Saturday Seed ~ 138 (Call of Cthulhu)

Posted by Runeslinger on January 12, 2013 · Leave a Comment 

This week’s seed is for Call of Cthulhu either in the 20’s or in the modern era and combines fear, wonder, and inconvenient locations to give your Investigators more reasons to doubt the motives of a universe which allows them to live in it.

The seed

The seed involves the opportunity to participate in an investigation of a meteorite impact crater in Canada’s western arctic. It also involves horrible frozen death with no living creature around for miles to hear your tortured screams, but we can wait to get to that part.

Planting the seed

The seed is appropriate for a group of researchers specializing in meteorite craters, but once the initial surveys have begun, all sorts of disciplines will be required – including linguists and anthropologists. Choosing which stage of the investigation to use as a launching point depends on the type of group you wish to run.

If you go with the first stage, you will be running a tale with a primary focus of investigation leading to madness, possession, disbelief, paranoia, and death. A clock will be running the entire time as other researches and relief crews will be on their way.

If you go with the second stage you will having Investigators arrive in a camp that is full of closed off and suspicious people – fewer than expected, with a number growing smaller as the arctic days pass.

The Details

The first team will quickly discover that this impact is an almost direct hit in the middle of an older and larger crater. The improbable nature of this should be among the milder mysteries they encounter as they begin their surveys. Extraterrestrial materials which defy known physical principles, traces of ancient and more recent glyphs and writings on fragments and in the native stone of the crater, indications of caverns below the surface, strange lights in the sky, visits from perturbed shaman from various northern communities, and of course… dreams. As always, the severity and direction these factors go is in your capable hands.

The second team will, of course find the first team (what’s left of it) in a state of discomfiture, and incipient paranoia. Whatever can be done to heighten suspicion without blatantly violating common civility should be done, but professional ethics and the spirit of sharing and testing each others’ findings is to be flagrantly violated and ignored. None of the first team want anyone to know what they have uncovered – for various reasons.

What is going on

This situation allows the story line to split in many directions. Some of the first team will want the newcomers to escape before they suffer as they have. Others among that team will want them killed, while still others will want them brought into the fold, or at least added to the larder in line ahead of themselves.

The meteor may perhaps be a transport system for jellied entities who have been here before, leaving quite a mark on a once proud, but now forgotten and vanished people… or are they entirely vanished?

Enjoy~

 

Filed under Call of Cthulhu, Saturday Seeds · Tagged with Call of Cthulhu, Plot Ideas, roleplaying, Story Hooks, Trail of Cthulhu