Casting Shadows

In August of 2023, friends and I started what could be described as an open-ended sandbox campaign with an intention for me to facilitate as immersive an environment as possible within the limitations of playing for short sessions online without props or special effects of any kind – just our capacity to pay attention to each other and the imagined moments of play. This came to include the additional detail of playing with relative strangers as the number of investigators in the campaign increased.

Playing with Intention and Intentional Ambiguity

In my terms, as I have come to understand roleplaying games, Immersion and its partner Engagement are the expected result of sustained and focused attention. When we attend to something to the exclusion of many, most, or all other considerations, that feeling is what the hobby has put the incomplete lable of immersion on. In this campaign, wherever possible, I as the Keeper endeavor to faciliate opportunities to immerse in character, meaning the barriers to playing in-character (IC), as that character (AC) are reduced as much as the format of play as a video conference will allow. We define the large category (stance) of IC play as decision-making in sync with the imagined setting, using information known only to the character. From this stance, it is hoped that the players will be able to direct their attention through the perspective of the character, and we call focusing on that vector of attention As Character play. So, ideally, this campaign allows for In-Character As-Character play (IC:AC).

However, as this campaign is not just an exploration of the Call of Cthulhu rules for its players, it is also an introduction of those players to each other, as most of us have not played together before. Contrary to the prescriptive advice to have a Session 0 and obtain what is mistakenly seen as consent to do things from the players, but what is actually establishing a consensus among the players (which includes the GM) about what interests them, this campaign is being run without much discussion in advance at all. Those who are invited to play can be expected to be compatible with those who are already playing, and have demonstrated an introspective mind about play and an interest in this campaign. As we play together, we learn more and more about each other as players and people. In the future, this will either create a very useful perspective from which to run an effective Session 0 or obviate the need for one altogether. Regardless, in this case, with new players joining at varying points, coming and going, playing solo, playing in groups, forming and reforming new groups, crossing over briefly with others, and so on, the standard one-size-fits-all-advice is “revealed” to need tweaking for the obvious specifics of this (and all) specific games. Does anyone run generic games in a generic way with generic people?

Anyway, without formal goal setting for a precise approach to play, there is no expectation that all or even any of the players will avail themselves of the opportunity to play IC:AC. What remains is an opportunity to explore variations in IC play and see how those are presented in the moment and explore how they interact with and affect the other players. As the campaign is on its way toward completing a second year, we can at least assume a certain amount of success in player selection. Working within the understanding that I can expect different vectors to grab the attention of some or all of its players a certain amount of the time according to what that suits them, be that IC:AC, IC:AA (as author), or IC:AP (as player) or something else (like OoC:AC) keeps me deeply engaged as the Keeper trying to facilitate that IC:AC opportunity while still serving the other vectors which manifest in the players intentionally or habitually. If that is working out for the players, then perhaps we can assume a certain amount of success in GM selection, too.

Which Call of Cthulhu is this?

This campaign was started using Call of Cthulhu 6^th edition as that was the version owned by the player who started as the first investigator. We have stuck with that edition throughout until this past August when the most recent branch to be started was launched using the 2^nd edition rules. Chaosium has re-branded this product as Cthulhu Classic, and the players in that branch and I quite enjoyed getting it out of the shrink wrap and onto the table. Amusingly for me, this use of an alternate edition requires no conversion of the characters or other beings as it falls within the range of the 6 fully-compatible editions. There are minor procedural differences such as the distribution of points in character creation, which are discussed with the players and the option to use either the procedure from 6th Edition or 2nd Edition is available to them. So far, we have stuck with 2nd Edition for that branch. The first 6 editions really are fully-compatible.

Cthulhu Classic is available from Chaosium in basic and expanded boxes or as PDFs. The difference in the expanded set is that it comes with additional adventures contemporary with the second edition – really cool stuff. If you are curious about trying pre-7^th edition Call of Cthulhu, that might the best way to get into it. One caveat I will make is that the text from the originals was scanned via OCR and the editorial and proofing passes before production missed some recognition errors – such as garbling fractions. This is not a lot of errors, but it can be mildly annoying if you are unfamiliar with the system.

The Investigators

Anyway, the campaign has grown from one investigation with a single investigator to five independent investigations (or branches) and nine investigators, so far. In order of appearance, those characters are Terrence McSweeney, a cub reporter for the Boston Globe, Callum McInnes, a true crime photographer specializing in mob hits, Alfred Smalls, an antiques dealer, Alex Thornton, an agent for the Prohibition Bureau, Jimmy Calloway, a hitman for the dominant mob in Boston, and Dr. Edward Call Junior, a newly-minted psychologist wrestling with his own problems. There is one which you will meet, but who will not be named just yet, and two more who we won’t cover in this enormous recap, so as not to confuse you with their details just yet – but look for them in the recaps to come. Once we get clearance from MID…

The Actual Play Sessions on YouTube

At the time of writing, there are 33 sessions currently available for viewing on the channel. Each has a runtime of around 90 minutes, not including the post-session discussions which can run for as much as an additional 30 minutes.  These sessions are all drawn from the first 4 branches of the campaign, but we will be in a position to release some from the 5^th branch relatively soon. This number of 33 sessions is roughly half of the sessions recorded to date.

The Sessions are organized into one master playlist and, as noted above, playlists for the five branches. These are The Reporters’ Branch, The Agent’s Branch, The Doctor’s Branch, The Gangster’s Branch, and the not-yet-available Soldiers’ Branch. The invididual videos are named by Session number which indicates their sequence in release order on the channel and are color-coded to the five specific branches of the campaign. Release order on the channel roughly lines up with play order at some points, but varies widely in others. This recap takes us up to Session 25 – for the most part. It details the events up to Session 13 for the Reporters’ Branch, Session 21 for the Agent’s Branch, and to Session 25 which matches up with a similar point in time for the Gangster’s branch as these other two stopping points. It covers some of the events of the Doctor’s Branch, but as many of the events in that branch have taken place outside the boundaries of time covered in this recap – it will mainly be hinted at. The fifth branch has its starting point in December of 1931, so we will get to it in a later recap.

Each session has been annotated, which is of course normal practice for me, but as the campaign progresses the annotations shift focus through different topics and explore different ideas. The earlier videos have a focus on the basic procedures required to facilitate the opportunity for In-Character As-Character play with some rules notes. This patterns develops into deeper notes on the rules, specifics of rulings for certain moments of play. Later in the campaign, the annotations begin to ask the viewer questions about what they are seeing, what the players are doing, and other points of interest for those who think about the nature of RPGs and the effects of how play them.

In addition to the annotations, as the campaign has progressed, more and more time has been devoted to editing the videos for the benefit of the viewer, starting with tailored themes for each branch, adding in visuals, props, historical cues, hints not given to the players, sound effects, and finally special effects. It’s not much, but we hope you enjoy them.

Wasn’t this supposed to be a recap?

Ok, let’s get into the recap itself now that we have already exceeded the length of a typical blog post sharing context.

Unlike the YouTube playlist which usually but not always prioritizes the order in which the sessions were played, in this recap I will basically present a chronological telling of events from play. Three of the five branches have covered about a month of time in our imagined Massachusetts, moving from varied starting points in the early days of November 1931 to roughly the middle of December. Other dates have factored into the campaign from these and mainly the other two branches, both before and after these points, but we will address some of those outliers when they come up. Some of them are way out there~

The framing device for this recap will be to limit it to the range of dates that contain the events of the first two completed investigations and take us through roughly half the currently watchable videos on the channel and a little more than a week of in-game time – sort of. That period of time has been chosen as it was at these points that we discussed Experience Checks and performed Experience Rolls for the characters. In this open-ended sandbox format the notion of an investigation with a clear start and end doesn’t match play, so we have to go by feel.

The Recap

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1931

As the campaign opened, a wealthy socialite and member of Boston’s elite, one Albert Gavigan, disappeared in an entirely inexplicable way from the office of a carefully notorious PI and ex-golden glove champ who now styles himself as a Confidential Investigator in tight with the mob and the upper crust. The truth is much less glamorous, of course.

One of the reasons for the distortion of that truth is the work of cub reporter, Terrence McSweeney, the first PC investigator in the campaign. The PI and the reporter are old friends from their school days, and both are struggling to keep their heads above an ocean of debt as the Depression deepens. McSweeney was on his way to the PI’s office under orders from his editor at the Boston Globe, to get a quote from the reclusive Gavigan concerning the biggest current rumor fit to print – the recent theft of several priceless books reportedly valued at several thousand dollars which had been donated by the socialite to a local auction house.

McSweeney would not get there in time. Something kept him on the street long enough to get cold and anxious, long enough for those few people who work on the street to leave the area, and long enough to miss the abduction. Perhaps it was good luck. One such delay was a hungry street dog, an English Setter. Another was the haunting lure of a distant song from a hidden speak-easy down the street that came and went in an unexpected flash of light.

That flash of light, as yet unexplained to any who saw it, was felt more than seen by a young doctor of psychiatry, who recently returned to Boston from the UK and is our 5^th Investigator, Dr. Edward Call, junior. Not yet active in his field, the troubled young man was living off of his strained trust fund and spending most of it and all of his time investigating the inside of booze bottles.  Not even a block from McSweeney, reeling with alcohol poisoning, Dr. Call Jr found himself unable to reliably exit the door of the speakeasy he was in and reach the street outside let alone stay in the same year.  His ears drinking in a compelling melody and a sultry voice telling the cruel tale of Strange Fruit, the realization of madness or an impossible translation to another time was conveyed to him by a torn poster and scattered newspapers around him proclaiming the year to be 1939. Before he could even begin to grasp the implications of that he began to tumble in and out of times and places within and beyond his ken – but more often than not – returning to a particular place and time on the floor of the gin joint he regularly haunts before being set adrift again.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1931

Creeped out, at the other end of that same street, McSweeney ignored the haunting melody, turned his back on the dog that was urging him to run off, eyes watering from the seen but yet unseen flash of light, and had to pick a lock to the outside door of the PI’s building which he expected to be unlocked before he could make his way upstairs to the office. There, he found his old friend unconscious and bleeding from a head wound. His quick search turned up the cover of a large medieval-looking book with its pages torn out, most of a man’s finger caught up in the metal buckle of one of the book’s leather straps, and the tip of an expensive shoe protruding from the plaster of the wall as though it had been put there by the plasterer.

Over the course of rousing his friend and looking around, he discovered that the pages of the book were more than just pages, and that he might be onto a story that could make his career – if anyone would believe it. The PI, obviously concussed, could not remember how or when Gavigan had disappeared, nor had he ever seen the shoe in the wall before. McSweeney decided to call in a photographer, our second PC Investigator, to help ensure the story would be believed. The photographer, a true crime specialist named Callum McInnes, wasted no time getting there and getting involved. The investigation would reveal that the shoe had a foot and other viscera in it on the other side of the wall. That wall ran between the PI’s shabby two-room space and what was ostensibly a surveyor’s office, but was really a mob surgery run by a disgraced doctor and former social mover named Edward Call – a man the underworld referred to as ‘the Consultant.’ That man’s estranged son was just then drifting forward and back in both time and space across Boston, unsure if he should go to the hospital to get his stomach pumped or sleep it off at home. His efforts to go anywhere were continually stymied by how unmoored he was from both clock and calendar.

Having completed their photographs and notes from the scene, the cub reporter, the crime scene photographer, and the woozy confidential investigator decided to make a play for the books. With the cover of one in their possession, they felt that they could identify the others which were said to be identical. Worrying them, however, was the PI’s report that Gavigan was desperate to see them all destroyed and that it was the O’Shaughnessy mob which had the books. Upset by the carnage in the office and needing to get the PI to the hospital, the three chose to head to the waterfront to take a look at a mob-run warehouse that they knew the big O’Shaughnessy gangsters, like Mickey the Fist and his boy Rory, used as a base of operations. Caught up in the excitement, they decided to visit the hospital second…

What they discovered on the docks, however, was that rumors that the whole district was under new management were right. The name Morgan was proudly painted across the front of the warehouse and two new guards were in place by the door. These two guards rebuffed them with an effort to use an elevated vocabulary, and sent them on their way.

Of course, with the PI passing out in the backseat of the car and the book cover rapidly re-growing pages in a way that McSweeney and McInnes seemed to be able to hear inside their heads, the two mercenary journalists decided to sneak around to the water side of the warehouse to try to force an entry there. Whatever was going on with this story, it was too big to just sit on.

They were caught, prevented from escaping by burly guards, and somehow rendered unconscious by the cheerful suggestion of a man with a strangely tattooed face to “sleep.”

Meanwhile, in the launch of our second branch earlier on that very night, our 4^th Investigator, Alex Thornton, found himself deep in conversation with a soon-to-be-brutally-murdered acquaintance about some shady book-keeping going on and some eye-witness testimony about the theft of those valuable books put up for auction by the now-secretly-missing-for-a-whole-week Albert Gavigan. Through kindness, and an offer of a chance for a better job working for his family’s respected accounting firm, Thornton persuaded his acquaintance to spill the beans on the O’Shaughnessy mob having roughed him up to ensure his silence about the robbery while also wanting to know everything he knew about Mickey the Fist’s involvement. He got him to talk about how the numbers of books reported stolen didn’t match up with what was on the invoices, and how a guard was brutally beaten and left for dead during the robbery – that guard still struggling for life in a body cast in the hospital. Thornton also persuaded his acquaintance to walk him through how the auction house was running two sets of books to help cover up kickbacks to some of its wealthy patrons. Better yet, the man, Steve Alwell, had made his own copies of the duplicate ledgers and turned them over to the Agent.

Sadly, Alwell didn’t live long enough to call in the favor and get that cushy job.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1931

When the reporters awoke from their mysterious slumber not long before dawn, they found themselves nude and ritually scarred, spread-eagled on the floor in ritual circles, near two corpses in ritual circles of their own. Those corpses, decided not to take death lying down and moved painfully and hungrily to feed on the pair of “truth seekers.” The “truth seekers” fled, stopping only long enough to grab their clothes and do an end run around another man with a tattooed face who entered the building as they were making haste to the exit – McSweeney snatching a letter from him as they passed. The letter, they would later learn when they opened and read it, marked them as the possessions of their captor, signed as X, and hinted strongly at some form of prescience as he already knew where and with whom they would read it.

After dumping the PI at the hospital, they took the still re-filling book to the antiques shop of our third PC investigator, Alfred Smalls, still before dawn, both to hide out and to see what he could make of the Latin writing in the bizarre book.

Soothed with food, coffee, and medicinal whisky, but plagued with the constant gnawing paper sound of the book regrowing its pages and a different sound of something heavy being dragged – sounds that they knew were not audible in the room around them, the pair were interrogated thoroughly by Smalls before he turned his probing mind to examining the book. Before he could make much more progress than confirming the title and authorship of the book, that it was called Mysteries of the Worm and was a record of the search for immortality by a crusader turned sorcerer by the name of Ludwig Prinn as recorded by a scribe named Johannes, the phone in the store below the apartment rang. It was a demand from the mob consultant, Edward Call – Senior, for their presence back at the PI’s office. It turned out that some of the mob’s boys, such as pretty boy Rory O’Shaughnessy, spotted the PI in the hospital and had some pointed questions for him – like, “Who else knows about Gavigan and the books?”

When those mobsters spotted the suffering PI and liberated him from the tender care of nurses and his no-nonsense doctor, they were actually searching for an aging hitman by the name of Jimmy Calloway – our 6^th investigator. Their boss, the big boss of the entire O’Shaughnessy mob and the real power in Boston, wanted to see Jimmy. Jimmy, suffering from leukemia and desiring nothing more than a quiet retirement, had been keeping to himself. The Boss was not happy about that. Rory O’Shaughnessy, using his charm, his personal ties to Jimmy, and their old bonds of loyalty and friendship, persuaded the dying man to go with him to the mob’s walled estate overlooking the ocean. On the drive, Rory talked about all sorts of nonsense like his father being missing, gang wars, and miraculous blind-to-see and lame-to-walk faith healings. Jimmy did his best to set him straight. When they arrived, the young, up-and-coming gangster dropped off the old, retired hitman, making plans to talk later in the coming day.

Once inside and alone with the Boss, stepping over the corpse on the way in of the former associate Rory had tried to explain had recovered lost body parts from a faith healer, Jimmy was once again hit with his old Boss and old friend’s request that he retire there at the estate, under the watchful eye and protection of the man he had spent the better part of his own life protecting. He also, however, was forced to learn all at once and in a hail of bullets, that the dead do not always remain dead, and that though near death himself, his first thought when faced with the vicious attack of a resurrected and seemingly unkillable Lou Malone, was to protect the Boss.

The young sharks in nice suits with big guns and the bigger bull bodyguards in better suits, mute and muscle-bound, who guard the Boss day and night dealt with the revivified and vengeful corpse of Lou Malone. Jimmy and the Boss kept focused on their conversation as the offer for a haven to retire in was agreed to, but Jimmy decided for himself to take one last job. Old Lou Malone, former smuggler and made man in this very mob, found his ravenous inhuman hunger chained and locked up inside a metal box kept for things like surreptitious drownings in the coal cellar.

Near Fenway Park, with the sun rising behind thick and wrathful winter clouds, using what little time that remained before the Consultant’s carload of gangsters came to pick them up, Smalls lumbered heavily across the street to a bakery he loved with a sweet woman at the counter whom he cherished, and asked her to hide the book for him. She agreed. Why wouldn’t she?

The gangsters, of course, were well-known to McInnes, the crime reporter, but that didn’t make the ride back downtown from the quiet safety of the Fenway end of Newbury Street any more pleasant – though it did seem to ease the intensity of the interview they had with the former Doctor, Edward Call. Like everyone else, Call wanted the books, but like Gavigan, he feared the books and the evil they could do, and he did many things to try to recruit them to this pursuit before letting them go. Call spoke as though he thoroughly believed that magic is real and that anyone who disbelieved was fooling themselves. He still proudly wore the signet ring of the occult society whose downfall in the 20s caused his disgrace – the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight. Smalls vowed to research that organization if given the chance.

The hot tempered Rory O’Shaughnessy went out with them. Rory was the next line in the public eye behind his father, the showboating mob lieutenant, Mickey the Fist. He had been upset and ill-tempered throughout this whole abduction and interview. Those around him knew it was because his father was missing. Some of them probably felt that he might be nervous he’d have to step up. Being that close to the Boss is no easy thing. No one wondered if he were responsible for the disappearance.

Rory took McInnes aside and pressed something into his hand with an apology before heading off to meet our 6^th investigator, Jimmy Calloway, the hitman. It was a small medallion like a St. Christopher’s medal, seemingly silver, but also mottled like damascus steel. It was blank on one side, and it bore an etched symbol of a stylized branch with one broken frond on the other. McInnes pocketed the medallion. The PI was required to stay with Call for the tending of his injury, and what could be assumed to be more interrogation.

Going straight to the bakery to pick up the book, which they had of course denied to the Consultant that they had, Smalls found that his warm relationship with the baker had suddenly cooled. She had looked inside the book and was deeply troubled by it. She informed him that he was not to return to her shop again. Hurt by this, Smalls took the now-complete book, and returned to his bachelor rooms over his small shop without his scruffy and exhausted companions. Something about the book… spoke to him. He wanted to spend time with it.

Callum McInnes, the crime reporter, took his leave of McSweeney and Smalls ostensibly to do some digging on his own. In truth, he was making secret preparations in his chilly one-room loft studio to flee the city.  To date, he has neither been seen nor heard from again.

McSweeney went to the Boston Globe to check out Call, the Gavigans, and the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight, with the aid of a diminutive friend with a large personality who oversees the vast records of the paper’s morgue.

The Antique Dealer, Alfred Smalls, on the other hand, experimented briefly with the book and fire before its peculiar and vindictive nature drove him out into the cold to visit the Boston Public Library to research the author of the obviously unnatural book. His experiments had determined it would not burn and could defend itself from harm in addition to its other strange properties of drinking blood and regrowing torn pages. The author of such a book was too compelling a mystery to ignore. He figured if he had time, he would also research the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight. He learned enough about both to be both worried and intrigued. McSweeney was likewise left with more questions from his answers. By merest luck plus geographical proximity and the coincidental selection of the same cuisine, Smalls, McSweeney plus his fragile contact from the paper, and a mobster set by Dr. Call Senior to guard Smalls, wound up at the same spot for an early dinner. Outside a family restaurant owned by Agent Thornton’s aunt and uncle, it was the young gangster who first spotted the vicious gangster Mickey the Fist, for whom the mob and the authorities had been looking for over a week. The self-important gangster – looking decades younger than the withered corpse McSweeney and Callum had seen in the warehouse ritual circles, erupted into violence right away – directed at McSweeney. Undaunted, though battered, the investigators rejoiced at driving the seemingly rejuvenated gangster off, but viewers of that session noticed that something they said to the brutal thug might have caused him to quit the field to pursue another prize.

While McInnes was packing and swearing up a storm, McSweeney was cracking jokes in the morgue of the Globe, and Smalls was learning that magic was real, Agent Thornton dumped the auction house ledgers on some accounting contacts working for his wealthy and estranged father to figure out, then headed into the Bureau.  There, he was tasked to investigate the recent shift in territory from the powerful O’Shaughnessy mob to what his boss, a WW1 vet named Bill Ranier, called the Morgan Outfit. Thornton acted quickly, and dressing down to look like an out-of-work laborer, drifted about the docks for most of the day to gather intelligence. What he learned confused him, as the dock and neighboring areas seemed to be free of the more obvious criminal activity conducted by the O’Shaughnessy smuggling operations which used to run out of that district, and everything was somehow being rebuilt or renovated. Taking a risk, he began actively seeking work and before long found himself taken by a kind young man for an interview with a Mr. Morgan in a recently-painted warehouse with a new sign that bore that same name.

During that interview Thornton learned that Morgan, Xavier Morgan, a suave man with a nice suit and a strangely tattooed face, knew all about him and claimed to have been waiting there to speak with him that day. He hoped that they could work together. During this interview, another man, obviously blind and also bearing tattoos on his face, sat in silence watching everything. Those watching the events of both branches on YouTube would recognize this man as the one who passed McSweeney the strange letter from X.

X, or Xavier Morgan, invited Thornton to imagine how working together might lead to a life of satisfaction before the agent went back to the office to report in. While there, he found a tarot card sitting on his blotter. It was the Knight of Swords. Not being familiar with tarot cards and at first assuming it was some sort of joke by his boss or fellow agents, Thornton was disturbed to learn that it had been delivered while he was talking with Morgan and somehow it had a face that was identical to his own.

After work, alone, he noticed more and more strangeness about the card and began to wonder if something might be wrong with him. Before he had much chance to confront those feelings, he found himself having a bizarre conversation with a huge police officer in his driveway. The man, not troubling himself with breathing in the cold night air, was an Officer John Malone, known as “Honest John” to his friends in the old neighborhood. His unnatural nature in combination with his disturbing message – from Morgan – left Thornton even more troubled. With nothing but a cold and empty house to look forward to at the end of his day, the Dry Agent instead visited his old psychology professor from Harvard. While explaining the weird events of the day, the image of the knight from the tarot card slipped under his skin, leaving the card mostly blank. Unable to verify or resolve this inexplicable event for Thornton, the professor promised to reach out to some colleagues who deal with more esoteric subjects than he normally handles. These colleagues, it would turn out later, were the famous Arkham Men – or some of them – who handled some sort of terrible disturbance in the town of Dunwich some years earlier. The professor was very worried about his former student, and the obvious stress he was under. Knowing the young man had few if any people to turn to in time of need, he willingly opened his home as a place of shelter.

Another person feeling concern for a young person was hitman Jimmy Calloway. He was deeply concerned for Mickey the Fist’s son Rory O-Shaughnessy. While waiting for the designated time of their appointment, Jimmy set about closing out his affairs and cleaning out his apartment in preparation for moving into the Mob’s sprawling manor house. He began asking questions about all the changes in the underworld, and finally taking note of the more political forces shaking up the poor neighborhoods. A group making major headway in getting the people’s attention called itself People and Future, and they not only promised food, training, and work, they promised – and by all reports delivered – healing. Faith Healing. Troubled, and tempted, he went to his meeting with Rory. Talking with the younger gangster, Jimmy grew more disturbed. As Wednesday passed into Thursday, things would get worse.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1931

An event that touched the lives of all the investigators including those in the as yet unreleased sessions of the soldiers’ branch, was what the papers called the Mob Massacre. As Thursday unfurled across Boston, rumors were already spreading through the underworld. By the time the papers’ lurid picture and bold headlines told the rest of the city, the secret was already out. The muscle of the O’Shaughnessy Mob had been wiped out – brutally and inexplicably – in a display of ferocity unmatched by anything reported from gangland since Prohibition began. What did it mean? Who was responsible? How did they do it? How did they do it and get away with it?

All questions with no answers.

The Reporters branch was tied closely to the massacre by having been in the office where it took place scant hours before it happened, were the first to discover it not long after it happened, and through McSweeney’s ties to the PI whom they plucked from the carnage before tipping off the Globe and fleeing the scene. The PI’s terrified whispers that whatever had done the massacring could not be seen urged speed in their journey home – though not before McSweeney stole a silver signet ring from the remains of one Dr. Edward Call.

The Gangster’s branch was tied to it, of course, as it was a direct attack on the Mob – wiping out all of their soldiers in one sickening display of power and bloodshed. Jimmy heard about it around the same time on Wednesday night that McSweeney was calling it into the Globe before beating a hasty retreat from the scene. Jimmy and the Boss of the O’Shaughnessy mob could see the writing on the wall. Their ability to reclaim the docks, their ability to wipe out the Morgan Outfit, their ability to survive against all the other gangs in Boston was now in doubt – unless – they could act boldly and decisively. At this low point, his health failing, his skills in decline, so many problems were happening all at once. The public face and media darling of the O’Shaughnessy Mob, Mickey the Fist, was missing with wild rumors circulating about him. His handsome boy Rory – his heir apparent –  was panicking and making mistakes. Among the most recent of these was giving some Crime Reporter one of two medallions from Dr. Call that were important to the Boss and somehow necessary for dealing with the still revivifying corpse of Old Lou Malone. Because only one medallion had been delivered, the sometimes dead former man had made good his escape. When would he strike again? And now this: the bulk of their muscle suddenly wiped out in one night in some fashion that defied explanation. That wasn’t the end of the hits for Jimmy, though. That night he also came face to face with an ambitious hitman looking to eclipse his legend. Would he be denied the peaceful retirement he wanted? Did he deserve it anyway? Through it all, the temptation of the People and Future meetings nagged at him. Could they heal him? Would that be enough?

In a similar fashion, the Agent was tied to the massacre as well because the men in shreds in the Mob Consultant’s office next door to the PI’s office of Confidential Investigations were his stock in trade. He had detailed files. Some of the investigating would fall to him and his colleagues in the Prohibition Bureau. When he turned up at the crime scene on Thursday morning, the police department, including the officer he had met at his doorstep the night before who considered breathing to be optional, were out in force. Thornton was introduced to Detective Lieutenant Gabriel Washburn and the two began an uneasy alliance as the Agent offered the harried Detective the resources of the Prohibition Bureau to help lift some of the burden from him. Little did either man know that Thornton would be calling in that favor just a few hours later – long before the blood-spattered medical records from Call’s abbatoire of an office could be delivered to the Bureau.

The Doctor’s branch was affected by the mob massacre, in an emotional way, but also in the most tangential way. Emotional in that Dr. Call senior, now deceased and in too many pieces, was of course, the disgraced father of our young and alcoholic Dr. Call junior, and tangential in that the mob now dismantled by violence was in the business of supplying the speakeasies and distributors which keep him in drink. However, it also meant that sooner or later, the police would come knocking on his door… His door in November of 1931… where he cannot reliably seem to stay.

The Soldier’s Branch? Well, I cannot speak in too much detail about that, yet, but the development of the transfer of MID to the South Boston Army Base, the events on the docks, and the mysteries in Chinatown – conditions which directly lead to the pending assignment of the soldiers, to the ongoing disappearances, to the increase in sightings of ghosts, and to the higher rate of membership in the political group People and Future, all arise directly from the events of the massacre in deadly measure.

So, what happened next? Things accelerate a little bit or a lot depending on which branch of the investigation we consider, and for the doctor, they get really weird, so let’s talk about him in the next recap.

McSweeney and Smalls, now in possession of some understanding of the strange book they hold, decided to follow up on some leads, but could not agree on what to follow up on first. When they reached Newbury Street after ensuring the PI was sent to the hospital for treatment under the protection of their blue-eyed guardian gangster, they discovered that a second massacre had taken place. It would wind up buried deeper in the papers over the weeks as stories on the Mob Massacre fought for the front pages and turned from jubilation at the violent comeuppance the Mob had received to jeering criticism of the police force failing to bring the perpetrators to justice. In that moment and continuing afterward, however, it was a personal pain that Smalls carried with him. The baker from whom he had asked the sudden favor of keeping the book safe, and who had shunned him for it in the end, had murdered her family while he was off in the lion’s den. He would eventually come to learn that this was due mainly to the vile things bound into the book, but there was no forgetting that he put it in her hands. That sin, was his to bear and his to try to balance out.

Eventually, with a few more details added to their list of discoveries, not the least of which was a secret journal written in code hidden within a desk Smalls had purchased from a state auction of items seized after the fire at the Scott Farm where the now infamous but once celebrated Hermetic Order of Silver Twilight had had its scandalous showdown with the police several years ago, the two decided that the next day they would investigate the ruined farm to search for signs of missing persons, stashed books, or more journals which might shed light on what was going on.

While this was going on, Agent Thornton was breaking in a new partner, Kyle Winchester, and looking at the corpse of his little friend, Steve Alwell, in the man’s dingy basement room. His heart had been smoothly removed from his chest. Under his body was a tiny stone statuette in the form of a kneeling featureless figure with its arms crossed across its chest. His preliminary search and talk with witnesses led him to a single set of footprints besides his own through the snow to the doorway and the idea that one of Mickey the Fist’s many kids… or more disturbingly the Fist himself, had been here and committed the murder.

Knowing what was right, but not who to trust in the very corrupt Boston Police Department, Thornton contacted Detective Washburn, who, exhausted from the grim labor of the night before and the day now ending, showed up and agreed to take the case.

The two exchanged notes using the obviously unnatural crime before them to ease the sharing of impossible ideas and uncomfortable admissions – such as that not all of the men of the police department breathe, and that Washburn had found an identical statuette among the remains of the Mob Massacre.

Jimmy kept busy. There was so much he needed to catch up on and he wanted to keep an eye on Rory. Whatever was going on with Mickey, the docks, these strange books he was supposed to have stolen, and this People and Future group, the young mob lieutenant was important to the survival of the mob. He pushed the distraught gangster to focus, and set him to track down the photographer, Callum McInnes, to get the medallion back. Jimmy would look for Mickey. In addition to checking more on People and Future’s rhetoric, he checked on Mickey’s homes, and broke into the auction house after dark with Rory as his getaway driver. Everywhere he went he was left with more questions than answers. Someone was renovating the auction house, covering up signs of obvious and extreme violence – and lying about it. Not even Mickey’s mistresses knew where he was and no one, including them, had seen him for over a week. The man couldn’t stay out of the public eye for a day let alone a week! And Rory? He wasn’t handling the pressure well at all. Jimmy sent him off again with a stern lecture to deal with the photographer.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1931

The investigation of the Scott Farm by Smalls and McSweeney, aided by a well-informed cabbie, confirmed much that they had learned about the Order, about the Call and Gavigan families, and the horrible things which had happened and which finally ended in fire and bloodshed when the police raided the farm looking for missing people years ago. They also found hints of another figure in the upper echelons of the Order – one Carl Stanford. Spurred on by information from the cab driver, who reluctantly agreed to wait for them for an exorbitant sum, they began to search for hidden rooms and chambers on the property. the ruins of the main building had obviously been picked clean of everything which could be taken and sold without revealing anything that the police had not already uncovered. This search led them to a series of mystical enlightenment paths cut through a now overgrown garden and woodloot. Moving quickly through the wood without giving the paths much thought, they found a fallow field with a sealed up wellhouse.

To give a hint of the weirdness experienced by the young Dr. Call junior, in a few days he will disappear from a moving taxi downtown and end up on a walk to the Scott Farm nearly 100 years in the past and stay for months before a fall through a gaping sinkhole where the wellhouse now stands throws him back to the floor of his familiar Boston speakeasy of 1931 but days before he left.

Smalls and McSweeney did not travel back in time to an idyllic farm in an earlier century, but McSweeney did take a dangerous fall into the well after one of the iron rungs sunk into the wall of the well gave way. An obvious way out at the bottom, however, proved to release a steady flow of cold and cloudy water. An attempt to climb the ladder again resulted in another broken rung. Smalls struggled to get him out of the pit though all seemed lost, when unlikely rescue came with a faint smile on the friendly but untrusted face of Xavier Morgan. With him were his similarly tattooed associate whose eyes lacked both iris and sometimes pupil, and the cab driver who brought Smalls and McSweeney out here – but who was now watching over the restrained form of their guardian gangster, Tommy O’Reardon!

Smalls negotiated for Tommy’s life and Morgan explained that sparing the young, blue-eyed O’Reardon would mean going down into the pit and learning more about the book and what he called ‘the book’s passenger.’ The two sides reached an uncomfortable alliance. Under Morgan’s instruction, McSweeney was able to stop and drain the flow of water, though that necessitated navigating a vile passage of disturbing aquatic things to come out in an underground cavern with pillars and other carvings, as well as a large iron pump from an earlier age. Once the water was back under control, the others joined him underground in the chamber. It soon became apparent that Morgan’s intent was to release whatever he claimed was imprisoned in the book and sacrifice Smalls on a cruel stone altar in this chamber to do it. Smalls wanted to live, but also refused to be allow young Tommy to die. The lad, for all his guns and toughness, was just 18 and had already proven staunchly loyal. Morgan seemed intent that at least one person was going to die down here.

Earlier in the day, Agent Thornton had taken another new agent, Tyler Prince, to the hospital to interview the PI about the massacre and the robbery at the auction house. His mind was mostly on the murder of Steve Alwell. The interview went well at first, but the PI required sedation as he started screaming at the sight of the stone statuette from Alwell’s murder site, and could not stop pleading for his life. With that line of inquiry seemingly blocked for now, Thornton went back to the office to learn that his aunt, the proprietor of a certain family restaurant where an antiques dealer and a scrawny reporter drove off lauded mob figure and former prize-fighter Mickey the Fist in broad daylight two days before, wanted to talk with him.

Thornton took his boss, Bill Ranier, with him as the place is one of the man’s favorites in the whole city. When he arrived, he found his aunt and uncle being held hostage by Mickey the Fist in the back office. He tried to defuse the tense situation, but at that moment the Knight tattoo living under his skin, it’s hoofbeats thundering in his mind’s ears, erupted into action across his chest causing the Fist to attack in fury – revealing his utterly inhuman nature. As the two struggled in the cramped office, nothing made sense, the Fist was incredibly strong, but impossibly light! He kept trying to gorge on the Agent’s blood, and when finally shot in the chest, turned and ran. He faded through the wall as if it were not there.

In the chaos that followed, Thornton gave an honest statement to Ranier about what had transpired. Injured and stressed out, he was ordered to report to the hospital for treatment. While there, he was ordered to the state mental hospital for observation.

He accepted that diagnosis calmly, but the agent never made it to the mental hospital.

Under the Scott Farm, things were also becoming more and more surreal. That heavy dragging sound which had been threatening McSweeney’s sanity kept getting louder and closer, and with it the fearful weeping he and Smalls had both heard in a dream that they had shared the night before. It was a dream of Gavigan’s fate, falling forever between worlds in the clutches of something which they could not see, but could sense nonetheless. Something horrible shambling hungrily across the void and between the stars.

Morgan continued to insist that Smalls lie upon the altar and sacrifice himself so that the being residing in the book might be released. The threat of harm befalling the young gangster was just the lever needed to keep the immense Smalls in check.

The bold and outspoken McSweeney found himself paralyzed with indecision. He tried to break it first by moving to flood the chamber, only to be talked out of it. He then clawed his small gun out of his coat pocket, but was dissuaded from using it by the disdain with which his captor, Morgan, regarded the tiny pistol. It sat, impotent, in his hand.

Across town, unable to find Rory, saddled with the ambitious and blasphemous hitman, and more and more convinced that he was going to have to burn the whole docks area to the waterline, Jimmy Calloway entered into one of the parts of old Boston the O’Shaughnessy Mob allows smaller and less important gangs to control. Following a lead on the crime photographer’s address, he went to finish the job. What he found was Rory’s abandoned car, and a petty thief and gunrunner talking big about how he had trounced the O’Shaughnessy lieutenant. Without hesitation, the two hitmen killed him in the street and stuffed him in the trunk of Rory’s car, moving it off onto a side street out of the way. They then went quickly up to the photographer’s studio.

Inside, they found an empty, uncut, perfect human skin hung by the mouth from a slowly oscillating ceiling fan while its skinless former occupant sat in a tipped over armchair screaming wordlessly in pain and terror, his blue eyes pleading for help. The younger hitman fled the scene. Jimmy whispered reassurance to the Skinned Man and slipped out of the studio. Finding a phone on the ground floor of the building on the way out, he called for an ambulance before leaving the vicinity.  

Deep underground, near the altar beneath the Scott Farm, the missing, maimed, and tormented Albert Gavigan suddenly extruded in streamers from nowhere visible to collapse bleeding before them, dragged with a heavy scraping sound across the stone of the cavern and up onto the smoother stone tiles around the altar by something large and unseen. That brutal, shambling force, echoed off into the darkness leaving the maimed socialite quivering on the dark tiles.

Smalls was out of options, the gangster was waiting for his chance to act, McSweeney caught in a paralyzing certainty of helplessness and failure kept standing and staring at Morgan. Each recognized that Gavigan, quivering and in shock, still clutched the pages of the book whose cover McSweeney had found in the PI’s office. Insisting that the young gangster lift and care for the maimed socialite, Smalls took their book into his arms and stepped to the altar to be sacrificed, as he did so, he begged the book to do something to save them all. It opened, revealing two pages to him and him alone. On one page was an image of the ceremony he was about to become part of and no doubt meet his end in. On the other were neatly written but incomprehensible verses explaining the ceremony in complex jargon and formulae that he could read, but not interpret. Valiantly, he tried to follow the mystic poetry inscribed on the pages and speak it aloud boldly, but the words fought and died in the tortured battlefield of his throat.

Morgan soothed him, then guided him into position on the altar with the book on his chest. Last arguments from McSweeney and Smalls were dismissed or fell on deaf ears. Handed a knife of very peculiar design, material, and manufacture by his companion, Morgan began the horrifying prospect of speaking the verses to free the being bound in the book. The knife flashed downward, McSweeney fired, his shot shattering the cruel echo-eating silence of the cavern, O’Reardon charged the altar flinging himself forward to shield Smalls from the stroke of the knife, and Smalls, surging mightily, swung the book to block the knife with it – everything seeming to happen all at once.

The downward knife stroke met the upward thrust of the book.

Both vanished instantly.

Stunned, no one acted. Finally, gathering his composure, Morgan left with his entourage. As darkness fell around them, the survivors counted their blessings.

This ended what we count as an investigation in this sandbox context of ongoing open-ended play for the Reporters’ branch. For the Doctor, however, this was just the beginning. On Morgan’s way out of the cavern, he spoke to the lost, angry, and bewildered Dr. Edward Call, Jr. who was briefly wandering in the darkness below ground, having arrived there not long after recognizing he had been poisoned on the night when Gavigan first disappeared. He asked the tattoo-faced man the date, and was told, “Wednesday” as he slipped out of that time and place. The man in the cavern, little did he know, told him the day he was headed for, not the one he was leaving.

Likewise, things were not over for the Agent or the Gangster. We will learn more about Jimmy Calloway in the next recap. We will finish this lengthy recounting of events with the Agent, who, not long after being told he was to be remanded to Danvers State Mental Hospital for the Insane, found himself being set free by the orderlies sent to ferry him there. They told him matter-of-factly that a double was being sent in his place and that he was to go home and wait in hiding. Mickey the Fist would be coming for revenge, and it would be better for him to surprise the monstrous former gangster. It was up to him as Morgan’s Knight of Swords to put Mickey down. They, as his Pages, would help him do so. As preposterous as that sounded, they spoke earnestly and with commitment. Thornton decided to trust them.

With the help of his new partner, and the two earnest Pages, he prepared for the arrival of the Fist. A human heart on a dinner plate in his refrigerator confirmed silently that the man was coming to get him. A note on the plate told him he wanted the statuette that Thornton still held.

Why?

The attack, when it came, was swift and brutal, and the battle ranged all over the ground floor of the house. Thornton had been instructed to imprison Mickey in a strange device brought to him by the two orderlies, now dressed as plumbers, a device which hurt the mind to even look at, and its hum threatened to undermine the reality Thornton had never questioned before. With the force of the Knight surging under his skin and the adrenalin of life and death combat, Thornton – with the timely intervention of his partner, Winchester, at the end, out-fought the blood-drinking, rejuvenated gangster who used to be a lascivious narcissist called Mikey the Fist. Though there was no court, no law, and no jury,Thornton imprisoned Mickey in the pulsing, impossible device. The two Pages, dressed as plumbers, carted him away.

Before much could be made of the events of the day, visitors arrived at the house. It was Thornton’s psychology professor with three other professors in tow. One of these men was Dr. Henry Armitage, head of the Miskatonic University Library. With him were two of his close associates, young men just starting their careers on the faculty. While Thornton didn’t recognize any of the three guests, Winchester, a graduate of Miskatonic University, certainly recognized and respected Armitage.

They spoke intently about the events happening in Boston, the sort of cult activity they thought was behind it, and when shown the statuette – the urgent necessity to destroy it. Their reasoning was simple. Knowing the arcane science used to create it, Armitage was certain it bore an innocent soul inside it in torment.

Reluctantly, for he believed it to be his only weapon against whatever monster was responsible for the Mob Massacre, which the coroner’s report had likened to meat run through a mechanical separator, Thornton destroyed the statuette.

He was not done, however. After everyone recovered from the immense shock that destruction unleashed upon them, the guests departed for the professor’s house. Dr. Armitage, weak of heart, looked wan and exhausted. His associates were very concerned about him, as was Winchester. The man had never been the same after he and the other two Arkham Men had heroically handled a terrible hunt for a maneating beast in the town of Dunwich.

As soon as they had departed, another guest arrived. It was Officer John Malone, the police officer who claimed to have gained immortality and could show a still and beatless heart to prove it.

He warned the drained, battered, and busted up Thornton that a victim of Mickey’s had escaped the morgue and would be out seeking her heart. Upon learning a heart was in the fridge, he helped Thornton and Winchester prepare to deal with her as she would be making her way to the heart to reclaim it. The battle was even more brutal than the one with the Fist, even though Thornton had more help. What was being asked in this fight seemed cruel, and physically was too much. He almost didn’t make it.

When it was over, he was broken, burned, and heartsick. Worse, he was left with the sudden certainty that his life was the central axis around which the destiny of the world spun. With that certainty came a sort of clarity and understanding of the path before him.

And with that came the end of that investigation, and the end of this recap.

What now?

The events recorded here are not the end of the campaign, they are important turning points in its progress. There is more to recap and reflect upon. If you are curious about any aspect of the campaign, from its rules and procedures, to its rulings and players, please feel free to leave a comment below or to reach out to us at SpeakPipe.