Rip It & Run! Bad Guys...

I have just waded through Season 13 of “Supernatural” which has left me feeling somewhat – meh. Occasionally shows like this need to do some house-cleaning and put things back in order and this is definitely the season where they do all of that (I thought about posting a review, but the whole thing can simply be summed up with the following: “this is prep.; stay tuned for Season 14!”). The good bits are fourfold – Rowena; Bobby and Charlie are back; Mark Pellegrino; and “Scooby-natural”; the bad things were par for the course – the Winchesters emoting; Kevin Tran getting killed (again!); soporific angel politics; and the egregious error of failing to pick up a “Wayward Sisters” spin-off show (I would have watched the Hell out of that!). Along the way, I threw a DVD into the ‘player entitled “Frailty”, starring Bill Paxton (who also directed), Powers Boothe and Matthew McConaughey; the film isn’t really anything to write home about, but it – along with the ‘Whinge-chester’ farrago - got some cogwheels turning in my brain.

When we embark upon a new campaign of “Call of Cthulhu”, there’s an unspoken automatic expectation that the group of players are going to be the ‘Good Guys’. The assumption is that our team will be going up against the Dreamer in Rl’yeh, taking names and kicking butts, but why should that be the case? Are they fighting a Good Fight? In Lovecraft’s universe, things such as an ethical disposition are entirely superfluous – the Universe doesn’t care whose side you’re on, or even if you score points for your ‘team’; it’s entirely meaningless in the grand scheme of things. The “Delta Green” source material for “‘Cthulhu” touches on this issue, but I don’t see why it can’t be brought wholesale into a mainstream version of the game.

Getting back to “Frailty”, the synopsis for this film is as follows: the American Midwest father of two young boys receives a holy vision/has a brain snap (your choice), and suddenly perceives that many people walking around the countryside are actually “demons” from “Hell”, working against God and His angels. A set of coincidences leads him to his ‘holy weapons’ – a length of steel pipe; an axe; and a pair of heavy-duty work-gloves – and he convinces his children to go with him to remove these monsters from God’s Creation. One child is fully on board with the plan; the other… not so much. And thereby hangs the tale. It’s an okay set-up as far as these things go, but it got me thinking: what if it was true?

Many “Call of Cthulhu” teams are established around the notion that the members of the group are seeking out evil within their communities and expunging it. They tend to band into organisations – ghost-hunters; private investigators; newspaper/TV reporting teams – which give them a rationale to be together and a means to be drawn in to their investigations. Alternatively, they become a loose confederacy of fellow-travellers, striving towards their goal while keeping their activities on the down-low. But what if their actions forced them out into the daylight and made it difficult to keep their fight completely sub rosa?

Sam and Dean are on an FBI hit-list; wherever they go, if they get noticed, they will get pursued (although the threat of this ever happening has faded absolutely into the background at this stage in their career!). The story outlined in “Frailty” is, in essence, the effort of one of the abused sons to throw off an active FBI pursuit that is closing-in uncomfortably on the ‘family business’ of demon-slaying. In both vehicles, the crusade against the Evil infecting the world requires that a whole bunch of misdirection and avoidance of the Powers That Be has to be undertaken in order for the Good Fight to keep going. Here is a way to lift your campaign from a simple string of escalating “Monster Of The Week” (MOTW) killings and to re-locate it into a narrative containing some Real World bite.

Let’s assume that your team is based in New York. It transpires that a cultist conspiracy has infiltrated City Hall and certain key figures within the government – the Mayor; the Chief of Police – have been replaced by leading cultists, or by shapeshifted/mind-controlling/body-swapping alien horrors and only your players’ characters know about it! Suddenly, your team’s focus shifts sideways – how do we confront the menace when the menace is an upright pillar of the community? You can’t just bowl into the Mayor’s press conference, toss the Powder of ibn-Ghazi in his face while he’s on the podium, gun him down with magic bullets while chanting in Senzar, decapitate his body with your holy blade and then calmly re-assure the members of the Press watching all this that he was “an evil entity who dripped down onto our planet as cosmic pus” and that things will all be fine from now on. No – we all know exactly what happens next and it doesn’t involve a photo of the party on the front page of the next day’s ‘paper receiving the keys to the city beneath a banner headline screaming “HEROES!”; it has more to do with white coats, electrodes and high-dosage injections of insulin.

An investigation of a local haunted house becomes fraught with difficulty when the ‘ghosts’ are cultist enforcers using the ruined building as a base of operations and the local cops are in on the scheme, as would be the case with a spooky mansion in, say, Dunwich, or Innsmouth. In such an instance, the stakes are raised: the investigators need to factor-in the idea that any sources of information that they access might be guarded by those with a vested interest in keeping nosey-parkers away and, if things go pear-shaped, the option of just dialling 911 is no longer available.

Take our ‘Invasion of City Hall’ concept above. Say that the invaders are the Insects from Shaggai, bent upon summoning Azathoth into the middle of New York. The Shan possess people by phasing into their heads and riding them around in order to do their evil deeds. Suppose one of our investigators discovers a certain type of lens, or photo-emulsion process that allows the viewer to see when a human being is possessed (all those wings and legs and neural whips don’t always fit neatly inside the victim’s cranium!). Now our players can target the evildoers, identifying them easily much as Sam and Dean do with a splash of Holy Water, or as Bill Paxton does in “Frailty” with an angel-provided written list of names. Suddenly our heroes have a long line of individuals to break down into an efficient MOTW timetable.

But identifying the enemy is just the first step and it’s arguably the easy part. What comes next is difficult and leaves the party open to punishment under the auspices of the Law, which doesn’t have ‘magic glasses’ to let them see the Truth and, even if they did, would probably not just say, “well, that’s okay then!”. When your team pits itself against an Enemy, they’ll suddenly discover that they have a three-way fight involving a de facto third front – the pesky Rule of Law and its enforcers.

What this all means is that your players will become outlaws. They will no longer have free access to the things that make life cool and dandy. They will have to curry favour with fixers, use connexions and employ cut-outs and dupes. They will most likely – initially, anyway – not have access to a base of operations. Some teams might enjoy this more desperate style of play; others might find it too gruelling – it depends on your players.

Of course, none of this is at all surprising really – most campaigns have a tinge of this sort of thing going on at some stage or another, moments when the characters skate a little too close to legal repercussions for comfort. However, dialling it up to 11 could be the thing that catches your players’ imaginations and brings them back for more!