We are in the Ceremony Room of Doom. Calliope and Evelyn, being unavailable this week, have mysteriously disappeared (although they’re technically there). Summerset, being available this week, has appeared in their places (and technically always was). :)
Alice: Is there anything in this room that draws me to it? Any images of my queen?
Summerset: WHEN DID ALICE BEGIN TO REFER TO HER AS ‘MY’ QUEEN?
Me: In the past session or so?
Summerset: THIS SEEMS VERY BAD.
DM: There is something that draws you, Alice, but it’s an image of the Black Pharaoh
Alice, while examining the Black Pharaoh mural, has a vision of a man having tea – he has the CAT! The angry cat! It looks right at me!
The lads are trying to open a portal/something when 4 monsters sneak up on us! Alice lets loose a bloodcurdling scream! The lads can’t actually see what’s going on! Alice avoids getting roughed up! Two of the other monsters attempt to get to the boys! One of them crit fails and brains himself, not quite killing himself.
Something begins to move in the deep darkness below…
Alice tries to shoot the crocodile-headed thing attacking her! CRIT FAIL, OH MY GOD. Her guns jam! At least they didn’t blow the hell up!
Summerset gets a critical shot off but doesn’t kill anybody, sadly.
The other two things attack the boys! Success on the one who didn’t crush his own skull, leaps up to attack Arad! …who doesn’t quite crit fail but does not do well and gets roughed up!
…the one who crushed its own skull tries again to climb again, gets all the way to the top, and… slips, falls, and breaks its own neck. Thank GOD.
Arad attacks the one that hurt him, using his magic scimitar (eyebrow waggle) and ROLLS A CRIT SUCCESS, 3 times damage! Post his own injuries, he does a full 360 and sweeps the thing’s head off in a dramatic chop!
Alice runs toward where the boys are, spending 3 in athletics, managing to roll A CRITICAL FAILURE and thank god also a success
There are NOISES from something LARGE down below.
Summerset: no no no no no. I have selective hearing right now
DM: no you don’t. This it the biggest thing you’ve ever heard. The biggest thing you can imagine, which is probably, say, a Zepplin.
Summerset: That is tomorrow’s problem. I’m going to shoot the monster I already hit.
He rolls well and kills it! Thank God!
We run! More monsters appear!
DM: Roll stability
Alice: CRIT FAILURE
Alice is now consumed by DREAD while Arad takes an attack of opportunity against one of the jackal-headed beasts and kills it. Another beast runs down the hall, screaming like a child looking for its father. Sadly, Alice’s moral stance is “protecting children” so she tries to go back to help. Arad grabs her and hauls her along, spending all his remaining athletics to get out of there, which is gonna be super great for sure in a minute here. But we do get up the stairs to the portal, where we can see a sliver of night sky. We begin to scrabble at the sand, trying to dig our way out, but do a shit job rolling and do not leap into a dramatic escape.
In the meantime, MANY MORE bad things begin to approach and we panickedly try to dig FASTER! We scramble out between the paws of the Sphinx, and the portal closes behind us!
Alice recognizes the image-cypher to open the portal as a depiction of the “bloody tongue” Nyarlethotep that the brotherhood in Kenya & NY worship, and gets the feeling it’s a more mindless version of Nyarlethotep that doesn’t engage with people, more a god of chaos and destruction rather than chaos and gathering the faithful.
Exhausted, sand-covered, and gibbering (at least one of us is gibbering), they return to the hotel, where Dr Willie Preston meets us on the veranda.
Preston: there you are! I was beginning to become worried and was considering calling for help!
Alice: WE’VE BEEN GONE ALL DAY
Preston: yes, but you DID find tunnels under the pyramids, right?
Alice, grabbing his lapels and rattling him: WE FOUND MONSTERS, WILLIE. MONSTERS.
Preston: …perhaps she means you saw statues?
The boys: I mean technically yes we did see statues…
Alice: MONSTERS
Summerset: goodness gracious we’ve all gotten too much sun we’d better get some food and drink and sleep
Overnight, Alice dreams she’s trying to find her gold mask of visions. In the dream she keeps feeling her face, but can’t find it, so she begins to peel her skin off until (in the dream) she can see a gold skull beneath her flesh. When she wakes up, the mask has disappeared FOR REAL but Alice feels it’s WITH her now, beneath her skin, and she feels as if something is protecting her.
They spend some time patching each other up, or trying to: Arad and Summerset succeed in their various roles, while Alice rolls ANOTHER CRITICAL FAILURE on Summerset’s psychoanalysis, so he’s down to like 3 stability until he spends more and someone else can try psychoanalyzing him again.
The next morning, our loyal concierge, Saleem, arrives at the hotel after a day off, lets us know the local people of Cairo are muttering about the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh’s presence in town. Alice becomes concerned he’s going to get hurt, hanging out with us, and he assures us he’ll be fine.
Alice, wailing: THAT’S WHAT YOU THINK, MY SKELETON HAS TURNED GOLD
Summerset, alarmed and concerned: …where did we leave that girdle?
Me: Teddy has it.
After Alice breaks down a few more times, they decide to putter around Cairo for a few days and gather information. They began by going to the Egyptian Museum, or the Museum of Cairo, or something like that. There, Arad calls on a Dr Ali Kafour, a museum curator he knows, and we’re led into the depths of the museum, where we begin to discuss the tunnels under the Sphinx, which Kafour is aware of, and believes is the throne room of the Black Pharaoh.
Kafour: But you cannot have been there and survived.
Arad: We barely escaped with our lives.
Kafour: and they know about…everything?
Arad: To the best of my ability to ascertain, they have been fighting this evil for many years, themselves.
Kafour: Very well. It’s believed to be the throne room of Netocris—
Alice: -gasp- that’s MY queen!
Summerset: -takes his hip flask out, downs its contents entirely, puts it away-
Kafour: –Netocris and Nefernka, gods from the outer realms, ie, not Earth, harbingers of (tbh I lost a lot of detail here, something about the black pharaoh or an idiot god rising) ‘fingers and toes’ after the death of the Great Good One
Alice: ‘fingers and toes’?
Kafour: we think it may mean twenty centuries
Summerset: …and the ‘Great Good One’ is…?
Kafour: The Jewish prophet.
Summerset: and that was…
Alice: Just under 2000 years ago
Summerset: oh look at the time I have a boat to catch
Kafour also saw Penhew who had de-aged 20+ years from an old 50s to an early 30s, also met our friend Jackson Elias, had heard bad things about the C…urrent expedition the name of whom I forget, the one we picked Willie up from, and when Summerset asked about the throne room’s pool full of leeches and what he thinks its purpose might be…
Kafour: probably to drain the life power of one who might have had visions or other powers and channel that life force into the body of–
Alice, whispering: my queen
Summerset: -visibly sweating-
Kafour: if that’s all, I think I would prefer to have nothing to do with you people ever again
Arad: wait, Summerset, didn’t you make rubbings in the throne room?
Kafour: oh I have some wood cuttings of my own to compare them to
We were then shown a cutting of a huge tentacle monster so horrible it required a high roll to take no shock just from seeing the image. Alice succeeded on THAT, at least, which is good bc she’s just really dancing on the edge of complete insanity at this point. The boys also succeeded, despite Alice having failed to psychoanalyze Summerset earlier, and the fact that he had to roll again for stability meant now somebody else can try to help him. Clearly it’s a bad idea for Alice to.
Kafour actually gave us a ton of good information, I just can’t remember it all right now, so having gotten a glimpse at the horrible sphinx tentacle monster, of which there may be HUNDREDS, we’ve departed, hopefully never to darken his doorstep again.
I may miss the next session, in which case we are to assume Alice has retreated to the hotel room to sob. :)
Your mention of “spending” Athletics made me realize I’m not sure which game system you’re using. That doesn’t sound like Basic Role-Playing (BRP) the standard Call of Cthulhu RPG system. (Though it has been a long time since I played it.) Are you by any chance using Trail of Cthulhu, which uses the Gumshoe system?
I’ve never had to play a character teetering on the brink of insanity for an extended period. Sounds fun (though I would imagine also a teensy bit stressful).
Thanks again for sharing these Thrilling Eldritch Tales!