Casting Shadows

This week’s seed is for Leagues of Adventure by Triple Ace Games.  With a little tweaking it could be set to connect to and run in a variety of different places on Earth either in the Steampulp Victorian age of Leagues, or in the Heroic Pulp era of Exile Game Studio’s Hollow Earth Expedition.

My Saturday Seeds also reappear on Ancient Scroll on random Saturdays~

The seed

The seed uncovers a murder most foul, but leaves huge questions of when it happened, and to whom. A mummy (Egyptian or otherwise) has been put on temporary display from a private collection hosted by a wealthy League. It will soon make its way to the Royal Museum, where it will languish unseen, until space is made available for it – if ever. The murder victim is the mummy, but what exactly does that mean?

Planting the seed

The seed can be planted in a number of ways, either directly or indirectly involving the characters with the focal point of the mystery. They can become embroiled in events by virtue of membership in a league such as the Society of Antiquarians (LoA, p62), or membership in a league with a competing interest in this case, such as the Osiris Club.

More direct means of involvement entail the characters themselves being the ones who uncovered the mummy and brought it to London, the ones who discovered the signs of murder, or if you are feeling particularly daring, the ones who committed the murder.

The Details

During the hours leading up to an exclusive VIP showing of the mummy before the display is opened to the upper crust guests of members selected for the privilege, blood begins to seep from the wrappings.

The mummy has a disturbing aspect already, as its wrappings seem more like bindings than bandages, and the body is marked from head to foot with warning sigils denoting the person within was perhaps not finished with living when introduced to the afterlife and may have designs on coming back. The tale of its discovery, recovery, and relocation is filled with accident, misadventure, violence, strange cults, and bad dreams. Some parts of these anecdotes are even true – although it would be hard to pin down just which parts those are.

When the mummy begins to bleed, fast action is called for. Should it be covered up? Should it be sensationalized? Should it be unwrapped? What can be said to the guests who are already making their way to the venue now, expecting and deserving to be entertained with this little brush with death?

Should the decision be made to unwrap the mummy, it will soon be found that while dead, the body within is only recently so. Still warm, and with signs of a heart beat having flushed out a good volume of the bothersome blood before it could beat no more, the body was alive less than an hour before the discovery of the bleeding.

Fully unwrapped, the body of a hermaphrodite will be exposed, bearing fiercely ragged knife wounds in the torso – front and back – with defensive wounds on the hands and lower arms. Someone stabbed this person to death. The teeth show signs of never having received the care of even the most primitive dentist, and the body is bronzed as though having lived a life wearing little and living under the sun. The corpse just does not feel British.

What’s going on

If this body has only recently been murdered, who had time to wrap it and put it here? Where is the original mummy? What is the reason for all of this, and who is behind it?

These questions and more need to be raised, and the pressure of time and the fear of discovery can never be far from anyone’s mind. Scandal that one does not shape and control is suicide. Paranoia, and long lists of grudges will surface soon in the minds of fellow members, and plots of revenge will be started before anyone even knows the target, or the way out of this pickle.

A few might suggest, in quiet voices, that the warding sigils are truth, that the mummy is ever-living, and seeks to rise, but its great wounds prevent it. Life returns to its corpse over and over again, but the cuts – perhaps also mystical in nature – cannot be closed, and so it dies the same death again and again.

Even fewer might suggest, that now that the warding sigils have been removed, that the body might actually be able to heal and rise…

What is the truth? Only play can reveal that.

Perhaps the characters secretly battled the risen mummy only to be foiled in their plans to keep that secret by the intrusion of an extra pair of eyes and drops of blood. Perhaps the mummy is actually trapped and cursed in an endless cycle of rebirth and murder which the characters have just broken by unwrapping it. Perhaps someone else has committed a murder and tried to hide the body here, where it points at the league and perhaps with some well-placed comments, at the characters.

Enjoy~