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'. There is a downloadable copy of "Abnormal Growth" with Call of Cthulhu stats here, and another Depression-era scenario is "Bleak Prospect" by Scott Dorward in the collection Nameless Horrors.
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.’)
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