GM-Blogging #2: Masks of Nyarlathotep – Jackson Elias

Hey folks! As I said last time, I’ll be doing some blogging of my ongoing Call of Cthulhu campaign to counter-balance our election-related anxiety (just a few more hours!). So let’s meet our team of doomed adventurers:

• Rabbi Guiseppe “Joey Irons” Ferro – WWI vet, locksmith, rum-runner. Italian Catholic who converted to Judaism and was ordained as a Rabbi. Which is helpful, since Rabbis (like other clergy) get an exemption from Prohibition Laws for “sacramental” wine. Not a made man, but a useful associate.
• Killian Digby – the other half of the “walks into a bar” gang, Killian handles the more technical side of the business, while Joey does the actual talking to people. Killian’s good with machines and has lots of contacts in the underworld, but is incredibly socially awkward and off-putting.
• Arthur Cameron, Naval Intelligence – representing the other side of the law, Cameron is a lawyer, served in the U.S navy in WWI, then transferred into Naval Intelligence after the war. Works the China desk.
• Doctor Professor Wendy Danger – with multiple degrees in anthropology, archaelogy, psychology, and medicine, MD/PhD Wendy Danger is one of the University of Chicago’s most distinguished scholars. A student of James George Frazer (he of the Golden Bough) and Sigmund Freud, Danger is on sabattical in NYC. Oh, and served in some classified capacity in the African Theater of the Great War…
• Sheik Horus, Magister Magician and Mentallist – an “Egyptian” (by way of the Mississippi, hey it’s still a Delta!) stage magician and occultist. Very stealthy and a dab hand with a throwing knife.
• Ricardo Fuentes, Veteran of the French Foreign Legion – a veteran of the Great War, has spent time since the war working as a guard on archaelogical expeditions, doing some “protection” work in various places. I’m not saying he’s a gun-runner, but he’s not not a gun-runner!
• Professor Thistlebottom – historian, linguist, noted pacifist.

The team gets together on New Year’s Eve of 1924, the year that saw the death of Lenin and the rise of Stalin, Kemal Attaturk abolishing the caliphate, Hitler jailed for the Beer Hall Putsch, the founding of MGM, J. Edgar Hoover appointed as head of the Bureau of Investigation, the Leopold and Loeb case, the passage of Federal immigration restriction, the first trans-Atlantic fax, the invention of the Caesar salad, the end of the American occupation of the Dominican Republic, the defeat of a badly divided Democratic Party at the hands of Cal Coolidge, the first Macy’s Day Parade, and Edwin Hubble’s announcement that there are galaxies outside the Milky Way…

What does 1925 have in store?

Well, while the team nurses their “headaches” that are definitely not hangovers, a telegram arrives from their mutual friend Jackson Elias. Journalist, globe-trotting adventurer, skeptic and debunker of cults and occult mysticism, Elias has led an eclectic life and made friends from all stations around the world. In this brief telegram, he informs them that:

A bit of a trawl through the newspaper morgues later, and the team learns that the Carlyle expedition was an archaelogical undertaking to Egypt that went disastrously wrong between 1919 and 1920. While the bodies of Roger Carlyle (millionaire playboy and underwriter of the expedition), Sir Aubrey Penhew (famed Egyptologist and academic head of the mission), Hypatia Masters (socialite, photographer, and linguist), Jack Brady (WWI vet, mercenary, bodyguard, and general factotum), and Doctor Robert Houston (psychologist to the rich and famous) were never found following the massacre of the expedition’s bearers, they were declared dead and a number of Kenyan tribesmen were summarily hanged for their presumed murder. But Elias thinks there’s something more to the story and he’s hired the team to find out.

Two weeks later, Killian’s acquired some expeditionary gear and Ricardo has got his hands on some guns just in case there’s trouble. Doctor Professor Danger and Agent Cameron have done background research on the colorful pasts of the expedition members. That afternoon, Jackson Elias, sounding nervous (if not to say paranoid), calls and tells them to meet him at the Chelsea Hotel at 8pm sharp.

Arriving  on time, the group hear some sounds of scuffling inside and carefully pick the lock before throwing open the door. They kick open the door to find several cultists wearing strange headresses (a leather headband supporting a piece of wood in red lacquer that dips down to cover the nose and then curves upwards into a vicious spike) and carrying curved machetes. What follows…is truly unexpected. Ricardo and the Rabbi unleash pinpoint-accurate shots, but only manage to wing their opponents. Agent Cameron attempts an Intimidate check, ordering the men to throw down their guns and surrender. They don’t. (Turns out two out of the three don’t speak English, and all of them are pretty high. And they’re fanatics.)

A one-sided gunbattle erupts, with both sides kicking the unlocked door open and shut and bullets finding their way into the ceiling and the hall light fixture. One of the cultists has his head blown open by Agent Cameron and the other takes cover behind a couch set. In the confusion, Sheik Horus sneaks into the room and takes cover behind an overturned table, and is joined by Agent Cameron, while the good Rabbi and Doctor Professor Danger step inside and immediately to the right, letting off a few shots into the couch which fail to find their target in the darkened room. Meanwhile, Killian advances into the room while Ricardo covers him from the hallway.

At that moment, one of the unluckiest cultists ever comes out of the bedroom clutching a sack of papers and promptly freezes. As Killian tries to get him to hand over the sack, the cultist hidden behind the couch vaults over and tries to hack his head off. A skilled dodge saves Killian’s neck, but the weight of the man knocks him to the ground. The machete buries itself two inches into the floor next to Killian’s head, who is somewhat more focused on the wooden spike coming from the headdress that’s about an inch from his eye. Sheik Horus pops up from behind cover and expertly hurls a throwing knife into the cultist’s right buttock, causing him to lurch upwards in pain, which gives Ricardo enough time to bludgeon the man unconscious with the butt of his gun.

Meanwhile, the rabbi has let of a warning shot that staggers the last remaining cultist, who drops the sack and clambers out of the window on the fire escape…at which point supposed civilian Doctor Professor Danger shoots him in the back, causing him to fall off the fire escape four stories down, to crash on top of the car which the cultists were going to use as their getaway vehicle. It’s at this point that the investigators hear the police sirens heading their way.

Having just gunned down three men, the team plans to split up, with Agent Cameron staying behind to deal with the cops and everyone else clambering down the fire escape, but first they’ll search the room. In addition to recovering the sack, they find the body of Jackson Elias, who has been tortured to death, with a strange symbol cut into his forehead. Reeling from the knowledge that they were only minutes away from saving their friend, the team manages to make it down the fire escape and into their waiting vehicles before the police arive.

That leaves Agent Cameron to deal with the irate Lieutenant Poole of the NYPD, who initially fears that Cameron is a Federal agent trying to take over his case. A couple good rolls on Law and Persuade later, and Cameron has agreed to aid the police in their investigation, as Elias’ death turns out to have been one of a series of cult-related homicides, mostly linked tangentially to Harlem.

The next day, the team reconvenes and looks over the documents that the cultists had stolen from Jackson Elias: a business card from the Penhew Foundation in London, a matchbook from the Stumbling Tiger Bar in Shanghai, an old letter from an Egyptian antiquity dealer to Roger Carlyle, a handbill about a lecture on Polynesian cults, a letter from a librarian at Harvard University about a missing book, a blurred photograph of a yacht at harbor surrounded by Chinese junks, and the business card of Emerson Imports with a name scrawled on the back.

What does it all mean?!

As is fine and longstanding tradition, they split the party to handle all of these investigative efforts. The two rum-runners handle Emerson Imports, where they find out that Jackson Elias was investigating exporters from Mombasa, and their one customer in NYC, a certain Silas N’Kwame who runs the Ju-Ju House up in Harlem, and look into one of the nine cult-murder victims, a low-level gangster named “Richie C.” Now that Harlem is coming more into focus, the two manage to score a sit-down with famed Harlem boss Bumpy Johnson, who explains that he’s had to deal with some minor attempts by African immigrants to muscle into his operations. As long as they stay out of numbers-running, they’re too low-level to bother him, but he allows the rum-runners to investigate up in Harlem as long as they report back to him. For some inexplicable reason, Killian gives Bumpy Johnson a few twists of cocaine found on one of the cultists while the rabbi profusely apologizes and manages to get them both out of there alive and in one piece.

Agent Cameron and Doctor Professor Danger call up Harvard Library and find out that Jackson Elias tried to find a book, Africa’s Dark Sects, which mysteriously vanished from the reference section before it could be consulted. In the process, however, they find out that the symbol carved into Jackson Elias’ forehead belongs to an African cult known as the “Cult of the Bloody Tongue,” which would explain the odd headdresses. Meanwhile, Sheik Horus and Ricardo head to the lecture on Polynesian cults, where I bust out a truly awful Australian accent to roleplay as Professor Cowles, who gives an animated lecture on the history and current practice of Australian bat-cults and then afterwards explains to Sheik Horus about Jackson Elias having contacted him about a James Frazer/Joseph Campbell-like theory that premodern cults around the world all shared a common origin Ricardo is more interested in Cowles’ pretty (and thoroughly bored) daughter.

The party reunited on January 17th for the funeral of Jackson Elias, at Evergreens Cemetary on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. An Episcopalian minister gives a rousing eulogy, saying that “only the world itself is a large or fine enough cathedral to contain all those who mourn his passing.” Psalm 13 is read:

“How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me? Consider and hear me, O Lord my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death; Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved.”

Standing over his grave, the members of the team individually make a silent vow to avenge the man who they came too late to save.

At the funeral, they meet Elias’ long-time editor and publisher, Jonah Kensington, who happens to have a few invaluable pieces of evidence: Jackson Elias’ notes on his upcoming book in two batches, one from Nairobi and one from London. The writing is in shorthand and often opaque, but the truth they contain is shocking: the Carlyle Expedition may not have been massacred, as previously believed, and their disappearance is somehow due to the Cult of the Bloody Tongue!

Next step is to talk to Erica Carlyle, sister of the perhaps-not-dead Roger Carlyle, to find out more about the mysterious expedition…