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

The Automaton

A friend of the investigators, Stuart Blatherly, is intrigued by an automaton chess player. The automaton, displayed by a Professor Wurtzel, is based on Kemplen’s 1769 device, and Blatherly is determined to discover how it works. However, despite several trials Blatherly can’t figure it out. Things take a turn for the worse when Blatherly is murdered. His body is so badly mangled that it is almost impossible to identify.

Possibilities

1 Blatherly was murdered by the automaton’s operator. Hidden inside the automaton’s base is a man, who runs the machine. This chess player is poor and desperate. He thinks that Blatherly is about to expose the automaton’s workings. If that happens, then the operator is out of a job. Professor Wurtzel doesn’t know that his chess player is a murderer, but he suspects.

2 Blatherly was murdered by Professor Wurtzel. Wurtzel is a no-talent stage magician who discovered that Mythos magic works very well. Wurtzel has found a way to bind the wraiths of dead men into objects, like the automaton, and make them do his bidding. The chess player was his first success, but he has other automata that he wants to display. Blatherly has been sacrificed to make one of Wurtzel’s machines work. Soon, Wurtzel hopes, he will have a whole range of performing machines.

3 Blatherly isn’t dead. Blatherly is a near-insane Mythos hunter, who wants a book that the investigators have. Blatherly intends to distract the investigators by getting them to investigate the red-herring chess player. The corpse is that of the automaton’s operator, and Blatherly now works the machine. Professor Wurtzel is kept under control by spells. When Blatherly thinks the investigators are off-guard, he will strike.

© Adam Gauntlett