Lerouxville

A long while ago I ran a modern Call of Cthulhu game on G+ set in a fictional town in Louisiana modeled after my hometown of Hattiesburg Mississippi.  There is a fairly likely chance that I'll be running a mini-campaign for my home group in the Classic/1920s era of Cthulhu.  As a thought experiment this morning, I decided to sketch out what I think Lerouxville and its surroundings would be like in the '20s.

Lerouxville - An Arkham-sized town that, while extant as long ago as 1810, grew in prominence due to a mass migration of carpet baggers after the Civil War.  It was for many decades a combination logging town and rail hub, but as logging has moved to the Pacific Northwest the magnates of the town have come to focus more on other forms of commerce.  The town is surprisingly Klan free, in part due to the Klan's opposition to bootlegging, which has recently lined the pockets of many residents.

Borden College - This college was founded about 30 years ago as a teaching college, but in the intervening years it has added a number of eclectic departments.  It is known throughout the region as a haven for radicals and wackos, many of whom were rejected from the more conservative institutions nearby.

Perilloup - This small community is a mix of Cajuns, African Americans, and mixed raced individuals and the subject of many rumors.  It is older than Lerouxville and by historical accident is home to the Skipwith Parish* courthouse.  It is home to an illicit gambling house and brothel, originally intended to service the loggers in Lerouxville.  These establishments have seen better days.  Many of the residents here make alcohol, which is smuggled to other parts of the country via Lerouxville.

Pinewood - A small farming community of old Southerners with only a handful of last names.  Locals are poor, insular, and bitter.  About halfway between Lerouxville and Pinewood is the Pinewood Asylum, which was built with a grant from the Collins family of Lerouxville.

Bayeux St Foy - About 30 miles south of Lerouxville, many of the Lerouxville magnates have second homes here to enjoy the lush scenery.  Many of these homes include surrounding communities of share croppers.  The town is rounded out with old cajun families who are resentful of the "New People."

*About 1/3 of Lerouxville lies in Skipwith Parish

Home Group Players Do not Read Beyond this Point
The supernatural elements can be roughly broken down as follows:

- The weird shit at the college - strange science experiments, weird ancient books, etc.

- The various turpitudes of the town magnates - usually pacts with Shub-Niggurath or Nyrlathotep for their own prosperity.  Some will have oddly old world or New England character.

- Hoodoo - usually presented as weird practices but some of which will have obvious mythos roots.  Practiced by African Americans, Cajuns, and old Southern families.

- D'Iberville Forest - strange standing stones in a region with mostly clay and sandy soils, "swamp monsters," half-monster squatters

- Yig - might use Yig to tie it all together because of its association with African, New World, and really really old Old World stuff.  Also there's just a lot of snakes

.

Secrets of Lerouxville

My players should not read this.  MY PLAYERS SHOULD NOT READ THIS. MY PLAYERS SHOULD NOT READ THIS.  MY. PLAYERS. SHOULD. NOT. READ. THIS.

Ok now that that's out of the way, I'm working on an Uzumaki-type structure for a Call of Cthulhu game set in a fictional parish in 1930s Louisiana.  I used the tag tables from Silent Legions to try to give me some ideas for what was going on.  This is the result.

Note: If there are two paragraphs, the first paragraph is mundane information replicated from here.  The second paragraph is the supernatural thing.

Lerouxville | Inhuman Masters, Secret Nexus, Horrific Wealth

An Arkham-sized town that, while extant as long ago as 1810, grew in prominence due to a mass migration of carpetbaggers after the Civil War.  It was for many decades a combination logging town and rail hub, but as logging has moved to the Pacific Northwest the magnates of the town have come to focus more on other forms of commerce.  The town is surprisingly Klan free, in part due to the Klan's opposition to bootlegging, which has recently lined the pockets of many residents.

The magnates in the town owe their wealth to a pact made with inhuman entities.  The swamps near the town contain a passage to an alternate universe rife with strange plant-life and things inimical to man.  While Natchez Indians in the area fought to keep these entities at bay, a small group of carpetbaggers interested in the occult were able to harness the power to increase tree production for the logging industry.  Unfortunately, this has caused a great deal of abnormal defects in the local population for many miles around.  The magnates will do anything to keep their secret and their wealth.

Pinewood | Bitter Envy, Plutocratic Control, Terrible Pact

A small farming community of old Southerners with only a handful of last names.  Locals are poor, insular, and bitter.  About halfway between Lerouxville and Pinewood is the Pinewood Asylum, which was built with a grant from the Collins family of Lerouxville.

An impoverished local whose land was taken to help build the Asylum has entered into a pact with one of the creatures from the Other World.  His goal is the death of all those who own land here but live in Lerouxville.

Perilloup | Lich Lair, Eldritch Radiation, Impending Doom

This small community is a mix of Cajuns, African Americans, and mixed raced individuals and the subject of many rumors.  It is older than Lerouxville and by historical accident is home to the Skipwith Parish* courthouse.  It is home to an illicit gambling house and brothel, originally intended to service the loggers in Lerouxville.  These establishments have seen better days.  Many of the residents here make alcohol, which is smuggled to other parts of the country via Lerouxville.

It is also the home to the grave of a creole witch whose power was very real.  She was in touch with the Other World and worked in her life to save both indians and slave populations from the depredations of the white man, but the side effects of this salvation was sometimes even worse than the cure.   Her power still radiates out from her hidden grave, which has a number of “hoodoo” cultists that make trips to it during dates considered important in her life.  Few would know that the intensity of birth defects in the region is due to this old magic.

Bayou St Foy | Feuding Elites, Impending Doom, Predatory Entity

About 30 miles south of Lerouxville, many of the Lerouxville magnates have second homes here to enjoy the lush scenery.  Many of these homes include surrounding communities of share croppers.  The town is rounded out with old cajun families who are resentful of the "New People."  The water locally is also rising, something the old locals notice but the “New People” seem blissfully ignorant of.  Money moves in while old families leave.

It’s position on the coast also means that many involved in bootlegging have moved their shipping operations here.  The conflict between bootlegging interests and the Klan has meant that Bayou St Foy has a much higher murder rate than a town of its size would normally warrant.  It is also home to an inhuman creature summoned from the Other World long ago.  Immune to the effects of aging, this creature stalks the bayou and most recently has interrupted the construction of a large casino on a barrier island off the coast.

Okoholo | Depraved Clergy, Massive Ritual, Corrosive Vice

The “town” of Okoholo has aproximately three extended families in it.  All of them are involved in a strange religion.  They worship a bottomless pit (an artifact of the Other World) that their preacher says can raise the dead.  It can, but perhaps not in the same way as the Savior.

Borden College | Horrific Wealth, Breeding Program, Academic Sorcerers

his college was founded about 30 years ago as a teaching college, but in the intervening years it has added a number of eclectic departments.  It is known throughout the region as a haven for radicals and wackos, many of whom were rejected from the more conservative institutions nearby.

The grant it was founded on is based on the same timber-money held by the magnates in Lerouxville.  Many in its departments are actually occultists, and a small clade of three of those occultists are involved in trying to solve some of the local birth defect problems for the magnates using magic from the Other World.

The Spiral

Junji Ito is one of the Greats

Over at From the Sorcerer's Skull, Trey has posted about small-scale mystery sandboxes.  This is a thing that several of us in the online Nightwick group have often discussed.  Infamous artist, blogger, and Star Trek aficionado Huth has a kind of dream campaign he says is based off the structure of Junji Ito's Uzumaki.  Since he has not done a post on it - despite several requests - I've decided to tackle the issue myself as best I can.

The idea is that the weird happenings in a small town are based around what Huth refers to as a "core phenomena" - a weird thing that causes the secondary weird things the PCs investigate and lends them all a loose theme.  In Uzumaki this is the town's connection to a "spiral curse."  In Twin Peaks this would be Bob or the Black Lodge. It is the innermost layer of Sandy Petersen's proverbial onion from the Call of Cthulhu corebook.  Deciding what the core phenomena is is the first and probably most important step to setting up one of these types of campaigns.

The core phenomena should provide a loose theme for all of the sub-mysteries.  I say "loose" because I feel like if you make it too thematic you will end up in a straight jacket.  The Spiral Curse in Uzumaki provides for a wide variety of bizarre effects including people merging together and mosquito-women.  The spiral is involved conceptually with each, but its a broad enough concept that it can work for multiple things.

The core phenomena would ideally provide a kind of mini-apocalypse that destroys the mini-setting in some thematically appropriate way.  All of the sub-mysteries hint at the nature of the core phenomena and when the core phonemena is revealed its conflict with the characters will destroy the setting either literally or by removing the threat.  This apocalypse could be an actual destructive event (like in Uzumaki) or it could be something more subtle.  Take for example the town of Deer Meadow in Fire Walk with Me.  The guys at RLM convincingly argue that Deer Meadow is what would happen to Twin Peaks if Bob's corruption is allowed to spread throughout the town.  It is not something that would make the news in the way Uzumaki's does, but it is its own kind of apocalypse.

The structure of such a campaign beyond the core phenomena is perhaps the biggest sticking point between Huth and me.  Huth has tried on a few occasions to do one where everything is a big web of relationships.  The sub-mysteries all occur simultaneously and the sandboxy nature is enhanced by the players being able to access any part at any given time.  It most closely matches the circular model of dungeon design described by Melan (though with facts instead of corridors and rooms).  This sounds great, but each time I have seen him attempt it we floundered and spun our wheels.  Perhaps mastering this would be the best form of the game.

The half-assed version I would argue for is closer to Melan's "branching" dungeon, but in reverse.  Each component part is fairly linear with a couple of branching paths that connect it to neighboring mysteries (just one or two so that the connections don't get too crowded).  All of the branches are accessible at any time but they are ultimately a line pointing to whatever layer of the onion they uncover.  This should be less work for the GM while still getting the overall idea of the campaign across.

I have wanted to try such a campaign with my Lerouxville setting.  When I ran it long ago I had not hit upon the idea of the core phenomena nor read Uzumaki.  I think it suffered as a result, but since I'm currently in the midst of a Nightwick Abbey game and am running a location hopping Delta Green game for my home group, it seems like it might be a while before I can try my hand at a better version.

The Spiral of Horror - A Campaign Frame

I don't think this has anything to do with mermaids

I've been playing World of Horror, which officially releases next month (and which you should grab before it's price goes up with that official release), and it's made me think about an old campaign frame I once discussed with one of the Nightwick Regulars but still haven't been able to pull off. Here I wish to revise that campaign frame into something more concrete and see how it sounds to my gentle readers.

First, we need the equivalent of the Spiral from Uzumaki, the overall theme and phenomenon that will drive the strangeness of the campaign. Here is the first place I wish to borrow from World of Horror: we're going to have the imminent return of a Great Old One. For my example here I'm going to pick Cthulhu but I think you'll see any of them can work. An important thing here is we don't want one organization that is trying to summon Cthulhu, but rather he is coming and his influence is spreading throughout the world. If you're playing Delta Green, we can do that literally, but if we're doing more traditional Call of Cthulhu or Liminal Horror, or especially if you're doing Liminal High School, we're going to be focusing on how this effects one town.*

Why a Great Old One? They're thematically broad, like the core phenomenon of Uzumaki. Cthulhu is most utilized in scenarios in the form of Innsmouth/Deep Ones stuff, but remember that the story the Call of Cthulhu is about his effects on dreamers and artists. The madness of dreams could certainly show up in a number of scenarios, as could ancient artwork that seems to resemble the modern, or what of the "white pulpous thing" in the swamps of Lousiana or the stellar nature of his star spawn, or even his defeat of other intelligent races in Lovecraft's Mythos? Maybe a Elder Thing ruin activates an ancient weapon meant to stop Cthulhu's return based on math created by that ancient race but now it will destroy the town the PCs occupy. I dunno. Lots of stuff. If you need ideas for expanding the meaning of your respective Great Old One, check out the section on them in Trail of Cthulhu or, if you have it, the d20 version of Call of Cthulhu.

The stars are right

Next we come up with 1d4+2** of mysteries around the town.*** In my head players will have access to the hooks for these all at once. In my original Lerouxville campaign the analogous list of hooks came in the form of the notes of a missing friend. He had collected a number of notes on the outer layers of various mystery-onions**** and the players could kind of pick which one they wanted to investigate. Unfortunately I did not have these as thematically consistent as we want here - they were just a bunch of weird things - nor did I have the intention of ever revealing the fate of the missing friend. In hindsight I should've probably made that explicit - "you're never going to actually find out who killed Laura Palmer, that's just the frame for the other stuff" - but the first part is remedied by this campaign model. How you develop these mysteries is up to however you do it normally. I'm a fan of the method in the DG Handler's Guide, but you do you.

For the sake of our Cthulhu example, and because I have Liminal High School on the brain, maybe some high school Wicca types were all visited by him in a dream and now they're out in the swamp feeding people to those polypous things. Get a list of NPCs, leads, maybe a handout for one of their dream journals, and you have a scenario.

Do you read Sutter Kane?

Finally, at least prep-wise, we have the main innovation I have taken form World of Horror. In World of Horror, every time you investigate a location some event happens. Often these are related to the case but often they aren't and sometimes an animated head or the missing class of 1971 just pops out of nowhere and you have to run away or fight it. That's a bit... too much if we want to be thematically consistent, but there is something we can take here. What we're going to do is come up with a list of kind of one off random spooky encounters that can be inserted into any investigation. These are tied thematically to the Great Old One.

As I hinted at above, our example for this is going to be a dream-driven deep one with a fire axe that'll attack the PCs during one of their investigations. What's his deal? Unfortunately for the PCs, that's likely to be a dead end; however, he sets up the broader theme of the Great Old One thematically and introduces an element of horrific synchronicity into our game. 

Investigation!

So mechanically what you'd have is the PCs select the scenario - "let's check out what those witchy girls were doing in the swamp our friend seemed so interested in. Maybe they killed him?" They ask around and find out that a fellow student who works at the Shell station***** has seen them meet up in the gas station's attached Subway every weekend before leaving for somewhere else. Thinking they might be able to follow the The Craft wannabes from there, the players decided to stake out the Shell station. The Keeper (or whatever you want to call them) rolls a die - let's say a d6 for old time's sake - and getting a 6, rolls a second die to determine which of his unplaced weird things happens at the Shell. Oh look, it's the fire axe maniac! How convenient for our example! He asks if they read Sutter Kane. They look confused. He attacks them with an axe. Gameplay ensues.

So why do this? What do we get out of it? Well from our example one thing we get out of it is potentially a higher density of weird moments instead of mundane detective work. I know a player who has disliked most of the CoC/DG games run by the Nightwick Regulars because of the lack of relative action. This perhaps does something to remedy that. Hopefully. It also sets up foreshadowing for the final bad thing in our Uzumaki spiral. And if you want to be real pretentious about it, and this is hack work, remember, it adds to the horror of the unknowable or some shit. Spooky!

* You could probably do that with Delta Green too.

** Not necessarily literally rolling dice but I wanted to be more concrete than "a handful." 

*** Or world. Whatever.

**** To slightly borrow a metaphor from some asshole.

***** Get it? Because of the ocean?