When Matt told me he was moving to Australia, it really bummed me out. He was a good friend, the closest player that lived near me, and a former coworker. And from my egocentric game master perspective, he was royally screwing up my game. Because Matt didn’t provide much information for his character Blade, I had loaded him chock full of plot points. Blade was at various times an Ultimate Fighting Champion, husband, father, roadie, and tribe member. I had a scenario planned for every one of those plot points. And here was his player, leaving for Australia.
After moping for a few days, I realized I had been given a gift. I dislike killing characters without reason; death, to me, should feel like it’s an important part of the plot. And I had two month’s notice. It was time to put good old Blade on the fast track to hell.
It also meant that, instead of spreading around various plot points that spotlighted each of the PC’s interests, it was going to be all Blade, all the time. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have a coherent thread for how I was going to suddenly tie all of Blade’s scenarios together. Separately, over time, it would have been a little more believable that Blade’s personal issues would pop up. All of them at once required a little more structure.
There’s something peculiar about Call of Cthulhu and ancient Indian burial grounds. I imagine it’s as much the fault of Poltergeist as it is horror literature in general. Basically, there’s always some Indian tribe tied to some bad mojo, only nobody ever listens to them. Since Blade is Native American, I came up with a thread tying all of the Native American scenarios together, drawing on friends and family, as well as his language skills.
We would first start out with Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays, the introductory scenario for Delta Green. It involves a heavy dose of Native American cosmology, including Coyote. I embraced the Coyote weirdness, which isn't really something that is typical for the Cthulhu mythos, but then this isn't a normal game. On one side, Coyote the trickster spirit and Blade's totem would be pushing him in one direction. On the other side was Stephen Alzis, who has a particular interest in Blade's son. These two threads worked out thusly:
- Faint Transmissions, a free download for D20 Modern, involved Blade getting a dream message from Alzis telling him to manipulate certain events lest certain doom befall his loved ones. It involves a movie producer, Derik VanVon, whom I gleefully stole from the Lori Lovecraft comic.
- Dire Wavelengths, another free download for D20 Modern. This one involves Blade's ex-wife, Christine Dee. By giving the main NPC a history with the PC, it complicated an otherwise straightforward rescue mission. It was also at this point that Alzis let slip that Blade was going to die.
- Thin Jack, a free download. It's essentially Interview With a Vampire: Hollywood makes a deal with something wicked that was buried in an old coal mine to get a movie produced. And of course, Christine starred in it. This bridged the first arc with the second.
- Skinwalker. A very haphazard scenario involving a Native American burial mound and a thing that steals peoples' skin. I know, you would never have guessed that.
- And finally Darkest Calling, which ends with the PCs being captured and one of them sacrificed.
Despite all my planning of the "Ex-Wife" and "Native American" scenarios, we played another scenario I just threw into the mix, Love's Lonely Children. And that changed everything.
Love's Lonely Children involves Y'golonac, a kind of traditional demon of lust. Reading his name aloud can cause possession. Getting bitten by Y'golonac causes wounds that never heal. Basically, any PC meeting Y'golonac is doomed to a horrible death at best and possession at worst.
Before I knew Matt was leaving, we played through Love's Lonely Children. For ick factor, it was the best scenario we've ever played. While Hammer investigated the cultist house, the other agents were in hot pursuit of the cultists out on the desert road. Their car flipped, and one of the suspects runs (think that scene in Fargo). Hammer transmits an image of an odd picture he found; as the agents search for the missing suspect, the image flashes on their phones: a huge, fat, headless man with two mouths in its palms. And then Y'golonac appeared, bursting out of the suspect's body, and biting Blade before finally being dispatched.
Thanks to the miracle of camera phones, I had Blade be the only one who saw the text containing Y'golonac's name. He was also the only one who was bitten. He was, in essence, on a downhill slope. I had my death march clearly plotted out to the end.
If you do the math, I mentioned five evil spirits (the Traveller from Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays, the Gaunt from Thin Jack, the Skinwalker, and the Festering Shambler from Darkest Calling) but didn't have five scenarios to defeat them. I decided Y'golonac was the fifth. Blade became both the salvation to stop the five evil spirits as well as the fifth evil spirit. Darkest Calling requires a bit of railroading -- the agents have to be thrown into a well to await sacrifice if they're going to witness the climactic ending -- but I nearly lost total control of the scenario.
Blade almost got out alive.
Blade was the "tank" of the group, specializing in martial arts and physical feats. Therefore, when he was tied up at the bottom of the well, he was actually the most capable. I rationalized that some of his amazing rolls (he rolled natural 20s on Climb and Escape Artist checks) were thanks to Y'golonac's influence. I also took some cues from Ramsey Campbell's short story Cold Print, where Y'golonac first appears, to show how the thing had infiltrated Blade's body and mind. A bit of the body horror genre, if you will.
Blade escaped, but was captured at the top of the well. And then suddenly there was an explosion. Blade and the cultists were gone.
I wrote what happened later in the story hour. But the short of it was that there was, as Majestic-12 had threatened, a fail-safe device in the agents. The exact nature of the device was unknown, but the agents all discovered they had been "disavowed." They were reinstated later.
So did they all have small explosives in their heads? I've never made it clear. The possibility of such has always lingered, and I wanted to amp up that horror. The agents went from being powerful, connected, capable people to unwilling puppets. And they could be destroyed at anytime, anywhere, without cause. Or could they?
What I did have was their case agent, Agent Drake, quitting in disgust over what he believed to be an assassination of one of his men. They were getting a new case agent, one that was a stickler for rules. One that wouldn't be nearly as lax. And one that would allow me to tighten up the focus of the campaign. It had started all over the place: now the game was going to become as much a political war of wills as it was about killing monsters.
But most of all, it was about giving Blade a heroic sendoff. In the end, he was the one who "took it for the team," deleting all the files about Y'golonac so no one else could be infected, sacrificing himself so that Y'golonac couldn't escape while taking the cultists with him. Incidentally, this made the cultists trying to sacrifice him the GOOD guys!
Matt was pleased. I handed him one of those certificates you get with the Call of Cthulhu Keeper's screen in a frame for meritorious service. I ended it all by playing Taps and describing a flag folding ceremony on his behalf. I wanted both players and characters to feel like something had really ended.
What surprised me most was when I turned to the resident religious PC, Archive, and asked the player to come up with an impromptu sermon. And Joe L., the guy who plays dwarves and grunts a lot, performed beautifully. It was a fitting ending to a story arc that was finished before it got started.
Matt left for Australia shortly after that. He still reads all the story hours and loves keeping up to date with the campaign.
It was time to get back to business. It was time to get back to my lynchpin character. It was time to mess with Guppy's head.
Lesson Learned: Planning a character’s death can be just as rewarding as creating one.
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