Ghost Train

Over the past few weeks people have spotted an antique subway train going through the underground. It is always seen in the dead hours of the night and it never seems to stop at any of the stations it is sighted at. Witnesses have described it as having three cars and have also seen strange lights moving around inside it. The transit authority has no information on the train.

Possibilities

1 The antique subway train is being used in a film. It is on loan from a museum and is travelling to various underground stations for filming. It is only seen at night since that is the easier to transport it during the non-peak hours. The strange lights are from the film crew setting up lighting for various interior shots. The Transit Authority knows what is going on but has been asked to keep quite by the movie company.

2 It really is a ghost train. Back in the early 1900 a novice driver took a wrong turn and barrelled into a dead-end tunnel filled with fuel. Everyone on board was burned to death in a gruesome fashion. Now years later the site of the wreck is being excavated and it has disturbed the ghosts. The ghosts, in their hate for the living have used their powers to recreate the subway train and lure victims to a similar fate.

3 The train belongs to an undead sorcerer who was alive at the turn of the century. Feeling nostalgic it has returned to the old stomping grounds of its life. The train has been created by means of magic most foul and populated with rotting and monstrous servants. The sorcerer takes on passengers for the purpose of needing food or experiment subjects.

© David Kapsos

Game Over – For Good!

Recently, a couple of teenagers have disappeared in the town. Research leads to a video arcade.

Further investigation reveals that all the victims were hooked on a new video arcade machine installed a few weeks ago. All were last seen in the hall playing the game.

Possibilities

1 The arcade machine is home to a flying polyp. These semi-solid creatures have, in modern times, learnt to shatter their bodies and send themselves via viruses and even live in digital form on the Internet and in computers.

This polyp uses the game as bait.

2 The machine is connected to the Great Old One, Gog-Hoor via a dimensional rift concealed inside. If the machine is pulled from the wall, one of Gog-Hoor’s multi-eyed tentacles reaches out from the rift. The vanished kids have all been sucked into the rift and are now with Gog-Hoor...

3 The game was designed by a man with considerable knowledge of the Cthulhu mythos. He went insane shortly after finishing it and is now in an asylum.

He poured much of his knowledge into the game - too much perhaps. At certain points in the game players can combine symbols and (seemingly) random letters and risk forming an invocation. The invocation summons something – a dimensional shambler, a nightgaunt, a star vampire or similar. Each time this has happened, the entity has arrived to carry off the hapless player...

© Stefan Jonsson

A Well-Respected Man

Newton Palmer is a pleasant and charming man who finds it easy to make friends no matter where he goes. Newton has gone from a sad and pitiable condition in his youth to a successful and well-regarded businessman. Through shrewd investing he has made a comfortable life for himself and his family and lives a life of luxury few could dream of.

Everybody likes Newton, and he personally knows many celebrities, and makes donations to many small charities. Newton is not famous himself and has built a built a wall of privacy around himself and his wife and young children. The only people who don’t really like Newton are the people who remember him as a sad and bitter wage worker, who Newton has snubbed off every time they have tried to contact him.

Possibilities

1 The real Newton Palmer is now dead. Palmer was once a down on his luck manic depressive. He had a thankless job at the offices of Rand, Webb and Sturgeon, a highly successful publishing firm run by the wealthy Patrick S Sturgeon. Sturgeon inherited the business, but it was insufficiently challenging for him. Sturgeon is a talented businessman, and a fantasist with a major ego problem and a determination to build a business on his own and away from the shadow of his father.

To this end, he decided to take on a new identity – that of a social misfit nobody would miss; Newton Palmer. After a faked helicopter accident, costly plastic surgery and a detailed study of Palmer’s life, Sturgeon killed Palmer and took over, quitting his job and using his skills to quickly rise in status, severing ties with Palmer’s family to avoid speculation.

2 Palmer worked for Rand, Webb and Sturgeon, a shell of a publishing company that had once been successful in the 50s but has been steadily declining ever since. Eventually Palmer’s job was cut, and the company went into liquidation, and Palmer drifted from one job to another. When he hit his lowest, he decided to take out his problems on the closed building of his old company. He broke in, using his position as a former security manager there, and started rooting around for things to steal but instead found a secret collection of books in the basement. Thinking them valuable, he took them home with him and started to read through them to assess their value.

Palmer had found a complete set of the Revelations of Glaaki, and he read of mysterious knowledge and dangerous rituals. However, upon reading Volume 12, he has contacted by the god Y’Golonac. The corpse god offered Palmer a choice; allow him to take over Palmer at certain times and he would have great fortune or be consumed alive. Palmer accepted, and found his fortunes increasing rapidly. However, Palmer is occasionally taken over by Y’Golonac without his knowledge, and the corpse god inflicts unspeakable things on his family. If he weren’t addicted to the thrill of power and control, he would have stopped himself long ago.

3 Palmer is a great success story but has relied on the all-too-human lure of crime to carry him to the top. He owes large amounts of money to various criminal organisations and is now struggling to pay off his debts. Out of frustration, a criminal named Robert Kime, who Palmer owes large amounts of money, has kidnapped Palmer’s wife and children. Palmer would do anything to get his family back, except of course, call the police.

© Paul Hebron

After the Funeral

One of the investigators is attending the funeral of an old friend with other investigators. After the funeral, they have drinks together and talk about their lost friend. Suddenly one of the investigators look through the window and sees the dead friend staring back.

Possibilities

1 At first, the investigator thins it’s just a trick of the mind... until he sees his friends staring at through the window too. Is it a ghost? Is their dead friend trying to send a message from the other side?

2 The dead friend is now a vampire and wants to see his acquaintances one last time before leaving for somewhere else.

3 After blinking the dead friend disappears. It was just a trick of the investigator’s imagination. But why are there footprints below the window?

© Nicolas Dao Phan

Ashes

On an island, an old volcano has erupted again for the first time in centuries. While there is no imminent danger for the few settlements on the island, big clouds of ashes are spreading over a wide area and the near continent.

Possibilities

1 In the areas where the ashes sink down, the deceased rise from their graves and start spreading terror, eating the flesh of the living...

2 In a night after a larger eruption, witnesses claim that amidst the ash cloud a big shadow was seen, as if a gigantic creature had emerged from the volcano, before disappearing into the night - and the volcano still hasn’t come to rest...

3 In the areas where the ashes sink down, certain people – artists, poets and other daydreamers – start having nightmares in which they claim to have seen an ancient city of strange and twisted proportions, as if not made for humans. As the nightmares continue, more and more of these people are driven by an overwhelming desire to go to the volcano and look for the city there, finally even climbing down to its centre, never to be seen again...

© Philipp Mählmann