Out of Spaceby

Adam Gauntlett

Robin D Laws

Jason Morningstar

Cover Art by Phil Reeves

2

TRAIL OF CTHULHU

Contents

The RepaiReR of RepuTaTions 4Behind the Pallid Meme 5The Repairer of Reputations 8

The Story 8

The Scenario 23The Spine 23The Horrible Truth 23A Subtly Awful World 23New York, 1920 24Quick Character Creation 24Assembling the Group 25Sanity and the 26Yellow Sign 26Supporting Character Tracker 27

Scenes 29The Inauguration of the Government Lethal Chamber 29

The Suicide of O. O. Vance 29Vance’s Lodgings 30Mrs. Starkfield 30Sheepshead Bay 31Diamond Dan 32The Yellow Sign 32The Twentieth Dragoon Regiment 33Mr. Wilde and his Fantastical Cat 34Revisiting Wilde 36Wilde’s Network 36Hawberk and Constance 37Arnold Steylette 38Hildred 38Dr. Archer 39The Chamber in Action 39Endings 40

Drive Cards 41

flying Coffins 42The Jolly Old RFC 43Flying Coffins 46Hook 46Awful Truth 46Spine 46Sagittarius Rising 46

Piloting and Stunting 47Stealth, Sense Trouble and Military Talk 47NPC Pilots 48The Flying Coffin: Damage and Structure 48Dogfight 49

Crates 50Germans 50Allies 51

Combat Examples 51Balloon Busting 53Scenes 53The Combat Report 56Flamer 56Military Intelligence 57One Over the Eight 58Other Ranks 58A Formal Occasion 59Local Flavour 59Dawn Patrol 61Curses! Foiled Again! 62The Devil’s Horsemen 63

Byakhee 63Hell’s Angels 65Pre-Generated Characters 65Optional Handouts 72

Many fiRes 77Many Fires Commentary 79Introduction 80Disclaimer One 80Disclaimer Two 80The Hook 80The Horrible Truth 80The Spine 80

Many Fires as Part of a Campaign 81Many Fires as a One-Shot 81

Reasons to Join Pershing’s Secret Expedition 81

Alienist, Doctor, Nurse 81Antiquarian, Archaeologist, Professor, Scientist 81Artist, Author, Dilettante, Journalist 81Clergy 81Criminal, Hobo, Military 81Police Detective, Private Investigator 81Parapsychologist 81Pilot 81

Background 82Secret Background 83

Antagonist Reactions 84Victory Conditions 84

The Trail of Clues 85The Valley 85

Getting Around 85The Altkolonier 85

The Town 85San Antonio 85

The Hideout 88Bustillos 88

The Gateway 90La Junta 90Guerrero 90Schönwiese 91

TRAIL OF CTHULHU

3

The MillionaiRe’s speCial 161Hook 162The Awful Truth 162Spine 162The Ship That Never Sank 162Titanic Timeline 164Luncheon with the Great and Good 165

Further Inquiry 167Luxury Accommodation 168Hag Ridden 170Unwelcome Attention 171A Woman of Modest Means 171Psychical Society 172Options, People! 173Amuse Yourself 174Priestess of the Black Pharaoh 174Survival Instinct 175Aftermath 176

Pre-Generated Characters 176

hell fiRe 120London in the Time of King George 121Hell Fire 125Hook 125The Awful Truth 125The Spine 125Rule Alterations 127Scenes 130The Lady Fornicator 130Emergency Meeting 132Our American Brethren 134Local Colour 136Pearce’s Progress 137The Jezebels 139Muckraker 142French Fancies 143American Intrigues 144Vauxhall Funeral 145The Dying Lover 146Full Fathom Five 146Prospero’s Cell 148A Sign of the Times 148The Hell Ship 150The Tempest 151Epilogue 152Pre-generated Characters 153

Hiring a Guide 91The Tarahumara 91

The Canyon 92Cañón el Nogal 92

The Sierra Madre 93The Red Castle 94

The Platform 95The Encampment 95The Ritual 95The Arrival 95Fighting the Horror 96The End 96

GM Resources 97People 97Handy List of Mexican Names 97Magic and Monsters 97Drugs 98NPCs 99Pre-Generated Characters 101

Documents and Handouts 107

The Repairer of ReputationsPublisher – Simon Rogers

A Scenario by Robin D. Laws

based on a story by Robert W. Chambers

Artwork – Jerome Huguenin

Playtesters: Simon Rogers, Ralf Schemmann, Steffi, Brennan Taylor, Graham Walmsley, Krista White

Trail of Cthulhu was written by Kenneth Hite, based on the GUMSHOE system by Robin D Laws

Trail of Cthulhu was created by arrangement with Chaosium, Inc.© 2011 Pelgrane Press Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Trail of Cthulhu is a trademark of Pelgrane Press Ltd.

www.pelgranepress.com

4

TRAIL OF CTHULHUCredits

TRAIL OF CTHULHU

5

Writers who let themselves worry about the reach of their influence after they die can find a reassuring parable in the case of Robert W. Chambers. This Brooklyn-born author (1865-1933) was the Norah Roberts of his day, penning top-selling novels of love among the beautiful and moneyed. Like writers of commercial fiction before and after him, his grip on the popular tastes of his time consigned the bulk of his work to oblivion when that time passed. Yet it is a slim number of short stories—four weird tales in a collection only partly devoted to the horror genre—that keep his name and memory alive in the hearts of genre fans.

He owes this enduring place to H. P. Lovecraft, a writer who himself needed championing by others to rescue his work from obscurity. Lovecraft, who was five when The King in Yellow was published and outlived Chambers by only four years, singled him out for reserved praise in his critical manifesto of the weird, “Supernatural Horror in Literature:”

Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier’s Trilby.

Some might say that Lovecraft calling another writer out for mannered

extravagance is like an octopus telling you that you eat too much shellfish. I say, in these two cases, bring on the mannered extravagance, pots and kettles be damned.

Lovecraft concludes his two-paragraph assessment of Chambers with another lamenting slap at his status as a boiler of literary pots: “One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised master.”

Fortunately for Chambers’ spot in the weird canon, Lovecraft also paid homage to him in his own work, by transforming the unifying element between the four stories, the book that leads to madness and the threat of apocalyptic social corrosion, into his own imaginary volume, The Necronomicon. Not to mention Unaussprechlichen Kulten and the rest, as added by Lovecraft, his circles, and his later followers.

Lovecraft follows Chambers’ cue by never making the Necronomicon the full focus of a story. Instead it’s a background element, a touchstone of terror identifying the action foreground as taking place in his singular, bleakly fantastic world.

Chambers’ evil book is not a tome of dangerous summoning spells and existentially maddening cosmic truths. It’s a play, a work of closet drama in verse, written more for the reading eye than for the stage. The King in Yellow depicts the doom of an otherworldly court of royal decadents alongside the Lake of Hali on the twin-sunned world of Carcosa.

(In another example of influence spreading like a contagion from one writer to another, these terms are borrowed from another forebear of the weird, Ambrose Bierce.)

As the narrator of “Repairer of Reputations” describes the history of the book that unhinges him, putting the entire account of his actions and perceptions in the story in doubt:

When the French Government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course, became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred KHUH�� FRQÀVFDWHG� WKHUH�� GHQRXQFHG� E\� SUHVV�and pulpit, censured even by the most DGYDQFHG�RI�OLWHUDU\�DQDUFKLVWV��1R�GHÀQLWH�principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in “The King in Yellow,” all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very EDQDOLW\�DQG�LQQRFHQFH�RI�WKH�ÀUVW�DFW�RQO\�allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.

The masterstroke of horror here lies in the elusiveness of the madness-generating effect. It is also a testament, in a twisted version of writerly hopefulness, to the power of the written word, to subtext over text. I certainly don’t want to drive you crazy when I write a work of horror for you, either in fiction or scenario form. But I sure want to mess you up. The unknown author of the King in Yellow, perhaps suicided, perhaps a fugitive,

Behind the Pallid MemeAn Introduction by Robin D Laws