The Matlock Fire

Dateline Matlock Derbyshire. The Charred body of a man, Mr John Wilson, is discovered at their home by his wife. By the location, state of the body and surrounding furniture, it appears that Mr John Wilson was a victim of spontaneous human combustion. Eg.: His entire upper torso, left arm and right leg have been reduced to ash. His left leg and right arm are still intact. As is the chair he was sitting in. A smoking pipe lies smouldering on the floor. Police conclude that the man died from dropping his pipe onto himself. The British Society for the Investigation of Anomalous Activities is looking for a party of investigators to ascertain whether this was SHC or not.

Possibilities

1 John Wilson was the planning clerk for Matlock Municipal Council and was violently opposed to the destruction of a local landmark, The Five Towers. These towers were built in 1798 by Sir Walter Townsend, to stop the biannual earthquakes that rocked Matlock. The towers have recently been sold to Dr Phillip Greening, who is the leader of a small band of Shudde M’ell worshippers. He has taken over the mind of Mr Wilson’s deputy and is hoping to get the authority to demolish one of the towers and thereby release the great Cthonian who lies pinned beneath the pentacle.

2 John Wilson was attacked and killed by a fire vampire, as a sacrifice to Cthugha by a local cult, of which his wife is the high priestess. She required this rather extreme sacrifice as the first step towards bringing Cthugha into this world. She will not be best pleased at the investigators’ attempts to look into the circumstances of her husband’s death.

3 This is a real case of spontaneous human combustion. And the investigators can get themselves mired deep into the lore and mystery that surrounds cases of spontaneous human combustion.

© Rik Kershaw

The Miracle

A weird character in the news has come to the attention of an investigator. It will most likely be a sceptical and cynic investigator, or one compelled to believe that kind of news.

The news, it turns out, deals with a person that seems to have stigmata that match those suffered by Jesus Christ on the cross, according to Catholic Mythology. The man, one Jacobo Lewis from Haiti, seems to have injuries on his hands, feet and side that match those famous wounds. These wounds keep bleeding, but apparently never get infected. People are told to have healed after he touches them, especially those with blood diseases, although none have been documented. Also weird is the fact that Jacobo is 30 years old, the same age Jesus was when he started preaching.

What has the religious community in an uproar is that Jacobo is black, and definitely not a Christian but a practicer of voodoo. He says the wounds were inflicted on him by the Loa of his tribe, as a reminder of his human frailty, and so he could spread the word.

Possibilities

1 Jacobo is, of course, a fake. The people he has been said to heal are healed by their own faith, just as a lot of people get sick when they believe they are. Most likely, those people weren’t even sick.

2 The man from Nazareth was an avatar of the Crawling Chaos. The reason why we don’t know anything about his life from his early years until his 30, is because at that point, he hadn’t been contacted by the Nyarlathotep, and therefore wasn’t important. The Black Man tried to recruit him when he is said to have been tempted in the desert, but he went mad and believed he was the Messiah. Given his newly found powers, that wasn’t hard to do. Now, more than 1900 years after that, Nyarlathotep is willing to try again with the son of a mortal woman. Jacobo might dream about “past lives”, which are previous avatars, and by those means, the players can find out the truth.

3 The Loa did contact Jacobo and inflicted the wounds. Unfortunately for him, the alleged Loa is a vampire, too weak to fully return from his resting place. He was in life a sorcerer and is trying to attract a cult to the place. Then he will control Jacobo to slaughter them all, so with the strength given by their blood he may return.

© Ricardo J. Mendez

The Hellfire Club

The Hellfire Club dominates the summit of Montpelier Hill ten miles south of Dublin city. This substantial ruin was originally built in 1720 as a hunting lodge by William Conolly, the speaker of the Irish parliament. After his death, it passed into the hands of the eponymous “Hellfire Club”. The club, based on a suppressed English antecedent, was founded in Athy, Co. Kildare, in the 1730s by Richard Parsons (a.k.a. Jack St Leger), the first Earl of Rosse, and a humorous painter called Worsdale. The members of the Hellfire Club were rakes and rowdy fops. They met in the Eagle Tavern on Dames Street in the city centre. As their name suggests they were rumoured to practice black magic. Reputable historians acknowledge that these stories have a basis in fact.

Possibilities

1 The Hellfire Club did indeed carry out black masses and orgies on Montpelier Hill. However they had no mythos knowledge and merely used satanic regalia to spice up their bawdy drinking sessions.

2 The Hellfire Club worshipped ancient Cthugha. When Conolly built the lodge a ‘fairy cairn’ was broken. It was actually a huge Elder Sign placed there thousands of years before to trap a swarm of Fire Vampires. When the Hellfire Club (which was at that time a bunch of drunken fakers) encountered these horrific beings they were seduced to the worship of Cthugha.

On one famous visit to Montpelier Hill the clubsmen set fire to the lodge whilst carousing within! Tradition claims that this was a wager to see who could survive the flames of Hell longest. This is incorrect. The fire occured when the cult summoned their master inside the stone-vaulted lodge.

Though the club disappeared in the 1740s the Fire Vampires are still alive, and hungry.

3 The club was a branch of a suppressed English Nyarlathotep cult. Several times, locals gained small hints of the club’s dark deeds. On one occasion, a wandering priest stumbled upon the Club during a macabre Bacchanalia and was forced to look on. The centre of attention was a huge black cat. Breaking free from his captors the cleric grabbed the cat and uttered an exorcism which tore the beast apart. A demon shot up from its corpse. Hurtling through the roof it brought down the ceiling and scattered the assembly. On another occasion, Tom Conolly of Castletown is said to have met the devil in the form of a ‘black man’ in the lodge’s dinning room.

After the death of its founder in 1741 the club became inactive but the cult continued, with the 2nd Earl of Rosse as its leader. It was with Nyarlathotep’s help that William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse built ‘the Parsonstown Leviathan’ in 1845. This huge telescope (which was dismantled in 1908) was the largest of its kind until 1917. Though the Irish climate is completely unsuitable for serious astronomy Rosse discovered the spiral nature of other galaxies, the Crab Nebula and the greater nebula in Orion with this miraculous instrument. It’s unknown whether his sons: Laurence, the 4th Earl (an astronomer) and Charles (a British inventor who died in 1931) were involved in the cult, which has today spread throughout the English speaking world.

© Andrew Behan

The House with Two Sides

The investigators discover an old house in the woods. It has no roads leading to it, and there is no obvious reason why it is built where it is. When they walk around the house they discover it is completely a mirror of itself. Both the front and the back look like they are the front of a nice building.

Possibilities

1 The house was built by an old man who loved making bizarre jokes on his family. He made the house to leave in his will to his family, but it was never discovered in the family papers.

2 The house is under a spell. Both entrances look like an ordinary house, but when the investigators find a door that leads them to the “mirror”-side, bad things starts to happen. In the mirror side, they find duplicates of themselves lying dead, having been brutally murdered - and there’s no way to the outside. The only way to leave the mirror site is via the door they entered, and when they do, they find that they can’t get out. And then killings start . . . exactly as described in the mirror side.

3 One side of the house seems more “dead” than the other - it appears to older and more weathered. Entrance can be gained into the house from either side, and if the house is left via one of the other doors the investigators find themselves 100 years in the future or the past (depending on which door they left).

© Truls Osmundsen

The Man of Her Dreams

The Ashthorns, a wealthy family of noble origins, are desperate, as their daughter Melissa seems to have succumbed to a mental illness:

She refuses to sleep, trying everything to stay awake, from coffee over cold baths to physically hurting herself, with needles, blunt objects etc. If she finally falls asleep, she’s tossing and turning around for a while, before she seems to wake up, acting in a very different manner to her usually gentle personality, which she later denies.

Ask upon these events, the frightened Melissa explains, that sometime before, she encountered a man in her dreams, who claims to be from the dreamlands. The man has become aware of the real world and wants to break through to it, a goal, which in exchange would probably kill Melissa.

Possibilities

1 Melissa is suffering from a severe case of schizophrenia, which derives from being abused by her father and her older brother in younger years. Her ‘other Self’, who is confirming ‘her’ version, has the personality of a lewd, uncaring man, who insults and hits other people, smokes cigarettes and drinks whiskey and shows a deep hatred against the Ashthorne family, even trying to kill the other family members. So far, the personality switch has only lasted a few minutes, but is steadily becoming longer.

2 Melissas story is true, the man from the Dreamlands exists. He is slowly overpowering Melissa, and has now reached the point, where parts of him can physically manifest, resulting in the scene, where an entire forearm comes out of the unconscious, twisting girls mouth! Physical damage to the arm will make him retreat for now, but if nothing is done, he will sooner or later burst out of the poor girls body.

3 Things aren’t quite, what they seems to be: the man from Melissa’s ‘dreams’ is in fact a magician, and he’s not from the Dreamlands, but from the waking world, trying to save the investigators, who themselves are trapped in the Dreamlands. He uses the dream figure of Melissa as a portal to make contact with them, but unfortunately his words turn into gibberish and written contact is not possible. If the magician loses contact, the investigators might be forever trapped in the Dreamlands.

© Philipp Mählmann

The Heist

A violent robbery has occurred at the local bank. After killing 4 staff and 1 policeman, the robbers evaded the police and seemingly disappeared. They escaped with £950,000 in cash and also emptied several safe deposit boxes. Among the objects stolen was a small bluish crystal, said to have occult significance. It was owned by Harold Darlington, the wealthy head of a local Masonic order, who is offering a reward for its return.

n interesting fact is that the robbers were reported not to have faces! The police have not been able to trace the robbers’ identities, but are organising a huge search to find the criminals. Due to the robbery’s violence, it is nationwide news, and is a popular point of gossip.

Possibilities

1 The robbery was carried out by a group of hardened gangsters. The robbery was the result of weeks of careful planning, but came apart when one of the staff attempted to wrestle a gun off one of the robbers. The bank clerk was shot in the head and killed instantly, and the robber freaked out and started killing people at random. The robbers fled, and have likely already left the country. However, the robber who started shooting has escaped and is hiding in the sewers, and has been left paranoid and violently insane after his group abandoned him.

The theft of the crystal is coincidental. It has no magic properties. The reports of the men having no faces are the results of the robbers wearing masks over their faces, to hide their identity.

2 The robbery was planned by a cabal of sorcerers, who heard about the crystal, and believed it to have magical powers. To carry out the robbery, they summoned a group of demons to act as muscle while they took the crystal. They also decided to take the money for the sheer hell of it. However, the policeman started firing at the demons and the demons began massacring the people in the bank. Realising what happened, the sorcerers teleported out of the bank and banished the demons.

The police are saying the victims were shot, to hide the fact they were all torn apart and bitten to pieces. The description of the men as faceless is the attempt of the only surviving clerk to mentally block out the image of the demons.

3 The robbery was carried out by the Faceless Men, the modern day cult of the Great Old One Yegg-Ha, the faceless one. In Roman times, Yegg-Ha threatened ancient Britain until he was destroyed by a band of Roman Legionaries. They broke him into pieces and scattered him across the countryside. The bluish crystal is a fragment of Yegg-Ha, and his cult hope to use it to revive their god.

Harold Darlington is a descendant of the Roman soldiers who fought Yegg-Ha, and is charged with protecting the crystal. The Faceless Ones specialise in violent crime to fund their activities, and took the money to invest in various criminal enterprises. They are violent by nature, and executed people out of habit. The faceless appearance is the result of a spell called “Mask of Yegg-Ha” that makes the face featureless, and both obscures their identity and acts as a form of worship to Yegg-Ha.

© Paul Hebron

The Gift

An investigator quite unexpectedly gains super-human abilities: his muscles grow, thicken and strengthen, he becomes a speed-reader, he finds all his five senses enhanced, and he can perform incredible feats of skill. If he has a chance to find out, he is also very difficult to injure, as his body seems to easily absorb many types of kinetic energy.

Possibilities

1 Nyarlathotep is meddling again. Instead of sending one of his many forms to spread mayhem, he decided to literally play god by enhancing several individuals’ abilities beyond human ken. He means serious fun though - he has also bestowed upon several religious cults the divine message that his saints walk the Earth once again. If the character shows off in public any of his amazing skills, he will be sought out by one of these groups, who will appropriate him as their Divine Messenger. At the same time, more Divine Messengers will appear, and inevitably some will go public. A clash of cults is imminent.

2 It is a gift - of sorts. Some stars are right, and a race of beings from a distant star has opened a gate to Earth - their seasonal hunting ground. As they find that human beings are generally frail and not that challenging to hunt, each hunter picks one target to be enhanced. These beings are normally invisible - but the enhanced character will now be able to see them. The alien appears after a few days and then gives chase.

3 It is a delusion. The character is not stronger, not smarter, and cannot suddenly read Braille or distinguish five brands of Root Beer by taste. His sudden overconfidence is entirely misplaced, and if he persists in this belief, he will get into major trouble. This might be an effect of lasting sanity loss, or a curse by a fiendish sorcerer. This condition, when noticed, is very disturbing to everybody else. “Look at me fly!”

© Felix Girke