Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

End of the road.

The final count for the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies is:

• 300+ props
• 150+ diorama elements
• 450+ pages
• 130,000+ words

In many ways, this is a campaign that grew out of control. I was wildly over-ambitious in my approach and the result was a lot of stress when it came time to close the deal down the stretch. But the final result was an incredibly intense experience. I doubt that I will ever attempt to run another campaign quite like this one, but I’m glad to have had the experience. And I’m happy to share the experience with you.

THE ORIGINAL PITCH

SETTING: Mormo was invoked in 1924. Cthulhu briefly awoke in 1925. The federal government raided Innsmouth in 1927. Yog-Sothoth nearly broke through the barriers in Dunwich in 1928. This game is about the decade after that. When things got worse.

If you’re familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos, then you’ve got a pretty good idea what’s going on. If you’re not then I recommend checking out these stories:

• “The Call of Cthulhu”
• “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”
• “The Dunwich Horror”
• At the Mountains of Madness

(The last of these is a short novel, but the other three make for quick reading.)

CHARACTERS: You are investigators. As the campaign begins you may or may not be previously aware of the Mythos, but you ARE renowned for your investigating and/or problem-solving abilities. That might just be a quiet reputation among the sort of people who really count; it might be a local renown like that enjoyed by the Great Detective; or it might be the national renown of an Eliot Ness.

On a meta level, it’s important to remember the “investigate” part of your name. When faced with the horrific unknown your response isn’t to run away and pray to your broken gods; it’s to solve the mystery. Your Drive will help you with that.

MY PLAY-THRU

I’m not going to attempt a comprehensive overview of everything that happened in my play-thru of the campaign, but I have had several requests from people who have been interested in how it played out.

The total playing time was 95 hours, split over 22 sessions.

NEW YORK: The PCs made a point of conducting a very thorough investigation in New York before leaving town. They discovered leads that pointed in the direction of Los Angeles, but they decided it still made sense to check out Doug Henslowe in Savannah first.

SAVANNAH: The investigation in Savannah proceeded basically in the way that you would expect. As they were getting ready to leave town, the thugs from Bangkok drove out onto the tarmac and started firing guns at them. They rushed up the passenger stairs, returning gunfire over their shoulders, as the plane began taxiing down the runway.

LOS ANGELES: Here’s where things took a sharp left turn. The PCs poked around Los Angeles long enough to figure out that George Ayers had mounted an expedition to Ethiopia in 1924. They also learned that the old cult was tangled up with hardened gangsters. After learning that some of the gangsters were living at Trammel’s mansion, they decided the mansion was too tough a nut to crack and they left without investigating it. (This meant that the only clue they had was the one taking them to Ethiopia.)

ETHIOPIA: Ethiopia is, in the original campaign, a dead-end in terms of investigating the cult. (You learn a lot of useful information, but because the cult hasn’t been active there for a decade there are no additional leads pointing at new cult activity.) This is why, in the remix, the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities is active in the region (so that clues will point back in the direction of Bangkok). The PCs got tangled with the Emporium around the Obelisk of Axum and then backtracked to the Danakil Desert.

One of the really great things that happened in our play-thru was the roleplaying around the question of violence: The group started out mostly as innocents with a couple of World War I veterans who had no interest in revisiting the horrors of their past. As they left Dallol, however, they were pursued by Afar fanatics as they sought Ayers. At the instigation of one of the World War I vets, they reluctantly agreed to ambush their pursuers. Once violence broke out, however, Robert (the character who had pushed for the ambush) failed his Stability check, prompting a violent rejection of the murders they had just committed. This caused severe tensions as the rest of the group, who had felt pressured into the conflict, were suddenly whiplashed by Robert’s change of heart.

Fortunately, in the Dream-Scourged Halls where George Ayers awaited them, the group had a time of respite in which tempers could cool.

Over the course of the rest of the campaign, this initial conflict would slowly develop and resolve in response to the horrible things they witnessed (and the horrible things they needed to prevent) until, quite naturally, the group found itself armed with machine guns and explosives. Watching them slowly harden in the face of the burdens they were forced to bear was a really fascinating (and powerful) bit of roleplaying.

SEVERN VALLEY: At this point, the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities was the only real face they had for the cult. And their animosity for the Emporium was heightened after they discovered that one of their allies in Eritrea had been killed by them. As a result, they pursued the Emporium to the Severn Valley in England (which they had learned was the site of their next expedition).

Midway through the Severn Valley, however, the campaign was put on a lengthy hiatus for several months. The over-ambitious nature of what I had been attempting had caught up with me and combined with several scheduling delays that had pushed the campaign into conflict with several other major projects. During the hiatus, however, I was able to prepare material at a slightly more relaxed pace. What forced the campaign out of hiatus, however, was that one of the original players was leaving town: Rather than leave the campaign unfinished, we decided to bring it back for a series of marathon sessions in June. (This eventually culminated in a run where we played 8 out of 10 days.)

The Severn Valley wrapped up with several of the PCs badly traumatized for the first time: One of the PCs had raised the ire of the Faceless Sentinels on the Isle Beyond Severnford. Most of the group fled with her back to London in order to escape the Sentinels, but the two World War I vets remained behind to check out the Church on High Street in Temphill… and what they found under the Church left them badly shaken.

At this point, however, Alice — a cop from Chicago — had yet to see a single supernatural thing. Mostly by chance she had chosen a path which seemed to always leave her with the part of the group that was experiencing mundanity. At times, the others had tried to impress upon her what they had witnessed, but she (at least partly in active denial) considered them to simply be hallucinating from the horrible stresses they had all been placed under.

BANGKOK: The PCs left England and pursued the Emporium to Bangkok. This was an interesting location because there’s a kind of baseline assumption here that the cultists are probably aware that someone is messing with their business. But for our play-thru this wasn’t the case: The cultists knew that somebody had been talking to Douglas Henslowe. A largely different subset of PCs had interacted with the Emporium in Axum under a convincing cover story that placed them nowhere near Savannah. And… that was it. They were midway through the campaign at this point, and they’d largely glided over the cult’s radar.

As a result, in Bangkok the PCs were successful in tracking Savitree to Ko Kruk Island before anybody really knew that they were in town. Rather than getting thrown into pits and hunted across the island, therefore, they ended up playing cat-and-mouse with Savitree in the ruins of her family’s mansion. This sequence was massively successful: Alice, who still hadn’t seen anything incontrovertibly supernatural, got sliced with a nectar-tipped spear. Which meant that her first real confrontation with the Mythos was having a Mouth grow on her arm.

When we wrapped up that session, the PCs were getting ready to loot Savitree’s library and then leave town, pursuing leads for Malta. This would have had the interesting consequence of carrying them even further into the campaign without knowing about the existence of Major Mouths or realizing what the true source of Nectar was. I was kind of fascinated by what that trajectory through the campaign would have looked like, but by the time we reconvened the following night they had decided to reverse course and check out the Phikhat Hwan death-fights after all. (This ended with them shooting Xuc Pramoj through the head just before blowing up the Major Mouth.)

MALTA: Much like Trammel’s mansion, the PCs did not like the look of the heavily fortified warehouse in Malta. As a result, this section of the campaign was largely about stalking Montgomery Donovan. This was also the site of their first major firefight: After blowing up the Major Mouth in Bangkok, they concluded that they needed more explosives and more guns. So they’d smuggled huge quantities of dynamite and several machine guns into Valletta (and put them to good use shortly thereafter).

Before the PCs had arrived in Malta, I had murdered a Source of Stability for one of the PCs: Her beloved horse Butterscotch. (The players never forgave me.) The PC was able to rescue both Monte and Alexi from the hospital, however, and they became, collectively, a new Source of Stability for her.

The other thing of note in Malta is that Sir Godfrey Welles never actually showed up. Because of how the PCs tackled the locale, he was never able to spot them until they were already blowing up the warehouse and fleeing town.

RETURN TO LOS ANGELES: They were now fairly certain that there was a Major Mouth beneath Trammel’s mansion in Los Angeles. And they were resolved to destroy it.

They were able to use Donovan’s blackmail material (recovered from Malta) to coerce several LAPD cops to flip on Trammel and lead a raid on the mansion with them. This went very well. (For the PCs, any way. Two of the cops were killed when Walker blew up their car with a grenade.) The sequence became particularly memorable, however, because the mouth on Alice’s arm (which had been causing problems for weeks) finally went hyperactive during the raid: There’s a linen closet in the mansion that contains a minor mouth. Alice opened it while she was completely alone: The long, prehensile tongue on her own arm initiated a disgusting, groping French kiss with the similarly grotesque tongue of the mouth inside the closet. Things went downhill from there. The other PCs managed to get into a car and drive away from the mansion before finally being forced to amputate her arm. Moments after the frantic, horrible, bloody field amputation was completed, the mansion exploded behind them.

MEXICO CITY: Mission completed. Time to get out of the country. Mexico City largely played out by-the book: Effective and disturbing, with a lot of really nice small roleplaying moments. But in pretty much the sequence you would expect based on reading over the material.

YUCATAN: Similarly, the Yucatan largely proceeded as one might expect. They ended up hiring two of the available guides (which provided ample opportunities for interesting interactions), while one of the dilettantes earned the inexplicable enmity of the third guide (who was also the cultist trying to kill them). Also memorable was the sequence just after they arrived at Chichen Xoxul: They would attempt to set up camp at a location, discover that it was horrible, and move to a different site to set up camp… which they would discover was horrible for some completely different reason.

THIBET: Upon arriving in Thibet, the PCs decided to attempt a risky landing without a runway in order to cut down on their travel time to Mt. Kailash. They ascended the mountain without great incident, but had a great deal of difficulty descending into the ravine. (They initially planned to descend one at a time for safety’s sake, but the first investigator only got down about halfway before being forced back by the terrifying things in the ravine.) In the end, they coordinated a massive explosion with a simultaneous summoning of Gol-Goroth to deal with the Liar. Wini, who had sacrificed her own sanity to master the mind-rending arts of sorcery the campaign demanded of the group, took one of the bricks from Chichen Xoxul, carved an Elder Sign into it, and left it lodged in the white snows of Mt. Kailash.

THE END: I’ve already discussed how their progression through the rest of the finale went. In the final scene, Robert — much to the horror of the other PCs — volunteered to accompany Jobs to the planet seen in The Gazer’s Perspective.

THOUGHTS FOR THE FUTURE

This will almost certainly not be the last time I run this campaign: Partly to recoup the time I’ve already sunk into prepping it. Partly because there’s a high demand from the other players I’ve developed relationships with through my open table. Partly because it’s a really great campaign. But mostly because I’m really curious to see what happens next time.

When I return to Eternal Lies, however, there are a few things I’ll be changing or adding to the campaign. It’ll be awhile before I make any of this a reality, but in the meantime you might think about doing these for your own campaign:

• I would strongly recommend adapting the Sources of Stability rules from Night’s Black Agents. They’re much more appropriate for the type of globe-hopping campaign you see in Eternal Lies. (It’s very difficult to connive for the PCs to get back home to their Sources of Stability between locations. This was particularly exacerbated in our play-thru because we embraced the global nature of the campaign and the PCs came from all across the globe. It might be a little bit easier if everyone came from the same hometown.) I’ve been playing with the idea of creating a hybrid system (in which characters would still have multiple NPC Sources of Stability, possibly scattered across the world for easier access and rich epistolary opportunities, while still including Symbols and Safeties), but I haven’t really hammered out the details.
• I’m planning to prep hotels for each of the locations. Probably aiming for three: A low, middle, and high class location. (I only figured out that this would be useful at the point where the campaign was already winding down.)
• I want to go back and add explosive charge guidelines for destroying each Major Mouth. My primary goal here is to establish the idea of thinking about explosives in terms of abstract “charges” that also need to be dealt with logistically, so that by the time you get to Thibet the PCs will (a) have a general sense of how much explosive power they need and (b) an established relationship with the mechanics involved in lugging them around the landscape. (Might be interesting to supplement the “lugging them around” guidelines with stealth guidelines for metropolitan areas.)
• Finally, I’m probably going to revise Savitree’s notes on the Mt. Kailash expedition so that the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities don’t actually make it up onto the peak. (They get chased off by pilgrims, which would force them to acquire their magnetic scanning equipment to take whatever remote readings they could.) My primary motivation here is to preserve the image of the PCs being the first ones to ever reach the top of Mt. Kailash. (I only consciously realized this was a meaningful concern when my players got up there, got excited about the idea of being the first people to ever be up there, and then remembered that the Emporium had beaten them to the punch. Which was a funny moment, but I think it’s more powerful to leave that achievement for the PCs. This remains true even if the players don’t immediately think of it, because then you can drop that image on them during the Triumph Atop Mt. Kailash sequence after the Liar has been destroyed.)

I also have a personal goal of making better use of the Eternal Lies Soundtrack Suite by preparing a more robust selection of playlists and probably adding more specific cuing prompts to my prep notes.

But that’s for another day.

If you’ve run the campaign (particularly if you’re running it with these remix notes), I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments! And don’t forget to join us over on Yog-Sothoth and the G+ community for Eternal Lies GMs.

FIN.

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

Campaign Overview PDF

The Campaign Overview for the Alexandrian Remix originated as a planning document and now serves as a general reference document for the GM.

LOCALE CLUES: Each locale in the campaign has its own internal structure of nodes linked by clues. The campaign also has a macro-structure, however, which links the various locales together. I find it’s easiest to separate these structures, tracking the macro-clues that are integrated into the various locales separately from the clues that move you around the locale itself. This reference sheet summarizes all of the macro-clues that lead from one locale to another.

CAMPAIGN CLUES – THIBET REVELATION: As discussed in the introduction to the Alexandrian Remix, there is an additional meta-mystery that requires the PCs to piece together clues from multiple locations in order to figure out their final destination. Whereas the locale clues are independent (you can pick up any of the clues that point to Malta, for example, and use it to get to Malta), in order to reach Thibet you need to have three separate pieces of information. Following the Three Clue Rule, there are three clues pointing to each of these pieces of information. This reference sheet summarizes them.

CAMPAIGN CLUES – DESTROYING THE MAW: Another key revelation for the campaign is how you can destroy the Maw of the Mouth. This reference sheet summarizes teh methods and how they can be obtained.

CAMPAIGN CLUES – FINAL RITUAL: When the PCs reach the end of the campaign, they’re going to need several key pieces of information in order to solve the problem. This reference sheet summarizes where they can gain those pieces of information (once again following the principles of redundancy laid out in the Three Clue Rule).

CAMPAIGN CLUES – APOCALYPSE: As with the Thibet Revelation, the information for realizing what’s happening at the end of the campaign is spread throughout the campaign.

CAMPAIGN CLUES – IDENTITY OF THE LIAR: This sheet is complicated by the fact that there are several red herrings in the campaign pointing the PCs towards false identities. This discovery requires a two-step revelation: First, the PCs must realize that the Liar is the Prisoner of Glaaki. Second, they have to figure out who the Prisoner of Glaaki is.

REFERENCE – WHO BELIEVES WHAT: In large part because the Liar is obfuscating his identity, it can get a little confusing about what the various NPCs know and believe about it. This reference sheet summarizes what the 1924 Cultists, the 1924 Inner Circle, the 1934 Cult, and the various cult leaders all currently believe.

REFERENCE – 1924: This summarizes all the known facts about what happened in 1924, including the known members of the cult, Walter Winston’s investigators, and what happened on the night of August 13th, 1924.

REFERENCE – MINOR MOUTHS / MAJOR MOUTHS: All of the stats for the Mouths summarized on a single sheet for easy reference.

REFERENCE – NECTAR: All the rules for researching or consuming Nectar.

REFERENCE – TRAVEL TIMES: A hodgepodge reference using real world figures for transcontinental travel in the 1930s. You should be able to interpolate from this data to come up with relatively accurate travel times for any locations the PCs might decide to hare off to.

SUGGESTED READING

The PDF also includes a recommended reading list for familiarizing yourself more intimately with the various Mythos elements that the Eternal Lies campaign is based around (including my additions to the campaign). This list primarily revolves around the lore of Gol-Goroth and the tales of the Severn Valley (including, most importantly, the Revelations of Glaaki). However, there are a few additional stories included here (mostly because their material appears in the various Mythos tomes found in Echavarria’s library and Savitree’s research).

Robert E. Howard
“The Black Stone”
“The Children of the Night”
“The People in the Dark”
“The Gods of Bal-Sagoth”
“The Thing on the Roof”
“Worms of the Earth”

Ramsey Campbell
“The Inhabitant of the Lake”
“The Stone on the Island”
“The Church in High Street”
“Cold Print”
“The Room in the Castle”
“The Render of the Veils”
“The Plain of Sound”
The Last Revelation of Gla’aki

H.P. Lovecraft
“The Shadow Out of Time”

David Drake
“Than Curse the Darkness”

Lin Carter
“The Fishers From Beyond”

Chaosium Cthulhu Scenarios
Masks of Nyarlathotep
No Man’s Land

The Chaosium scenarios are strictly non-essential, but there are oblique references to No Man’s Land in some of the lore books (largely because one of my players created a PC who used the scenario as part of his back story). And Masks of Nyarlathotep, unsurprisingly, serves as the fountainhead for several key pieces of lore regarding the Black Pharaoh (among others).

Go to 1.0 Maps and Campaign Props

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

Campaign Notes – Diorama – Props Packet

As with the Yucatan, Thibet is organized in sequences and locations instead of around nodes. Primarily sequences, because this location is largely about journeying deep into uncharted territory in search of a finale.

Speaking of finales, we’re getting near to the end of the campaign so I’m going to refresh our:

SPOILER WARNING

I’m going to do my best to keep things fairly vague at this juncture so that someone casually glancing at these pages won’t have the campaign spoiled for them, but since we’re also nearing a critical juncture it wouldn’t take much to spoil yourself.

MACEWAN: One thing you won’t find in my remix notes is the explosives expert MacEwan. This is nothing personal. By this time in the campaign, my PCs had become so completely well-versed in explosives that they had no need for MacEwan and I didn’t bother prepping him.

HIGH ROAD, LOW ROAD: One big shift I did make is bifurcating the first sequence so that the players have a choice of the route they want to follow. This is designed as a pretty straightforward incomparable: One route is fast-but-dangerous; the other route is slow-but-safe.

There’s a sequence of photographic props designed for each of the routes. If you’re playing with the poster maps, you can put these travel photos directly onto the map in a rough sequence pointing towards the mountain.

THE RAVINE: In a similar fashion, I’ve tweaked the design of the final descent into the Devouring Ravine. Regardless of which method the PCs use for destroying the Liar, there is now trade-off between going deeper into the ravine (which makes it easier to destroy the Liar) and staying higher (which is safer).

As written in the original campaign, the Devouring Ravine is cripplingly difficult. For my remix, I tried to take the “auto TPK” quality out of it (primarily by treating the entire descent as a single Mythos experience, so that the maximum Stability loss gets capped). But, in practice, I discovered that it’s still too tough. I’ve talked in the past about the numerous hard limits that the GUMSHOE system has which severely limits your flexibility in scenario design. In this case, the scenario drains out the Athletics and Outdoorsman pools of the PCs and then auto-kills them.

When I run the campaign again, I’ll be re-visiting these mechanics once again. Without doing a thorough analysis, I’d suggest (a) getting rid of the auto-kill climbing mechanic and (b) reducing the Athletics climb check difficulties by 1. Also: If the PCs make ANY attempt to gauge what they need to do to destroy the Liar (and they have the appropriate skills), I would make it clear what the trade-off is between going deeper and staying higher. After they’ve made the initial inquiry, I would also offer appropriate spends to give them specific number (the Liar’s inertia and/or the number of explosive charges required at each level of descent).

FINAL VISION: I’ve shifted the wording in the Final Vision provided by the Liar in order to obfuscate that it’s revealing the completion of a sacrifice. This is deliberate. I want to give the players a chance to discover that idea for themselves instead of having it handed to them. I think it makes for a more powerful “oh shit” moment. (It’s a problem if they don’t realize it, of course, but there’s a thematic Get Out of Jail Free card programmed into the final chapter of the campaign.)

PROP NOTES

DIORAMA: There’s a large number of “mystic paintings” in the diorama material for Thibet. I wanted to strongly instill the sense of Mt. Kailash (and its surroundings) as a holy place, so that the contrast between that and what’s lurking inside the mountain would be as large as possible.

You may also note that a large number of diorama elements actually feature Mt. Kailash. This presumes that, by the time the PCs are coming to Thibet, they already know that the Maw of the Mouth lies within the mountain. If they don’t know that — for example, if they’ve built up a theory that the Maw must be somewhere else in the region since the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities didn’t find anything on the mountain — you’ll want to hold back those elements so as to avoid tipping your hand.

Go to 3.2 The End

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

Campaign Notes – Diorama – Props Packet

The Yucatan marks a shift in the organization of my notes for the campaign. Form, in this case, follows function. Whereas the other locations up to this point in the campaign are designed as mysteries (which are best handled by a node-based structure), in the Yucatan the PCs are primarily concerned with mounting an expedition to discover the lost ruins of Chichen Xoxul.

Therefore, the node structure is foregone and I’ve instead used a collection of sequences and locations to organize the material. The exception is minor miscellaneous investigations, research, and preparations that can be undertaken when the PCs first arrive in the Yucatan. (These have been grouped together as Prologue: Merida.)

This is one of my favorite sections of the campaign. And it was, in fact, while reading the conclusion of the Yucatan location that I became resolved to run the campaign. For the most part, I’ve merely contented myself with enriching and expanding the material (particularly around the mythology of Gol-Goroth), but there are a few key changes to keep an eye out for:

LOCATION OF CHICHEN XOXUL: In the original campaign, the location of Chichen Xoxul appears to be something of an open secret. (There even seems to be a standard location where people park their trucks before hiking out to see it.) That seemed a little strange to me, so I’ve made it a little more remote and I’ve made its location a little more mysterious. (The PCs still shouldn’t have any real difficulty finding it. There are, in fact, multiple ways for them to track it down. But hopefully it will feel like they’re actually tracking it down, and not just grabbing a brochure from the local tourist bureau.)

GOLXUMAL vs. GOL-GOROTH: In the original campaign, Golxumal is an alternative name for Gol-Goroth and also the name of the moon where the Xoxul live. Because I was working to incorporate global Gol-Goroth lore into the campaign, I decided to completely separate the two terms: Golxumal is the moon. Gol-Goroth is the Mythos god. (Although a few Western scholars do screw it up in the handouts.)

RESCUING FRANCISCO DE LA BELALCAZAR: I’ve specifically made it possible to rescue Francisco de la Belalcazar. (The PCs might manage to release him back into his own time, which could theoretically change history. More likely is that they’d bring him back to contemporary times, which could lead to an interesting interchange between Franscisco de la Vega and his distant ancestor.)

EXPEDITION GUIDELINES

I’ve added a set of detailed guidelines that will allow the players to actually plan their expedition. It’s nothing too extravagant and it shouldn’t turn your campaign of Lovecraftian horror into a session of Wilderness Expedition Logistics, but it should give just enough meat to give the PCs some meaningful decisions in Merida. The key elements are:

ORGANIZING: Any character with Outdoorsman can efficiently organize an expedition. Alternatively, a guide can be hired to provide the expertise. If not, add +1 to any Credit Rating spends associated with the expedition.

SUPPLIES: 1-point Credit Rating spend per week of supplies.

PORTERS: 1 porter per investigator and guide. For an expedition lasting longer than three weeks, double the number of porters. 1-point Credit Rating spend per porter. An Interpersonal ability is necessary to keep the porters well organized, although a guide will also generally take care of organizing the porters.

NAVIGATION: Outdoorsman can navigate to generally known locations. Local guides can provide guidance. For unknown locations, additional skills and/or spends may be necessary.

These costs can be reduced through the application of other skills (like Bargain, for example). Detailed notes are given in the prep notes.

MEETING GOL-GOROTH

At the end of the Yucatan location, the PCs have the opportunity to “meet” Gol-Goroth. In the published campaign, the initial moment of telepathic contact is a horrific experience during which Gol-Goroth goes rummaging through the minds of the PCs and they all collectively share a set of memories as he yanks them out to look at them.

And then I thought to myself: Wouldn’t it be cool if that’s how Gol-Goroth communicated? If he existed on such a completely different plane of existence that the only way for him to actually interact with a human being was by shuffling around their own thoughts?

In the end, I designed the encounter with Gol-Goroth around three techniques.

MEMORY MANIFESTATIONS: The investigators’ psyches are intermixed and tangled as Gol-Goroth paws through them. The idea that he’s attempting to communicate either comes from a gestalt of these memories or by transforming/combining them. (Go around the table and ask each player to share a memory of the specified type from their investigators’ past.)

VISIONS: Gol-Goroth simply shows them a vision of what he wants them to know.

APPROPRIATED BODIES: Gol-Goroth takes control of one or more investigators and speaks through them. (A technique I discovered during play – and which, therefore, isn’t represented in the remix notes – is to break up the declarations made through appropriated bodies and give them to each player to read aloud.)

As you’ll see in the remix notes, each major concept that Gol-Goroth wishes to communicate is packaged using some combination of these ideas. (And it’s actually quite trivial to improvise additional interactions if the players take the conversation in unexpected directions.)

My players encountered Gol-Goroth quite late in the campaign, which meant that the revelations of various memories and thoughts were a penultimate culmination of everything that these characters had experienced and a final exploration of all the aspects of them that had been developed through play. But the scene would probably play just as well near the beginning of the campaign (as a way of developing depth that would be explored through the rest of the campign) or the middle of the campaign (as a pivot point in that development).

PROP NOTES

PHOTOS OF THE SPAWN OF GOL-GOROTH: The idea here is that each player gets a different photograph of what the Spawn looks like without showing the other players. (Once the characters have a chance to compare notes, it’s fine if they flip the photos over.) This worked particularly well in my play-thru of the campaign because one of the PCs peeked around the corner, saw the Spawn eating corpses they had left on the Plaza, said “nope, nope, nope”, and skedaddled back to where the other PCs were waiting. The players thought the reason I handed her the photo face down was because they hadn’t seen the creature yet, so I got an inadvertent double whammy of having one of the players try to describe the horrible thing they had seen and then, later, revealing the “you all see something different” gimmick.

PHOTO OF THE PYRAMID: This is a really cool photo of a heavily overgrown Mayan pyramid. It is not, however, a perfect rendition of the pyramid at Chichen Xoxul. (Most notably, the backdrop behind the pyramid should be a thick and tangled jungle. It’s also a little too small, the structure on top isn’t quite right, and the observatory slits aren’t present.) Even while giving the proviso that “this photo isn’t 100% accurate”, I still found the photo an effective way to shake loose the popular image of modern Chichen Itza in the minds of my players and replace it with the image of a truly ruined complex. (This was important for me because I wanted to strongly contrast it with the image of an immaculate temple complex during the observatory sequence.)

I also used a small, miniature version of the Chichen Itza pyramid that I purchased while vacationing there about a decade ago. Having the 3D representation was a nice reference and then it lived on the gaming table for the rest of the campaign as another memento of their journey. The closest version I’ve been able to find online is a model kit of Kukulcan, which is really cool but considerably more expensive.

Go to 3.1 Thibet

Go to Eternal Lies: The Alexandrian Remix

Campaign Notes – Diorama – Props Packet

I’m afraid I need to preface the remix of the Mexico City locale with a hard truth: In my opinion, this section of the original campaign is a big mess. Despite some really interesting ideas (that are largely left undeveloped), it’s easily the weakest section of the entire campaign.

First, it’s heavily overwritten. There’s a lot of meandering about self-evident contingencies, but there’s also a lot of bizarrely out-of-place GM advice. For example: “Eternal Lies is performed on the soundstage of your imagination. It is not played out on location in Mexico City, 1937. When conjuring an imaginary Mexico City for your adaptation of Eternal Lies, remember that your dramatic interpretation of Mexico City must, foremost, serve your story.” At this point you’re 260 pages into the book and at least 6-8 sessions into the campaign. It feels really weird to be saying things like, “Hey! Remember that the thing you’ve been doing for the last two months is totally a work of fiction!” Or to say things like this: “Keep all of that in mind while you’re making choices for Gonchi, because when you’re playing the role of Gonchi, you’ve also got to be playing the part of the Keeper still.”

Ignoring the fact that I consider some of the advice in this chapter to be flat-out bad (like explicitly telling your players that a particular prop is really important, so they should make sure to pay attention to it), you’re still faced with the fact that it’s curiously banal.

Second, it’s structurally weak (featuring a long, tenuous string of linear clues with little redundancy and a lot of faith-leaping). It’s also structurally bloated. For example, when the PCs are trying to track down a band of musicians, there’s a sequence where they have to go to a bar, have a conversation with a specific NPC, then get invited to a party, have another conversation with that same NPC, and then finally get introduced to the band. Later they’re supposed to get captured by the bad guys and tossed down a pit lined with mouths. Then they’re supposed to walk across a room and fall down ANOTHER pit with a Mouth in it.

You’ll note that these curious redundancies are absent from the remix: The bar and the party are conflated into a single interaction. And there is only one mouth-filled pit in the bad guys’ lair.

Third, speaking of mouth-filled pits, the conclusion is a bit of a disaster: In order to play out as written, it requires the PCs to be captured and thrown into the oubliette. But there’s no reasonable way to actually arrange for their capture. The scenario then explicitly breaks the normal rules for handling Stability checks, implementing a custom system which is impossibly brutal and essentially guarantees that the PCs will be wiped out. The author then seems to realize he’s made a mistake, because he includes an entire section dedicated exclusively to discussing how to railroad the PCs back out of the trap you’ve railroaded them into in order to avoid the inevitable TPK.

Fourth, there’s Elena Alcatruz. I thought about renaming her Mary Sue, but that felt a little too on the nose. Elena is this completely inconsequential and irrelevant character who is stunningly beautiful, utterly charming, versed in every subject the PCs are interested in, and literally the most amazing person they will ever meet. She receives the largest write-up of any NPC in the entire campaign (including three unique, detailed outfits), it’s suggested that one of the PCs should fall in love with her, and “if the Investigators (or their players) look forward to seeing her again in a future scene, you’re playing her just right.”

As a result of all this, Mexico City is probably the most heavily altered location in my version of the campaign: Entire scenes have been dropped, clues have been added and many have been redirected. It’s the only location where I recommend laying the book aside during the game and running strictly from the remix notes.

PROACTIVE NODES

One thing that will probably leap out at you about Mexico City is the large number of proactive nodes. When you’re running the location, don’t lose track of these: There are five proactive nodes and some of them (like Gonchi Del Toro or Brooks’ thugs) can even be used multiple times. Given that there are only eight static nodes (and three of those already include variations of the thugs in their own right), you won’t want to wait for the PCs to settle in before hitting them with the proactive stuff.

In many ways, these proactive nodes are the defining characteristic of the Mexico City location and set it apart from the other cities of the cult: Brooks has eyes and ears everywhere (and many of them are watching each other). Between Gonchi, the thugs, the birds, a second round of thugs, the shooter in Node 3, and then the thugs who attack La Paz, the entire city should pretty much just scream Brooks’ paranoia.

DE LA LUZ SONGS

One new addition to the Mexico City location that I’d like to call particular attention to are the additional De La Luz songs I developed: In the original campaign, there’s only one recording of Leticia de la Luz and its effect is fairly minimal. To this I’ve added “Cancion del Cuco”, “Armonia de los Dioses”, “Caricia de los Labios”, and “Grunido de la Montana”. Each of these has their own unique effect, which is summarized on a reference sheet (pg. 5 of the remix notes).

The conclusion of the Mexico City location, instead of being based around the oubliette, is instead based around Leticia de la Luz and the Major Mouth influencing the PCs through the alternating use of different songs. There’s no specific script for this: Play it by ear (pun intended) and keep switching the songs up while using them to best effect.

PROP NOTES

A LOVE POEM FOR LETICIA: I’m particularly satisfied with how this creepy-as-hell poem turned out. I’ve included a file for printing a 5.75″ x 4.5″ envelope. The poem is designed to be printed on matching stationary, but it’s relatively easy to print it on any size paper and trim it down. (You can skip the envelope, but note that it’s the primary clue here: The return address points to Brooks’ penthouse.)

LA PAZ MATCHBOOK: Print this onto cardstock and then cut it down to the size of a matchbook cover. It’s then relatively easy to rip the cover off a book of matches and staple the new cover on to replace it. A text file included in the props packet gives the address you’re supposed to write inside: La Cruz 29, 3°, 18. (That’s how addresses work in Mexico: It means #29 on La Cruz street, 3rd floor, Unit 18.)

LINER NOTES FOR THE NEW ALBUM: Separate files are given for the front and back of this handout. As detailed in the included text file and the scenario notes, there’s a crytography key that you can give to someone making a Cryptography spend. That should give them enough information to translate the text.

PHOTO OF DOMINGUEZ AND HIS CREW: Here, again, there’s a text file noting what needs to be written on the back of the photo.

VICTOR CORTEZ BUSINESS CARD: These are designed for 8471 Avery Business Cards. (You could also print them on cardstock and cut them down to business card size.) I filled the whole sheet with them because… well… why not? And then I developed the idea of Cortez compulsively handing them out to everyone he talks to.

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