Out of Time

Rumor has it that in 1920, to a select group of scientists, Thomas Edison unveiled his spirit phone, or necrophone - a device for communicating with the other side. What few know is that as with many other of his supposed inventions, Edison was merely borrowing the work of one of his employees - a bright and intense young engineer named Samuel Ward DeBill. Edison's device, based on an early prototype that DeBill had fashioned from certain papers and books passed down from his mother's family, the Wards of Providence, was little more than an electronic Ouija board, capable of opening up a channel to the Void, but unable to fix its signal on any specific voice or target. The first demonstrations of the device were disquieting and chaotic, sometimes a babble of voices and sometimes nothing - until the final demonstration, when no human spirit reached out through the trembling wire, and Edison was forced to smash the device to break the connection. His experiments ended there, the damaged necrophone locked in his laboratory at Menlo Park - but Samuel Ward DeBill went further with his experiments, and succeeding in refining his design to the point where he could give voice to a specific disembodied spirit, provided he had some part of their corpse. With this discovery, DeBill's intent to perfect his device became a ghoulish obsession that consumed him, and he sought out the remains of his cousin, Charles Dexter Ward, for some strange purpose...and whether he succeeded or not, was never heard from again.

Appearance: The receiver end of the necrophone is a standard, economical speaking bell and earpiece connected by a handle, scavenged from a German WWI trench telephone and still bearing a few marks and characters in German. The body of the device is contained in a large leather black bag, and appears similar to a very complicated radioset, or perhaps two - there are unusual crystals for determining the correct operating frequency, mercury-filled valves to open and close contact, and a strange glass bell edged in copper wires where the antenna should be - large enough to contain an entire human skull, which it often might, and somewhat stained from this sort of use - as well as two large, heavy batteries, set at the end to counterbalance the weight of the device for easier carrying. A heavy switch with a black handle activates and deactivates the circuit.

Powers: Without a skull, or using the earlier Edison design, the Necrophone allows the user to speak into the void - the Keeper should treat this as a random Contact spell, with a duration of (10 - Magic Point cost of the spell) minutes, after which the batteries are exhausted. With a skull, hand, essential salts, or some other bodily component hooked up correctly, the necrophone allows a conversation of up to 30 minutes with the deceased owner before the batteries must be recharged (it has no effect if the tissue is from a living entity). Using the necrophone costs 1d4 SAN to all within earshot when activated, plus whatever additional SAN loss the Keeper finds appropriate for conversing with the entity or entities in question, though the total SAN loss for conversing with such entities should not be more than half the maximum SAN cost of seeing them, as listed in their profiles. With a sufficient power source, the connection brought by the necrophone could be maintained almost indefinitely.

Possible Hook: The investigators, investigating a possible haunting, break into a walled-up chamber where whispers are heard. They discover there the dried corpse of Samuel Ward DeBill, sitting at a table, still listening to the scratchy, inhuman voice babbling from the other end of the phone clutched in his mummified hand...

The Necronomicon Telegram
Inspiration: The Caller of the Black
By the mid-1920s, relatively advanced electro-mechanical teleprinters using the Baudot code or variants had been invented and begun to penetrate the market, replacing older machines and circuits in major companies, post offices, and Western Union Telegraph offices. In 1926 the Miskatonic University installed a primitive teleprinter, in part because the Arkham Telegraph Office was unable to meet the demand required by certain researchers abroad to contact the university library in a timely manner, and librarians began a student project to transcribe certain rare, out-of-copyright, and highly requested works to telegraph archives - translating the text into a series of stacked cards which could be fed into the teleprinter, to reproduce the text on the other end of the circuit. The Miskatonic University Library Telegraph Archives (MULTA) project lasted for ten years, in part due to the high turn-over of students working on the project, and was never fully completed due to changes in the technology rendering the project obsolete.

Appearance
The MULTA consist of piles of punched cards, usually grouped in bricks of 100 cards, each representing between five to ten pages of text from a given work. By the end of the project, over fifteen thousand cards had been punched, consisting mostly of the complete text of the Latin Necronomicon, which was given a priority by the librarians in charge of the project. The remaining cards consist of specific pages requested by professors, scholars, and graduate students, including selections from Prof. Laban Shrewsbury's conjectural translation of the R'lyeh Text and the Cthäat Aquadingen.

Powers
To be read, the cards must generally be fed (in order) through the university's teleprinter or an equivalent model. Errors in the transcription and the ommission of illustrations and annotations in the text may, at the Keeper's option, lower the quality of the copy of the Necronomicon, the out sheets printed from the cards are still in Latin and must be translated into English. Among the other cards is one brick - #114 - includes a portion of spell from the Cthäat Aquadingen, which at the Keeper's option may result in the calling of the black.

Life does not take the same forms in every place, and strange things may be attracted to the network of cables and wires that map the world. Insubstantial things that dwell in dark circuits on the ocean floor may be disturbed by the laying of underseas cables, and ghostly emanations in the upper air may be drawn down to strings of telephone wires. Once entered into this new environment, free of whatever predators they may once have been subject to, such creatures may explore the limits of their new system or propagate themselves in strange ways.

The Thing in the Wires
Source/Inspiration: Bruce Sterling's "Flowers of Edo"
It began with an invocation from a dusty tome, read over a pay telephone in Arkham. The syllables themselves did not matter much for the conjuration, but the pattern of electric impulses in the wire continued to perpetuate themselves through the circuit. The phenomenon was noticed by the local telephone company, whose technicians were baffled--the signal did not behave normally, but moved throughout the system, noticeable by many of the residents. Efforts to eradicate the rogue noise came to naught - the signal seemed to sense and sometimes resist efforts to trace it, and the engineer, Paul Reuben, called in to study the matter declared it a ghost signal produced intermittently by local radio stations and insufficiently shielded wires. Unwilling to undergo the expense to take down and replace the lines for such a minor problem, the company chose instead to ignore it.

Appearance: Phone calls into or out of Arkham may experience a slight sound in the background - a subvocal, rhythmic noise, usually very faint. Arkhamites who hear it for long periods of time typically report headaches and tiredness.

Powers: The Thing in the Wires is mostly harmless, unless it grows hungry or agitated, content to explore the telephone network around Arkham. The thing grows agitated when its domain is restricted and it feels trapped - which can happen when circuits are opened or telephone lines cut. It loses 1 POW per month, replaced by feeding on neural electricity, typically a very small amount drawn from Arkhamites on long telephone conversations (it can draw 1 POW/hour from a victim, until the connection is cut or the phone is put down). It cannot normally be forced to manifest save by extraordinary measures - a catastrophic failure of the telephone network, for example, dire hunger, or supernatural compulsion; if it does manifest, use the stats for a fire vampire, save that the entity is invisible (it may be rendered visible by the Powder of Ibn Ghazi).

A suitably modern occultist with some understanding of sound and electricity might be able to invent a Bind Thing in the Wires spell. It would be a potent servant for a sorcerer, able to listen in to telephone conversations, weaken and slay enemies from afar - for few houses and businesses in these modern times lack a telephone, and none have wards to hold back the Thing in the Wires, if any such wards exist that have power over it...

The Call through Space
Source/Inspiration: The Matrix, The Prestige
Johann Galthus was a German engineer that pursued his higher studies in the electrical sciences at Miskatonic University. He spent long hours at the library and in the labs, working on some device related to the telephone, based on a strange and arcane theory he had created - or some say discovered in certain iron-bound books in German black letter - that all of time and space were an illusion, and men and animals and all matter consisted solely of information, which could be transmitted as electrical signals over the telephone wires. In 1929 he prepared a demonstration of a device he said could affect this transmission, and on a small stage before a well-assembled crowd his assistant placed a call - the receiver rang - Galthus raised it to his ear - and disappeared from the knowledge of men. The account caused a small sensation in the Arkham Advertizer, though the Gazette was more guarded and circumspect in its coverage. After three days the police began an investigation, and suspicion immediately fell on Galthus' assistant, Gram Parsons; when the mangled body of Galthus was discovered in a telephone relay station a short distance from the hall where the exhibition had taken place, Parsons was arrested for murder, and after trial was sentenced to life in prison.

Appearance: Galthus' bulky apparatus requires several substantial capacitors and dynamos, configured to generate a tremendous but momentary charge - and is configured to be plug in to what appears to be a standard telephone, although this is a conceit - beneath the simple exterior lies an electromagnetic device of tremendous complexity, with components including rare and difficult to work materials, at the edge of existing technology - or beyond. There are two such devices, one of which must be placed at either end of the line to send and receive the signal of the individual.

Powers: Galthus' apparatus works, more or less, though even the slightest interruption in the line will lead to a lethal and incomplete re-materialization. However, unbeknown to Galthus even without his accident he was doomed, for his understanding did not extend to how time and space are interconnected - every use of his device had a flat 50% chance of attracting the attention of the Hounds of Tindalos.

Mythos Images
We've had a few threads now on how to make scenarios, and I've stated my preferred take on things - a sandbox for the players to play in, with a loose collection of scenes. The thing is, the scenes are important keystones in a scenario, they help to define the critical moments, and are what players will remember afterwards. It pays to give a good bit of thought into how a scene will play out (with or without player character intervention), and really are the points that give a Keeper a chance to shine. Crafting a scene is an art rather than a science, and every Keeper or scenario writer will have their own preferred methods to go about it - but for me, I always start out with a single, iconic image, usually one that can communicate or suggest a great deal while remaining extremely simple. I'd like to share a few images with you in this thread, and the stories behind them.

1. The Measure of Man
On a raised platform or altar, marked at the edges by four great pillars of petrified wood, a vast rugose cone lies recumbent on it's side, an unnatural pose that the strange body was obviously never meant for - there is a curious depression near the middle as though some vital internal support had collapsed, and even now a curious bruising is apparent on the imperishable flesh. Yet for all that, the thing seems purposeful and calm, the tentacles at its base curled about each other, the head resting on a petrified mass as a man might lay on a pillow. With that thought, the rest of the strange surroundings takes on new focus - and you recognize, though all out of scale and separated by man by millions of years, that the tremendous cone lies on what was once a four-poster bed!

There's a story that the Elephant Man would have to sleep sitting up, because the weight of his deformities made lying down dangerous - and that at the end, in a desperate bid to live like a normal man, he laid down to sleep, and died. Imagine then the same story, but it would be a man of the same period transplaced by a member of the Great Race - and perhaps trapped in that form, and desperate in some way to retain a fragment of their former life and identity.

2. The Prisoner in Ink
The cell is bare, but clean and simple. Solid cement walls, painted an institutional gray free of adornment, the sole light source a high, barred window. Squatting in the middle of the cell is a man, taut skin over wiry muscle, stripped to the waist and dragging a needle through the skin above his bellybutton, leaving a line of black dots to complete a strange heiroglyph growing down from his sternum. Lines of script follow down through each arm, over chest and belly, and crawl up the neck - but planned and laid out with care, like a book dissected and laid out like a butterfly. Interspersed with the lines of text are miniatures and illustrations picked out in exquisite detail, and the chapters are laid out in blue-black on skin so pale you can see the veins throb beneath the dark words. With the patience of a monk, the prisoner is illuminating his book.

Books-on-skin is an old idea - but it is an enduring image; tattooing is one of those things that every generation seems to want to discover or rediscover on their own. There is a similarity in many respects between the prisoner and the anchorite or monk - the abstinence, ascetism, the freedom of distraction to focus tremendous energies on a single painstaking craft or work. With the Mythos, of course, this tends to take on more overtly occult leanings - the book may be a Mythos book, the blasphemous knowledge engrained on the prisoner's hide, to be flayed off him later, so that only a skinless corpse is discovered in the cell. Or - and I like this one better - the "living canvas" may not be the prisoner in ink at all, but some darker thing imprisoned by the spells written on the flesh. Imagine a shan, or some other inner horror, their influence on the host cut off even as they live inside him...and his bindings ensure that when he does die, the dark thing will be trapped in his rotting corpse for some time to come, unable to escape its prison of ink and flesh. Such a binding might also serve to keep dormant certain Mythos influences...the hidden genetics of Innsmouth seeking manifestation, for instance.

3. The Voice in the Fire
Even in this electric age, you are familiar with the million faces of fire - the small orange flames of the stove, the bright yellow sparks and streamers from hearth and chimney, the tiny lights of candles surrounded by clear pools like water, yet not drowned; the roaring ruddy of furnaces and the almost blistering, sooty warmth of the campfire on cold nights. There are many tricks of fire too - scientists with strange chemicals and powders that can make a little gas flame burn blue, or green, or even clear, so that only a ripple in the air betrays the consuming presence - yet this flame is different. For other flames more quickly in response to the wind, and flare upwards and stream like gas, but this strange fire is sluggish, and moves like a syrup, so that you would almost think of burning molasses, if molasses could be as bright as a red-hot coal and slowly blacken and consume that which was beneath it, leaving not even a tarry residue. The fire moves like water finding its level, and settles after a winding trail into a tiny pool, though you cannot see what fuel it consumes and think again to the fine blue flames of rum or some other potent spirit. And with no wood to pop and crack, the air still and the darkness as quiet as it may be, a slight hissing comes, the steady movement of air being drawn in or out of some organ. The fiery pool before you begins to ripple, shockwaves undulating from the center as a little vacule forms, and flaoting in that glowing orange mass you can see will-o'-the-wisps of trapped air, tiny rainbow skinned bubbles that float untoached in the blaze...and when one of those bright spheres reached the central disturbance it erupts into a discernable syllable. And again, and again, until you remember again that line from Lord Dunsany's play, of how terrible it is to see stone walk - but oh, how much more terrible to hear fire speak...

Part of fantasy is a central paradox, breaking what is known of the world. You see this in efforts to assign living qualities to inanimate things, or human qualities to animals, or alien qualities to that which is human. There is a terrible and inherent wrongness that comes with metal as supple and warm as flesh, which moans to a caress, and which seems drive by a terribly human hunger - but, and this is the key, presentation is everything. It is not enough to have the fantastic, the reader has to be led up to the truth of it by degrees. It is said when the Native Americans first saw the massive ships of the Europeans, they described them as floating mountains - because they had no concept or vocabulary to better address the concept. Players, when faced with something novel, are more difficult to deal with, because they already accept that they play a fantasy game. They expect tentacles and eldritch horrors, and the mere appearance of a fungus-man or a buzzing thing piloting a despoilt corpse is not enough to really move them. For maximum effect, you need to work up to it slowly - keep the versimilitude as long as possible, engage their own speculations and experiences, let them think, for as long as possible, that this is within normal explanation - and then take it a step further, so that all the pretenses are blown away, and they come at last to realizing that this is not some unusual natural phenomenon, but something new and completely beyond their experience.

Which is difficult, because players are skeptics and jaded - as I said, they come to the table expecting fantasy. That is why it is most important to give them plenty of mundane details and interesting-but-natural material to process and acclimate to. Players tend to pick up on little details and if you do it right, you can engage their suspicions and allay them and engage them again for some time before there is any payoff - like an NPC that always wears gloves, no matter the setting or the heat. A player might rightly note this detail, but the best response is not for the gloves to come off right away, but for the NPC to offer to shake hands - and the PC receives a strong, secure grip, if somewhat squishy as if the hand was plump and soft, but not necessarily boneless or abnormal.

How many times have you heard of a place or object ascribed attributes that you would normally associate with people? The brooding city, the vibrant pulse of malice from the dread tome, the cruel edge of the ancient stone knife dredged from the ocean - sometimes these attributes are given to some inhabiting spirit or entity, but so often in Lovecraftian fiction the place and the thing themselves become almost characters in their own right; The Dunwich Horror does not have quiet the same impact without Dunwich itself. An idea that is sometimes touched on but seldom elaborated, the Literal is a character concept where anthromorphization is taken one step beyond metaphor - the place or tome or object literally becomes a character, cosmetically indiscernable from another human being, but decidedly not human in experience, powers, and outlook.

Keepers may like to use Literals to throw a curveball to players that have seen and done it all, and as an opportunity to allow NPCs to interact with certain classical Mythos concepts in new and interesting ways. This will tend to bring a game closer to a Gothic or fantasy feel, depending on how the Keeper plays the encounter, and may be more appropriate for a Dreamlands campaign. Most of the details of Literal attributes are up to the Keeper, but in general there are two kinds:

* The Substitute Literal can exist in only one form at a time - that is, either the place/object exists as such, or as a human/animal form. For towns and cities this is problematic - people would notice if Arkham disappeared tomorrow, and all its people with it - but for books and magic weapons, this is rather easy.

* The Manifest Literal can exist in multiple forms at once - that is, Mr. Arkham may approach the investigators to do some business on his behalf, and the city of Arkham continues to exist. Manifest Literals are often limited or circumscribed in some way which restricts their powers or movements - the human form of Arkham cannot move beyond the geographic boundaries of the city, or the human form of the Book of Eibon cannot move itself, but has to be carried by an owner.

Literal Places
Examples: Fiddler's Green from Neil Gaiman's Sandman, John Shirley's City Come a-Walkin'
I've discussed this a bit before, but the basic idea is that a city or location is more than a genius loci or reflection of the inhabitants - it is a being in and of itself. The human form often reflects the spirit or nature of a place - Dunwich may manifest as a rural farmer with shadow-haunted eyes, features marked with the scars and creases of hard life eked out on unhealthy ground, and reflect traits of many of the oldest and most established families; Arkham meanwhile is sure to be more erudite and sophisticated, liable to be dressed in slightly old-fashioned finery but with a quick mind and eyes that seem to see past and through you, with one hand that is never seen.

Of course, it need not be a city or town to be a Literal; Cthulhu cultists may incarnate the distant star Xoth to walk the earth in the form of a human female, her invisible radiance invigorating alien life all about her, and in the Dreamlands certain forbidden foothills of Leng may walk the streets of fair Celephais under the guise of men, unwilling to return to the rites conducted on them.

Literal Tomes
Example: Demonbane
An expansion of the book as a character, the Literal Tome is a living Mythos book in human form, which may have arisen spontaneously (the book becomes aware and knows itself) or which may be an artifact of its creation (the book is a construct with a specific purpose, and the human form facilitates this). Tomes know their entire contents, which can make them much more accessible (especially if enciphered or in a dead language), and likewise provide them substantial magical abilities, but are otherwise often naive about the world, and rely on others to help accomplish their goals (whatever they may be). Giving a Literal Tome a personality, including fears, preferences, and quirks (such as a fear of getting wet or being set on fire) can help to make it more than a one-shot grab bag of arcane lore to player characters, and help to differentiate a legendary Mythos tome from a more common occult work.

The human forms of books tends to reflect their origins as filtered through the syntax of the current era; the essence of a work is timeless but the view of it changes with the times. So the Necronomicon in 1920s Boston may be a dusky-skinned woman of Middle Eastern descent with dark eyes and strange scars and tattoos just hidden by the formal wear common to American women of the period, or in 1890s London might be an older Arab gentleman whose dress combines aspects of an English suit of clothes and Oriental costume. Pre-human tomes such as the Pnakotic Fragments tend to be distant and disturbing (1/1d4 Sanity loss to view), particularly if incomplete - they may sport strange injuries and limitations, speak in broken rhymes, or appear perfectly human while still but then move with a strange fluidity that reflects a complete alienness to human internal structure.

Literal Objects
Examples: Stormbringer and the Runestaff from Michael Moorcock's Elric/Eternal Champions series
Many Literal Objects are much like Literal Tomes - objects that are aware of themselves as objects, which retain certain of their powers in human form, or at least knowledge of these powers. The Shining Trapazohedron may be one such Literal, a wizened and timid thing who seeks to retain his human form to lock away the Haunter of the Dark, but remains hunted by cultists who seek to use him. On the other hand, a Literal Object may be Hidden - the Object is possessed of false memories and believes themselves to be human, the better to hide it from those who might seek it out.


Robert Lee Morgan, Ghoulmaster
Among the eccentrics of Arkham is a haunter of cemeteries, a pale drawn man of unaffected grace whose long, lazy stride carries him through the tall grasses of uncropped graves, and whose long fingers are stained with the crayons he uses to take rubbings from fading and forgotten headstones. Locals know him as the Ghoulmaster, and the neighborhood children around Mt. Tabor Cemetery have built up an impressive local legendry about his all-hours vigils of certain graves, of the former funeral home behind Zaman’s Hill that he calls home when his wanderings are done for a time, and how sometimes he has been seen talking to the shadows in the graveyards.

Yet Robert Lee Morgan was not born a subject mothers use to frighten babes to sleep, but merely a retired policeman turned into morbid scholar. Many of the college set at Miskatonic University join him for picnics before the Witches’ Tree, and share stories—for R. Lee Morgan knows more of the bloody and sensational deaths in Arkham than any living body, and for a glass of red wine or a good cigarillo would draw bay his long, graying brown hair and happily talk of some of the city’s less-remembered history.
Damage Bonus: +1d4
Weapons: .38 revolver 80%, damage 1d10
Skills: Arkham Lore 76%, English 65%, French 15%, Handgun 80%, Hide 20%, History 34%, Law 66%, Listen 52%, Spot Hidden 74%
Note: Keepers that wish the “Ghoulmaster” to live up to the darker parts of his reputation may add the skills Cthulhu Mythos 8%, Speak Ghoul 45%, and the spells Contact Ghoul and Create Bad-Corpse Dust.

Hagop Gharibyan, Al Ghûl
During the 1920s Al Ghûl lived in burning grays and somber blacks upon the silver screen, a demon star whose appearance was marked by the pull of organ stops and the trill of violins. But Edison chased the movie business out of New Jersey, and the Armenian immigrant chose not to make the long flight to California and its booming Hollywoodland; or else fell out of favor with the industry. Some in the business say he was affiliated with a strange set in New Jersey, and was friends with the notorious Boston artist Richard Upton Pickman during the latter’s sole assay at cinema. Some say it was the latter who inspired Al Ghûl’s notorious pyromania—then again, as an avid collector of flammable nitrate films, perhaps Al Ghûl is merely over-precautious.

So the famous monster Al Ghûl, officially Jacob Carey, retired to Kingsport, to stalk the streets where his singular appearance and poise still marks him as one born for the stage. No one in Kingsport speaks of who Jacob Carey was before he came to America—and why he yet avoids any Armenian immigrants to these shores, crossing the street so none from his home country can get a good look at his strangely elongated skull, or how he stoops to conceal his full seven-foot height and deep chest.
Damage Bonus: +1d4
Weapons: Bite 40%, damage 1d6
Skills: Acting 72%, Arabic 35%, Armenian 75%, Climb 80%, Disguise 53%, English 60%, Hide 55%, Jump 65%, Listen 70%, Silent Films 58%, Sneak 75%, Spot Hidden 40%, Theater 54%
Note: At the Keeper’s discretion “Al Ghûl” may, due to his heritage or certain events he participated in during his affiliation with Pickman, have or develop more ghoulish traits, such as a Claw attack (30%, damage 1d6 + db) or only taking half damage from firearms and projectiles (rolled up).

Novalynne Snow, Pickman's Daughter
Seamus Okeley’s Carnival wandered through the Miskatonic Valley in the fall of 1922; Okeley lost two gaffers who preferred picking apples, and picked up a baby girl for the freak tent. The carnival migrated up and down the eastern seaboard and in 1929 returned to the Miskatonic Valley to play in Aylesbury, Kingsport, and Arkham—and left behind a precocious seven-year old girl with a six-inch tail, holding a locket with the only clue to the identity of her birth parents: a picture of a hollow-eyed young man with a disaffected leer, the initials “R.U.P.” on the back; the matching portrait of the woman is dark-haired and full-figured, the back signed “Lily;” and a map of the tunnels beneath Arkham, Massachusetts.

In the early 1920s Richard Upton Pickman had an affair with one of his models Lillian Snow. Lily left for Hollywood, but left behind a daughter, and the last token of Pickman’s affection. Richard never knew. Now Novalynne Snow, “the Little Puppy Girl” is loose in Arkham, and she will find her parents, or any family she has left, and whatever inheritance they may have left behind.
Damage Bonus: -1d4
Weapons: Bite 33%, damage 1d6 + db
Skills: Acrobatics 55%, Bargain 74%, Climb 80%, Conceal 42%, Dodge 58%, Drive Automobile 40%, Electrical Repair 10%, English 50%, First Aid 15%, Hide 65%, Jump 25%, Listen 72%, Mechanical Repair 10%, Sleight of Hand 46%, Sneak 76%, Spot Hidden 84%, Swim 13%, Track 33%