This is the much anticipated continuation of the Call of Cthulhu chronicle created by Jim Comer for Viet Nam. If you missed the earlier Tickets, you can read them first by going to the Tickets Intro Page
ENDGAMES
Tying Up Loose Ends
The game is over.
The Keeper may have to integrate the investigators
back into the frame of a 90s game,
and this may take some time.
Scott Davidson will go on to inherit
money and live a life of ease. He is a subject at the Winthrope
Institute for Dream Research and later a successful businessman.
He goes on to practice magic of the Wiccan school, shunning the
Norse mysticism of Schwärmer's disciples and the Mythos
as well. His At Your Door self is a very different person.
Brandt, who is also Don Luftbard, may go on the finer things
or back into a mental hospital at the Keeper's discretion; it
is certain that he will not go back into the Mythos. He
is rehabilitated or wounded still further, depending on whether
the players completed the dream-mission or not, but his ghosts
have been laid to rest. If Schwärmer did not die in
the dream, then he did not die. He and his followers went
on to spread evil and horror, infect people with diseases, eat
human flesh, lose the Vietnam War, and attain government posts
of high degree. In the best of all possible worlds, Jacob
Schwärmer might be content with dying well. In the
worst, he is probably a regular guest on Jennifer Armbruster's
bodybuilding program, "Working out with Shub-Niggurath".
The Green Berets would be prime supporters of Full Wilderness
and would be on the top of the list for visiting passes to the
"preserves" that the group proposes to create, void
of human artifacts.
In Army records, the player's names
may appear as men missing in action. The Green Berets are
all listed as such, unless Brandt makes it out with the players.
In a 90s campaign, these men could appear as leaders of skinhead
mobs, as Aryan fascist guerrillas, as medieval re-creationists,
or as senators and congressmen
ON THE FUNGI
Among
the most interesting creatures to come from the typewriter of
H. P. Lovecraft are the Mi-Go, or Fungi from Yuggoth. These
creatures are the primary movers behind the story The Whisperer
in Darkness, in which their actions come to light. In the
story we find that they visit Earth's mountains, notably the
Appalachians and Himalayas, to mine exotic minerals unobtainable
elsewhere. They are said to have a vast interstellar empire
of planets, dark stars, and other things, and to have come originally
from outside our own space-time. They can pass as humans
by wearing disguises (a shift impossible to Great Cthulhu, for
example), and often do so, though the disguise presented in the
story was viable only in dim light and as long as the creature
wearing it did not move. Presumably other and more sophisticated
disguises are known, and a recent Chaosium publication states
that the Yuggothian population of Peru's Himalayas uses such.
GOALS AND QUESTS
There are several major subplots operating
at once in this game setting. They can be summed up in
a series of questions. Many of the questions are of variable
importance, and all will never show up in a single run of this
game-or at least, to handle them all would take a referee's utmost
concentration
1. Why are the bodies being mutilated? Who's doing
it?
A. The mutilations are being performed by Tcho-Tcho cannibal
cultists led by a girl whose body runs with botflies. She
bites off the parts in question, then the flies clean up the
edges of the wound. Then come the tribesmen with obsidian
knives and remove meat from the arms and legs for drying and
smoking. The eyes and genitals are ritual delicacies that
do not keep long. The many mutilations are the work of
about six people: they travel at Tibetan trance running speed
between sites.
2. What are the burnt corpses hiding?
A. The American commanders are burning the bodies with napalm
to hide the mutilations above. Schwärmer suggested
it to the commander at Tan Son Nhut, but the commander
has forgotten this with time.
3. Who is Jacob Schwärmer? What is he?
Why does he do what he does?
Can he ever be redeemed? Who is Frank?
A. These questions deal with the same topic. Schwärmer
is a Special Forces captain in league with the Mythos powers,
driven to their service by the death of his buddy Alec Baldwin.
His followers are driven mad by repeated exposure to the Mythos
while on assignment with him. His ultimate aim is to secure
the return of Alec in the body of Alec's bastard son, or, failing
that, to raise Alec from his salts. Schwärmer could
return to the human point of view enough to see the evil of his
ways, but is very unlikely to do so. This could only happen
if Alec returned and convinced him that his actions were wrong,
or if someone proved that Alec was never coming back. Frank
is a metis, the son of a French corporal and a bar girl, adopted
by Schwärmer as a personal companion.
4. Who is meeting in the Cao-Dai Pagoda? What does
the headman fear?
A. The people who rendezvous at the pagoda and cache drugs
there are smugglers moving opium, heroin, hemp, and CTH, or hammer,
south from the secret base in the Golden Triangle to South Vietnam.
The headman knows this, but is afraid that he will be punished
for revealing the secrets of the kaitong Hei-Ren-Tze, or CIA
secrets. He know the CIA only as the Company.
5. Who is Louis Wu and what does he know?
A. Louis is the son of a Tonkinese woman and a Chinese
soldier. His opium den is the last of the great Saigonese
fumeurs, catering to a mixed clientele. He knows that Patty
Holeran is a dope smuggler with a base in the Triangle, and that
she is a great kaitong. He also knows just about everything
about sex.
6. What are the Tcho-Tcho or Trung-Cho?
a. A tribe expelled from Tibet for practicing cannibalism
and black magic. Groups have settled in China, Malaysia,
and Burma, and one village in Vietnam. They are utterly
abominable. They worship Shub-Niggurath with human sacrifice,
use her Milk to fertilize their fields, and plunder and eat anyone
who gets near enough. In their case genocide would be downright
praiseworthy.
7. What is happening at the mysterious mountain in Laos?
A. The Tcho-Tchos and Nyarlathotep are producing food on
the slopes because underneath lives the larval Great Old One
Qaggjhaqq-Unglorh. This being eats the human herds that
are bred in the antechamber of his cave, which is actually his
mouth. The laboratory in the hill tunnels has a door that
opens onto his flesh, which is the source for the arcane chemicals
used to reduce a human body to its essential salts and restore
it from them. Schwärmer uses the place for his rites,
and has come to initiate a new member of his band and to revive
Alec. Depending on the Keeper's whim, this may or may not
be possible.
8. What is happening at the seaside at the archaeological
site? Why do the natives fear it? What do the Chinese
carvings mean?
A. The site is a Chinese temple erected in the 1400s by
Cheng He, the Muslim eunuch who sailed to Africa.
In Arabia, he became aware of the existence of the Necronomicon,
and reproduced a copy by writing Chinese characters to represent
the Arabic text and then tattooing them onto a hundred Nubian
slavegirls in white ink. The girls would not survive the
return trip, so at the temple site he had them flayed and the
book bound from their hides. The natives buried the temple
because it symbolized Chinese domination. Under it is a
Champa temple to the Hinduized Mythos gods of the Indian subcontinent.
Under that is a prehuman shrine. The carvings replicate
the Necronomicon in Arabic and Chinese and the Rlyeh Texts in
Chinese. They also warn of the danger that the temples
guarded against: that the evil ones met at this place.
9. What is the horrible drug called hammer? Who makes
it, and from what? Why?
A. The Army refined it from the hallucinogenic mushrooms
of the Tcho-Tcho. They believed that the fighting frenzy
that the drug produced could be controlled. They were wrong.
10. What are the dreams that investigators have?
Why do they involve the Captain?
A. The dreams are Schwärmer's dreams, his happy
memories of boyhood times with Alec. The Dreamlands experiences
come to those who are ready.
11. Who is the investigator who enters the game as an adoptee?
How can he use his unusual origin to help the player-investigators?
A. He is a Ghoul in human form. At maturity he starts
to change, and as the game progresses he will center more and
more on death and corpses. He can enter the Dreamlands
awake, a feat impossible to most.
12. Who are the whisperers in darkness? Why do they
avoid the prehistoric monastery? What is the stone and
what does it do? What can be done about it?
A. They are the fungi from Yuggoth. They cannot enter the
monastery because the chant of the monks would cause their bodies
to explode. The stone allows them to assume human form
and breathe hot sticky air with no visible discomfort.
13. Why did Ho visit the cannibal fortress many times?
What did he do there? Who is the pregnant woman and what
will happen to her and her child?
A. He sought to impregnate a woman so that he could return
as his own son even if the plot to cook him up from his salts
should fail(as, historically, it did). The child will rule
Vietnam when he becomes aware that he is his father as well as
himself. He will be a part of the Mythos plot to take over
the world by reviving the great dead.
14. Who are the final movers behind this? What do
they want? Who is Patty Holeran?
A. Patty is Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos. She
plans to spread drug addiction, witchcraft, and AIDS throughout
the world to ruin human society. She knows that the Vietnam
War, the French colonization, and the Chinese invasion were all
a plot to keep Vietnam a nightmarish backwater so that the Fungi
had a safe route to the sea.
If the game was set in the Sixties,
it is over upon the return of the dreaming investigators to the
prehistoric monastery in the Lao hills. The game can simply
end there and the characters be retired, never to be heard from
again. Or the Keeper can play out the trek from the mountains
back through enemy territory to South Vietnam and some safety(or
Thailand and less safety). The characters may reappear
in a Cthulhu Now campaign as fathers or patrons of modern characters,
or even be characters themselves-who better to delve dark mysteries
than those who have already fought them on the other side of
the world? In a Cthulhu 20s game, the Sixties characters
would have more trouble appearing, and would likely lose some
SAN just trying to adjust to being marooned in the past.
Their advanced knowledge and skills could prove useful if handled
properly(bets on the Stock Exchange, anyone?) or very dangerous("What
do you mean, "Free Love"?). An especially vicious
idea for Keepers who have not used Shadows of Yog-Sothoth is
to have the Vietnam veterans appear as a result of Lostalus Black's
conjuring during a meeting of "Look to the Future".
Black, being one and the same as Hei-Ren-Tze or Patty Holeran,
might choose to let the investigators go freely. For the
dreaming 90s characters, this would be a further wrinkle.
The Keeper can work up a sequel set
in Laos, as this is where the action ends. The investigators
could pursue the plots of the fungi, who are everywhere.
They could seek employment with the opium lords in the Golden
Triangle. They could fight for the Royal Lao government,
the Pathet Lao, the KMT Fifth Army, the Burmese Communists, the
Shan United Army, or the Muppets. They could do whatever
the Keeper lead them to do. So far the story is written.
What happens next is up to you. Good hunting.
Cthulhu and Christ
Religion in Tickets for a Prayer Wheel
H. P. Lovecraft was a devout atheist.
A childhood in the essentially post-Christian atmosphere of turn
of the century New England shaped this attitude, and a life in
the intellectual circles of science fiction and fantasy writers
reinforced it. Lovecraft's world was a mindless dance of
molecules void of reason or plan, and humans who think otherwise
get nothing but trouble. The cosmos is indifferent to human
wants and wishes, an example being the blind mindless Azathoth,
the idiot god at the center of the universe. The dominance
of man of Earth was an illusion born of human ignorance; other
sentient races had ruled the world before him and would rule
it after. Man was destined to become extinct and would
have no effect on the course of world affairs beyond a footnote
or two in the records of the Great Race of Yith. Religion
was either self-delusion, usually in the mind of and inferior
human being, or was a front for the manipulations of the Great
Old Ones. The "gods" of the Dreamlands, or Great
Ones, are not indifferent to human wishes, but even Randolph
Carter is not able to speak to them, and they are really beings
of dream in any case. While Lovecraft is not as hostile
to religion in general and Christianity in specific as his earlier
contemporary Mark Twain, religion doesn't come off looking too
good in his work.
All this changes when the Mythos enters
the hands of other writers. Many after Lovecraft wrote
Mythos stories, the most notable being August Derleth.
In his tales, the Mythos becomes dualistic. Derleth, a
lapsed Catholic, assumed Elder Gods of good who had fought the
Cthulhoids and driven them down. These Elder Gods are ill-defined.
The game Call of Cthulhu ignores the Elder Gods, and for good
reason: Lovecraft did not invent them, and they are so poorly
described that it would not be very interesting to use them.
But the mention of the Elder Gods brings up an important point.
Lovecraft's eccentric Anglo-Saxon dilettantes are the original
Call of Cthulhu characters, but they are not typical Tickets
characters any more than they are typical human beings.
No such people fought in the Vietnam War, and to import them
or their moral framework is to grossly misrepresent war and warriors.
A mad mishmash of religious expression flavors the thirty years
of the war, from the Spartan Communist piety of the VC cadres
to the evangelical oddities of the Americans and the intense
weirdness of the Cao Dai. How do the varieties of human
religious experience and the ways that they affect human personality,
nationality, and character relate to the Cthulhu Mythos, and
how do religious beliefs and practices affect human response
to the Mythos?
We can offer a simple answer.
From the researches of Phileus Sadowsky, the renowned Bulgarian
occultist, we know that the Mythos was known in almost all ancient
human cultures. The name Cthulhu was known in China, Palestine,
Arabia, Greenland, India, and many other places; and is mentioned
in the Bible twice(in two different forms). The major religions
of the world, such as Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam,
and others, begin with a ban, common to them all, on the worship
of idols or of other gods. In the past, rationalist scholars
have called such commandments proof of blind ignorance or prejudice.
They ask what harm is done when prayers are offered to idols,
or to other gods. The obvious answer, to any student of
the occult is that these religious laws have a very real meaning.
They existed to suppress the Mythos, whose destruction was the
aim of all major human religions. No society worthy of
the name could exist unless the Cthulhu cult and its ilk were
abolished, and so great religions came into existence.
The god or gods established by these faiths were of varying nature,
and their existence is often doubted in a universe full of pain
and suffering. However, next to the entities of the Mythos,
anything was preferable.
ONLY DREAMING.
The dreamworld sequences for Tickets.
These sequences are intended for the
referee who wants the campaign to take on greater depth or who
feels that his players would be interested by the more complete
exfoliation of the plot that they offer.
There are three ways that the referee
can include the sequences. First, if he has no characters
who are experienced dreamers, he can simply insert them as regular
dreams and play them as solo runs between gaming sessions.
If some players have visited the Dreamlands of H.P. Lovecraft,
the referee can use the Tickets dream sequences as openings to
the Lovecraftian dreamworld. The dreams taking place on
Earth, but in the past, are actually the Captainís dreams,
carried to investigators by his sorcerous powers. These
all have to do with his boyhood friend, Alec Baldwin, the loss
of whom began Schwärmerís plunge to Mythos madness.
They have two uses; first, to explain the mystery if the investigators
have trouble finding out what happened by other means, and second,
to enable the investigators to feel more fully the tragedy that
lies at the root of the Captainís evil plans.
The Captainís Dreams
The dreams are in no particular order,
but cover a period of five years, from 1939 when the two friends
met, until Baldwinís death in 1944. They may repeat,
and more than one person may have the same one, in which case
the referee can compare reactions. If Schwärmer does
not yet have a favorite among the players, use their reactions
to these sequences to select one. The loser will be the one who
grasps the implications of the scenes most deeply.
One: the dreamer is walking down a hall at night, in the barracks-like
dorm of a military school. The latrine is lit up, and muffled
curses come from within. The dreamer is not himself(if
the dreaming character is a woman, she may voluntarily drop a
point of SAN upon finding herself a male) but a smaller, younger
person-the latrine mirrors show an adolescent Anglo-Saxon.
The dreamer knows that the noise is an illegal and violent hazing
session. He may turn around and go back to bed; these dreams
bring knowledge but do not compel. In the latrine, two
bullies known to the dreamer's new self harass a small ninth
grader, a newcomer whose English is broken and heavily accented.
The boyís face drips, and he is gasping from being held
with his face in water and gut-punched. The dreamer, if
he wishes to fight the two bullies, will find that they flee
after one has been hit hard. Their victim will be incoherent
to English-speakers. Those investigators who know German
will find his speech intelligible, though laced with odd idiom.
He will thank his rescuer profusely. The faces of these
two characters will be familiar to any who have seen the photo
at the bottom of the Captainís trunk, but they are much
younger, and the difference in height is great. The dreamer
will likely help the little guy back to his room, and will exchange
a few words, the light of hero worship already burning in the
smaller boyís blue eyes. He will tell the dreamer
that his name is Jakob Franz Schwärmer.
Two. The dreamer stands in a doorway in a creaking old
house. He looks into a room with high windows, a dresser
and desk, and a bed where a blond boy with a crewcut lies tossing
and turning. Rain and cold wind lash the house. The
desk holds a framed picture of a stout pretty woman no longer
young, in a dress that ignores the 1930s fashions, and a letter
in a language that resembles German, and is actually Flemish.
The dressers holds sheets folded with lavender, and winter blankets;
on top are a comb, brush, and other grooming articles laid out
with precision. The suitcase on the floor contains clothes
that look as if they would fit the boy lying in bed, and awards
from a summer camp run by something called the Amerika-Deutscher
Volksbund. If awakened, he will not be fully aware. If ignored,
he will get up, mumbling in Flemish to himself, and will walk
out the door of the room in bare feet and pajamas, tugging a
blanket after him. He is at best half awake. He will
go down the hall to another bedroom, much larger. Here
the bookcases are full of childrenís books, classics,
and reference works. The walls are full of ship models,
hunting prints, and such. In a four-poster bed, another
boy sleeps peacefully. The insomniac will walk over to
the empty side, crawl in, and fall asleep. The referee
should run this scene very carefully, as itís difficult
to convey the emotions involved. The suggestion might be
made to the players, through their characterís memories
of childhood, expressed as a successful Idea roll, that the insomniac
has always been so. Many sleepless children are indulgently
allowed to crawl in bed with their parents, or with a sibling.
This might be whatís happening here. (In fact, it
is exactly what was happening, but was not all that it led to.)
The faces are those of Schwärmer and
Baldwin, of course, but younger than in the pictures. An
investigator who already knows of their intimacy will realize
that this was the first night that they spent together.
Three. The dreamer finds himself walking down a street
in muggy heat. He is not himself. He wears a gray uniform
and marches precisely. The air is full of magnolia and
gardenia scent; itís early fall. A few automobiles
roll by. The marching man turns into the dooryard of an
old Episcopal church, and sees his own reflection in the windows.
It is the face from the graduation picture and no other.
Then he sees the freshly turned grave, still lacking a marker,
and awakens. A player who understands fully now may wish to drop
SAN, but this isnít really necessary.
NASTY SURPRISES TABLE, D30
(Heh-heh-heh!)
1 Large spider
2 Large cockroach, 2D6, able to fly about and buzz loudly, but
not deadly
3 Biting ants. Take 1pt damage from bites
4 Scorpion. Make luck roll to avoid being stung. Then make
Con rolls to avoid loss of 1 hit point from poison each hr until
death or until injection with antivenin
5 Snake, not dangerous
6 Snake, lucky species idolized by Viet, will anger them if killed
7 Snake, poisonous, as scorpion but each minute
8 Snake, 1D6
9 Snake, D%
10 VC bomb, will explode if touched, disguised as random object
11 Ticking bomb, explodes in a few minutes
12 Bomb that will explode if hit or dropped
13 Gas grenade, nerve gas
14 Gas grenade, mustard gas
15 Gas grenade, tear gas(even VC have their off days)
16 Bag of rice, normal in all ways
17 Bag of rice, with any of the above buried in it
18 Crock of stinking rotten tofu, can be sold to Viets as delicacy
19 Insect that carries dysentery
20 Insect that carries malaria
21 Insect that carries yellow fever
22 Weird ritual object(make Idea roll to recognize any Mythos
significance)
23 Hornets, as ants but can fly
24 Icky worms. Wash your hands before you eat or catch a tropical
disease!
25 Leeches
26-30 Referee's Choice
Tahoe Larn, PTY.
P. 13 Trothy Lane , North Platey, Ca.
July 4, 1991
Dear Sirs,
I am a Veteran of the Vietnamese Conflict. Recently, as
you may be aware, Vietnam began welcoming visitors from the U.S.
as tourists. Although Vietnam was the scene of much suffering
for me, I can not but wish to return to a land so beautiful and
strange ó I am drawn to that county as a moth to a flame.
Because I am personly convinced that forces other then
the purly worldly were at play in Southeast Asia, and still are,
I seek the services of Spiritual Investigators. Your names were
recommended by an associate, Laren Patothy, who read of your
earlier work.
I wish you to accompany me to Vietnam. I offer expenses
and a fee of $1000.00. We will take AIR CANADA to Toronto on
the 11th , then to Honolulu, Krungthep and Ho Chi Miinh City.
We will have a tour of 9 days, during which I expect, no I fear,
some paranormal incursion. You and Your Associates are to maintain
a watch for any threat, both physical and metaphysical, and take
active measures against them.
Sincerely,
Don Luftbard
All Material is © Conrad Hubbard.
References to products created by White Wolf or other
companies are not challenges to their copyrights
