Oblivion Circle

One peaceful night the investigator goes to sleep normally in her own bed. Hearing a noise in the night, the investigator wakes to find the world outside her bedroom totally changed. Odd, many-legged chairs and tables and weirdly organic trinkets now furnish her home. Other residents sleep soundly but if awakened, see nothing wrong. They seem well disposed toward the investigator, yet their speech sounds ominously strange; for instance, they swear by the names of unknown gods.

The night world outside the investigator’s house has also changed. She sees dreamily twisted houses, new bends in once-familiar roads, and inexplicable advertisements. (“Play Canton-Prefecture Super Lotto and win up to three years of life!”) Newspapers bear enigmatic headlines such as “Kaiser denies cranching out of control.” The victim detects no single obvious branch from her previous reality.

Fellow investigators, too, have changed and now pursue surreally distorted goals. Where the victim might remember a journalist ally as a zealous seeker of truth, the changed reporter now just as zealously casts horoscopes of target politicians, divining their future misdeeds. Though friendly toward the victim, changed investigators recognize nothing wrong with the world, instead believing the victim herself mad.

The victim may explore this nightmare world until dawn. Then she awakens in her bed, with the world outside back to normal. Yet she holds physical evidence that proves her “dream” actually happened, and an unbroken circle of white dust surrounds her bed.

Possibilities

1 An enemy sorcerer has magically transported the investigator into a carefully prepared section of the Dreamlands. Eavesdropping on the victim’s movements, the magician hopes to learn the whereabouts of incriminating evidence or a vital object the investigator owns. After the sorcerer learns the desired information, he dissolves the enchantment, returning the victim to the waking world.

2 In a previous adventure, the investigator offended a Cthulhoid cult. Cultists have projected her into a nightmare world of their communal imagining. They forge the physical evidence to make the illusion convincing. Though the spell cannot work in daylight, the cult intends to torment the investigator nightly until she goes mad.

3 The investigator has gone mad and created a submerged, split personality. This personality creates the nightly dream vision, a projection of the world she would prefer to live in. The mad investigator hallucinates the “physical evidence” and dust circle. Because some sane part of her still dwells on current investigations, the subconscious intuitions revealed in her nightmares may prompt genuine real-world leads.

© Allen Varney

Smiling Jack and Mr Smith

Some years ago, ventriloquist Drew Smith made a radical change to his vaudeville act. Instead of mediocre "Gottle of gear" and "He's behind you" routines, Smiling Jack (his puppet) became a bully and "forced" Drew to cower and beg. This bizarre angle kick-started his career and he quickly became a celebrity.

Apparently inspired by his audience's response, Drew allowed the act to become steadily more strange. Smiling Jack often hit him on stage and reviewers wrote of Drew's disturbingly realistic acting. Rumours started - Drew was unstable and could be heard arguing and pleading with Smiling Jack in his dressing room.

Events took a turn for the worse when, halfway through a show and with tears streaming down his face, Drew implored his audience to rescue him from his tormentor. The shocked silence that followed was described by the papers as "Breath-taking" and "Macabre and beyond decency."

That night Drew Smith was found dead in his dressing room, his arm ripped from its socket. Smiling Jack was a never found.

Possibilities

1 Drew Smith had made a dark pact in return for fame. A demon possessed Smiling Jack and first gave him what he had asked for - then tortured and destroyed him. Once Drew was mentally destroyed the demon lost interest and killed him brutally. Then, still in its little clown outfit, it sought new prey.

2 Drew is a sorcerer who has used Smiling Jack as a juju doll to contact creatures from beyond. He has been fooling the otherworld creatures into thinking that theatre audiences are actually worshippers. Unfortunately the entity he has contacted is demanding more from his congregation and wants them to demonstrate their faith. Eventually the thing became tired of Drew's reticence and returned to the otherworld, taking the doll and Drew's arm with it.

3 Drew is a sorcerer using his act to perform mass suggestions on his audience. He has trapped a lloigor in Smiling Jack, and the suggestions which are "demanded" of him by the lloigor affect everyone in the audience.

The suggestions affect everyone emotionally, and are very useful to Drew. For instance, pity (for Drew) usually engenders some charity, anger causes increased criminal activity that mask Drew's other activities and so on. However, Drew miscalculated - one of his audience persuaded to "rescue" Drew burst into his dressing room and killed the puppet by cutting it off Drew's shoulder.

© Nathan Gribble

The Followers

You are being watched. You cannot see the things that follow you. It could just be your imagination, but movement at the edge of your vision and malicious chattering voices in the wind, haunt your every waking moment. At night they come closer and hide behind reflections in mirrors and darkened windows. And if you turn out the light . . . they become really bold. So you sleep with the light on. Always.

It’s that or the nightmares . . .

Some nights you wake unable to breathe as if something heavy is sitting on your chest. And the room still smells of fetid breath and damp fur.

Possibilities

1 Your block is the subject of secret government experimentation. An experimental drug has been introduced into the water supply, in minute quantities. The drug is heightening everyone’s paranoia and is affecting their sanity.

As well as your own difficulties, other residents are affected. Arguments flare at the slightest provocation. Nobody talks to their neighbours. Security systems are installed. And then nice Mrs Dolittle, who made you cookies the other day, is arrested for making a stew with her husband’s head.

After that, the experiment stops and things slowly return to normal. Nobody is any the wiser.

2 The shock almost killed you. You were having a cup of coffee in a café when suddenly another customer screams and flails at the air as if attacked by something. You stood up to help but, like an after-image of bright lights, you could see things swarming over him. Or at least that is what you think you saw.

Since then you have perceived those things everywhere. And they know that you can see them. Whatever their malign purpose, they wish to do it unobserved and are Now out to get you.

3 For hundreds of years scientists have observed, catalogued and dissected things to see how they work. If a few dogs die of lung cancer or a rabbit has its eyes burnt out, well, it’s all for the common good. We need to know that cigarettes are bad for us and that our cosmetics are kind to our skin.

Now scientist of a different hue are making the same justification. They come in the night and drug you so that you can not remember exactly what has happened and they take you away and conduct experiments. A dissection one night, mazes and electric shocks the next. It’s cruel, yes, but they need to learn a few things before they arrive and it is all for the common good. Well, their common good - and they have never considered that any other kind matters.

© Nathan Gribble

Jars

In a remote corner of Laos, on a hard-to-reach plateau, are hundreds of massive stone jars. They cover an area of 30 square miles and are scattered through the thin forest with varying density. In places they seem to cover the ground, with barely space to walk between them.

The jars themselves are huge, typically three feet tall and carved from granite. Many of them appear to have been moved to the plateau, for reasons unknown. Some of the jars have lids - perhaps all of the jars once had lids, and a few are sealed. Others have strange markings carved in their sides.

The plateau is sparsely populated, and the natives have no more idea of what the jars are for than anyone else. They use handy jars for storage, or as water butts. Most of them, however, are just left.

Possibilities

1 The jars are stone-age artefacts and were carved 3-4000 years old. They appear to have been used by the stone age tribes of the area for storage - as some of them have been found to contain pots and shards of bamboo. The jars also seem to have some kind of religious significance, as several of the sealed jars have been found to contain skeletons.

2 The jars had originally been brought across from the dreamlands. They had been used by the Men of Leng centuries ago to transport moonbeasts into the waking world. The jars have since been left scattered, debris of an ancient scheme. They have since been used by the local people for storage.

The jars are not entirely benign, however. In the original scheme some of the moonbeasts were missed. Some have died, and strange twisted bones can be found in a few of the jars. In one or two of the sealed pots, however, hibernating moonbeasts wait for the unsealing. They are unlikely to be pleased when they finally awake.

3 The jars are ancient artefacts of worship. Long ago, the people of Laos worshipped an avatar of Nyarlathotep, the Bloated Woman. She would visit annually, and would be most displeased with her people if the offering had not been properly prepared. They were therefore always most eager to prepare it properly.

The offering, a vile mixture of rotting herbs, pustulent body parts and live sacrifices would be prepared over the course of several months and poured into a hand-carved stone jar. The lid would then be sealed and the concoction left to turn in the sun for several weeks. At the time of the Great Coming, the jar’s lid would be removed and, upon smelling the fragrant aroma belching forth, the Bloated Woman would arrive to bless the people of Laos.

© Steve Hatherley

Couch Potato

Darren Richards, aged 13, is not a happy boy. Neither is he an unhappy boy. At least, not so far as you can tell. He sits vegetatively, occasionally rocking to and fro, unresponsive to external stimuli - even his favourite TV show. His parents spoon feed him mush. "The lights are on, but nobody seems to be home," as Doctor Clarke says.

Darren was found in exactly that state, sat in front of his computer game console plugged into the wide screen TV in the family home, a little over a week ago. Prior to that he was a perfectly normal lad of his age.

Questioning the family reveals a seemingly irrelevant detail, that the computer game had malfunctioned, the screen looked "odd". If pursued it emerges that Darren was video taping his progress to enter a "game glitches" competition in a magazine. The tape shows the player's character in the game moving through a seemingly solid mountain range in the game environment into a "wrongly" coloured surreal landscape where moving images leave strangely blurred after-shadows.

Possibilities

1 The game provides an entrance into the dreamlands. If the investigators play the game and retrace Darren's route (requiring hours of frustrating practice), they are also drawn into the dreamlands, leaving their unconscious bodies behind. Getting out of the dreamlands is a little more complicated, but if they manage it, they restore Darren and themselves to normality.

A larger issue remains to be solved. Is it only Darren's copy of this game that has this potential, or will there be an epidemic of dreamboys amongst fanatical players of this new game?

2 The game's effect is caused by a combination of its addictive gameplay and hypnotically flickering lights. It has induced a form of catatonia. Darren is not the only player affected, and while medical hope remains, he may remain unresponsive for years.

3 The effect is deliberate and has the same effect on any weak minded player. After a few days, Darren starts to come out of his catatonia, and returns to normal. However, he has now been reprogrammed by the game. In response to broadcasting a further subliminal signal (teenage computer gamers always watch too much television) the affected feel a compulsion to carry out some great and terrible task.

One of the programmers at EtherTec, the game manufacturer, has been corrupted and seduced by an agent of the mythos. He has added unnecessary code to the game, and although he now swears allegiance to his new master, he has no real understanding of the additional code.

© Jon Freeman