Lady Knight and Noble Steed

I haven't done a ton of painting since the end of the Challenge, but I have done a little bit and it's about time I shared it.  These are a pair of Reaper Bones figures I picked up at my FLGS, painted and placed together on a 50mm base with some basing grit and dried plant matter.

Cthuesday: The Xotl'mi-go

Last week I alluded to T.E.D. Klein's ghastly humanoid horrors, the Xotl'mi-go, from the short story "The Children of the Kingdom," published in the 1980s in the collection Dark Gods.  I read the story years ago, having gotten the book for a dollar at a used book sale - would that I still had it! While much of the plot of the story has faded from my memory, much of the story's imagery, and of course the creatures themselves, remain fresh in my mind.  I decided it'd be worthwhile to devote this week's Cthuesday Creature entry to these grotesques.

The story is set during the New York City blackout of 1977, during which something like 36 blocks of Manhattan were ravaged by fire in under 24 hours, people basically going mad from the heat, the power outage, racial tensions and fears of the "Son of Sam" killer.  Klein took this all-too-human horror and wove a tale of inhuman horror amidst the looting and rioting.  The Xotl'migo, a race of pallid, near-blind, web-fingered humanoids, emerged from the sewers and sub-basements taking advantage of the darkness and chaos to pursue their unwholesome goals.

Much like the Deep Ones, the Xotl'mi-go are driven to perpetuate their race on humankind; mythology suggests that the Xotl'mi-go are a race of men that "God made wrong," and He cursed them with eyelessness and a complete lack of reproductive organs as punishment for their sins.  This lack of genitals has not stopped them from assaulting and trying to forcibly breed with human women, and they are indiscriminate - I recall from the story an infant and an elderly woman being assaulted.

Point blank, I'm going to say this: I'd leave the rape on the cutting room floor in any game I ran featuring the Xotl'mi-go.  I've got both men and women in my games right now, spanning a thirty-year age range, and we play in a public space.  There's no way I feel comfortable presenting the fact that these monsters are rapists at the table, no matter how "real" it makes the horror.  It doesn't have a place in my games.

Let's take a look at the stat block, updated to 7th Edition:

 STR= (2d6+8)x5 = 75
CON = (3d6+6)x5 = 80-85
SIZ = (2d6+6)x5 = 65
INT = (3d6)x5 = 50-55
POW = (3d6+3)x5 = 50
DEX = (3d6)x5 = 50-55
Move: 9
HP: 14-15
Av. Damage Bonus: +1d4
Build: +1
Attacks: 2 Claws, with a chance to bite if a victim is held.

Claws, 30%, dmg 1d6+DB
Bite, 25% if  victim is held, dmg 1d6

Armor: 1 point of rubbery skin
Spells: None, normally
Skills: Jump 55%, Listen 75%, Stealth 80%
Sanity Loss: 0/1d6 for seeing the Xotl'mi-go

While the Xotl'mi-go are not insanely heavy hitters, with these stats they can still be pretty nasty, especially given that they tend to be encountered in gangs of 2-10 individuals.  They're faster than the average man, and stronger as well, and with that 80% chance of being stealthy they're likely to be on a party of unsuspecting investigators faster than they can react.

So how do we want to use these creatures in an adventure? Rather than recycle the C.H.U.D. inspired scenario from last week, I'm going to draw from another horror film from the 80s and tie it into the blackout scenario from the original short story.

Psychiatrists at Oakhaven Sanitarium have been studying an unusual phenomenon - four patients, violent men kept away from the general patient population by electronic locks and armed guards, have begun to correlate their psychoses in an unprecedented fashion, forming a singular, shared obsession.

It began with Jack Cutter, a former POW who served in Vietnam.  He emerged from his captivity paranoid and insomniac, convinced of the existence of "creatures" - not men, but close, with grasping hands and tiny, burning eyes above a mouth like a fanged sphincter - that emerged from the jungle or the tunnels at night, lurching through villages in the darkness of the New Moon, looking for...something.  More than once, he says, inhuman faces were pressed against the bars of his cage, while boneless, rubbery white hands reached for him.  US Army Psychologists suggest that these were hallucinations brought on by the extreme mental strain of his captivity, dehumanizing his captors into loathsome monsters.

In Oakhaven, Cutter found confirmation in Fred "Preacher" Dobbs, a former minister and current pyromaniac who filled Cutter's mind with stories of lost tribes and races of men cursed by God for their sins, made monstrous and driven to the edges of civilization.  Cutter began to rationalize that the creatures he encountered were of such a tribe, while Dobbs found Cutter's stories to prove his own religious mania.

The two of them enlisted Reggie "Lennie" Bruster, a giant of a man judged not guilty of child-murder due to his own simplistic mental state, and Jimmy "Ferret" Skaggs, a rat-faced little man with some fairly antisocial compulsive tendencies and a long history of violence towards women.  Cutter became convinced that Lennie and Ferret were on the verge of being cursed by God to become the creatures he saw, and concluded that he and Preacher had been placed with these men to save them.  The fact that Ferret, in his old job with the sanitation department, claimed to have once seen the hastily-disposed of, waterlogged corpse of a similar creature fished out of the sewer, cemented his usefulness to Cutter.

The four became convinced that they were the only ones who knew for certain of the creatures' existence, and decided that God had ordained them to burn these creatures out of wherever they'd found refuge from the harsh light of day.

When a blackout disables the electronic locks to their cells, the four realize that now is their chance, and set off for nearby New York City, intent on cleansing the Big Apple of the worms at its core.  In hot pursuit are a team of psychiatrists, orderlies and security guards (i.e., the Investigators), eager to return the four madmen to the safety of their cells before they can burn down half the city in their hunt for these imagined "monsters."  But are they so imaginary...?

This scenario takes its set up from my absolute favorite under-known 1980s horror film, 1982's ALONE IN THE DARK, from writer/director Jack Sholder, starring Jack Palance, Walter Matthau and Donald Pleasence.  Using it here, I've made the focus on pursuing the human monsters, which if handled well will lull players into a false sense of security, letting them think that this is a "red herring" sort of scenario where there are no Mythos elements - then BAM, a webbed, slimy hand emerges from the shadows and clamps over an investigator's mouth, dragging them backwards with their friends none the wiser.  Of course, then we have the moral quandary - what do the players do when they realize the lunatics are *right*?

Cult of Chaos Report: "Stern as Death is My Sway"

"Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway; From my ruthless throne I have ruled alone for a million years and a day." - Robert Service, "The Law of the Yukon"

August, 1903.  Elsie Thorne, an adjunct professor of anthropology at Miskatonic University, along with her uncle Charles, a retired soldier, her father's lawyer Jackson Watt, and a hired Canadian guide, Frenchie Sinclair, arrive in the small town of Fort Yukon, Alaska, on the banks of the Yukon River near the Alaskan/Canadian border.

They are looking for Professor Wendell Thorne, Elsie's father and an ethnographer employed by Miskatonic University.  He'd come up to Fort Yukon to record the folklore of the local Inuit people, but his letters had stopped arriving home.  Fearing the worst, Elsie organized a small expedition to look for him.

Their first stop was Haly's Roadhouse, the center of life in the small town.  Arranging beds for themselves for the duration of their stay and food, from proprietor Jim Haly they learned that "the Professor" had not been seen in town in at least two weeks, and that he mostly kept to himself or talked to the local tribal elders.  He also mentioned that one of the local prospectors, a man named Amos Phillips, had struck it big the night he last saw the Professor.

Further inquiries around town netted them the information that the Professor had purchased large quantities of volatile chemicals through the mail (three pounds each of ammonium perchlorate and potassium perchlorate were awaiting pick-up at the post office) and that Amos Phillips had been acting very strangely since his big strike.

Investigating Professor Thorne's cabin, they discovered his journal, in which he correlated Inuit legends of "star people" with the "Old Ones" spoken of in the Pnakotic Manuscripts.  They also learned that Amos Phillips had been by on more than one occasion, and that the prospector's big strike had also opened up a cavern, buried for millions of years, which the professor expected to yield evidence of the "star people."

Checking out Amos Phillips' claim, five miles up the nearby tributary of Porcupine River, they find a bag of dynamite and are shot at by a member of the Billy Boys, a local gang of Inuit teens.  Shooting back, they force him to surrender.  Interrogation yields that he's working for "the Master," and if they want to see the professor they'll need to go through the Master.  They force him to lead them to this so-called Master.

They're brought to a cave in a cliff-face; the cave discovered by Amos Phillips, they realize, and are ushered inside.  They're taunted by a few other members of the Billy Boys, then "encouraged" at gunpoint to go deeper into the cave.  In the next chamber, they discovered a "temple," with a pentagonal altar, a five-sided throne and two rows of pews.  The pews, carved out of the living rock of the cave, are littered with the bones of pre-human creatures, and two mummified examples, still clad in ancient finery, squat in niches on either side of the throne.

In the next room they meet Amos Phillips, squatting with shotgun at the ready, and the Professor, who is working out complex chemical formulas in charcoal on the wall of the cave, near a carefully carven pit, half-filled with bubbling, milky fluid - water mixed with certain chemicals, they learn, as Professor Wendell Thorne takes the ammonium and potassium from them and adding it to the pit.

Wendell Thorne begins to rave joyously about how the "Master" will save the world from itself, and how the investigators will be so happy to serve the Master as agents, advancing his agenda through the world until he is ready to make his presence known.  When they try to argue against this, he gives them a smile, shakes his head and explains it's not their choice to make - the Master's race created humanity, as it did all life on Earth, and "our gray matter is as sculptor's clay to them, to mold as they see fit."

They demand to see this "Master."  Professor Thorne ushers them into the next room, where squats what at first glance is a barrel-shaped, plant-like growth...until its eyes open and it rises up on five spidery legs, tentacles unfurling and raising a glowing, crystalline rod...

The thing whistles and chirped, and Jackson Watt fell to his knees before it, eager to serve his new Master; meanwhile, Sgt. Charles Thorne lit the dynamite on a very short fuse.  Elsie and Frenchie began to make a run for it, narrowly avoiding a shotgun blast from Phillips.  The chemicals and vapors in the cave ignited when the dynamite went off, and Elsie and Frenchie were blasted off their feet just as they reached the mouth of the cave, sending them flying into the river below.  The cave and its inhabitants were no more.

***

All in all, I think this turned out to be a really good session.  The older players liked the change of locale and time period that the Alaskan Gold Rush provided (one of these days I'll run something set in Dawson City, Yukon -- kind of the last no-holds-barred "Western" boom towns) while my youngest player, Katie, went from being kind of ho-hum regarding the choice of characters to really engaged and eager for the next game.

I really liked being able to use the Elder Things finally in an adventure; I played around with an idea that I think I pulled from an episode of the Unspeakable Oath podcast, that the psychic commands used to control the Shoggoths would work on lifeforms derived from the byproducts of Shoggoth-generation -- including humanity.  I liked the idea of an Elder Thing setting itself up as a god to lesser beings - originally Voormis (the pre-humans whose bones and mummified priests were discovered) and now restarting its cult with humans.

Next time, May 3rd, I'm actually going to be starting up the "Time for Harvest" organized play campaign that Chaosium is putting out in installments to members of the Cult of Chaos, and I'm lucky enough to have a full table - six players, including my fiance, who will be playing Call of Cthulhu for the first time.

Cthuesday: the Miri Nigri

It seems like Cthuesday comes around faster every week.  This week we've got something a little bit further off the beaten path, unlike most of what we've covered so far, I'm actually unfamiliar with the source material for the Miri Nigri - I've yet to get a hold of and read a copy of Frank Belknap Long's The Horror from the Hills.  So my only familiarity with the Miri Nigri is the entry in the Malleus Monstrorum.

So these are a race of small, ugly humanoids created by the Great Old One Chaugnar Faugn from toads, to serve him and his offspring.  They look human except for their toad-like faces, cannot speak and exist solely to fulfill the will of Chaugnar Faugn, spending much of their time crawling over their god's inert form (picking off parasites, perhaps?).  They are generally encountered in groups of ten or more.

Not having a lot to go on here, I think I have a lot more leeway to make these creatures my own.  First, the stats:

Miri Nigri, Strange Dark Dwarves
STR = (2d6)x5 = 35
CON = (3d6)x5 = 50-55
SIZ = (1d4+4)x5 = 30-35
INT = (2d6)x5 = 35
POW = (3d6)x5 = 50-55
DEX = (3d6+6)x5 = 80-85
APP = (1d6)x5 = 15-20
Move: 8
HP: 8-9
Av. Damage Bonus: -1
Build: -1
Attacks: 1 claw attack per round.

Fighting 35%, damage 1d3+DB

Armor: none
Spells: none
Skills: Stealth 90%, Swim 75%
Sanity Loss: 0/1d2 to see the Miri Nigri

So what do we do with these strange, dark dwarves? Well, how many horror movies have you seen?

Specifically, I'm thinking of some of the early work of Canadian director David Cronenberg, in my opinion the indisputable master of body-horror.  The first thing that came to mind when I read about these weird, sexless, alien dwarves was Cronenberg's film THE BROOD, in which a woman undergoing an unusual psychiatric treatment manifests her rage as grotesque "children" that kill at her command.  The similarities are striking; she is effectively imprisoned in her therapist's office, leaving these dwarves to serve as her hands in the world, much like with Chaugnar Faugn and the Miri Nigri.

The Miri Nigri are referenced in The Malleus Monstrorum as abducting blood sacrifices for the vampiric Chaugnar Faugn.  I love this imagery, of them descending the mountain to remote villages and carrying off young men and women in total silence.  If you wanted to tie this in to Cronenberg's RABID, for example, I'd give the Miri Nigri a blood drain ability similar to a vampire's - they do the actual drinking of the blood, which Chaugnar Faugn "feeds" on vicariously - via a tentacular trunk, similar to Chaugnar Faugn's, that emerges from a concealed pouch on the body.

So let's put these in an adventure, and I'm going to continue the '70s-'80s horror movie theme.

The Investigators get involved when a homeless man turns up, torn to shreds.  Investigating reveals he was one of the city's "mole people," homeless people who had colonized abandoned subway stations and forgotten sub-basements to make living spaces for themselves, away from the eyes of the law.  Getting down there to speak with them will prove difficult as they are elusive and wary, but communicating with them can earn the investigators word of "those little guys," silent, child-sized figures in bulky clothing that are occasionally glimpsed in the distance but never up close.  They've become an urban legend to the already-legendary mole people, a sort of boogey man; whenever one of their own goes missing, well, "those little guys" must have taken them.

Exploring the city's underworld turns up recurring images scrawled and scratched on walls of Ganesha-like figures accompanied by script in no recognizable language.

The second phase is introduced as the mole people begin to arm themselves; lead pipes, fireplace pokers, anything they can swing like a club gets picked up and carried with them; one of them is caught trying to steal a police officer's pistol, claiming he needed to be able to defend himself against "those little guys." Interrogation reveals that those little guys have been coming closer, lingering longer around human settlements in the underworld.  They never speak, but the mole people pick up..."ideas," for lack of a better term, when those little guys are around.  The ideas are infectious.

First, a mole person begins drawing "the elephant headed fella" and writing the strange runes.  Then they start talking about how the elephant headed fella is the oldest god, the First God, the god that doesn't forget his children and leave them to go homeless and hungry.  They stop blinking so much.  Their bodies hunch and dwindle, their hair falling out.  They stop speaking.  Then eventually, they just slink away into the darkness to join their new family...only coming back to find food for the elephant headed fella.

So that's kind of a blend of THE BROOD, RABID and the 1980s cheeseball classic C.H.U.D., with the Miri Nigri taking the place of the Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.  Just about any good Deep One-focused adventure could probably be adapted to use the Miri Nigri as well, while the adventure outlined above would also work with the sinister Xotl'mi-go from T.E.D. Klein's "Children of the Kingdom."

That's it for this week, readers.  I'm running a session at my local gaming store tonight, test-driving a new scenario I've written.  I'll hopefully have the write-up posted Friday.

Cthuesday: Desh, Greater and Lesser

Apologies for the lack of Cthuesday post last week, readers, I spent the weekend in Cleveland at the Cinema Wasteland Movie and Memorabilia Expo with friends, and just didn't have the time or energy to produce content here when I got back.  So this week I'll give you a two-fer, and cover both varieties of Desh, an interdimensional creature that originally appeared in the adventure "The Dark Wood," in Adventures in Arkham County.

Appearing as long, tadpole-like creatures, both varieties of Desh are native to a coterminous dimension that overlaps but does not intersect our own, much like the Terrors from Beyond.  Unlike the Terrors, the Desh are not accessible through the use of an Ultraviolet Projector - Desh come into our dimension when summoned by specific spells known to the Hyperboreans.  When cast, the spell uses the human neural network to draw Desh into our dimension; the process is painful but not otherwise harmful with Lesser Desh, but tends to prove fatal with the Greater Desh, who explode out of a subject's skull, leaving a star-shaped hole behind.  Intriguingly, the Greater Desh's skin flickers with images drawn from the memories of the individual through whose brain it was summoned.

Lesser Desh seem to have only the most tenuous grasp on our reality when summoned; they tend to "unravel" within 1d3 days, and are ineffectual in combat.  They may be of the most use to the Keeper as "warnings" to investigators - signs that their investigation is proceeding in the right direction, and that if they keep going they'll encounter much worse.  Alternately, swarm the PCs with them! They won't take any physical damage (unless the Lesser Desh use their grab and trip ability near a flight of stairs or a cliff, heh heh!) but the feeling of dozens of cold, wriggling alien bodies slithering over and around them is good for some SAN loss for sure.

Lesser Desh
STR = (2d6+1)x5 = 40
CON = 1d6x5 = 15-20
SIZ = 1d6x5 = 15-20
INT = 1d4x5 = 10-15
POW = 1d3x5 = 10
DEX = (3d6+1)x5 = 55-60
Move: 6
HP: 3-4
Av. Damage Bonus:N/A
Build: -2
Attacks: 1 Trip

Grab and Trip 35%, dmg N/A (target must make a Hard DEX roll or fall prone)

Armor: none
Spells: none
SAN: 0/1d3 to see a Lesser Desh

Greater Desh are another story.  They are fast, they are mean, and they can chew your face off.  With a movement value of 30, there's simply no such thing as outrunning them.  They're even likely to have spells, albeit possibly with strange effects in this dimension, which is a double-whammy.  The luck required in killing them is a triple whammy.

Greater Desh
STR = (4d6+3)x5 = 85
CON = 3d6x5 = 50-55
SIZ = 2d6x5 = 35
INT = 2d6x5 = 35
POW = (3d6+2)x5 = 60-65
DEX = (6d6+1)x5 = 110
Move: 30
HP: 3-4
Av. Damage Bonus:N/A
Build: 0
Attacks: Greater Desh Grab and Hold their targets to restrain them for a Bite attack.

Grab (Maneuver) 45%, target is restrained and a Bite attack hits automatically.
Bite 55%, dmg 1d10

Armor: none, however Greater Desh do not take damage normally.  On a successful attack against a Greater Desh, the damage is rolled then multipled by five, giving a percentage chance that the creature is destroyed outright by the attack, dissipating from our dimension in a star-shaped burst of light.
Spells: keeper's choice, likely with very bizarre effects in this dimension
SAN: 1/1d4+1 to see a Greater Desh

So what do we do with these creatures in an adventure? I think a good starting point is their
connection to the Hyperboreans, the prehistoric magic-using people of Greenland in the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith and others.  The adventure "The Dark Wood" has an artifact that can be used to summon the Desh, an item that, while not mass-produced, was likely not a one of a kind deal, but, like a Hand of Glory, was created by wizards as needed, and as such would be a useful tool to use in creating adventures.

For example, in a Gaslight or Classic scenario, an expansion of the London Underground might unearth buried Hyperborean ruins - a crypt or, perhaps, a wizard's laboratories.  Hyperborean runes look enough like Elder Futhark at a glance to be mistaken for Viking, and archaeologists descend on the site.  One of them determines that he's looking at relics of an entirely unrecorded civilization, and becomes obsessed with the site, with unlocking its secrets, to make himself famous.  He interprets bas-reliefs of humans "communing" with this bejeweled skull as a form of ancestor worship, and when he finds the skull in a sealed lead box, he can't help but pick it up and touch the gems...activating it.

For a more scientific take on the Desh, I'd tie them in with altered states of consciousness - either on the cusp between waking and dreaming (maybe connecting them to the terrifying experience known as "sleep paralysis") or from hallucinogenic drug use - in which case, could the Desh be the "Self Transforming Machine Elves" associated with DMT usage?

To borrow an idea from an old episode of "Kolchak: The Night Stalker," maybe the subconscious mind of a coma patient has made contact with the Desh-Dimension, and during REM cycles he begins to "leak" Lesser Desh into the facility.  Perhaps at first the Lesser Desh try to swim out into the world to contact his family members with messages (flickering across their quicksilver-like skin) from his trapped personality, or harass people he held grudges against.  Soon these tadpole-like creatures begin to emerge from the heads of those he's "contacted" in this way.  What happens when a Greater Desh follows its lesser brethren into our world?

In the latter case, if we're using DMT/REM Desh, I'd give the Greater Desh access to a lot of the perception-altering spells - things like "Consume Likeness" and (a personal favorite of mine) "Curse of the Putrid Husk." Spells like "Gate" would be completely apropos as well, and I might throw in some nasty stuff with a memetic or genetic memory bent to it, like "Dread Curse of Azathoth" or "Red Sign of Shudde-M'ell" (for more on memetic horror ideas, check out Ken Hite's "The Madness Dossier"!)

I think that'll be it from me for this installment.  Next Tuesday I'm running another one-shot at Just Games Rochester, and I'll have a fresh installment of Cthuesday for you all as well.

Cthuesday: Inhabitants of L'gy'hx

In the fiction of Ramsey Campbell, the L'gy'hxians are squat, cube-shaped creatures of living metal, native to the planet Uranus.  They briefly played host to the Insects of Shaggai following the destruction of their homeworld, but ultimately drove the Insects off-world as a response to their religious rites.  Some L'gy'hxians may have come to Earth with the Insects, possibly as slaves.

I'm kind of surprised at how many times I've seen these creatures pop up in scenarios, given the fact that they're metallic cube-creatures from Uranus.  They appear in the adventure "Death by Misadventure" in the book Terrors from Beyond, in which they are missionaries looking to spread the worship of their bat-like god Lhrogg.  One also appears in the MULA monograph "The Big Book of Cults," associated with an unscrupulous plastic surgery clinic.  I feel like I've seen a third appearance, but I'm not recalling it right now.

So right away we have an interesting dichotomy for these creatures: religious fanatics or consummate scientists? Either way, they don't want anything to do with Azathoth, at least in the form that the Insects from Shaggai worship it, which seems wholly reasonable from both angles - both as a competing religion and as "they're worshiping an atomic explosion.  Maybe we don't want that in our backyard."

Let's take a look at the stats before we go any further:

STR = (6d6)x5 = 105
CON = (3d6+6)x5 = 82
SIZ = (2d6+10)x5 = 85
INT = (2d6+10)x5 = 85
POW = (3d6)x5 = 52
DEX = (2d6+3)x5 = 50
Move:  8
HP: 16-17
Av. Damage Bonus: +1d6
Build: +2
Attacks: 1 attack using an alien weapon (most commonly a thin slashing blade capable of cutting through metal as readily as flesh, or an electrical whip).  Other weapons are possible, even likely.

Fighting 30%, dmg 1d8+DB (knife) or 1d4+2d10 electrical damage (whip; on an Extreme success, the whip wraps around the target, dealing an automatic 2d10 electrical damage each round thereafter until the target is killed or manages to escape the coil)

Armor: 19 points of metallic "skin."

Spells: On a successful Extreme Intelligence roll, the L'gy'hxian knows as many spells as the number shown on the dice. One of these will always be Contact Lhrogg.

Skills: Electrical Repair 50%, Mechanical Repair 50%

Sanity Loss:0/1d8 to see a L'gy'hxian.

So what do we do with the Inhabitants of L'gy'hx? Well, let's take a look back at that dichotomy I mentioned earlier.  The L'gy'hxians have strong religious beliefs and advanced technology; as noted in the Malleus Monstrorum, they're not necessarily hostile, but they are curious.  

To that end, I'd equip them with spells that tie into these ideas of proselytizing and exploring.  Gate spells are going to be the big one, because this lets you bring the L'gy'hxians to Earth without relying on the Insects.  Spells like Mind Transfer would allow them to wander undetected among humanity, observing and studying, Suggestion lets them plant the seeds of L'gy'hxian ideas into human minds, making people more tractable for the purposes of conversion - either spiritual or physical.  

Another point I'd like to make here is - look at the literature of the UFO world, especially cattle mutilations, abductions and the various Contactee movements that have sprung up here and there since the 1950s.  People tend to only associate flying saucer lore with the Mi-Go, but I think it offers a lot of good, gameable ideas that can be used with any aliens.  The Malleus Monstrorum uses an altered image of Ezekiel's Vision as the image associated with the L'gy'hxians, and the description of "wheels within wheels" described in the Bible is often cited as evidence of a UFO encounter in the Bronze Age Mediterranean by ancient astronaut proponents.  

Here's a quickly-sketched out idea for a scenario that would play off the UFO ideas as well as the religious/scientific dichotomy mentioned earlier:

A ranch in an obscure corner of Utah begins experiencing a series of cattle mutilations over a series of weeks; the cows having been literally taken apart, the pieces neatly arranged around the main part of the carcasses.  The owners of the ranch begin reporting strange lights and nocturnal encounters - noises on the porch or the roof, like something heavy moving around slowly.  UFO investigators begin to investigate the area, interviewing the owners, setting up motion cameras, etc.  

Cuboid being by Michael Bukowski
(Yog-Blogsoth)

Then the owners of the ranch begin claiming to have been contacted by aliens, having been given a message of "perfect peace" to deliver to the world.  The aliens are spiritually superior to Mankind, and are willing to serve as Messiahs to lift us out of our current benighted state.  The ranch metamorphoses into a church, preaching the message of salvation via alien intervention.  The aliens' god, an angelic creature of wings and eyes, is praised and venerated.  The church attracts converts and devotees the way any new religious movement does, drawing in the lonely, the forgotten, the ill and desperate.  

There's an undercurrent to the message, only given to those who have served the church faithfully and done their part to spread the teachings of Lhrogg.  For the chosen, there is a special heaven that awaits - they will be whisked off to the aliens' homeworld, to dwell in beauty and wonder forever.  

The ranchers-turned-preachers are no longer human; their bodies have been taken by L'gy'hxians, their minds consigned to a slow death inside the alien metal bodies of these invaders, kept securely locked in the storm cellar under the ranch, slowly asphyxiating in the thin, oxygen-rich atmosphere of Earth.  Whether they are looking for converts to take to L'gy'hx as slaves (surgically altered and mechanically augmented to survive the pressures and atmosphere of Uranus) or to Uraniform Earth into a colony world for their own kind to inhabit I leave to other Keepers.  

Cult of Chaos Report: "The Crystal of Chaos"

Things have been progressing beautifully with my biweekly Cthulhu games at Just Games Rochester.  I had a nearly full table this week for "the Crystal of Chaos," the second scenario from the collection "The House of R'Lyeh."  All the scenarios in this book are sequels to stories Lovecraft wrote, in this case "The Haunter in the Dark."

Cast of Characters:
an Archaeology grad student from Harvard
a Folklore grad student from Miskatonic
a Librarian from Miskatonic
a Private Eye from Arkham
a Mineralogist from Arkham

The PCs are hired by Professor Ronald Galloway of Miskatonic to locate the Shining Trapezohedron, a reference to which his assistant, Professor Jonathan Engels, had found in passing.  The Trapezohedron had been discovered by Professor Enoch Bowen in 1843 in the tomb of Nephren-Ka, the Black Pharaoh of the Third Dynasty, and brought to Providence.  It's location in the nearly hundred years since then has been unknown.  Miskatonic University is offering the PCs $50 a day, plus expenses, plus a bonus of $200 apiece to locate the stone, which will become the centerpiece of an Egyptian display and a feather in the cap of the Archaeology Department on campus.

Searching through the library at Miskatonic (and failing to convince the aging Professor Armitage that they should be granted access to De Vermis Mysteriis), they find a few interesting tidbits about the Trapezohedron and its connection to a demon called "The Haunter in the Dark," then board the train to Providence to continue their search there.

From the archives of the Providence Bulletin, they learn that Dr. Bowen purchased an old church upon his return from Egypt, and started a cult there.  The cult, known as the Church of Starry Wisdom, was vastly unpopular with its Irish and Italian Catholic neighbors, and rumors circulated of the cult's connection to certain disappearances over the years, and finally, in the 1870s, police officials caved to public demand and forcibly disbanded the group.

Locating the old Free-Will Church where the cult held session, they broke in and began to investigate.  Helping themselves to some gold accouterments of the Starry Wisdom cult and marveling at the still-intact (and horrifying) stained glass windows, they soon found the Trapezohedron, reposing in an open gold case atop an altar inside the church's steeple.  They closed the box - AND THUS ENCLOSED THE TRAPEZOHEDRON IN THE PERFECT DARKNESS IT SO CRAVED - and took the case out of the church.

After some experimentation, in which the mineralogist could not identify the makeup of the stone and he and the archaeology grad student both felt a hypnotic pull from the stone, they turned it over to Dr. Engels, collected their fee, and went on their merry way.

A week later, having noticed a news article in the Providence Bulletin about hordes of rats pouring out of the Free-Will Church, they realized something might be off and went to Engels to negotiate for the stone back, hoping returning it to the Church would stem the rodent plague.  Engels, no longer the stuttering, nervous man they'd met previously but smug, confident and for some reason studying physics and chemistry textbooks in his free time, brushed them off.

When they tried to push the issue, he led them to the workroom where the Trapezohedron and its case were being cleaned.  As soon as they were in the room, he slammed the door and turned off the light, summoning a snakey entity that, from what little they could see of it, resembled the images on the stained glass in the church.  This beast encircled the private eye and nearly tore his arm off with its jaws.  The entity vanished in a puff of black, foul-smelling smoke when the PCs got the lights on, only to learn that Engels had vanished during the confusion and the private eye was rapidly going into shock and needed to be taken to the hospital.

Months later, the mineralogist noticed a news item about a "Dr. Jonathan Engels" who was touring the country lecturing on the benefits mankind would reap from splitting the atom, and wondered what had been unleashed on the world.

***

I think this is the first time I've run a scenario where the PCs have really "lost." It's also the first time in years I've run a published adventure without extensively rewriting it.  Overall everyone had fun, especially the private eye's player - a teenage girl and daughter of one of the other players, expanding beyond the D&D/Pathfinder paradigm for the first time.  She kept wanting to check the rooms of the church for secret passageways and traps, but eventually she worked out of that mindset into the more investigative Cthulhu mindset.

I was a little disappointed that the PCs never went into the basement of the church, and thus never encountered the animated mummy that was hiding down there - I love mummies, and was excited to get to use him, but it just didn't work out that way.  C'est la vie.

I think the biggest issue I ran into is that I feel like the adventure presumes that one of the player characters will end up sucked in by the Trapezohedron and possessed by Nyarlathotep's Haunter in the Dark avatar, which just didn't happen here.  The players kept rolling really well on their POW rolls to resist possession, so it fell to Engels, the NPC, to be possessed - I think this is mentioned briefly in the adventure notes as a possibility, but isn't really elaborated on.

Next week I'm off, as the other guy's Horror on the Orient Express campaign is picking back up after a brief hiatus, and I'm not sure yet what I'm running the week after that.  I'm currently writing an adventure for the Gaslight Era set during the Klondike Gold Rush, but if that's not ready in time I'll pull out a published adventure - for some reason "A Happy Family" from the book "Adventures in Arkham County" is kind of calling to me.