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Chaosium Digest Volume 32 Number 05
Chaosium Digest Volume 32, Number 5
Date: Tuesday August 8, 2000
Number: 1 of
Contents:
* THE BROKEN SEAL (CTHULHU)
By M. Blenkarn
Editor's Note:
Sorry it's been a while between issues, but the wife and I have been moving this
past week. Now that we're getting settled in, I can turn my attention back to
the Digest.
Mr. Blenkarn has sent us another story to fill in until the next chapter of
"Whippoorwill House" is ready. "The Broken Seal" discusses the area around
Whippoorwill House and the horrors to be found there. For those new to the
Digest,
Michael Blenkarn's fiction has been featured in the past three issues if you
care to look them up.
The rest of the issue features some announcements. I'm still waiting to hear
from Dustin Wright about the winner of last quarter's Chaosium Contest. I figure
that he's being kept busy by all the Cons going on this time of year, especially
Origins and Gen Con. In any case, keep those submissions coming!
ANNOUNCEMENTS
* Matt Sanborn monsterfashion@earthlink.net
Is trying to garner interest for an October COC convention in northern
Massachusetts. Anyone interested should send him email so that he can determine
the level of interest.
* Chaosium News
Awards
During the ORIGINS 2000 show held this year in Columbus, Ohio, Chaosium was
honored and pleased to accept two great awards for our work over the past year.
Our massive BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS adventure for Call of Cthulhu won
for Best Role-playing Adventure. Congratulations to authors Charles and Janyce
Engan. You can find more information about this supplement, and about the Call
of Cthulhu role-playing line in general at:
www.chaosium.com/cthulhu/rpg/2380.shtml.
It is also extremely gratifying that we received an award for the fiction side
of Chaosium. "Just a Tad Beyond Innsmouth" by Stanley C. Sargent, one of the
stories contained in our TALES OUT OF INNSMOUTH anthology, won for Best Game
Related Short Work. Find out more about the book, and
about other Chaosium fiction titles at:
www.chaosium.com/cthulhu/fiction/6024.shtml.
Changes
Well, we have finally completed the move and, after some weeks in the new place
at the Old Army Base, it's starting to feel like home. We still have lots of
doo-dads and knick-knacks to adorn the place with. For anyone who has not yet
heard, the following is our new address and contact info:
Chaosium Inc.
900 Murmansk Street, Suite 5
Oakland CA 94607-5018
Phone: 510-452-4658
Fax: 510-452-4659
The move had many effects on our schedule (like shooting it full of holes). As a
result, we have been forced to make the following changes:
The Yellow Sign and Other Stories
CALL OF CTHULHU FICTION. At the printer for release August 8th. This is a great
compilation of the complete weird tales of Robert W. Chambers. About 650 pages
in all; some stories have not appeared in print in nearly a century. #6023,
$19.95, 650 pages.
Cthulhu For President
NOVELTY. We're out of time, don't have the orders we need, and really must
concentrate on other core products on our schedule. Therefore, we will not
release this kit. We still plan on hosting our huge rally at Gencon '00. Shucks.
Keeper Companion
CALL OF CTHULHU CORE BOOK. This is one of the things that we want to focus on
getting out. Available in late August. Now at more than 200 pages, we've gone
and raised the retail price to $23.95. This is THE essential book for Call of
Cthulhu keepers, with dozens of articles, tidbits, hints and tips on helping
your become a more skillful gamemaster and to make your life easier. #2388,
$23.95, 200+ pages, Illustrated.
The Three Impostors
CALL OF CTHULHU FICTION. For release in early September. Some of the finest
horror stories ever written, this is the first volume of Chaosium's Arthur
Machen collection. Machen had a profound impact upon H.P. Lovecraft and the
group of stories that would later become the Cthulhu Mythos. #6030, $13.95.
Unseen Masters
CALL OF CTHULHU MODERN-DAY ADVENTURES. For later September, this set of three
mini-campaigns lead the investigators through serial murders, madness, and into
the midst of an ancient conflict. The three scenarios can be combined to form a
modern NY state campaign. #2384, $19.95,
Illustrated.
* August 7, 2000
THE HILLS RISE WILD AT GENCON!
Pagan Publishing's New Miniatures Game Somehow Remains On Schedule
SEATTLE -- In a dramatic reversal from ten years' hard-won precedent, Pagan
Publishing's new fast-play miniatures game, THE HILLS RISE WILD!, will be
released exactly when the company first said it would be: at GenCon 2000 in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 10th.
"I'm not sure if we've ever stuck to our first release date for a retail product
before," said a shocked John Tynes, co-designer of the game, no doubt as the
lamb opened the seventh seal.
THE HILLS RISE WILD! is a colorful cardstock miniatures game of monstrous
hillbilly carnage for two to four players. Using a tile-based playing surface, a
deck of 32 cards, and 24 unique characters, players rampage across the
ramshackle shacks of Dunwich searching for the Necronomicon, a book of powerful
magic.
An online support page for the game is now up at the publisher's website
(http://www.tccorp.com/), offering faction sheets in PDF format, suggested board
layouts, and space for fans to submit their own variants, optional rules, and
other skullduggery. A web-based message board sponsored by the Gaming Outpost
website (http://www.gamingoutpost.com/) will be up shortly as well.
After debuting at GenCon, the game will ship to distributors the following week
and should be in gaming shops across the U.S. (#PAG2500) soon afterwards at a
retail price of $34.95.
In what will doubtlessly be hailed as a major technological innovation, every
copy of the game includes a safety-orange pocket tape measure for determining
range and line-of-sight. "We could have included a floppy paper ruler or a rigid
plastic stick," said co-designer Jesper Myrfors, "but ours is both floppy *and*
plastic--we insisted on quality all the way down the line!"
Despite this seemingly uncompromising assertion, the game's cheerful-looking box
is not, in fact, made of solid steel.
For more details:
http://www.tccorp.com/
--------------------------------
THE BROKEN SEAL
By M. Blenkarn
"Magnificent creatures of glory
We've climbed down from the stars
To stand before you as idols
Star-matter shapes of power
Cast from the seeds of the gods
As instruments of perfection"
Snorre Ruch, 2000.
The sky was drained of colour, and the dreary tenements of Middlesbrough were
stifled by heavy and unyielding humidity, like part of a universe inside a
Tupperware container. From the upstairs window of a decrepit and squalid
terraced house filtered inane and driveling music from a cheap, tinny radio.
The corpulent atmosphere was reflected by the decrepitude of the houses
squatting darkly in a haze of chemical smog. High altitude winds were drowning
the town in fumes from the chemical works that ringed its outskirts like
predatory creatures closing in on the mangled corpse of the stagnant,
meaningless town. Mingling with the already unpleasant air were the writhing,
swarming clouds of cigarette smoke generated by a group of disheveled, gaunt
and emaciated youths with messily close-cropped heads. They were conversing in
the nasal, sniveling accent characteristic of the area. They coughed and
spluttered with every sentence, a guttural, painfully dry sound that contrasted
with the importunate whine characteristic to those such as they. Their presence
seemed to defile an already decrepit den of squalor, clinging desperately to the
last vestiges of civility with skeletal, nicotine-bleached fingers.
They watched with eyes deadened by hopelessness, standing fishlike from their
sockets and colourless as their unhealthy pallor, which sang silent hymns to
urban deprivation, no emotions playing across their lifeless countenances. They
stared, mindlessly captivated, as PC Chandler, newly recruited to the force,
pried at the damp and flaking boards condemning a certain tenement dwelling to
the death-row of demolition sites. He had futilely requested assistance from the
delinquents, showing unbecoming naiveté in such an action, and was rewarded with
a flickering of middle-digits. He wondered momentarily at that point of
dispersing the youths by means of his questionable authority, but he correctly
surmised that in this dark, dripping street the name of the police had very
little weight.
He swore callously as the damp, rotting board he had been working at split
artfully, and his demanding efforts resulted in a tiny chunk of damp wood
falling to the floor. The crowbar he had been using looked innocent enough in
its imposition, but he cast it hard at the pavement where it bounced heavily,
chipping the stained, ancient concrete slabs.
What was the use of it all? He wondered. He couldn't begin to guess what was so
worthwhile in investigating another identical, wretched slum dwelling for signs
of cheaply affordable iniquity as appropriated by any of the town's endless
legion of drug dealers and suppliers. Every time such a situation occurred, the
police always succeeded in only penetrating the lowest echelons of a complex
hierarchy of criminality worming its insidious way through the town's black and
depraved underbelly.
The incident with the door was bitterly allegorical. Every time he chipped
ineffectually at the dampened boards a merest fragment only would be exposed and
a glimpse of hinted rot within. In this, any small-time criminal stupid enough
to be caught would be the merest suggestion of the blacker depravity lurking
just beyond the sulphurous light of the street lamps.
Chandler's car was about twenty metres away down the claustrophobically cramped
street away, at the end of a huddled, degenerate mass of terraced houses seeming
to merge formlessly into one three-dimensional essay of decay. Behind it was a
dirt-smeared, once-white van with a corporate logo printed in supposedly jaunty
lettering upon its bonnet, in which a weaselly, disreputable looking man was
enjoying a Marlboro in what might only be described as apathetic rapture, if
such a bizarre state can be acknowledged and accepted. Chandler's eyes narrowed
slightly as the humanoid-weasel man, with a cracked-toothed leer flicked his
filter skittering across his patrol car with a scattering tail of ash like the
universe's most downmarket comet. Chandler quickly made a mental note of the
license number and the registered company, one of the locality's most prolific
employment providers, Nihil Industries. He smiled bitterly at the lack of
criminal charges to level at the dogsbody, but without resorting to archaic,
puritanical hygiene laws he couldn't think of an adequate reason to remonstrate.
The policeman finally lost his temper. With disillusionment awakening anger he
hammered at the stubborn boards with a heavy boot, splintering the wood and
rupturing their bloated faces. Finally some furtherance of his design was
achieved and he managed to beat his way through with his booted onslaught. The
emaciated delinquents laughed, and it sounded to Chandler like the chittering of
malformed insects rather than the product of human vocal chords. Had their
mouths opened in a slightly distorted fashion, the lips too thin and their teeth
abnormally small? Their high-pitched tittering quickly became permeated by
spluttering smokers' coughs and then receded as the youths shambled off, their
entertainment done, with a disturbingly lopsided, distorted gait akin to people
becoming familiar with a different level of gravity to their own. Chandler was
pleased to see them go, and risked a glance into the stricken hovel he had
forced entry to.
There was a clattering noise behind him and along the street. One of the youths
had tossed a package containing something that sounded plastic and hollow onto
the hood of his car. Chandler foreswore his glance and shouted officially
sanctified police threats at the irritating, cackling stick figures, as they
cavorted into a parody of a run and scattered like a nest of disturbed insects.
He thought that one, glancing back, was grinning with a grotesquely wide,
strangely batrachian mouth full of maltreated teeth and the lingering fumes of
smoke. The usual police-related insults echoed in nasally whining voices off the
rot-dampened plaster facades of the tenements, and then they were gone,
dispersed among the endless, empty alleys.
Dole rats, thought Chandler. Bloodsucking dole rats with no purpose in life than
to piss off the people with the work ethics and wallow in drugs. Those types
were never the dealers or the organizers, they were the mindless slaves, the
witless moronic drones of an upturned anthill of perdition.
Sighing with a silk-thin temper he swung his gaze back to his work.
An unending fresco of dereliction masquerading as an entrance hall looked back.
Filth smeared the walls like the graffiti of an avatar of decay. Broken glass
lay ready to crunch sickeningly underfoot, and pregnant and blackened bulbs hung
like predatory insects overhead. The bare floorboards were dirt encrusted and
looked ready to submit a symphony of damp creaks and splintering crescendos.
Bare mattresses and stained pillows slouched against the walls and bespoke some
desolate excuse for habitation. The dank hovel was silent but seemingly
expectant. Chandler felt an awareness as if the activities that occurred within
this den of iniquity had permeated the walls with and a natural sense of sleaze
and seediness (I take it that this was when he became aware of me).
A smell sensuously imposed itself on the policeman's nostrils before triggering
the button labeled 'nausea', hot-wiring his brain's reactionary systems.
Chandler bowed to the pressure and stepped muzzily backward, almost tripping on
a discarded vodka bottle.
Before attempting his examination, Chandler staggered nauseated back to his car
and gingerly fingered the package that the dole rat had tossed negligently onto
his bonnet. There was no address, but
"PC CHANDLER" was printed on it in a jerky, sloppily infantile hand, and the
whole thing was a sheet of newspaper messily affixed together by duct tape. He
tore at the cheap wrapping, which felt slightly greasy under his hands, and he
disgustedly rubbed them on the seat of his trousers before progressing.
An audio tape, surmounted by the Nihil Industries logo, and a handful of photos
scattered into the gutter. Chandler profaned loudly and stooped to collect them
into some semblance of order. His eyes rested on the content of the photos,
photos which I had much enjoyed creating, though his countenance had been
difficult with the little experience of him I had from his standard beat. The
colour drained from his face until it nearly matched the Tupperware clouds
reclining sullenly overhead. His hands were visibly shaking as he looked at each
photograph in turn, nausea dancing merrily around his stomach, bouncing off its
walls and messing around inanely with his motor-functions. Hastily and with a
look of abject horror on his face he stuffed the photos and the tape into his
pocket and sat on the bonnet of his car before his legs abdicated from their
role out of fear.
He sat for perhaps five minutes, horrified eyes staring numbly at an
uninteresting middle distance, before tentatively returning to his examination
of the hovel, but not without locking the dubious contents of his pockets in a
professionally reinforced glove compartment. As he did so he tried not to look
at the photos, and muttered to himself disquietingly as he walked back to the
degenerate hole that he had yet to search and examine. This time he covered his
nose with a hanky and fingered the end of his standard issue truncheon
nervously, stepping into the dank hellhole with the expected, discordant sound
of glass crunching. Doors hung invitingly, eagerly, open like hungry mouths
waiting to swallow anyone tempted by the beckoning of the cheap and seedy or the
hypnotic compulsions of substance abuse. Little could be seen within but dirt
and deprivation, damp-stained walls, burst bulbs, filthy bedding and sheets, the
unsurprising sight of discarded needles glittering maliciously amidst the dust.
At the end of the hall rickety and unsafe stairs pathetically implored him to
ascend, but Chandler doubted by the condition of the house that the upper floor
was remotely safe. He would simply try the closed door at the end of the hall,
to which there was a track in the dust. Then he would return home, and burn the
photographs in a fire until only the ashes remained, to be scattered to the four
winds.
Something white and rectangular caught his eye nestling in one of the folds of a
moth-eaten quilt, heaped amongst the bedding. As he reached for it an enormous,
bloated spider skittered madly and hysterically across his hand. The revulsion
welled up in Chandler so strongly that he barely resisted the urge to empty his
stomach immediately. The white rectangle was a business card, emblazoned with
the increasingly portentous Nihil Industries logo. Chandler felt his reserves of
patience being drained, because of the symbol which had cropped up again and
again, on the tape that he hadn't listened to, on the bonnet of the van
containing the weasel-human crossbreed and now here in this den of social
depravity. His resolve reasserting, he reached for the door (I hungrily waited
for him to enter).
Chandler opened the door nervously and peered in. A cavalcade of expressions
temporarily suffused his face with several good examples of fearful puzzlement,
tinctured by a flicker of intrigue.
(I took pains to manipulate the atmosphere to tempt that intrigue and nurture it
into fruition. I remained an intangible atmosphere and slowly refined his fear
into a needle that burrowed into his spine, while subconsciously teasing and
beckoning his inquisitive aspect).
Eyes aflame with curiosity he approached the one furnishing in the utterly bare
room, a large metal circlet a metre across, embossed with a strange, sensuously
curved interpretation of a classic pentagonal sigil, lying on the floor.
Chandler knelt, sweat beading his forehead and tracing rivulets down his cheeks.
With shaking fingers he traced the edges of the strangely beguiling symbol that
lay before him. He was familiar with pentacles from previous raids on tenements
in this area, sordid dens of perdition where pimps paid obeisance to unnamable
entities while collecting their filthy money, and smack-heads clumsily
genuflected with their needles born aloft. This was unlike them, though; it
seemed darker, more insistently macabre, imposing a blackened tincture on this
entire area of tenements. He almost felt malice radiating off it like an
intoxicant; how many of those emaciated youths gathered here in a circle for a
slaves' high on full-moon nights? Chandler decided to act swiftly. He ran back
to his car, and grabbed a heavy hammer from his boot (acting on the compulsion I
implanted in his head).
Where he smote the metal circle it smoked with an intoxicating odour and caused
his senses to pinwheel. He had caught that smell from smoking braziers in the
most ardently occult dens of the endless criminal network of Middlesbrough. He
hammered and hammered, and eventually the plate cracked sickeningly with a sound
uncannily like bone. For a second he thought that crimson streams of blood
coursed across the metal, but it was only the reflected evidence of the deep,
baleful red light now pouring from beneath the plate. Chandler gasped with
horror and backed agitatedly away (but I dragged him back with chains formed of
his own inquisition. I succored the primal terror steaming off his aura in
aetheric waves, piquing my hunger).
As soon as Chandler looked through the hole his face went a ghastly white, but
illuminated in horrific redness, and a piercing shriek echoed around the ruined
tenement. He jumped in terror to his feet, and his uncontrollable fear destroyed
his rampant curiosity, making him run clumsily, slamming into walls and bruising
himself in his agitation. As he ran screaming through the open door, he realized
the sky was darkened overhead and rain was spattering across the litter décor of
the pavement. Lit by the dark, flickering storm light and their chittering
blotted out by the thunder, the emaciated youths cut off all exits from the
street, emerging from all the doors, grinning with malformed, stretched inhuman
grins. Their mouths belched smoke but none carried cigarettes, and red malice
glittered in the eyesockets of each and every one. Chandler heard the sounds of
rupturing and gouts of steam spouting in the house behind him, before an
emaciated youth grabbed him from behind.
The youth holding Chandler pulled a dusty, fractured walkman from a tracksuit
pocket with thin, pale skeletal fingers stained with nicotine. He grabbed the
Nihil Industries tape from his pocket and triumphantly thrust it in, untangling
ear-phone leads like sticky cobwebs and slipping the speakers into the
struggling policeman's ears. Then, pressing <play>, he stood back.
A slow look of puzzlement tinctured Chandler's face, and then it became
abnormally stretched and ghostly grey, as his bloodshot eyes widened
horrifically. Rivulets of blood began to emit from his flaring nostrils and
flecks erupted from his mouth as he began to shriek anew. In agonized insanity
he tore at the skin of his face. Then, encircling him, the evilly grinning
youths, like leering marionettes created by the most pernicious of puppeteers,
watched with growing pleasure as Chandler began convulsively banging his head
against a wall. Blood flew, and their grins widened when they heard the first
crack of bone. (I watched with amusement, feeling his insanity pouring aetheric
energy into me. Slowly I began to manifest, coalescing out of the air to the
drunken, syncopated applause of the youths). Chandler was slumping lifelessly,
his head caving in and blood pouring from innumerable ruptures. Wordlessly, two
of the figures carried him back into the house with surprising strength in their
withered limbs. Soon other sounds began to emit from one of the inside rooms.
(Wearing his face, I walked back inside on new, three-dimensional human feet, my
ideas and hopes realized).
(My only pain was the brief pang of longing when I beheld through the broken
seal, a porthole looking through a vertical angle into a maleficent city,
echoing with shrieks and the sounds of machinery, beneath the glowing of a
crimson tri-lobed sun. Chandler had been horrified at the face he beheld in
intolerable agony gazing from beyond the hole, and now was assuredly learning
the full import of its presence. Some time I would return home and behold what
his bodiless soul will become. Until then, I must ensure our presence felt in
this pernicious town nestling in its valley of perdition.
With that thought, I went to the entertainment).
--
