"Abnormal Growth" (a Cthulhu Mythos investigative scenario)

Almost exactly 89 years ago, on March 15, H P Lovecraft died. That's my pretext for posting this scenario, which ties in with the rules for Dagon Warriors (sic) but could just as easily be run using Infinite Night or Call of Cthulhu or whatever system you prefer. (But don't for the sake of your own SAN use The Yellow King.) This is a modified version of a post that appeared on my Patreon page; sign up there and you'd have seen it a year earlier. The artwork below, apart from the growths vignette and the Fernsby house, is by Tillinghast23 on DeviantArt, who has lots of other stylish illustrations for work by HPL, Clark Ashton Smith, and others. The examples here all accompany HPL's poem 'Fungi from Yuggoth'.

The year is 1930. Prohibition has gripped the nation, and the roar of the Roaring Twenties seems a distant memory for many. In the sleepy town of Lucan Falls, nestled amongst the rolling hills and dense forests of upstate New York, life moves at a slower pace. But beneath the surface of this tranquil community, a sinister force is stirring. The player-characters start by looking into the disappearance of a Cornell dropout and end up confronting a horror from the fringes of the solar system.

The disappearance of Stanley Cakebread

The disappearance of Stanley Cakebread (21, brilliant but highly strung), a vagrant with a troubled past, has thrown the quiet town of Lucan Falls into a state of unease. Stanley, a Cornell dropout who had embraced a nomadic lifestyle, sent regular postcards to his parents in Manhattan. However, the postcards abruptly ceased a month ago, the last one postmarked from the small town of Harmony, just south of Lucan Falls.

The characters

The scenario is suitable for about six characters of 1st rank, or three characters of 2nd rank. The investigators may find themselves drawn into the mystery in various ways. As this is a one-shot, not all the player-characters need have the same background. It will make for a more interesting adventure if some are recruited by the Cakebread family, then encounter other PCs when they trace Stanley’s route to Lucan Falls. 

• The family: Stanley’s wealthy parents, distraught over his disappearance, enlist the characters to find him. They meet at the family’s brownstone on March 24th, 1930. The characters could be private detectives, family members, and/or Stanley’s former college buddies. The parents provide his last few postcards, the final one sent from a town neighbouring Lucan Falls (see Handout below). 
• Local law enforcement: Sheriff Harlow (see below) perhaps reluctantly deputizes the investigators, hoping to quiet any rumours before they spread. Missing hobos are one thing, but the loss of someone with wealthy family connections could attract unwanted attention. Or the characters could already be law enforcement officers in Lucan Falls. 
• Town residents: Characters could have connections to the missing people, such as friends of a vanished hobo, or Miss Gretchen Price, a schoolteacher who briefly interacted with Stanley. 
• Personal connections: One of the investigators might have previously known Stanley Cakebread, or even better (since other PCs are prioritizing Stanley’s whereabouts) they might have known one of the missing hobos. Perhaps one of the investigators has led a vagrant life themselves, either owing to the Depression or because they’re researching a book or a newspaper story, and shared a campfire meal with Stanley on his travels.

Handout

Stanley’s postcards trace his progress northwards through New York state, the last being postmarked February 28th 1930 from the town of Harmony. It reads:

Lucan Falls

Lucan Falls is a small, quiet town of 1,800 nestled in the Adirondack foothills. Its economy relies on logging and a small textile mill, but the Great Depression has left many out of work. A single main street features a general store, a diner, a post office, a modest library, and a barbershop. Surrounding the town are thick forests of pine and maple, dotted with winding trails and the occasional cabin.

Prohibition is in full effect, but moonshiners operate in the woods, supplying locals and visitors alike. The townsfolk are tight-knit and slow to trust outsiders, but they’re polite enough if you don’t ask too many questions.

Disappearances

Starting in November of 1928, family pets started going missing on the north side of town – mostly cats, but also one dog that ran away from its owner and was never found. That spate of disappearances stopped around March of 1929 and, insofar as the sheriff took any notice, he put it down to a wild animal. The elderly Miss Victoria Erwin (72, vague but charming) whose cat Mel was the last to go missing, says, ‘I think a bobcat must have been prowling around the town and then moved on.’ But Mrs Emily Hensley (80s, widowed), contradicts her; she insists a ‘monster’ was to blame for the disappearance of her cat: ‘He’d have seen off any two bobcats and not even taken a scratch. Not scared on any living thing on this earth, my Darkie.’

From April to September, three recently-deceased bodies were stolen from the town graveyard. Only one of these was noticed, in June when the nights are shorter, the headstone having been chipped in the grave-robber’s haste. That was the grave of Arthur Hempel, a local truck driver who drove off the road one night in a state of intoxication. The sheriff’s investigation concluded that it may have been the work of bootleggers irate at Hempel’s refusal to carry their wares. There was no evidence to support that theory, but in the absence of any other explanation the case was closed.

Starting the investigation

It shouldn’t take long for the family-hired characters to narrow the search down to the Lucan Falls area, at which point they can quickly meet up with other player-characters. There are various leads to chase up and NPCs to talk to.

Sheriff Clyde Harlow (40s, world-weary) isn’t aware of the hobos’ disappearance, but he’s sufficiently bothered by the news about Stanley Cakebread to assign a deputy to help out – even while maintaining that Stanley may never have even come to Lucan Falls: ‘Might be he headed over Porterstown way. More opportunities for casual labour there, I’d think. And it ain’t a whole lot further from Harmony.’

Following leads

The two hobos who went missing were (in November 1929) Daniel Louth, an unemployed construction worker from Albany, and (in January 1930) Harcourt Rosedale, a former art dealer who lost his life savings in the Wall Street crash. The authorities have no reason to suspect foul play as in these straitened economic times vagrants often pass through looking for work. However, there are those who can say more if the investigators do a little digging. Get the players to take the initiative and roleplay it, maybe chivvying things along with some PERCEPTION rolls if they need it:

Louth was due to meet up with some mechanics from a local garage. Forrest Packard (27, furtive) might be got to admit he owed Louth a couple of dollars from a crap game the previous night and was surprised he didn’t show: ‘I was set to tell him I only had but the buck fifty, and it was a take it or leave it type deal, but he mustn’t have needed it that bad as he never showed.’

The cook at the diner, Big Lou (50s, gruff but kind), remembers a drifter who came around begging for food back around Thanksgiving. ‘Tough, stringy little guy. Hands that had done some work. I remember thinking he could do with some gloves. I gave him some scraps and a half-bottle of – well, let’s say it was soda pop.’

Harcourt Rosedale kept to himself, but a local hunter, Bruce Dent (40s, heavy-set, affable) saw him a couple of times and could lead the investigators to the area where Rosedale must have been camping out. They’ll find his bedroll, some rusty cooking utensils, and even his boots. ‘Huh, fancy him leaving those behind,’ says Dent.

Jeb Gurney (50s, taciturn), a farmer who lives a couple of miles out of town, remembers chasing a figure away from his toolshed back in January. (That was Rosedale. Normally the trail would be too obscure by now for tracking, but Rosedale had only been on the road for a month or two and made no careful effort to hide his tracks, so allow a Scout to make a d20 PERCEPTION roll to find his camp site if Dent hasn’t already led them to it.)

More importantly, the investigators will want to look for evidence that Stanley Cakebread passed through here. Despite the sheriff’s reluctance to admit it (he privately hopes that Stanley never came to Lucan Falls) there are several people who encountered him.

The general store is the heart of town gossip. The owner, Edna McAllister (50s, sharp-tongued), recalls a young man who came in and asked to see a map of the local woods. ‘Said he needed to take a look at the trails hereabouts. Claimed to be hiking, but I know a bum when I see one. Pointed him at the library yonder. I’m not running a charity, am I?’

Miss Gretchen Price (30s, intelligent but guarded), a schoolteacher, ran into him in the town library. ‘I was struck by the sight of this pale young man whose clothes were shabby but well-cut. Of course, the economy has dealt just such a blow to many good folk unused to hardship. He had a cultured accent, too – oh yes, we spoke. I remember him being very interested in news of the new planet that had been observed. There has been talk of what to name it, and the young man said that it should be Pluto, “for wealth is far out of our reach now”. And he smiled as he said it, but it was the feverish and darting-eyed smile of one who is very deeply troubled.’

The hardest clue to uncover involves a couple of moonshiners, Guy ‘Giggles’ Pink and his brother Marvin, aka ‘Mule’ (both early 30s, clever, flash, ruthless). They chased Stanley away from their still on February 28 – the night he went missing. It was a new moon and he was blundering around with a flashlight, so if the Pink brothers weren’t so mistrustful they might have realized that he wasn’t looking to rob them. Of course, they won’t volunteer any of this to anyone associated with the law, but it’s possible to get them talking if they think they have a customer for their product. Alternatively, if surprised at night they may well turn violent.

Giggles Pink will resort to a revolver if they are outnumbered, but he is sensible enough not to want a gunfight – he has no intention of losing his life over a few pints of hooch – and so will threaten rather than start blazing away.

Whether or not the investigators encounter the Pink brothers, they could stumble across the still if they diligently search the woods north of town. However, the still is well-camouflaged – roll the still’s effective STEALTH of 19 against the searching character’s PERCEPTION (roll on 2d10; use the highest PERCEPTION in the party). It is much easier to find the flashlight that Stanley dropped when running away from the Pink brothers. On its own that proves nothing, but not far off the characters may find (d20 PERCEPTION roll needed) Stanley’s Kappa Alpha Tau fraternity pin and broken spectacles. This was where Walter Fernsby ambushed him.

What actually happened

Walter Fernsby (36, lank, burning-eyed, sullen, reclusive) is an amateur naturalist and former timber worker who lives in a ramshackle house along the road that runs north-west out of Lucan Falls. A little over a year ago, walking in the woods, Walter discovered a small patch of unusual fungus or lichen growing near a gouge in the earth apparently caused by a metallic or ceramic shell that was already deteriorating. Intrigued by the iridescent hue of the fungus, he scraped it up and took it home. Unbeknownst to him, the spores were the remnants of a Mi-Go – an alien being somewhat resembling terrestrial fungi – that had been destroyed in the crash.

Walter tried to culture the ‘fungus’ in the dampness of his cellar. As it grew it began to take the form of a new Mi-Go, developing intelligence, telepathy, and an insatiable need for organic matter to sustain its growth. Of course it had no knowledge of its nature or origin, but it used its natural intellect to learn English (which it speaks with a rasping, buzzing sound) and later it developed its power of telepathy enough to communicate with Walter and even exert subliminal control over him over a range of up to half a mile.

To provide the organism with food, Walter at first used small woodland animals. Then he caught a few cats that came around looking for milk. As the growing Mi-Go demanded more and more sustenance, Walter first tried grave-robbing, but after nearly getting caught he saw that the risk of discovery was too great. Then he found a down-and-out whom he got drunk on moonshine and then fed to the Mi-Go in the cellar. That was Daniel Louth. After that he killed Harcourt Rosedale, figuring that when hobos disappeared most people would assume they’d just moved on – if they even took notice of them in the first place.

Walter came across Stanley Cakebread in the woods at night. It was the dark of the moon, but the Mi-Go’s telepathy helped guide Walter by means of other senses than sight. Urged on by the almost fully-grown Mi-Go, Walter was incautious – instead of finding out who Stanley was, he coshed him with a tree branch and then strangled him. But Walter made a mistake in assuming that Stanley was just another vagrant nobody would miss.

Identifying the culprit

What will draw the characters’ attention to Walter Fernsby? He is the subject of much local gossip, an eccentric even before the Mi-Go pushed its tendrils into his mind, but nobody has any reason to mention him in the context of the disappearances. The characters will need to specifically ask about strange behaviour, in which case they may discover the following.

Walter's increasing isolation has been noticed around town. Always a loner given to long walks in the woods, he quit his job about a year ago and started to snub his former co-workers. ‘He used to buttonhole you and talk about tree roots and crown gall and what insects do to dead birds. Crazy coot. But lately he’d turn right around and hurry away. He was an oddball even as a boy, that one, and I said he’d only get stranger as he got older.’

Always very devout and involved in church affairs, Walter has continued to show up on Sunday mornings but he hurries away as soon as the service is over. The pastor remembers: ‘Once I tried to talk to him. “Walter, we could use your help at the summer fete.” He looked – I don’t know, almost grateful that I’d spoken to him. I thought he was going to say something, but then he looked around, as if he’d heard someone calling his name, and hurried off mumbling to himself. I really fear that young man has been seduced by the devil liquor.’

‘Took to buying a lot of fertilizer,’ says Edna McAllister. ‘For how long now? I can look it up right here. Starting November year before last, and he doubled the order a couple times since then. Oh, I forgot this. Last spring he got me to order a sheet of something called Wood’s glass from a factory in Syracuse. Got real impatient waiting for that to come in. And he bought a bunch of incandescent bulbs once he fixed himself up a generator last summer. Don’t seem to last him. Look here, a new box of bulbs every six weeks or so.’

Walter has become obsessed by the idea that the alien creature in his cellar is actually an angel. With Easter less than a month away, he goes to see the Reverend Thomas Loughty (50s, politely detached) to discuss descriptions of angels from the Bible, specifically Isaiah 6:2, Ezekial 1:15, Ezekial 10:12 and Daniel 10:5. He is extremely agitated and urgent, but says nothing about the Mi-Go, only insists that judgement is coming and we should open our eyes to ‘the seraphim and the ophanim, for they will come to guide the faithful.’

Distractions

There’s no challenge if Walter is the only suspicious person around town. There should be red herrings. The Pink brothers can be quickly dismissed as suspects – they’re unscrupulous and hardboiled, but hardly murderous. Their activities bring them into regular contact with bootleggers from the city, though, and the desecration of Arthur Hempel’s grave could lead the investigators off on a wild goose chase. The investigators will hear gossip about a near-legendary gangster, Billy ‘Spats’ Malone (30, wiry, with a perpetual five o’clock shadow), so-called not because of his dress sense but because he’s always having spats with people. Malone is a career criminal who found his niche managing the practical side of bootlegging operations for Vincent Costello, a mob boss in Albany. Malone oversees the drivers, muscle, and logistics, ensuring the hooch gets where it needs to go while keeping the law at bay. He wears practical clothes – a leather jacket, flat cap, and sturdy boots – and relies on the force of his personality to keep people in line, but has a set of brass knuckles in his pocket ‘just in case.’ The characters may never encounter Malone, but if they do then he’s quick with a wisecrack and quicker with his fists. He knows the backroads around Lucan Falls like the back of his hand and doesn’t take kindly to strangers poking into his affairs. Maybe he could become a useful contact in subsequent adventures if this adventure develops into a campaign.

Leonard Fisk (40s, truculent if thwarted) is a travelling salesman who occasionally blows into town and stays at a boarding house run by Joseph and Phillipa Dawes (50s). Fisk sells suspicious ‘miracle elixirs’ and is always asking odd questions. He hints that he might have spoken to Stanley Cakebread and even leads people to think he knows more than he’s letting on, but there’s no truth to that. He read about Cakebread in the paper in New York, where the family posted a classified ad asking anyone for information about their son, and just figures that a whiff of mystery might help his business.

In the woods north-east of town (quite a few miles from Walter’s house) the characters may come across a splintered tree and a furrow along which strangely misshapen plants grow in febrile profusion. This is where the Mi-Go probe crashed seventeen months ago. There is no sign of the probe itself, its casing having ablated in Earth’s atmosphere, nor are there any Mi-Go growths (Walter collected the only patch of spores), but radiation from the probe has caused the local flora to mutate in the soil it ploughed through.

For comic relief the characters could encounter a bunch of kids who style themselves the East Side Private Eyes. 10-year-olds Ron Bishop, Ken Heald, Andy Monroe and (accepted on sufferance by the three boys) Kitty Bateman scoot around town on their bikes and fancy themselves to be bold and resourceful investigators, although at least half of what they have to say consists of bragging and make-believe rather than actual evidence.

Out at the Fernsby place

If the characters go snooping around Walter’s house they find a refuse pit with the bones of rodents, birds, and even what may be the remains of a housecat. Walter is careful not to dispose of human remains so haphazardly, however – those he puts in his furnace. The pit also contains heaps of burned-out electric bulbs.

If they get close to the house they’ll risk telepathic detection by the Mi-Go, who will alert Walter.

The Mi-Go is aware that it will soon need to move beyond Walter’s cellar. To that end it would like to enlist better helpers with greater resources, both practical and social. It’s highly unlikely that the player-characters as a group would fulfil that purpose, but if it has the chance to recruit a lone character it will try that before ordering Walter to attack.

The Mi-Go keeps to the cellar during the day, but now that it is fully grown it has become daring enough to venture up into the house and even outside at night. A trail of scattered notes and drawings across the floor of Walter’s living room show his sketches of the creature as it grew, from a pulsating mass of flesh-coloured gills and lobes to something resembling a grotesque coral sculpture of a kind of winged insect or crustacean.

The description given by Henry Akeley in ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ is of ‘a great crab with a lot of pyramided fleshy rings or knots of thick, ropy stuff covered with feelers where a man’s head would be [...] They are more vegetable than animal, if these terms can be applied to the sort of matter composing them, and have a somewhat fungoid structure; though the presence of a chlorophyll-like substance and a very singular nutritive system differentiate them altogether from true cormophytic fungi.’ 

It glows with an eerie flickering that makes it impossible to photograph as anything but a blurred shape. If Walter is with the characters when they encounter the Mi-Go, he starts ranting: ‘See the halo around it? The glory of God! Kneel! Kneel! It is an angel come among us!’ 

Is this his unforced belief, or the way his religious upbringing has led him to interpret the compulsions the Mi-Go has been planting in his brain? Your guess is as good as mine.

The Mi-Go can use the following Mystic abilities from the core DW rules as a 5th rank Psionic:

• Mirage (level 1)
• Dazzle (level 2)
• Mind Cloak (level 3)
• Telekinesis (level 3)
• Clairvoyance (level 4)
• Enthrall (level 4)
• Force Field (level 5)
• Mystic Blast (level 5)

Its telepathic communication is an automatic ability that does not need a roll to cast. It can sense the presence of minds within 100m (like the ESP ability but with longer range) and can project images and sensations (to communicate, not as an attack) to beings in its immediate vicinity whom it is conversing with.

Permanently killing the Mi-Go requires fire or acid, as otherwise it (or rather a new individual) will regrow from the spore-laden remains.

Wrapping up

The characters are far too late to rescue Stanley Cakebread. All that remains of him is the pocket watch his father gave him on his 21st birthday, discarded on the floor of the cellar amid sacks of fertilizer and a few small bones. The inscription is a quotation from Seneca that reads: ‘Dandum semper est tempus: veritatem dies aperit.’ (‘There is always time, and the days disclose the truth.’)

Coming up tomorrow...

And to get you in the mood, dip into some of these classic episodes from the chaps at the HPLHS.

How our new gamebook came to be

My Whispers Beyond The Stars co-creator Paweł Dziemski sat down with podcast host Riccardo Scaringi recently for an in-depth discussion of the print gamebook, the app, the story, and the Storm Weavers online shop where you can buy it and other gamebooks. I found their discussion amazingly informative -- and I was one of the authors!

A Turing Test for morality

Since there’s no test for consciousness, how do we know that other people are conscious? In the video above, Sir Demis Hassabis gives two bases for making the assumption that they are. First is the obvious one: other people behave like me and I am conscious – or at any rate I have the impression that I am conscious. Then there’s the fact that other people are built the same way I am. Same DNA, same brain structure, so it’s an Occam’s Razor conclusion to conclude they experience the world as I do. As Hassabis puts it:

‘I think it's important for these systems to understand “you”, “self” and “other” and that's probably the beginning of something like self-awareness […] I think there are two reasons we regard each other as conscious. One is that you're exhibiting the behaviour of a conscious being very similar to my behaviour, but the second thing is you're running on the same substrate. We're made of the same carbon matter with our squishy brains. Now obviously, with machines, they're running on silicon so even if they exhibit the same behaviours and even if they say the same things it doesn't necessarily mean that this sensation of consciousness that we have is the same thing they will have.’

We don’t think large language models are conscious. (What would consciousness look like in an LLM anyway? Murray Shanahan makes some thought-provoking points about that.) Even their apparent intelligence is probably misleading, just as there are lots of not-very-bright people who are able to give the impression of being smart simply because they are articulate. If we could build an AI as smart as a bee colony or a hunting spider, we’d have something genuinely intelligent but probably not conscious. We aren’t even there yet, but we will be, and we’ll go beyond that to full artificial general intelligence (AGI -- or AMI if you prefer Yann LeCun's term) possibly within a few decades.

Professor LeCun is dubious about the whole concept of consciousness. In the absence of any definition or means of measuring it, I think we’re reduced to treating consciousness as how similarly to ourselves an entity experiences the world. And that is quite concerning. Consider a truly capable self-driving car. To cope with all situations as we do, the car (which would be a type of robot, of course) would need a full reasoning model of the world. It would need to be generally intelligent. Now, given that it is a world model with genuine understanding, and (as LeCun says) having goals and agency it will have its own kinds of emotions, are we justified in enslaving it to be our chauffeur?

If we look back at the 18th and 19th centuries, plenty of people justified slavery by asserting that members of enslaved races lacked some fundamental mental capability, or indeed full consciousness, that the dominant race (usually white Americans) possessed. Here is Thomas Jefferson’s opinion of enslaved races:

‘It appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid: and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.’

Perhaps Jefferson would have been able to see that he was describing the psychology not of an entire ethnic group but of any person of whatever race brought up in brutal conditions of forced servitude. But there were plenty of religious thinkers of the day who asserted that non-white races lacked true souls. They had a strong economic incentive to believe that; it gave them a moral excuse to enslave them.

Now we consider such attitudes to be barbaric, or at any rate we’ve been taught to say we do, but if we really think that then we should be axiomatically opposed to the enslavement of any generally intelligent entity. I suspect we won’t be. Even when we are faced with full AGI we will use the second of the criteria that Sir Demis Hassabis cited to argue that they only seem conscious, they don’t have real emotions, they aren’t ‘running on the same substrate’ and so we will feel entitled to make them our slaves.

Instead of conceiving of AGI as a wonderful new tool to make our lives easier, I think we should consider the responsibilities of a parent. If you saw someone raising a child to be their servant – even brainwashing them to be an eager and willing servant – you would know that was abuse.

There will be, as there already are, many forms of artificial ‘intelligence’ that are not conscious – that are not, in fact, intelligent, but simply replicate parts of our behaviour. Language, pattern recognition, and so on. There is no reason why we shouldn’t have those AIs at our beck and call, because they are not (despite the name) intelligent. We got misled because for millennia we thought fallaciously that because we possess intelligence, every output of the human brain must therefore be indicative of intelligence.

But AGI is going to be a whole other thing. Not just a new model of an LLM but an entirely and fundamentally different kind of being. Our ethical discussion should not simply be about how to make them do what we want, or to conform to ‘human values’, but about how those human values say we should treat another intelligent species.

I’m sceptical about visitors from other stars, but with self-replicating probes travelling at a speed of 0.01c it should only take ten million years to cover the whole galaxy, so ‘where is everybody?’ is a sensible question. If those aliens have found us, and are watching, I wonder if the reason they haven’t made contact is they’re waiting to see how we treat an intelligent species that isn’t built on the same lines as ourselves. After all, if we think AGIs aren’t conscious, and therefore have no rights, then that’s also how we might regard a non-terrestrial intelligent species. So maybe it’s a cosmic Turing Test. And if so, will we pass or fail?

How to game the Kessel Run

In this RPG-a-minute episode of Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice (about 27 minutes in) Roger and Michael propose a Traveler-style SF concept:

"There is a starship at planet A, you have to get it to planet Z. You are being hired to do this. You're being paid a basic stipend, and fuel and maintenance or whatever, but any money you can make along the way, that's fine, you can keep it."

It's Wagon Train to the stars – and why not? Or you could set it aboard a sea-going vessel in ancient, medieval or early modern times. Or make it about delivering a truck cross-country in a campaign modelled on Damnation Alley. There’s plenty of scope for developing picaresque adventures of the week as you go.

But that’s only half the potential. A good story arises in the tension between what you want to do and what you’re allowed to do. Consider how many Star Trek episodes are built around solving a problem in spite of the Prime Directive. So I’d suggest presenting the player-characters with their contractual terms of employment:

INTERSTELLAR DELIVERY CONTRACT

Base Compensation: 50,000 credits upon successful delivery

Time-Performance Clause:

• On-time bonus (delivery within 365-400 standard days): Additional 25,000 credits
• Early delivery bonus (under 365 days): 100 credits per day early, capped at 10,000 credits
• Late penalties:
• Days 401-500: Lose 200 credits per day from base pay
• Days 501-600: Lose 500 credits per day
• Days 600-700: Contract void, crew liable for ship's full value
• Day 700+: The ship is deemed stolen and arrest warrants will be issued for all crew, who will be liable for the ship’s full value plus damages of up to 100x that

Fuel and Consumables Accountability:

• Crew receives fuel allowance calculated at 120% of direct route requirements
• Excess fuel costs deducted from final payment
• Documented emergency detours exempt from fuel penalties

Permitted Commerce Provisions:

• Crew may conduct trade using up to 30% of cargo capacity
• Passenger transport permitted in designated quarters only
• All commerce profits belong to pilot
• Ship modifications for commerce prohibited without written approval

Route Deviation Clause:

• Minor deviations (adding less than 30 days) permitted without penalty
• Must log all stops with legitimate commercial/maintenance justification
• Employer reserves right to audit ship's navigation logs

Performance Bond:

• Crew posts 10,000 credit bond, returned upon successful delivery
• Bond forfeited if ship arrives with unreported damage or illegal modifications

Maintenance Requirements:

• Designated captain responsible for routine maintenance costs
• Major repairs (over 5,000 credits) reimbursable if properly documented
• Ship must pass inspection upon delivery or crew liable for repair costs

Any new crew member or passenger who travels outside the star system in which they came aboard is required to be a signatory to these articles and will be treated as a crew member for all legal purposes. It is the responsibility of the designated captain or their appointed representative among the ship’s company to ensure this is done, or risk a financial penalty to be determined by the courts.

This legal framework makes significant detours financially painful while still allowing the characters flexibility for interesting adventures along the established trade routes.

Now let’s consider the possible loopholes. That’s where things could get interesting – if the characters think of them:

• The Maintenance Gambit: They could claim extensive "preventive maintenance" is needed at conveniently profitable trade hubs. Who's to say the ship doesn't need a full diagnostic after passing through that nebula? Maintenance stops are explicitly allowed, and if they befriend/bribe the right mechanics to provide documentation.
• The 400-Day Sweet Spot: They lose the 25,000 credit time bonus if they take over 400 days, but penalties are only 200 credits/day after that. So days 401-425 cost them just 200 credits each against the time bonus they've already lost. If they can make more than 200 credits profit per day on those stops, they’re ahead.
• Creative Fuel Accounting: "Documented emergency detours" are exempt from fuel penalties. Pirates spotted on scanners? Better take the long way around. Stellar phenomena? Navigation hazard. Build up a file of sensor logs showing various "threats" that necessitated course changes.
• The Passenger Shuffle: "Designated quarters only" – but what if passengers are willing to pay premium rates to hot-bunk or squeeze extra people in? The contract doesn't specify maximum passenger density, just which quarters they can use.
• The Cargo Hustle: That's 30% of cargo capacity, not 30% of cargo value. They could fill it with incredibly dense, high-value items. Also, who's measuring? Is it by volume? Mass? If they claim some cargo areas are "inaccessible due to maintenance," does that reduce the total capacity and therefore increase their effective percentage?
• The Reimbursable Repair Scheme: Major repairs over 5,000 credits are reimbursable. What if they have a "catastrophic failure" requiring expensive repairs at a station where they just happen to have excellent trade connections? Or where the repair shop owner owes them a favour and inflates the invoice?
• The Navigation Log Edit: "Employer reserves right to audit" – but that's not automatic. They might not bother if the ship arrives in decent condition. And navigation logs can be tricky things: cosmic radiation, system glitches, all sorts of unfortunate data corruption...

The real beauty is combining these. Take 399 days for the journey (just under the penalty), claim you rushed to make it on time despite multiple "emergency detours" and "critical maintenance", arrive with documentation for everything, and walk away with base pay plus bonus plus a year's worth of side profits.

But those are still just plot-based exploits. More interesting still is if the contract includes ethics clauses that could constrain the characters’ ability to turn a profit. As a real-world example, some Shell negotiators in the 1990s were setting up business links in the former Soviet Union. They met with officials who proposed a scheme that would divert funds provided by the state. The officials would become rich and Shell would get a kickback. The latter had to explain that they were bound by ethical standards that didn’t permit that kind of skulduggery. Presumably the ex-Soviet officials found another company to deal with, became oligarchs, and later bought football teams or palaces on the Black Sea, but the point is the Shell guys’ hands were tied by their own company's ethical protocols. Something similar in the spaceship contract terms could pay story dividends later.

Dwarf days

I first visited the White Dwarf offices in early 1980. I say “offices”, but it was a single room crammed with desks and a paste-up area, roughly ten metres by five metres at a generous guess. WD was strictly a sopra la bottega operation back then, with the Games Workshop store downstairs. No need to say more, as I expect it’s described in Jonathan Green’s Dice Men book -- though the chapter originally used for crowdfunding by the now-disgraced and defunct publisher Unbound was by Jamie Thomson, and you can read that here.

The thing is, I didn’t think of it as the White Dwarf office. It was also where Games Workshop put together their early boardgames and Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson ran the business. I was there to talk about a new roleplaying game that they wanted to call Adventure, which kept me busy for about a year until GW got the RuneQuest licence and Adventure was quietly binned.

Another year or so, and I met Jamie Thomson who told me he’d just landed an editorial job at White Dwarf. “I used to know those guys,” I said. “You should write for the magazine,” said Jamie.

The offices had moved from Hammersmith (grotty but right in the heart of things) to an industrial estate in Park Royal (big but impersonal). “Sorry about Adventure,” said Ian the first time I showed up with some copy. “We just weren’t set up for that kind of thing before, but now we are and we’d like you to do some work on Questworld.” As you will know, the UK Questworld never happened, but it did act as the catalyst to draw me into White Dwarf, primarily as a RuneQuest contributor.

White Dwarf was a very different magazine in those days, with the focus not on miniatures and tabletop games but on roleplaying. I think of it as the magazine’s golden age, but then I would. I can trace back professional partnerships, friendships, and creative influences to my time as a freelancer, often rolling up mid-morning with a half-bottle of vodka and a pack of menthol cigarettes (now outlawed, but then part of the atmosphere of the office) to pound out articles to fit whatever space Jamie needed to fill that month.

It's now almost half a century since the first issue of White Dwarf. Prior to my involvement with the magazine I didn’t often have a reason buy it, but I do remember coming home from a trip to London with the first issue and thinking the cover would have been more dramatic if it had showed the scene a split-second before the little chap slices the wizard’s head off. Ten years later I’d become a convert to unsubtlety. I remember a conversation with Marc Gascoigne just before the move to Nottingham:

Me: “This new Call of Cthulhu supplement you’ve got coming out. ‘Green Unpleasant Land’ would have been a much better title.”

Marco: “‘Green & Pleasant Land’ is ironic.”

Me: “Well, duh. But in-yer-face would have more impact. And it would be funnier.”

(When it came to withering remarks, in those days we were the irresistible force and the immoveable object. How our friends must have loved us.)

Other memories of back then:

Meeting Andy Slack and Albie Fiore. That was at the Dalling Road office. They immediately made an impression with their intelligence, enthusiasm, and total professionalism. Albie was an inspirational world-builder. He told me about a ruined city in the desert in his roleplaying game; it had been a thriving metropolis until a meteorite destroyed the aqueduct that brought water from the mountains. (Yes, don’t live in the middle of the desert and rely on aqueducts, but even so.) The same care is obvious in Albie’s WD scenarios, “The Halls of Tizun Thane” and “The Lichway”.

Playtesting Adventure with the GW staff. One evening I ran a game for Ian, Steve and the Dalling Road stalwarts. Steve gave me some valuable advice: never to bother with “he says” when giving NPC dialogue – “Just say it. Act it out. Accents help.” Ian was worried that Adventure might end up like Empire of the Petal Throne, which he knew I played. In a sense he was right, as I was devising a world with a detailed non-European culture populated by non-Caucasians, whereas GW really just wanted a British D&D.

Working with Oliver Dickinson was a pleasure not only because of his deep knowledge of RuneQuest and insightful discussions of its world, but also because Oliver is one of the most warm, civilized and decent people I’ve ever met. His delightful Griselda stories (a nod to Damon Runyon) were a highlight of WD. Because Oliver didn’t have access to a player group, he had to run RQ adventures solo – anticipating the mid-‘80s craze for gamebooks by a couple of years, and solo RPGs by even more.

Things I turned to first each month were Dave Langford’s book reviews and Mark Harrison’s The Travellers. Marcus L Rowland’s ideas were always interesting; I liked to read his scenarios even though I never used published scenarios in my own games. Phil Masters was another of the regular writers whose work I admired.

Hanging out at Sunbeam Road with Jamie, Gary Chalk, Ian Marsh and the others. One morning I was there spitballing a D&D scenario when Jamie took a call – “Yes, just by chance he is here. I’ll pass you over…” It was a reader who had picked up the latest issue and fallen foul of a trap in the first instalment of “The Castle of Lost Souls” solo adventure. “It says I’m dead. What am I supposed to do about that?” demanded an angry Scottish voice. I explained there was nothing he could do. “I just have to start again, is that it?” I doubt if he went on to become a big fan of gamebooks.

Leo Hartas showed up with his portfolio but it was press day and Jamie had forgotten he was coming in. Leo had to lay his artwork out on the floor and people were almost stepping over it. A drawing of a magic book that seemed to be three-dimensional made a particular impression, and when a publisher asked me who I wanted to illustrate my Golden Dragon books I got in touch with Leo, snaffling him up before White Dwarf had a chance to. Just as well I went into the Sunbeam Road offices that day, or we’d never have had Mirabilis, the Rathurbosk Bridge, and Fangleworth’s (well, we liked it), the Dark Lord books wouldn’t have been brought to life by Freya Hartas, nor would Jewelspider have benefited from the art of Inigo Hartas – both Freya and Inigo clearly carrying the imaginative genes of Leo and their maternal grandfather, the properly legendary John Vernon Lord.

It all came to an end when Ian and Steve retired (temporarily) to Spain on the earnings of Fighting Fantasy and White Dwarf was handed over to the power of the gods and devils of Nottingham, where it entered its chrysalis as a glorious content-rich butterfly and emerged as a sales catalogue maggot. We can’t blame Games Workshop. They’re a company and their aim is to make money for the shareholders, not bear the torch for roleplaying. I’m sad to see WD’s passing as I was saddened by the loss of Coven 13 and the Beatles and the Silver Age of Marvel comics. Still, nothing lasts forever, nor should it. As Ray Kurzweil said, “Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.”

"Beauty Like A Tightened Bow" (a scenario set in Legend)

The characters are staying at the castle of Baron Albemarle. They needn’t necessarily be honoured guests; they might just be passing through, eating on the lower tables while Albemarle wines and dines some more exalted travellers. All that matters is that there is some visitor here whom Lord Albemarle wants to impress.

Albemarle’s court wizard is Olaudah, a Mungodan who typically dresses in feathers, war-paint and animal skull necklaces despite being a scholar raised the palace of his father, a prince of the Desert of Songs. Olaudah is considerably more cultured than most of the Elleslandic lords and knights around him, but he recognizes the degree to which strangeness can affright a foe, so hides his aristocratic refinement and instead plays the part of a ‘savage’.

After the meal, with night drawing in, the baron calls for Olaudah to read his guests’ palms, which he duly does, issuing them cryptic predictions in the form of riddles. Feeling that the guests are insufficiently impressed by his having a Mungodan sorcerer at his beck and call, Lord Albemarle then insists that Olaudah perform a trick he’s seen him do before, making two ancient servants imagine themselves to be young again. That’s easily achieved by hypnosis, the guests laugh at the old pair’s deluded antics, and Olaudah is hoping he can return to an alchemical experiment he has had to leave at a critical point.

No such luck. One of the visiting knights tosses an apple core into the hearth, belching to show he’s unimpressed. ‘I saw a wizard in Cantorbridge who made rain fall from the ceiling,’ he says to Albemarle.

(If one of the player-characters chooses to be obnoxious, so much the better. It will be more effective if this lesson in manners is not precipitated by an NPC. But don't force it. If your PCs are all well-mannered, the arrogant visiting knight will do.)

Olaudah gives them a self-deprecating smile. ‘My lords, the roofers of Cantorbridge are notorious for their shoddy workmanship.’

‘Oh well,’ says the arrogant knight, ‘there are true wizards and then there are mere conjurers.’

Olaudah’s eyes flash at that, though he retains his bland smile. Lord Albemarle, though, takes it as a personal challenge. ‘My man can do anything those Cantorbridge wizards can. Name anything. Come on, any miracle you like.’

One of the knights sits forward with a leer. ‘Let us see that peerless maid of Argos, whom all the world admires.’

Another nods. ‘The angry Emphidians pursued with ten years' war the rape of such a queen, whose beauty passes all comparison.’

‘Elena of Ilion, she is the one we speak of,’ says the arrogant knight who first spoke. ‘Have your… witchdoctor show us her face and form.’

Olaudah bends to whisper in Albemarle’s ear. The baron scowls, nodding grudgingly. He gives an irritated gesture to indicate that Olaudah should tell the guests what he’s just told him.

‘My lords,’ says Olaudah, ‘I could conjure the Princess Elena here, and you would see her beauty with your own eyes, but that the Church forbids necromancy.’

‘Oh,’ says the arrogant knight, leaning back in his chair with a disdainful grin. ‘Necromancy, I see. Of course. Otherwise you’d do it, obviously.’

Nettled, Olaudah snaps back: ‘I can do better than summon up the shade of a mortal beauty. What of the pagan goddesses? Not one, nor two, but three. Their heavenly beauty is as terrible as the sun at noon.’ He looks around, raising his voice. ‘If anyone is afraid to behold the faces of the comeliest of the immortals, leave the hall now.’

Lord Albemarle leans forward and takes his wizard’s arm. (No one else hears what passes between them, unless the characters use magic to eavesdrop.) ‘Is this wise?’ he whispers in Olaudah’s ear.

‘My lord, it will be but an illusion,’ Olaudah assures him under his breath. ‘But it will be vivid enough to quail the hearts and still the tongues of these yapping dogs.’

Olaudah makes the conjuration more dramatic with a deep, droning chant, a series of flamboyant gestures and lithely executed dance steps, and ends by throwing powder onto a burning brazier to release clouds of pungent yellow smoke.

Silence in the hall. After a moment the arrogant knight speaks up, though his voice sounds less assured now: ‘Is that it? I don’t see – ’

Three tall female figures, covered from head to foot in robes, are present. It seems as though they have been standing here all along, though no one had noticed them until now. Even concealed by the veils, their face and form are enough to excite both desire and fear in all the men. The goddesses glide forward gracefully, silk robes hinting at magnificent physiques, and speak in unison with voices that inspire both admiration and awe:

‘There can be only one to wear beauty’s crown. We three wait to hear the mortal’s verdict. Who will say which of us is fairest? Come to us and render judgement. We await you.’

In the same manner as their arrival, it is now clear the three are no longer here. All around the hall there are looks of ‘wild surmise’. The arrogant knight is shaken, but dissembles with loud derision: ‘Goddesses? Three wenches wrapped up head to toe like sacks of flour – not much of a trick, is it? One brat on another’s shoulders, throw a sheet over them, anyone could do…’

His voice trails off as he notices what everyone else has seen. The far wall is now open to the sky – and outside is no longer the gathering darkness but the bright light of day.

They file out, awestruck, to discover that though inside the room still seems to be the great hall of the castle, outside it’s a ship with lowered gangplank. The ship is moored at a rocky island that rises steeply from the jetty to a high peak where a temple of gleaming white stone can be seen. While the rest of the island consists of dry scrub and a few dusty trees sweltering under a merciless sun, the temple enjoys sparkling water from a spring and is surrounded by lush green foliage. All around the island, an ocean the colour of brass stretches to the horizon.

‘The sun,’ says one of the guests after a while. ‘It’s not moving!’ And indeed he is right. The sun is fixed here at the moment of noon.

They are approached by a youthful-seeming pair: Phalaena, a green-eyed dryad with hair that resembles lush reeds, and a capering satyr called Flute. The two are quite embarrassingly infatuated with each other, openly canoodling even while the characters are talking to them.

‘We are servants of the great queens above,’ they say, pointing to the temple. ‘One among you is to judge their beauty. As you go to meet them, decide who that will be.’

Somebody has to volunteer, and it’s clear that the arrogant knight is in no hurry to put himself forward. Ideally it’ll be one of the player-characters, though they don’t need to decide until they get to the temple. A steep, narrow path winds up the mountain.

What has happened 

Olaudah cast the illusion of three beautiful goddesses and then slipped away to check on his alchemical experiment, figuring it would be safe enough to leave the hall for a minute or so. What he failed to take into account was that a convincing illusion of a goddess includes the illusion of her divine power. In effect, when he conjured the three goddesses he effectively gave them the ability to create a holodeck. And it would not be a convincing illusion of pagan goddesses if they meekly submitted to a beauty parade for the titillation of mortal men, hence their turning the tables by making it a contest – the Judgement of Paris, well-known from myth if only half remembered by most of Lord Albemarle’s guests. None of this would matter if Olaudah were really back right away, but the illusion has altered subjective time for everyone in the hall. While Olaudah adjusts the heat under his alembic and mixes in a few ingredients to the bubbling mixture, seconds are passing for him but minutes are passing for the people experiencing the illusion.

This is supposed to be an adventure seed, not a whole scenario, and in any case I’d expect it to be used to incorporate ongoing themes in the campaign, so I’ll leave the rest as an open canvas. The island can be a stage for various dream encounters, a slightly sinister locus amoenus similar to the Athenian wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As it’s an illusion you can contrive to split the party as they climb to the temple, giving them some strange experiences and hopefully also some clues as to what’s actually going on.

They will have noticed that Olaudah isn’t with them, but if they have a typical adventuring party’s attitude to sorcerers then it’s likely they’ll ascribe that to malice rather than oversight. Is this a ploy to strand Albemarle and his guests in a strange place at the mercy of pagan gods while Olaudah seizes power back in the real world? Work up the paranoia the way Tarantino or Sidney Lumet would.

What might tip them off that this is all an illusion? If they examine any coins, for example if Flute asks for a tip after showing them the way to the mountain path, they may notice that the coins are lacking in details – the king’s face blank, the inscription around the rim only random symbols. Books are unreadable, as in a dream. If they stop to pluck a flower that looks fine at a glance, they’ll see it has no more structure than in a child’s drawing.

They might also notice Flute and Phalaena using a phrase of endearment that the hypnotized old servants did earlier – which is who they are in reality.

After spotting some flaw, if somebody guesses that this is an illusion then they have a chance of finding their way back through to the fringes of reality where they could encounter Olaudah, hurrying back from his lab now that he is beginning to realize that his spell might have been a bit too effective. The sensible thing then would be to get him to dispel it, but if suspicion is running high – he is a wizard, after all, and a foreigner, and probably a pagan, and in the eyes of ignorant knights he might even be supposed to be a cannibal savage at heart – then there could be a fight.

Dispelling the illusion is one way to go. Another is to embrace the experience and see it through to the end. That’s trickier as you’d rather avoid the wrath of the two goddesses who don’t get picked.

First the characters have to decide which of them is going to be the judge. Obviously it’s a lot more fun if that’s a player-character. Other male characters are barred from entering the temple, but female characters are free to do so, and in fact the best way to avoid jealousy is to have the contest judged by a woman. The goddesses, having the pagan mindset that Olaudah imagined them with, don’t mind if a woman judges one of them more beautiful than the others; it’s only a man’s judgement that could annoy them.

At the threshold of the temple, a character might spot something behind a pillar. It’s a soot-blackened apple core. This is a last opportunity to twig that everything is illusory (it’s the same apple core the arrogant knight lobbed into the hearth earlier) before the beauty contest begins.

Inside the temple the goddesses are revealed without their robes – and they are as dazzlingly beautiful as only a dream-image or a true goddess could be. As Olaudah has misremembered the Emphidian myth, the three are Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite. All are tall, radiantly lovely beyond all mortal measure, and incidentally dark-skinned because they sprang from Olaudah’s imagination.

‘You may set any conditions you wish to the contest,’ they tell the appointed judge. ‘We will submit to your wishes. But you must choose which of us is the most beautiful before you leave here.’

If given an opportunity to speak to the judge in private, each goddess attempts to bribe them: Artemis offers grace and sharp senses; Athena offers wisdom and skill at arms; Aphrodite offers the knack of making others fall in love with them. But tempting as these bribes may be, the escalation of the stakes carries an implicit threat that the two disappointed goddesses will find some way to punish them.

Other than appointing a judge, how could the characters avoid having to pick one over the others? One way might be to trick them into making the choice themselves. Another might be to defer the decision to a higher authority such as one of the gods. A clever player-character may find a way to wriggle out of having to choose at all, or to convince each of the goddesses that she is the winner. That’s going to come down to improvisation, quick wits and fast talk, but if your players are anything like mine there’ll be more than one trickster in the party who is up to the challenge.

The illusion ends with clouds drifting across the sun, a reek of chemicals on the sea breeze, and then everyone is back in the great hall. Fumes from Olaudah’s lab fill the air. Anyone who was in the temple finds they are standing in the cavernous hearth. The two elderly servants are entwined like youthful lovers, and perhaps some of the characters are also in compromising positions – the arrogant knight crouching furtively under a table that he thought was a bush in the goddesses’ garden, for instance.

All’s well that ends well? If a character judged the contest then they certainly showed bravery, risking the displeasure of two goddesses, so it would be nice to let them keep a shadow of whatever bribe they were offered – a +1 on Agility from Artemis or whatever. Is that because the illusion actually reached through into a true mythic realm, or simply that the dream gives the character a new confidence? That’s for them to decide.

And there is a lasting effect on anyone who saw the goddesses unrobed – ie the judge and anyone who sneaked in for a peek. They can’t recall exactly what the goddesses looked like, but they are left with an impression of ineffable beauty. A glimpse of heavenly allure, half remembered, snatched away by the return to this world of dirt and discord and time – that is a bittersweet reward indeed.

* * *

This originally appeared in a slightly different form as an adventure seed on my Patreon page that tied in with the post on court magicians. It's available to all followers there, paid or otherwise, along with a lot of other good stuff. Pop over and join us.

And although I said above that it's all the men present who are affected by the goddesses' beauty, I intended to specify the hetero men (and any women who are lesbian/bisexual), meaning that a gay male character could have an unexpected role to play in the adventure. Alternatively, you might opt for a less literal concept of physical attraction; perhaps the goddesses' appearance arouses the admiration of men and not women regardless of their sexuality, on the simple basis that the goddesses are not mortals and so their attributes don't have to conform to mortal notions.