Casting Shadows

This video Saturday Seed is being planted for Call of Cthulhu, in response to several mysterious craters being carved into the very depths of the earth around my quiet home.

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

The seed

The seed is built around the usual uncertainties arising from unknown agents with unknown motives doing seemingly innocuous things…but in all the wrong places. It rides on the creeping sickness that is suspicion left to fester in flesh with no coherent sustenance. To right-thinking men and women of the working world, what could be wrong with new development? What is a more healthy sign of human security and prosperity than new construction? Should we not sink our roots deep into the earth so that we can raise ourselves high into the sky?

Planting the seed

The seed can be planted most easily for a group with a static base of operations, with roots in the community. It may flow most smoothly for an experienced group of players, running inexperienced characters or troupes of characters of different generations.

Alternately, this could be of much larger scope in terms of area, and  so require a network of contacts, clipping agencies, and the like all providing tiny clues over long periods to ignite the initial suspicions. Likewise, the characters would need to be widespread or have convenient access to methods of travel.

The Details

What’s going on

In order to work, the seed will need to build slowly, and come into explicit play when the players draw connections from all the disparate items planted over the course of the campaign.

• neighborhood grumblings about developers leaning on property owners that do not want to sell
• properties chosen have at least a few rumors of strangeness or tragedy hidden away about them
• mapping the properties demonstrates a shape of significance in the campaign when linked together, such as a circle around a central point, or a line of properties which flow with the terrain like the ley lines occultists believe in.
• details around the construction sites seem extreme, such as the depth of the excavation for the foundations, or the security taken to shield the work from prying eyes
• no clear lines of ownership to the sites can be revealed, suggesting active obfuscation of these details, or that a conspiracy of overlapping organizations and goals which might not be apparent to anyone

This could be their opportunity to be proactive,  to learn what human and not so human faces their opponent wears in its ineffable pursuits across time and space, or to discover that others like them have the will to marshal resources and resistance in opposition to things which may not really be opposed.

Motivations could include one, some, or many different goals. Some that his might be are:

•  a true excavation seeking something or some things deep below the surface. Have they been found?
• an effort to tap into local ley lines (real or not) to enhance the power (real or not) of a secret society of occultists
• an effort to prevent something worse which looms in prophecy, but which is plagued by infiltration by darker beings
• nothing at all
• a site or sites of importance to a local cult who has now reached a level of resources which enable them to build a monument to their patron(s)
• a normal development project with a small group of investors behind it twisting aspects slightly to their own ends

Someone is tunneling down into the depths for good or ill. This seed is all about the fear, and weakness which must be overcome in the pursuit of the facts behind that tunneling. Is it crippling, or the first step toward the heroic?

Enjoy~