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NODE 5: FATIMA’S SHRINE

(169 Page Street West, St. Paul, MN)

• Across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Paul.
• Couple blocks off the streetcar lines.

THE HOUSE

Back Door: Leads to kitchen.

Front Entry: Front door leads to a small coat room. Stairs lead up to the indoor garden and front room.

• Gardening boots on the mat, but no coats on the hooks. (The boots, on closer inspection, are unused.)
• Architecture / Evidence Collection: There’s a secret hatch in the wall behind the coat rack. (You can grab the rack and pull the whole wall away.) Behind the hatch is a staircase leading to the basement.

Indoor Garden: Opens from the front room.

• Glass walls let in the sun.
• Tiered platforms hold numerous flowering plants.
• Biology: The flowers growing here are Rosa richardii, acacia, willowherb, dragonwort, and Crinum lilies. These are all species notably native to Egypt. (Medicine 1 / History: Historically, all of these species had medical applications in Egypt and, later, the Mediterranean in general).

Front Room: Opens to the indoor garden. Doors to the kitchen and two bedrooms.

• Well-accoutered. A sofa, two chairs, and a coffee table.
• The coffee table has a magazine rack on one side with several magazines in it.
• Evidence Collection: The magazine are all from January 1925.

Kitchen: Backdoor leads to the backyard. Another door leads to the front room.

• Everything looks normal at first glance. But casual inspection reveals that the cupboards are empty and the food packages on the counters are also empty.
• Icebox: Empty. There’s no ice.
• Kitchen Table: There’s a stack of Prop: 13 Black Cats Flyers on the table.

Bedrooms: Each has a door leading to the front room.

• Single Beds: The quilts
• Bedside Table: Drawer empty.
• Closets: Empty.

Basement Shrine: Stairs down from the hidden panel in the front entry.

• Basement has been converted into a work space, with a large table in the middle of the room.
• Letter: Prop: Letter to Gladys is lying on the table.
• Photostat Machine: With more Prop: 13 Black Cat Flyers next to it.
• Shrine: On the far wall, there’s a shrine built around a Hamsa made from lapis lazuli. Stubby white candles covered in melted wax surround the hand. (If the Hamsa is removed, the Eye of Ra can be found carved into the wall behind it.)
• Map of the Twin Cities: Thumb-tacked to the wall. (Prop: Map of the Twin Cities)

GM Background: The map shows locations Alicia Corey was investigating for possible Tanit cultist activity. The only non-eliminated location on the map (labeled “Harriet”) is the Node 4: Harriet Tubman’s Asylum for Colored Orphans. The name “John Barca” has also been written on the map, perhaps allowing the PCs to research him.

MAP OF THE TWIN CITIES

(click for larger version)

LETTER TO GLADYS

Go to Node 6: Davis Farm

Go to Part 1

NODE 4: HARRIET TUBMAN’S ASYLUM FOR COLORED ORPHANS

• During Jim Crow era, major orphanages would not accept black children.
• In 1905, two Quaker sisters named Anna and Hannah Glass opened Harriet Tubman’s Asylum for Colored Orphans.
• Located in a formerly abandoned hotel in the Rondo neighborhood west of downtown St. Paul.
• Anna died of typhoid in 1913, the same year that Minneapolis finally acknowledge that their municipal water was the source of the typhoid outbreaks and opened a water purification plant to solve the problem.
• There are currently 47 children.
• Small staff of female attendants (of which Perlie Coleman is representative). Marcus Washington serves as a maintenance man and is now the best thing they have to a security guard.

TANIT CULTIST ACTIVITIES

• 5 kids have been kidnapped from the asylum by Tanit cultists. (They’re taken to Node 7: Harris Chemical Plant.)
• St. Paul Police have taken cursory reports, but have concluded that the kids are just run-aways.
• The staff has been similarly unable to get the local press interested.
• If either of those things were to change, the Tanit cultists would back off and leave the other children in the asylum alone. (They assume this will happen at some point, but aren’t surprised it hasn’t yet: They picked an asylum for black children for a reason.)

INVESTIGATING

• Evidence Collection: New locks have recently been placed on the windows.
• Evidence Collection: There’s a chemical residue on the carpet Alex Griffin’s bedroom.
  • Chemistry: It’s a patented polysaccharide created by a Minneapolis company called Harris Chemical (see Node 7: Harris Chemical Plant).
• Streetwise: Canvassing the neighborhood will discover that a Harris Chemical Plant truck has been seen parked near the orphanage during the time of each disappearance. (See Node 7: Harris Chemical Plant.)

MISSING KIDS (DATE TAKEN)

• Thomas Young (August 30^th) – missing from his bed, window unlocked (staff did, in fact, assume he was run-away)
• Millie Clark (September 8^th) – snatched from the street
• Edward Robinson (October 10^th) – was missing during a headcount following a recess period
• Frances Allen (October 31^st) – missing from her bed, cheap old lock had been jimmied (staff replaced the locks on all the windows after this)
• Alex Griffin (November 11^th) – missing from his bed, window was broken, other kids in his room were slow to wake up (Medicine: they were gassed)

HANNAH GLASS

APPEARANCE:

• Prop: Photo of Hannah Glass

ROLEPLAYING NOTES

• Weary; in body, spirit, and voice
• Clasps her hands and wrings them with very small movements
• Fervently protective of the children

BACKGROUND

• Grew up in Pennsylvania. Her father was a frequent pastor in a “programmed” branch of Quakerism.
• She and her sister, Anna, became disillusioned with the program, believing fervently in the non-hierarchical structures of the faith. This estranged them from their father.
• In 1905, they opened the asylum.
• Anna died of typhoid in 1913, the same year that Minneapolis finally acknowledged that their municipal water was the source of the typhoid outbreaks and opened a water purification plant to solve the problem.
• She intends for Perlie Coleman to take over the asylum.

CLUES

• Knows the names and dates of the missing kids. (Very angry about the police and press being dismissive of it.)
• Can introduce PCs to Perlie Coleman and Marcus Washington.
• Reassurance 1: To get access to the kids.

HANNAH GLASS: Accounting 1, Bureaucracy 2, Oral History 4, Reassurance 6, Theology 5, Health 4
Alertness Modifier: +0
Stealth Modifier: +0
Weapons: fists (-2)

PERLIE COLEMAN

APPEARANCE:

• Prop: Photo of Perlie Coleman

ROLEPLAYING NOTES

• If all the investigators are white, she will be painstakingly polite until reassured that they don’t pose a danger. (This deferential self-defense also means that the PCs won’t get anything useful from her.)
• Always keeping one eye on the kids; will randomly shout out cautions to them or a kid might run up and she’ll scoop them up.
• An incredibly warm smile if she trusts you.

BACKGROUND

• Perlie is an African Methodist Episcopalian.
• She grew up in Duluth.
• Her father was lynched by a white mob when she was seven years old. Her mother immediately took Perlie and her three sisters and moved to Minneapolis.
• Her mother has gone mostly blind and can’t work any more. Perlie depends on her job here at the asylum to support her.
• She is a caretaker and teacher for the children.

CLUES

• She discovered that Alex Griffin was missing. She remembers a sort of chemical smell that was lingering in the air.

PERLIE COLEMAN: Assess Honesty 5, First Aid 5, Library Use 5, Reassurance 8, Health 4
Alertness Modifier: +0
Stealth Modifier: +0
Weapons: fists (-2)

MARCUS WASHINGTON

APPEARANCE:

• Prop: Photo of Marcus Washington

ROLEPLAYING NOTES

• Very protective of Hannah Glass and her reputation.
• Slow, powerful movements.
• A voice that sounds like a quiet river.

BACKGROUND

• An African Methodist Episcopalian.
• Began working for “the Missuses Glass” in 1906, so he’s been with the asylum almost from the beginning.
• He lives in the Rondo neighborhood. He usually walks six blocks to work.
• He’s been staying at the asylum overnight since Frances Allen was taken, acting as a sort of security guard to try to keep the kids safe. He’s incredibly angry with himself for not being able to stop Alex Griffin from being taken. He feels like he’s failed the children and Hannah.

KEY INFO

• Leveraged Clue: If the name “Harris Chemicals” is mentioned, he’ll say that there’s been a Harris Chemicals truck parked in the neighborhood recently. (He doesn’t think it’s significant and hasn’t connected it to the kidnappings, which is why he doesn’t mention it otherwise.)

MARCUS WASHINGTON: Assess Honesty 2, Athletics 5, Fleeing 2, Oral History 4, Scuffling 8, Sense Trouble 5, Streetwise 4, Health 6
Alertness Modifier: +1 (on edge)
Stealth Modifier: +0
Weapons: fists (-2)

Go to Node 5: Fatima’s Shrine

The first sanity mechanics appear in Call of Cthulhu in 1981 and, in many ways, it remains the definitive mechanical model: The character is confronted by something unnatural, stressful, or terrifying. They make a check using their Sanity attribute. If the check succeeds, everything is fine. If the check fails, they take damage to their Sanity attribute based on the severity of the event that triggered the check. If the damage is sufficiently large (either immediately or in aggregate), they suffer some form of temporary or indefinite insanity. These insanities often force a particular action on the character (fainting, fleeing in panic, physical hysterics, etc.).

We can identify three distinct elements in these mechanics:

• The trigger which requires a sanity check.
• The check to see if the trigger causes harm to the character’s sanity.
• The reaction of the character to the trigger (usually due to a failed check).

This is a fortune at the beginning mechanic: You make the sanity check and THEN determine what your character does based on the outcome of the check. It is also a reactive mechanic, by which we mean that it is used in response to a triggering circumstance rather than resolving a statement of intention.

(Thought experiment: What would a non-reactive sanity check look like? It would probably be part of a wider array of personality mechanics which the player could use to interrogate their character’s state of a mind; a very non-traditional form of player expertise activating character expertise, with the player essentially “asking” their character whether they’re scared or aroused by Lady Chatworth or tempted by the devil’s offer. But I digress.)

RESOLUTION SEQUENCE

In my experience, most GMs resolve sanity checks in the same sequence listed above: they describe the trigger, make the check, and then determine the reaction.

GM: A tentacular thing comes slithering out of the closet! Make a sanity check!

Player: (rolls dice) I failed!

GM: You take (rolls dice) 3 points of Sanity loss! What do you do?

Player: Bertram screams and runs out of the room!

In this, they are usually mirroring how the mechanic is described in the rulebook: this is what this rule is for (the trigger), here is how the mechanic works (the check), and here is the outcome of the mechanic (the reaction).

This all makes sense.

But in my experience, it’s not the most effective way to run sanity checks. Instead, you usually want to invert the check and trigger, like so:

Player: Bertram very carefully turns the handle and eases open the closet door.

GM: You peer into the closet… There’s… Yes! There’s something moving in there! Give me a sanity check!

Player: (rolls dice) I fail!

GM: A tentacular thing comes slithering out of the closet! You take 3 points of Sanity loss! What do you do?

Player: Bertram screams and runs out of the room!

It’s a subtle distinction. What difference does it make?

First, the mechanical resolution now functions as foreshadowing: While the check is being made, tension builds at the table as the players anticipate whatever horrific thing might be triggering the check. (What’s in the closet?!)

Second, by resolving the check before describing the trigger, you allow the players to have an immediate, immersive response to your description of the trigger.

Which makes sense, right? When Bertram sees the tentacular thing he immediately wants to scream and run in terror. He doesn’t want to wait a minute while dice are being rolled.

So, in short, you heighten the emotional engagement of the moment both coming and going.

In my experience, the exception to this is when the trigger for the sanity check is generated by a different mechanical interaction. (For example, watching your friend’s brains get sprayed across the wall by a sniper’s bullet.) This is more a matter of practicality than effectiveness (unlike the tentacular horror slithering out of the closet, the GM doesn’t know whether or not the bullet will hit their friend until it does, and the whole table often learns that simultaneously), but does serve as a reminder that the “proper” ruling in an RPG is rarely a simple black-and-white affair.

TRAIL OF CTHULHU – LIMITS OF SANITY

In Call of Cthulhu, PCs start with a fairly large amount of Sanity and usually lose fairly small quantities in each session of play. There’s generally no way to recover lost Sanity, so over the course of a campaign, their Sanity is slowly eroded away by the horrors which they’ve seen, until finally the last few points are taken away and they are left permanently mad and broken by their experiences.

This is very effective at evoking the slow, inexorable destruction of Lovecraftian fiction. But, like hit points in D&D, you generally don’t feel actual risk until near the end of the process. There are some mitigating factors, but this can easily have the effect of reducing the impact of Sanity losses.

In Trail of Cthulhu, Kenneth Hite does a very clever tweak on this system by splitting it into two separate tracks: Sanity and Stability.

As in Call of Cthulhu, Sanity generally can’t be restored once lost. However, you also don’t lose it directly. Instead, you usually only lose Sanity as a result of your Stability meter hitting 0.

The Stability meter CAN be restored when depleted, but it’s limited enough that it can easily be wiped out in a single session (which would result in Sanity getting hit).

This allows the system to create a mechanical sense of risk that builds over the course of each session (as Stability is depleted), while ALSO capturing the long, slow, inexorable, and irreversible destruction of a character’s psyche (as Sanity is depleted). It allows characters to brush up against madness without being permanently broken.

If you’re a Call of Cthulhu GM coming to Trail of Cthulhu for the first time, you’ll want to consider how the hard limits in each system are different. This will affect both scenario design and the pacing of individual sessions. In some ways Trail of Cthulhu is more forgiving (because Sanity is “shielded” behind Stability), but in other ways it is considerably less forgiving (because it’s relatively easy to completely blast through Stability in a single session).

The game is fairly well-tuned so that in a typical scenario some or all of the PCs are likely to feel the risk of running out of Stability, but it won’t actually happen in every single session. (Which is also good, because if it’s getting hammered so hard that it IS happening like clockwork every single session, that also deflates tension.) But this is something you’ll want to monitor and adjust in your scenario design and rulings: If their Stability is rarely or never at risk of running out, check to see if you’re not calling for Stability tests as often as you should. If their Stability is being sand-blasted away, see what you can tweak to get a more balanced result.

UNKNOWN ARMIES – A MULTITUDE OF MADNESS

Unknown Armies by John Tynes and Greg Stolze has several more features in its sanity system (which, in the first edition, was called the madness meter and was resolved using stress checks).

First, instead of having a single track, the system has five separate meters, one for each type of psychological stress the character might experience:

• Helplessness (unable to take action you feel is necessary)
• Isolation (when you’re cut off from society or loved ones)
• Violence (pain, injury, death)
• Unnatural (challenges to your perception of reality)
• Self (violations of your deepest beliefs)

This paints a more evocative picture of a character’s psychological state. It also allows the game to track separate effects for each type of trauma, while still measuring overall psychological stability across all the meters.

Having these separate meters also allows Unknown Armies characters to become hardened: Each stress check adds a hardened notch to the associated meter. Each trigger is rated by its severity, and if a character has a number of hardened notches in a meter equal to or higher than the rating of the trigger, then they don’t need to make the stress check. (They’ve seen so much Violence, for example, that someone being punched in the face no longer has a psychological impact on them.)

Systems that harden you against tests can suffer from a “plateau effect” where you reach a certain level equivalent to whatever style of play you prefer and then stop rolling checks (see Katanas & Trenchcoats). This also happens in Unknown Armies, but it sidesteps the problem by having the five different meters: You can plateau in one, but the character will remain vulnerable in the other meters (and realistically can’t plateau in all of them because there are cumulative psychological consequences based on the total number of hardened notches the character has).

Unknown Armies also does something interesting with the reaction phase of the resolution: If the PC fails a stress check, they have to choose fight, flight, or freeze – in other words, is the character’s reaction to furiously attack the source of psychological stress, flee from it in a panic, or simply lock-up in indecision, terror, or a “deer-in-headlights” effect.

The cool thing about this mechanic is that, although the failed check constrains the available options, the player still remains in control of their character. Conversely, even succeeding on the check gives a roleplaying cue (because becoming psychologically hardened is meaningful) that the player can pick up and run with.

SANITY CHECKS FOR NPCs

Something which many games with sanity mechanics miss (and which, in my experience, many GMs ignore even in the games which do include support for it) is to also make sanity checks for the NPCs.

If you aren’t already doing this, it’s well worth exploring. It can really push the narrative in cool and unexpected directions.

It can also emphasize how dangerous and unusual the PCs’ lives are (and, therefore, how extraordinary and meaningful their actions are). It can also remind them why they need to be the ones to solve the problem and that it may be a very, very bad idea to call in people who aren’t prepared to deal with it.

On that note, remember that NPCs will generally only have a fraction of the screen time that the PCs do, and, therefore, will only have a fraction of the opportunities to make sanity checks. Don’t load ‘em all up with the default maximum Sanity ratings for starting PCs. Seed in a broad range of Sanity ratings, from those who are fairly robust (at least to begin with) to those who are already psychologically unsound.

A DIGRESSION ON MYTHOS MADNESS

So it turns out that there are aliens. And some of them have visited Earth. Maybe they’ve even been involved in genetically engineering human beings.

… why is this driving me insane again?

As Unknown Armies demonstrates, sanity mechanics are not ineluctably linked to the Mythos. But they did originate there, and so pervasive is the influence of Call of Cthulhu that any Mythos-based game seems almost incomplete without them. So this feels like an appropriate time for a brief digression on why Mythos-inspired madness exists.

Partly this is just cultural dissonance: At the time Lovecraft was writing, these things were not part of pop culture, so it was possible to believe that people would find their existence unsettling to their settled views of the way the world worked. The understanding of how insanity worked was also different in some key ways. And, of course, Lovecraft was a huge racist and had a plethora of mental issues himself, so there is some projection of his own preexisting mental infirmities into the mental state of his characters.

So, to a certain extent, it’s like wondering why women faint all the time in Victorian literature.

On the other hand, there’s a bit more to it in terms of the time when the “Stars Are Right,” which suggests a fundamental reordering of the laws of the physical universe. The creatures of the Mythos literally belong to a universe incompatible with the universe we think we live in. To put it another way: We live in a little tiny pocket of abnormality which uniquely makes it possible for human life and consciousness to exist and/or prosper. The idea that at some point the Earth will leave our zone of grace, the stars will right themselves, and our little epoch of abnormality will come to an end can be rather unsettling in a way that “there are aliens” isn’t.

But more than that: The creatures of the Mythos are a living connection to the way the universe is supposed to work… and the way the universe is supposed to work is inimical to humanity. At extreme levels it can be like trying to run COBOL programming through a C++ compiler. At lower levels it’s more like trying to run a program through a buggy emulator. It’s not just “that monster is kind of creepy,” it’s “that monster has connected my brain to a place where my brain doesn’t work right.” (This idea also works in reverse: Mythos creatures are operating in a semi-insane state within this period of abnormality. That’s why Cthulhu is lying in an induced coma below R’lyeh… he’s trying to minimize the damage.)

But even more than that: The damage being done to your mind is actually a direct result of the mind desperately trying to rewrite itself to cope with the true nature of reality. Mythos-induced insanity? That’s not the mind breaking. That’s the mind trying to fix itself. It just looks like insanity to us because we’re all broken.

Back to the Art of Rulings – NEXT: Traps

Go to Part 1

Here’s my random tip for using Idea rolls as a GM:

Don’t.

Let me start by explaining what I’m talking about: In Call of Cthulhu, an Idea roll “represents hunches and the ability to interpret the obvious.” In some of the older scenarios published for the game, this roll would actually be used to prevent players from having their characters take certain courses of action because the character wouldn’t know to do them — sort of aggressively preventing player expertise form trumping character expertise.

There are some obvious problems with that, too, but what I’m interested in right now is the far more common technique of using the Idea roll to tell players what they “should” be doing. For example, if the players are talking about how they can get an audience with a casino owner, the GM might call for an Idea roll and say, “You could disguise yourselves as high rollers.” Or when the PCs stumble onto a bloodstained altar in the center of a stone circle, the GM might call for an Idea roll and then say, “You could try putting that idol you found earlier on the altar!”

Even in games that lack a specific mechanic like this, you may see similar techniques improvised (usually with some form of Intelligence check).

GM-INITIATED IDEA ROLLS

The basic function of the Idea roll is essentially like using a walkthrough in a video game: You don’t know what to do, so you have to consult a guide that can get you past the point where you’re stuck. A GM-initiated Idea roll, though, is often more like having an obnoxious friend sitting with you who’s played the game before and simply WILL NOT shut up and let you play the game for yourself.

If you’re a GM prepping a scenario and you come to a place where you think an Idea roll will be necessary, that’s a really clear sign that you need to DO BETTER. Saying, “I need an Idea roll here,” is basically saying, “I have designed a scenario where the players are going to get stuck here.” Instead of prepping an Idea roll, figure out some way to redesign the scenario so that the players won’t get stuck there. (The Three Clue Rule will often help.)

What about run-time Idea rolls? In other words, you’re currently running the session, you can see that the players are irreparably stuck, and you need to fix the problem. Well, there are two possibilities:

First, they’re not actually stuck, in which case you don’t need to use an Idea roll.

Second, they ARE stuck and definitely need help to get unstuck. In which case, you shouldn’t be rolling the dice because failure is not actually an option: You need to give them information. Therefore you should not be rolling to see whether or not they get it.

PLAYER-INITIATED IDEA ROLLS

On the other side of the screen, a player-initiated Idea roll is generally more viable: This is basically the players sending up an emergency flare and saying, “We’re lost! Please send help!” To return to our analogy of the video game walkthrough, this is the player who has been stymied to the point where they’re no longer having fun and just want to be able to move on in the game.

In my experience, it should be noted, what such players are looking for is often not the solution; what they are looking for is an action. They feel stuck because they don’t know what they should be doing. A Matryoshka search technique, therefore, is often a great way to respond to this.

Something else to look for is the clue that they’ve overlooked. Not necessarily a clue they haven’t found, but one which they don’t realize is actually a clue, which they’ve radically misinterpreted, or which they’ve completely forgotten they have. For example:

• “You realize that patent leather can also be used for furniture, not just shoes.”
• “While S.O.S. could be a cry for help, couldn’t it also be someone’s initials?”
• “You suddenly remember that you still have Suzy’s diary in the pocket of your trench coat. Didn’t she mention something about the color purple, too?”

Trail of Cthulhu innovated a cool mechanic along these lines for its Cthulhu Mythos skill: You can use this skill to “put together the pieces and draw upon the terrible knowledge that you have been subconsciously suppressing, achieving a horrific epiphany. The Keeper provides you with the result of your intuition, sketching out the Mythos implications of the events you have uncovered.”

There are two important features to this mechanic: First, it doesn’t require a roll. (Again, if the players need help, then denying it to them on the basis of a dice roll doesn’t make sense.)

Second, it has a cost: The sudden insight into the terrible realities of the universe will cost you Stability and, quite possibly, Sanity. Importantly, this cost is NOT exacted “if the player deduces the horrible truth without actually using [the] Cthulhu Mythos ability.” The cost, in my experience, not only dissuades players from relying on the mechanic instead of their own ingenuity, it also enhances the sense of accomplishment they feel when they solve the mystery or gain the insight without using the mechanic.

The 7^th Edition of Call of Cthulhu has similarly modernized the Idea roll, using a fail forward technique where a failure still gets the PCs the necessary clue/course of action, but also results in some sort of negative consequence: Getting the clue might bring you to the attention of the bad guys; or you might waste weeks of time digging through a library before finally stumbling across the right reference; or, like Trail of Cthulhu, the insight might force a Sanity check.

Another cool technique it suggests, particularly in the case of failing forward, is to aggressively reframe the scene: Jump directly to the point where the PCs have followed the lead and gotten themselves into trouble as a result.

A final interesting variant here is to make the Idea roll concept diegetic instead of non-diegetic; i.e., to make it a decision the character makes instead of the player. In a fantasy setting, for example, the character might literally make a sacrifice to the Goddess of Knowledge in order to receive a divine vision.

GM DON’T LIST #10.1: TELLING PLAYERS THE PLAN

Like an aggressive Idea roll on steroids, some GMs will go so far as to just literally tell the players what their characters will be doing for the entire scenario.

For example, I was playing in a convention one-shot where we were street samurai who got hired to be ringers on a Blood Bowl team in order to rig a high-stakes game. This was a really cool premise, turning the usual expectations of the game on its head and giving us an opportunity to explore how the PCs’ heist-oriented abilities could be used in a completely novel environment.

Unfortunately, the session quickly went completely off the rails. Rather than letting the players make any meaningful decisions, the GM had pre-scripted every play of the game: We were reduced to simply rolling whatever skill had been scripted for us. (It didn’t help that the rolls themselves were essentially pointless since the outcome of every drive and most of the plays had ALSO been planned ahead of time.)

This was an extreme example of something closely related to GM Don’t List #7: Preempting Investigation, but I bring it up here mostly because I’ve seen several GMs who use Idea rolls to similar (albeit usually less absurd) ends. These game are characterized by the players making an endless stream of Idea rolls, with the GM constantly saying things like, “Pierre [your character] thinks he should come back and check out the Le Petit Pont after dark.” Or, “You could probably get a pretty good view from the top of Notre Dame. You’ll need to figure out some way to get up to the top of the towers.” Or even, as literally happened in one game, “Rebecca thinks she should stab the Archbishop in the chest.” (“No, really, she thinks this is really important.”)

Basically: Don’t do this. Present your players with problems, not solutions. Give them the space to mull over a situation and figure out what they want to do (or what they think they need to do) in response to that situation.

Go to Part 11: Description-on-Demand

Go to Part 1

NODE 3: ALICIA COREY’S BOARDING HOUSE

• A wooden, hand-painted sign declares as much on the sloped front lawn. An attached lower placard reads ROOM FOR RENT.
• Ma Kelley is a woman in her mid-50s. Widowed when her husband was killed in the war. She knows what the Girls know (below), and can also provide Alicia Corey’s rental application.
• Men are generally not allowed through the door at any hour; if they have official credentials, she won’t make a fuss about it, but it will nevertheless startle the girls.

Bedrooms: One of the second floor Chambers is occupied by Ma Kelley. The other four are furnished for rental. Three are occupied (including Alicia’s); the fourth is currently available for rent.

ALICIA COREY’S RENTAL APPLICATION

• She moved into Ma Kelley’s in July.
• Lists a forwarding address: 169 Page Street West, St. Paul, MN.  (Node 5: Fatima’s Shrine)

QUESTIONING THE GIRLS

• Betty, Grace
• They probably don’t’ know that Alicia is dead (unless it’s been a couple of days, in which case the cops have followed up).
• Alicia always paid her rent promptly in cash.
• She worked as a secretary, but they realize they don’t know for what firm.
• She never had any guests that they can recall, but she did keep strange hours from time to time. (Ma Kelley doesn’t have any sort of curfew, so this wasn’t considered a problem or anything.)
• She’d once mentioned during dinner that she had been in Cairo. The girls thought this was terribly exotic, but it didn’t seem as if Alicia wanted to talk about it. (Betty is convinced this means that she has a dark and mysterious past; probably featuring a lover who tragically died.)

ALICIA COREY’S ROOM

Furnished with care and love. A handmade quilt on the bed. (Features an arabesque design indicative of it being Egyptian in origin.)

Writing Desk: Everything is meticulously clean. Any written matter has been carefully destroyed.

Loose Floor Board: Under the bed. Alicia Khouri’s Diary is hidden inside.

ALICIA COREY’S BACKGROUND

Alicia’s real name is Alicia Khouri. She is of Egyptian descent.

Rashida Khouri, Alicia’s mother, is a Hu-manifestation of Ra and a Sister of Fatima. Alicia learned the teachings of the Sisterhood from her mother, but had not yet been indoctrinated into the inner mysteries of the coven. (She didn’t know that her mother was a Hu-manifestation of Ra.)

Gladys Roy had alerted the Sisterhood that there was Tanit activity in the Twin Cities. Alicia was sent to conduct an investigation. She had tracked the cult activity to kidnappings at Harriet Tubman’s Asylum for Colored Orphans (Node 4), but gotten no further in her investigation at the time of her death.

Investigators may suspect that Corey was directly targeted in response to her investigation, but this is not the case. Her exposure to the Tophet serum whiskey was coincidental.

ALICIA COREY’S DIARY

Flipping through this thin red volume – well-worn and weather-beaten despite containing pre-printed entries only for the year 1925 – reveals that the first half is completely blank and unused. In July of this year, however, entries in a fine and elegant script begin (mostly in a blue ink, although there are some scrabbled out in pencil and others in a black ink; all appear to be of the same hand, however).

At first glance, most of the entries appear to be concerned with sightseeing around the Twin Cities. But in aggregate an odd pattern appears: The sites she is notating as if they were tourist attractions generally… aren’t. They’re common businesses or even private residences. Mixed in among these curious entries you notice a recurring mention of the name Tanith, and also one reference to “a defacement of the eye of Ra”.

Over the past month, the entries become fixated around a single location: Harriet Tubman’s Asylum for Colored Orphans, located in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul. The exact nature of these notes is difficult to discern as they are partly written in some form of code, but they seem to catalog the comings and goings of numerous individuals, tracking their movements in some detail.

If Lost, Please Return Me to
169 Page Street West, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Go to Node 4: Harriet Tubman’s Asylum for Colored Children