The Mythos Collector

It is a stormy night. In an attempt to find shelter, the investigators enter an antique shop by the name of Bradshaw’s Curios. Bradshaw’s Curios is owned by Marshal Bradshaw, a withered old man. (In reality, Bradshaw is only 36 but he has experienced things that have agee him.) Bradshaw is obviously kind but if asked about the weather, he says, “Nice, is it not?” His mind is obviously shattered, and this only a hint of it.

The interior of Bradshaw’s Curios is filled with objects, artefacts and curios of the past and present. There is a flight of stairs at the far end of the shop leading up to a door.

Upon one wall there are five clay bas-reliefs. One is of a pulpy octopus head surmounting a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings (Great Cthulhu). Another shows a monstrous ever-shifting mass of protoplasm (a shoggoth).A third  is of a bloated, grotesque and headless human-like body, completely naked with orifices upon the palm of its hands (Y’Golanac).

One bas-relief is clearly different to the others, as it is more detailed and appears to be more recent. It shows a worm-like entity with tentacles upon its head that has been pierced by an odd crystal. The sides of the crystal are covered various symbols (among them the the Elder sign, the yellow sign, Y’Golonac’s symbols and others).

This bas-relief was carved by Bradshaw himself and shows a trapped and bound Cthonian - a scene Bradshaw saw in life. Due to the realistic like of said bas-relief the sanity loss is much more severe then any of the other statues.

One wall is covered with book shelves that are crammed with books and pamphlets. The collection includes a number of forbidden books: Necronomicon in Latin, Al-Azif in Arabic, the Book of Eibon in English, The Cthäat Aquadingen in German and more.

Possibilities

1 Using sorcery contained within one of the forbidden books, Bradshaw is able to create an illusion that brings the bas-reliefs to life.  Bradshaw does this to entertain himself - he doesn’t have a television or radio.

2 If Bradshaw perceives the investigators as a threat, he will excuse himself and retire upstairs. There he tries to summon a byhakee - but unfortunately the summoning goes wrong. The byahkee arrives, but is merely angered. It lashes out and kills Bradshaw before turning on the investigators.

3 The stairs are a powerful magical illusion. If anyone tries to climb them they fall through the seemingly solid “wall” and into caverns below the shop. The caverns are deep and almost endless - and somewhere down there is a Cthonian, trapped by a giant symbol-covered crystal... 

© Daniel Dunn

Dark Road

The new road was a gift to the voters; straight, even, black, no potholes, and a solution to several unfortunate traffic impediments. And in the beginning, it was.

Then, the accidents started. Without apparent outside interference, many cars swerved off the road, hit trees or just crashed. The police ruled out climatic reasons. A search of the slopes on the side of the road revealed no sign of pranksters. No other cars were ever involved, and witnesses are rare. The road acquired an ominous reputation, and its shining black surface seemed to hint of black ice and death. Even commuters take to the more cumbersome side-routes.

The new, black tar comes from a natural deposit of pitch at La Brea, Trinidad. It is well-known for its high quality and superior texture, more able to withstand extreme temperatures and humidity. This time, however, the pitch taken from La Brea was not pure. Pitch Lake is well-known for the underground currents and movements of the earth at work in the area. Objects are dragged into the deposit from as far away as 15 miles, and disgorged years later from the lake proper.

Possibilities

1 The load for the Dark Road contained a few fragments from the burial place of a Carib sorcerer. He died in the first clashes of Carib defenders and Spanish colonialists, and is now haunting the road, as he haunted the ship carrying the pitch. The sorcerer is beyond reasoning, full of blind hate, and attacks the life force of anybody of Spanish descent using the road.

Some survivors have vague recollections of seeing “a man wearing feathers”, others remember hearing wild ululations. The wraith can manifest anywhere on the road, and wherever else the city decides to use the leftover material from the La Brea-shipload.

The situation grows worse as a number of despondent ghosts start haunting the sites of their crashes.

2 The load is impurely refined. This causes slickness in certain sections of the road, which require extensive repairs. However, the refinery in Trinidad can be blamed for the poor quality of the tar, and the city will be spared the costs

3 Before people started taking things out of Pitch Lake, the Caribs were using it to get rid of things. A shoggoth was lured onto the lake and magically sunk around 1430; only modern industrial technology has enabled man to delve deep enough to uncover it. The shoggoth’s protoplasmic structure was able, over 500 years, to merge with the semi-organic pitch.

Thus, the city has just covered an important stretch of real estate with shoggoth-tar, and while this transformation has slowed the shoggoth, it has grown considerably stronger and bigger. Only a few spasms are enough to send any vehicle going faster than walking speed off the road, and after devouring its victims, the shoggoth always returns to its stable shape, straight, even, and black.

© Felix Girke

The Horror of Fang Rock

Five nights ago, the three man crew of a lighthouse twenty miles off the south Dyfed coast vanished without trace. The St-Davids lifeboat went to see what was wrong with the light, but they never returned Just what has happened the lighthouse men of Fang Rock? The wives of the missing people seek the help of a number of experienced investigators to answer this question.

Possibilities

1 Fang Rock, which is built on a sea mount has been over-run with deep-ones who are using it as the focal point for a ceremony designed to bring about the return of dread R’leyh.

2 After a particularly violent storm, a strange ancient glass container was fished from the ocean. Inside this container, which was of elder design, was a Shoggoth. When the lighthouse keepers opened the container the Shoggoth was released and has been prowling the lighthouse ever since.

3 The lighthouse stands at the point where the Dreamlands and the waking world overlap. Five nights ago, the way was opened and a raiding party took possession of the lighthouse so as to ship wreck the ship carrying Randolph Carter. By stopping these raiders, the investigators will trap themselves in the dreamlands.

© Rik Kershaw

The Wreck

Dr. Harold Rathborne has been locked away in an asylum. Otherwise a prominent medical examiner for the police department, Rathborne lost his mind after examining the corpses from a recent train wreck. In related news, someone removed an as-yet unidentified corpse from the morgue in which Rathborne worked the night he went mad. Police are investigating the case, but the real evidence is in Rathborne’s private journal, not his work one.

The new examiner has learned that many of the victims were dead prior to the crash. The police have suddenly stopped sharing information.

Possibilities

1 The Fungi from Yuggoth have stolen back the corpse of the Reginald Bernby whom they impregnated with eggs prior to the train’s departure. Controlled by the Fungi to travel to a specific location, he boarded the train. When he began to germinate in the train car he flipped out and started attacking people with whatever weapons were on hand insisting he be killed. The Fungi, realizing their eggs were suddenly in danger, swept in and caused the chaos that led to the wreck.

Rathborne examined poor Reginald Bernby and discovered the eggs in his abdomen, ready to hatch. Rathborne went mad and later Bernby continued on his quest to the hatching grounds, easily discovered by plotting out the path of the wrecked train.

2 Rathborne’s notes reveal the source of his insanity. One of the bodies he examined (the one that has gone missing) had crawled off the examining table using its skin - not unlike a slug. Rathborne went mad, but not before he concluded that the body was host to an inexplicable organism whose plastic nature seems, to those that know, much like that of a shoggoth.

As it happens, train wreck victim Alexander Marcus shares his body with a shoggoth. The shoggoth gives him unusual strength and durability, enough strength in fact to have ripped an axle off of the train car he was on, and enough supernatural constitution to have regenerated his body sufficiently to walk out of the morgue. His goal was the scientist on board the train who had learned of his unique condition. Rathborne will be next.

3 After seeing one too many bodies broken apart in this horrible wreck doctor Harold Rathborne went stark raving mad. In the comfort of his asylum cell he hears the screams of the dozens of mutilated passengers and the whispers of one victim in particular, a powerful wizard seeking a new, working body.

© Jim Sliney Jr

Stones of Doom

The stone fragments are at the bottom of a shoe box filled with stone arrowheads. Although now broken, they fragments clearly fit together to form a larger stone. The arrowheads have been collected from Anasazi ruins by archaeologist Dr Rachel Smith. She is auctioning them along with her other finds because she needs to raise money fast.

She found the stones of doom in a previously undiscovered Anasazi chamber, but forgot about them. They have been lying in the shoebox with the arrowheads for years, quite forgotten.

Possibilities

1 The stone is an ancient Anasazi fertility symbol. Originally steeped in the milk of Shub-Niggurath, when assembled (and bound together so that it cannot fall apart) the stone causes everything in the immediate area to become fertile. Everything - plants flourish, insects swarm, rats and mice are everywhere. Milk sours overnight, creeping mould is rampant and weeds overrun the garden.

The stone affects humans as well - curing infertility and increasing the likelihood of twins and triplets.

2 The stone is an ancient Anasazi curse stone. The curse inscribed on the stone can be translated only after painstaking research. From what is left to be translated, the curse appears to have been put on a woman who was unfaithful to her husband. Whether the stones had an effect cannot be determined, although the Anasazi took their curses very seriously and held their shaman in high regard.

3 The stone is an old deep one device. When the pieces are assembled the symbols emit a bright light. The stone fuses together into a single piece, and starts sweating. But it appears to do little else.

The stone is a shoggoth leash, used by deep ones to protect themselves from the terrible shoggoth attacks launched at them by the elder things during the war millennia ago. The stone itself causes any shoggoth that comes near to lose control of its mass, reducing itself to bubbling ooze until the holder of the stone moves away. The deep ones have lost the means to create more leashes, and would be interested in recovering the stone (should they learn of it) to rediscover that lost art.

Quite what the stones were doing in Anasazi ruins is a complete mystery, however...

© Steve Hatherley