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Chaosium Digest Volume 13 Number 08
Chaosium Digest Volume 13, Number 8
Date: Sunday, March 24, 1996
Number: 1 of 2
Contents:
The Gloves of Pygmalion (Eamon Honan) CALL OF CTHULHU
Editor's Note:
Welcome to part one of the newest Chaosium Digest. This time around, a
CoC artifact (in V13.8) and an Elric! adventure (in V13.9) that I've
had sitting around for a few weeks. Thanks to both authors for their
patience. Coming up: Pendragon adventures, Nephilim stories and more.
Keep those submissions coming in!
Shannon
NEW RELEASES:
* Call of Cthulhu - _The Disciples of Cthulhu_ (Chaosium, 258 pg.,
$10.95) is the second edition of an excellent 1976 volume of Mythos
fiction. This edition has had "Zoth-Ommog", by Lin Carter, and "The
Feaster from Afar", by Joseph Payne Brennan removed, and has
replaced them with "Dope War of the Black Tongue", by Robert M.
Price, and "Glimpses", by AA Attanasio. Disciples is volume 10 of
Chaosium's Cthulhu Cycle.
_In the Shadows_ (Chaosium, 64 pg., $11.95) is a brand new set of
three 1920s adventures. They are set in Scotland, New York and the
US South.
MAGAZINE SIGHTINGS:
* Pendragon - "The Adventure of the Forester Knight", by Ben Chesell,
a five page forest adventure, Australian Realms #27 [Feb/Mar, 1996]
RECENT BOOKS OF NOTE:
* Nephilim - _World Without End_ (Tor, HC, $23.95) is a brand new book
centered around an Atlantis which once resided in the Bermuda
Triangle, and the gods that lived there. I haven't had a chance to
take a look at it yet, but it looks like it will contain story ideas
of use to Nephilim gamemasters.
RESTAURANTS OF NOTE:
Thanks to Charlie Seljos (azathoth@wam.umd.edu) for the following note.
* Call of Cthulhu - If you (or any CoC player you know) ever happens
to find himself or herself in the Washington, D.C. area, you should
visit the Clyde's Restaurant, at its Chevy Chase location. The decor
is drawn mostly from the late 1920s and early 1930s. Inside, there
are working, 1/3 scale models of a Bugatti roadster, a Mercedes SSK,
and several other vehicles which were used in the common CoC
settings. Furthermore, the dining booths are modeled after those in
the dining cars of the Orient Express trains, perhaps the the most
famous and luxurious rail system the era had to offer. Clyde's menu
is affordable, if a bit ordinary, but the decor alone should make a
visit worthwhile to any CoC fan. Clydes is conveniently located a
half block away from the Friendship Heights metro station.
Reservations are recommended, but not required. When calling, look
for the number of the Chevy Chase location.
--------------------
From: Eamon Honan <Spire@Indigo.ie>
Subject: The Gloves of Pygmalion
System: Call of Cthulhu
The Gloves of Pygmalion: An Artifact for CoC
APPEARANCE
The gloves appear to be a pair of ordinary gloves, made out of some
strange metallic fabric of a blueish, purple hue. The back of the
gloves and the fingers are encrusted with strange iridescent lozenze
shaped jewels. Any jeweler or geologist will be baffled as to the
jewel's origin; they have obviously been cut, but apart from that bear
no resemblance to any terrestrial jewel, looking somewhat like jewels
found in meteorites and not of Earthly origin.
The gloves are connected by a thin cord of the same fabric. It
stretches between the gloves for about a yard. However, should the
wearer wish to spread their arms, the cord will stretch with
surprising elasticity for over two and a half yards.
The gloves always appear to be just a little too small for the person
viewing them, but if the are put on, they are just right, fitting the
wearer like a second skin.
Once worn, the wearer quickly comes to like the feel of the glove's
fabric moving over his (or her) hands and will be loath to remove
them. The jewels make little clicking sounds when the gloves are worn,
as they seem to move and slide past each other. Anybody studying the
gloves for any period of time will notice that the jewels actually
move, as if they were not really attached to the fabric. Careful study
will see jewels move from finger to finger, around the glove and back
again.
ABILITIES
The gloves allow the wearer to mould organic matter, including living
tissue, as if it were clay. The wearer has no control over this; the
gloves affect any material he touches (including himself) as if it
were modeling clay. The material shaped does not change in any other
way, apart from its malleability. A statue made out of a tree would
still smell and feel like wood, it would still contain sap and grow
leaves, it would just look like a statue. The material does not suffer
any ill affects from the reshaping unless something vital was removed.
For example a man who was reshaped into a table would retain stomach,
kidneys, liver, etc and would continue to live, he just wouldn't be
able to move. However if the shaper reached into somebody and removed
their heart, they would obviously die instantly. The gloves also
impart the wearer with an insatiable desire to shape, who or what does
not matter. The gloves do not give the wearer any ability to sculpt,
which is something the wearer must learn by himself.
The wearer will become obsessed by sculpture, making statues and
"works of art" out of anything or anybody he can lay his hands on. He
will dream of the ancient cities of the serpent people in the steamy
jungles of Valusia and of a fellow sculptor to whom he is related to
by art, if not by species. Eventually, the wearer will never be able
to take the gloves off and will become obsessed by the idea of
reshaping himself. This he will enevitably do with fatal conseqences.
All this is obviously sanity taxing. Here are the costs in SAN of that
which is described above:
To see the gloves for the first time. 0/1 (from fascination)
To see something "reshaped". 0/1d2
To see someone "reshaped". 1/1d6
To be "reshaped". 1d6/1d20
To wear the gloves. 1 per day of wearing
To "reshape" something. 0/1
To "reshape" someone. 1/1d6
To "reshape" oneself. 1d4/1d10
To learn of the true history and origins of the gloves.
1/1d4
HISTORY
(The last entry in this history is in 1889 to allow Gaslight Keepers
to use the gloves, 1920s Keepers such as myself can fill in the
intervening 30 years pretty easily.)
The gloves were created by an unknown serpentman artist and sorcerer
about 67 million years ago, during the decline of the serpent people.
The creator wished to be able to sculpt like none ever had before. To
do this, he created the gloves using powerful sorcery and unearthly
materials. He created sculptures of inhuman beauty, sculptures that
denied imagination and defied rationality. His sculptures became one
of the few popular art objects of the serpent peoples culture.
Attempts were made to make more gloves, but they all failed.
The gloves were lost to the serpent people when the owner (not the
original one, but one of his distant descendants) was discovered by
the soldiers of King Kull, and put to the sword. The gloves were kept
by Gonar, the King's wizard. The wily old bird knew of their power,
but also knew that it led to doom. So, he kept them safe until he lost
them during the sinking of Atlantis (I assume that the date given for
the sinking of Atlantis in the CoC rulebook is about 5000 years off,
to allow for R.E. Howard's Hyborian Age).
They lay beneath the sea until 12,000 years ago, when a Zingaran
fisherman dragged them up in his net. He exchanged them with an
Iranistani merchant for a fine boat and a crew. They were then sold to
a prince of Ophir. The prince experienced the powers of the gloves,
went mad and sculpted the entire royal family into statues of serpent
people. The throne (and the gloves) went to a Zamoran mercenery
captain, who gave them as payment to a Stygian sorcerer for aid in a
battle against another usurper. The sorcerer was later destroyed by
the most powerful of his kind, Thoth-Amon. Toth-Amon recognised the
power of the gloves and managed (a unique feat amongst the glove's
human owners) to utilise them without being destroyed himself. The
gloves were given as a reward to a junior member of the Black Ring,
who was driven insane by their power and buried himself alive (with
the gloves) in a Hyrkanian steppe.
Approximately 11,000 years after the passing of the Hyborian Age, the
tomb was discovered by the shaman of a slavic tribe that lived in the
area. The gloves were placed in one of the shaman's sacred drums, as
they were considered to be a gift of the gods. Several generations
later a group of Thracian merceneries wiped out the tribe and carried
the gloves back as booty to Thrace. There the gloves went through a
succession of owners (all of whom were destroyed by the glove's
power), until the mother of the last owner sealed them up in one of
her late son's statues. The statue was sold to an Ithican merchant and
was bought and sold several times during the next sixty years.
The statue eventually made its way to Athens and from there to the
Great Library of Alexandria. The statue remained there for two hundred
years until the library was burnt to the ground by the Romans. The
statue was taken to Rome by one of Caesar's centurions. There, the
statue remained until the Centurian retired to Herculaneum. The statue
remained in his family until the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD when it
was buried under a thick layer of ash with the rest of the town.
It was not until 1709, during the Austrian occupation of Italy, that
Herculaneum was dug up. That staue remained buried until 1713, when an
Austrian nobleman named Wolfgang Von Bulow saw it in one of the newly
excavated portions of the town. He bought it and transported it to his
home in mountainous western Austria, near Schruns. Von Bulow lived in
an ancient schloss in the alps, and the statue remained there until
his death. The statue would have probably remained there until this
very day, if not for an accident five years later.
Von Bulow's grand-daughter, Michelle (Von Bulow junior married a
french woman, he was something of an oddity), aged twelve, was playing
hide and seek with her little brother. He hid behind the statue, and
when she caught him, he knocked it over, and it was smashed on the
stone floor. Both children were given a stern ticking off by their
father, but what he failed to notice was that Michelle had pocketed
the gloves. She was fascinated by them and wore them in secret,
experimenting with their "delightful" powers and losing her soul piece
by piece at each wearing. Her spirit was strong and none since
Thoth-Amon had worn the gloves for so long and with so little ill
effect. However, the end came when the desire to sculpt overcame her
and she ran amok in the castle, one dark and stormy winter's night.
After a month's silence, local villagers plucked up their courage and
investigated the castle. What they found entered into village folklore
forever: living statues, hideous fleshy parodies of the statue of
David and The Kiss, strange cylindrical towers that were warm to the
touch and babbled insane gibberings at the horrified investigators.
Only Michelle's little brother survived, dirty and silent. He was
found hiding under the bed in the master bedroom, beside the screaming
obscenity that had once been his mother. Michelle, fled into the
mountains. She wandered until she fell down a chimney high in the
Alps, both her arms were broken, so she could not escape, and over a
period of several days she starved to death.
Her bones and the gloves were found by a young Swissman in 1772 while
he was climbing the mountains. He brought the gloves (and the bones)
back to Santa Maria, his home town, where they were given a Christian
burial by the town's priest. However Michelle's bones did not rest
well that night, for the village's Doctor heard of the jeweled gloves,
dug Michelle's grave up and fled with the gloves to France. Once in
France, he attempted to sell them to a jeweller in Strasburg. The man,
baffled by the jewels, said they were coloured glass and offered to
take them of his hands for a derisory sum. The doctor whose name was
Karl travelled around France trying to sell them until he died in
Paris, a pauper.
The gloves languished in a Paris pawnshop, dismissed as clever fakes
until 1787. A young English sculptor named Thomas Basildon bought them
for a few francs, simply becuase he liked the colour of the "glass".
They remained, unworn in his studio in the artists quarter of Paris
until 1788, when drunk and penniless, his hopes destroyed, he decided
to kill himself. Putting them on accidently, just before he was about
to do the deed, he discovered their unique powers and began to sculpt
like never before. He rocketed to fame, making more sculptures in a
week, then most do in a year. He reshaped his mistress, Marie Dupont,
to be the most beguiling beauty of Verailles. In 1789, a few days
after the storming of the Bastilles, a mob broke into Basildon's house
and dragged himself and his mistress out into the street, where they
were hacked to death with knives and axes. The gloves were stolen as
the house was looted and were sold a few days later to a pawnshop for
the sum of 3 francs. It was Basildon that gave the gloves the name
"The Gloves of Pygmalion"*.
The gloves stayed there until the daughter of a merchant, Simone
Boulle, bought them and brought them to England, where she gave them
to an admirer, an Irishman named Steven Kelly. Kelly, the youngest son
of a prosperous Dublin merchant-venturer kept them as a keep sake. A
few years later, disowned by his father, he fled to Chile. After
spending ten years in Chile working for the Spainish, transporting
gold to Spain from the mines in Chile, he left Spainish service and
joined the British navy as a privateer, harrying Napoleon's navy and
helping wipe out his fleet in "The Battle of the Nile". Steven died of
liver failure brought on by the heat and years of heavy drinking. He
was given a decent burial near Alexandria. The gloves were liquidated
to pay one of his creditors, a tavern owner in Alexandria. The gloves
went through several owners in the back streets of that exotic and
ancient city, until the were bought by the wife of a visiting British
naturalist in Eygpt in 1843. She lost them waving to people from the
side of the ship, as it entered London, dropping them into the Thames.
There they remain until in 1889, a mudlark (a young boy who fishes in
the Thames mud at low tide, looking for bits of scrap to sell) found
the gloves and sold them for the sum of four schillings and sixpence
to Lin-Tze, the owner of a opium den in the Limehouse district of
London. What he uses them for, or if he knows of their power, is
unknown.
Keepers can fiddle with the glove's recent history as they wish, for
their own purposes. After covering the last sixty seven and a bit
million years I doubt thirty or a hundred and six will prove much of a
problem.
* For all those going "Eh, what's he on about?": Pygmalion was a
king in ancient Greece who created a beautiful statue of a woman and
fell in love with it. He asked Aphrodite to bring her to life, which
Aphrodite promptly did. Basildon was refering to the fact that
Pygmalion brought dead stone to life, while he made living flesh (it
was his preferred medium) into the deathly counterpart of stone. He
was also trying to butter up his mistress by comparing her to Galetea,
the beautiful statue, Pygmalion created.
PRIMARY SOURCES
The gloves are referred to in several books, both Mythos and
non-Mythos. They represent the only realistic way most investigators
will learn of the gloves. I have included a list of the books and a
brief description of each, including in some cases a brief passage
referring to the gloves.
The Book of Drad
San loss 1d4/2d4
Cthulhu Mythos +3
Atlantean +8
Spell Multiplier X 2
Spells: Consume Likeness
Main Topics: The Serpent People and their nameless evil, Atlantis, the
reign of King Kull.
Description: A scroll of papyrus rolled on two willow rods and bound
with a black ribbon. It is surprisingly fresh despite its age.
The journal of a young Atlantean scholar during the time of King Kull.
It chronicles the period in the King's reign where the extent of the
of the serpent people's hidden presence in his kingdom was realised.
It mentions in passing the discovery of a serpent man who had taken
the form of one of the king's guard and how the king found him out
because of his ophidian shadow. It also describes how the serpentman
disguised himself using sorcery and managed to evade detection for
several years by clever use of sorcery and drugs. It also mentions a
pair of gloves that the creature possessed.
"...once the beast had been slain by the King's guard, it was found
that it wore a pair of gloves of most unusual aspect. They were about
as large as my hand and were covered with strange jewels that seemed
to writhe on the gloves themselves. Gonar, the King's adviser, bade no
man touch them and was quite insistent that they be handed over to
him. It was whispered later, that Gonar was in league with the
monster, but the hushed tones and guarded tongues of those that spoke
such, pointed to the untruth of such a lie. A soldier sent to search
the creatures chambers, lest more of its kind lurk there, returned
white faced and shaking, speaking of blasphemous horrors not men and
yet disturbingly like men that were found there. The King had them all
burned. The stench was unbelievable and the yard stunk for days
afterward."
Location: The book is currently in Carcosa, abandoned in one of the
cities many twisting streets and alleyways. How it came to be there is
a mystery.
The Notebook of Thomas Basildon
San Loss 1d4/1d8
Cthulhu Mythos +2
English +3
No Spells
Main Topics: The Serpent people and the creation of inhuman and
abhorrent sculpture.
Description: A worn brown leather A4 note/sketch book, with the
initials TB embossed on the front.
A well thumbed sketch book filled with pencil and charcoal drawings,
designs for statues, concept drawings, and other similar things. It
also acts as a diary, with pages of pencilled script filling in
between drawings. The first few pages are all fairly normal drawings
of Greek style statues, nymphs and Aphrodite feature prominently.
Later on, the book is filled with pages of frantically scribbled
descriptions of dreams and deeds of a strange and unwholesome nature.
Pictures of snakes and snake men predominate in the last few pages of
the book, with one of the last pictures being a large (two page)
pastel of a gleaming many towered city nestled in a deep jungle
valley. The inhabitants of the city are not present, but the garish
and disturbingly real colours unsettle the observer nonetheless. the
gloves are pictured only once, but the hastily pencilled drawing still
gives a very clear picture of the gloves. There would be no doubt in
the mind of anyone who had seen the original as to whether the two are
one and the same. The last written part of the book (dated two days
before Basildon's death) reads as follows:
"... (obliterated word) Marie, dear God Marie, why did you cry last
night? Why? I made you beautiful! More beautiful then words can say!
You are the darling of Versailles and you cried in my arms, I changed
you beautifully, why aren't you grateful?"
Location: A second-hand book shop on the rue sacre coeur in Paris. It
lies tightly wedged between a book on anatomy and a walking stick in
an elephant's foot hallstand.
SECONDARY SOURCES
The gloves are mentioned indirectly in several books the most
important being mentioned here.
* The Book of Dyzan includes a second-hand report of the incident
described in the Book of Drad.
* An clay tablet by an unknown scribe, from Trace describes the
death of one of the gloves' Thracian owners and how "gem fingered
death plucked his life away".
* The Pnakotic manuscripts contains several mentions of the
sculptures the original owner of the gloves created. It does not name
the owner or reveal anything about him apart from his species. However
the description of the sculptures describe the style so accurately,
that anyone who had studied a recent creation could say with authority
that there were definite similarities between the two pieces.
* My Years as a Clergyman, is a the self published memoirs of the
Austrian priest, Gotfreid Braun, who took over the parish where Von
Bulov lived. An avid amateur historian, he details several local
legends, including one that refers to the demise of the Von Bulov. The
legend labels Michelle's mother a witch and describes how she made a
pact with the devil and how it led to the destruction of the entire
family.
OTHER RESEARCH
Should the investigators think to test the physical composition of the
gloves, they will have to spend a great deal of time and money.
Research in all eras shows that the gloves are not from any known
human culture due to their design and composition. The jewels are
unidentifiable in any era. The nearest anybody can come to a definite
answer is that they bear some resemblance to quartz crystal, but
that's about it.
Tests of the fabric in the 1890s will show high concentrations of
aluminium (aluminum), mercury (which is not liquid for unknown
reasons), silver, thorium (not actually emitting radiation, for some
strange reason) and two unknown elements, one of which is similar to a
known compound*.
In the 1920s, the vaguely identifiable element will be titanium, but
the remaining element will remain as inexplicable as ever.
In the 1990s, the mystery element will remain a mystery, but under a
powerful (very, very powerful) electron microscope, it will be shown
to be incredibly dense and to have a very complex molecular shape like
a sort of lattice. In the 1990s, it will be possible to date the
gloves, but it will be very hard and expensive to do so. The gloves
will need to be bombarded by a high powered molecular stream to
dislodge the remains oldest of the oldest organic material that it has
come into contact with (these of course will be only a few molecules).
Once they have the organic material, they can try and carbon date it,
giving the obviously "impossible" answer. (I am a little uncertain as
to the validity of this method, I saw it on Tomorrow's World and it's
the only way I can think of that dating would be possible, bar the use
of magic.)
* There was one titanium-oxygen compound known in 1824, but pure
titanium was not tracked down until 1910.
SCENARIO IDEAS
I think the gloves should be used as a campaign thread, with little
bits of information being discovered every so often. I would allow the
investigators to find the gloves farely early on in a campaign, with
the various references to them being unearthed as well as the main
plot of the campaign.
My favourite way of introducing the gloves is the "doomed artist"
idea. A penniless, destitute and desperate sculptor finds the gloves
and is suddenly catapulted to fame only to have the effects of the
gloves destroy him. The investigators coming upon the ruins of his
studio find him warped and inhuman on the floor (a nasty idea
involving cats has come to mind, but I think I will save it until a
later date).
Alternatively the investigators could find them in the back of a old
and decrepit pawnshop to be sold them for a suspiciously low price.
Along with the gloves, they could find a book warning of the dire
conseqences of donning the gloves. If they choose not to buy it,
that's their affair...
I hope you enjoy the Gloves of Pygmalion. Feel free to use them as you
wish, and I hope you enjoy using them as much as I enjoyed creating
them.
Till R'lyeh rises,
Eamon Honan
--------------------
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Games. The old digests are archived on ftp.csua.berkeley.edu in the
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