This is the long awaited 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.

TICKETS FOR A PRAYER WHEEL
THE THIRD TICKET
The Cao-Dai Pagoda.(Acts 14:11)

     The investigators have another patrol-this time to a  pacified village,.  What could be easier?  Paranoia and jumpiness could  turn this hike into a massacre.  If they keep their heads, the soldiers could win the cooperation of the village chief, whose aged aunt is the last to worship at the dilapidated Cao-Dai pagoda above the paddies. He knows that men from the north come there by night but not who they are, and is afraid to ask.  The pagoda holds opium, secreted by the smugglers, and guarded by deathtraps, and a thing more astonishing, in the sanctuary: a picture of H. P. Lovecraft, worshipped as a god. 

Sidebar - the Cao-Dai Faith and other syncretisms
     The Cao-Dai, a weird religion of Vietnam, plays a part in the game, and here it is explained.  Briefly, it is a syncretism of Roman Catholicism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, spiritualism, mumbo-jumbo, and humanistic reverence for the great deeds of great men.  Tickets assumes that in addition to Poe and Victor Hugo the Cao-Dai chose to reverence H. P. Lovecraft, and proceeds accordingly. 

THE LAND

Near the firebase there are no people, and the montagnard tribes are so loyal as to require no comment.  The rivers valleys closer to Hué, however, hold the usual assortment of Viet peasants.  The village of Xa Kim warrants comment.  Its three hamlets, one of which is abandoned, pooled their resources long ago to build a pagoda sacred to the Cao Dai, a sect to which many adhered. 

A successful Viet Nam skill roll will reveal that the sect was founded in 1927, has two million followers, and regards itself as the Third Amnesty (Buddha/Confucius and Moses/Jesus being the first two) of God and also reveres a strange eclectic pantheon that includes everybody from Pericles to Joan of Arc. Players with a sense of Mythos history will immediately notice that the sect was founded on the year and day that Cthulhu rose from the waves.  (The year also saw the birth of Jacob Francis Schwärmer, the mad Green Beret captain  whose team has wreaked frightening atrocities throughout the warzones in praise of the mishmash of Norse and Mythos powers that they venerate.) 

The pagoda stands on a rise in the swampy bend of the river that the villages inhabit, and commands a fine view of the valley for many miles.  Captain Pernell is suspicious about renewed activity in the area-trains of people entering and leaving at night, carrying baskets, and so forth.  He suspects that the VC may be using the pagoda as a base of operations, and orders the players to investigate the pagoda thoroughly, checking for VC presence in the area also.  As the villagers have been models of loyalty to the US in the past, the squad is to refrain from wanton destruction of property or human lives, and is to spare the pagoda at all costs. 

At many points in this ticket, the referee may wish to roll on the Nasty Surprises table, above.  This table details some of the horrid things that may lurk in dark holes and crevices in the Nam.  If the horror chosen is inappropriate for the occasion(for example, a snake in an area devoid of life from chemical warfare, or a VC bomb in a VC leader's bed) then the referee may roll again or ignore the horror. 

THE VILLAGE

Upon arrival in the village the players are greeted by the headman with a horrid obsequiousness that turns the stomach.  He informs them in Vietnamese or broken French(he will not try his laughably poor English on them, as he is reserving much of the little pride that remains to him on this subject) that the pagoda was sacred to his father but not to him, that the elders of the Cao Dai are no longer able to make the trip from Hué to Xa Kim and that the pagoda is no longer visited much save by his aged aunt, who keeps it presentable and well cleaned and makes offerings herself. 

Men come from the north every so often, well armed, and ask to worship at the pagoda, after dark.  The headman doesn't know what they do there, as he is nonreligious.  Out of fear for perfectly ordinary dangers, he avoids the old place.  He does not think that the Tonkinese men are VC, though VC have come to his village before. They do not call themselves VC, but the men of Hei Ren-Tzu, who from his name might be a kaitong, or opium godking,  in the mountains of the west.  The men of Hei Ren-Tzu take rice from his village, but do not steal his sons, as the VC do.  They last visited before the monsoon, and may come again before Tet.  He does not know.  Once the kaitong visited his village.  The kaitong was slim, below the middle height, with dark eyes.  Hei-Ren-Tze looked like a Chinese, but the headman was far from sure that this was the case.  In the description, avoid gender references.  The headman did not know that his visitor was a woman. 

     The old lady herself can be found in the second hamlet.  She is a bent crone with a dowager's hump, four feet high, who walks with a cane.  She is deaf as a post and any remarks addressed to her must be shouted via a successful Oratory roll, in perfect Vietnamese.  She will mumble constantly to herself about nothing of any consequence; the Keeper should make up inane village gossip about pigs and chickens if pressed, and the trip to the pagoda passes without complication.  Have the players make Spot Hidden rolls to find VC every few minutes.  A critical success will reveal little boys playing in the bushes with sticks, farm animals, snakes, holes in the ground, and so forth.  There are no VC here.  But don't tell the players that. 

THE PAGODA

    The pagoda has a four-tiered roof, flaking gold leaf.  The old woman pauses at the gate and at each door to make sacred and purifying signs.  She cannot be hurried, as the day passes, and will complain about her aching joints and the lack of respect from the young.  Within the outer hall of the pagoda are tattered banners dedicated by the elders that bear illegible slogans in archaic Vietnamese.  A photo of the elders has a date attached; the last ceremony held here was in 1944, twenty-five years ago.  The floor boards wheeze with rot as the players advance into the sanctuary. 

      The sanctuary is dimly lit by clerestory windows; it is dusty and smells of incense.  At the far end is the altar.  It is flanked by depictions of great men.  The men depicted here are Confucius, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Muhammad, Jesus Christ, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, and H. P. Lovecraft.  The altar itself holds an eye in a triangle, the pupil a swastika.  The old woman will offer riceballs to the gods.  If questioned about her ritual, she'll say the obvious: she is propitiating them for their goodness.  No one else cares.  She knows that the three writers were writers, but she can't read. 

     Leaving the temple, the players may fall through the floor.  Make a Luck roll for each.  The rotten floor will hold the woman, who weighs perhaps ninety pounds, but the huge Americans may fall.  The space below is a sump reeking of stagnant water; all present will be bitten by swarms of mosquitoes and must make luck rolls to avoid infection with a virulent strain of malaria.  The cellar area has a lump of packages at its center.  If the players wade through the crud to them, they find a mighty pile of decayed Cao-Dai religious tracts, unreadable from mildew, and nothing else.  Leeches will be clinging to them as they crawl out.  Use the lump carefully.  If the players see monsters under every rock, then the pagoda basement is a good place to have some fun.  The slimy pile looks and smells like a Cthulhu Mythos creature. 

     A successful Spot Hidden as the players leave will reveal a trapdoor in the vestibule, under a hump in the mats on the floor that is obvious only when the light is behind it.  Beneath is a crawlspace intended for the storage of incense burners (a few brass ones remain) and used at present for the storage of baskets of opium resin.  The old woman knows nothing of this.  The men from the North are opium smugglers using the pagoda for storage; the opium in the baskets is worth about a million piastres( $10,000) if cut and sold to American soldiers.  If refined into the purer oils or into morphine base, its value would mount incredibly.  The players may do what they like with the noisome stuff, although the penalties likely to fall on the villagers are as obvious to an Idea roll as the ones that the player's characters could get from authorities if they take the opium. 

     Also in the basket is a more sinister cache.  There are three foil packets.  Each holds twenty grams(less than an ounce) of white powder.  The smell and taste of the powder are utterly unlike any drug known to the investigators.  90s characters may achieve a critical success on the Pharmacy skill roll to notice a similarity to methylphenidate, Prozac, and several other drugs that drastically affect higher brain functions.  The drug is CTH, or hammer, an experimental drug refined from hallucinogenic mushrooms at a secret CIA base and later used by the Army in a horrible experiment. 

THE DRUG (HAMMER)

When the doses are ingested in food, injected in serum, or otherwise introduced, they turn the drugged person into a raging psychopath.  He will act normally for  one to five minutes after injection and for thirty to seventy minutes after ingesting the drug, then will mindlessly attack anyone in sight.  He will fight until he reaches 0 hit points, and then collapse dead.  Short of bludgeoning the user into unconsciousness and keeping him there for a number of hours equal to ten times the number of grams he has ingested, there is no antidote.  Sedation also quiets the user until the drug breaks down.  In no cases can its effects last more than a day.  The user will gladly attack his best friend and kill him.  When alone, he will be violently destructive, or self-destructive.  This drug is so obscure that no government is known to have banned it, but no one not mad or desperate would ever take it deliberately.   For more on drugs see below. 

PIECES, CLUES AND FURTHER INFORMATION

     The headman, if confronted, will plead ignorance, and is telling the truth.  He knows nothing of the drugs and dares not investigate.  If the players do something drastic, a RC present will object, and on return to the base will file a complaint.  The characters are in real trouble if they attack or kill these innocent villagers. 

     H. P. Lovecraft has been included here to introduce him to the  campaign, which would otherwise lack any real hint of the Mythos.  The view of him used in the present work is dealt with elsewhere, but in this game it is certain that he lived and wrote.  His picture bears no name.  If anyone photographs the picture, a teacher at American School or Saigon University identifies the man as a reclusive New Englander whose horror tales imitated those of Poe.  More comes with library research. 

     In French Indochina séances were very common and the one that founded the Cao Dai one among many.  The Cao Dai added the portrait of Lovecraft in the fifties, when Cao Dai worship was at a height all over Vietnam, and the sect was almost an independent nation.  The sect's power waned with the rise of the line of dictators that ruled south Vietnam for the last decade of its existence.  In the early 1960s, many pagodas were abandoned with the massive return to Catholicism that accompanied the Catholic regime of Diem.  Later still, many of the sect died in the war, though the sect survived.  Cao Dai was an example of a fairly common type of religion that seems to spring up whenever cultures clash.  Other examples are the Serapis religion in Roman Egypt, Voudon in Haiti, and the Peyote cult or Native American Church of the US. 

     Players or their investigators may think the Cao Dai is a source of harm or protection for them.  Some may express interest in it, even to the point of wanting to join.  Do not encourage this.  If the individual Keeper has the resources for a lengthy look into the mysteries of the Cao Dai, then it may play a central role in his campaign, but it is not very important in Tickets. 

THE SMUGGLERS

     If the Keeper wishes, the opium smugglers may come to the pagoda that night.  They are a band of twenty porters with Kaysone as their leader.   This man buys opium from monatagnards in Laos and has it refined there into smoker's opium, the type described below.  Each man carries twenty kilos of the stuff.  They move east toward Hué and south to Khe Sanh and the A Shau valley, where Vietnamese dealers buy the stuff and resell it, often to GIs.  Kaysone uses the old pagoda as a convenient storage shed and bullies the headman into silence.  He is neither a fool nor a knave and wants only his profit.  If cornered, he will fight to keep the drugs, but he is no hero.  He knows Patty Holeran well, but does not know that she is the Crawling Chaos. 

ON DRUGS

     The use and abuse of chemicals was a prime factor in the Vietnam War.  Here are a few guidelines.   The most popular drug was alcohol.  I need say no more.   Stimulants have been detailed above.  Hemp, called reefer, pot, or by other names, was cheap in Vietnam-about $20 a pound.  When smoked, it produced a mild euphoria.  Effectively, any character using the stuff is totally without motivation for a few hours.  He also loses 5% from his Know for each dose of hemp taken.  Hemp cigarettes are often laced("dusted") with other drugs, in which case the effects of the other drug apply also. 

     Opium, the resin of the poppy plant, was the reason for much conflict in Southeast Asia, and still is.  It comes in several forms, treated the same way for game purposes.  Opium was smoked in pipes, these holding a small lump of the refined resin or a large amount of the raw poppy gum.  For each pipe smoked, take one point from STR, DEX, INT, and POW.  When O is reached in any category, the smoker is in a daze and can do nothing save take more opium.  When O in all categories is reached, he is asleep in a dream world.  One point in each characteristic can be regained per hour of rest.  Americans often smoked opium in larger pipes such as those used for hemp and tobacco; each of these holds 2-12 pipes worth of opium at once, but was often shared among a group.  Opium is physically addictive.  After using it a number of times equal to his POW, the user is addicted.  If an addict goes for a day without his opium, allow a SAN roll.  If the roll is failed, the addict loses one point of SAN.  Smoking more opium will not restore SAN, but no more will be lost. 

Heroin and morphine, opium derivatives, are stronger.  They can be eaten and drunk like opium, but are smoked(the purest heroin can be sniffed) or injected.  Each dose of heroin or morphine is equal to 3-18 pipes of opium.  Addiction to opiates can be cured by therapy.  Treat this just like psychotherapy to cure the insane.  It takes just as long, costs just as much, and has the same chance of success. 

     Another popular class of drugs were the hallucinogens,  such as LSD.  When a character takes one dose of LSD, he loses one point of SAN, and must make a SAN roll.  If he fails, he goes indefinitely insane for one day.  Choose a state from the table in the Cthulhu rules or make something up.  If he succeeds in the roll, he merely sees bright colors and hears pretty sounds, acting much like a hemp smoker.  He is not really impaired in his ability to do anything, but the Keeper is free to throw hallucinations at him.  Note that seeing a Mythos creature while drugged still costs the same amount of SAN, maybe more. 

STATISTICS

 Tran Giap Truc, The Headman of Xa Kim Village
  STR 8   DEX  11   INT  14
  CON  11 APP  12  POW  13
  SIZ  7   SAN   50   EDU   5
HP 9
Rifle 30%, Knife 40%
Skills: Speak Vietnamese 75%, Speak French 40%, Speak English 10%, Accounting 30%, Bargain 60%, Listen 50%, Oratory 30%, Occult(Buddhist and Ong Ba)30%, Read/Write Vietnamese 50%, Track 40% 

Kaysone Krangsan,  Chinese-Lao opium smuggler
STR  10  DEX 13   INT 14
CON 12   APP 10  POW 12
SIZ   8    SAN  30  EDU 9
HP  10
Automatic Rifle 50%, Rifle 55%, Knife 50%, Crossbow 40%
Skills:  Speak Lao 70%, Speak Cantonese 50%, Speak Yunnanese 30%, Speak Mandarin 20%, Speak Yao 40%, Speak Hmong 20%, Speak Tai 40%, Speak Lolo 10%, Speak French 10%, Speak English 35%, Speak Vietnamese 40%, Bargain 80%, Botany 30%, Debate 20%, Fast Talk 70%, Hide 40%, Listen 20%, Pharmacy 20%, Track 40%