Casting Shadows

For Day 11 of #RPGaDAY2024 I am turning to the alternate list of prompts because I want to make good use of it, and also because as a GM, it is not my habit to make use of printed adventures. The alternate prompt for today is invasion and the d10 roll presented me with making a notice on a bulletin board.

For fun and a little color for our ongoing Call of Cthulhu campaign, Turn of a New Leaf, I ask you to imagine the leaflets, pamphlets, one-sheets, and other printed material an activist group might circulate in 1931 Boston, nearing the end of Prohibition, during the grip of the Great Depression, with the terror of the Dust Bowl starting to be visible on the horizon.

The War to End All Wars ended just over a decade ago and people have already started to forget its lessons, despite the maimed and battle-fatigued still being an active part of daily life. More than a third of people are out of work in the US and require soup kitchens and breadlines to survive. The center of hope-driven and mechanically-enforced agriculture in the US is turning soil to sand. A steady drift of the hopeless is moving west by whatever means necessary, dividing families and eroding identity. Lawlessness has been in the public eye for so long that villains have become folk heroes. The view of the universe, both around us and inside us is becoming clearer every day, lending more and more credence to the notion that God is dead. Under it all, the grind of fear and hunger, the rapid changes in technology, and the spreading reach of more rapid communication shrinking the distances between communities has been suggesting thoughts that will lead to the growing fear that essence does not precede existence, rather it trails it – and poorly.

Into this freefall of too-rapid change and too-enduring despair come the voices of dissidence which seem like solutions – and sometimes are – but who can tell? Sometimes a leap of faith ends with the leaper dashed on the rocks of reality below.

On the fictional streets of Boston in a November that never happened in a 1931 that should not be, there are neatly painted green and white trucks in motion delivering clean-cut and well-fed young people in plain, well-maintained clothes to street corners to hand out pamphlets and not just talk about but deliver on opportunities for work for reasonable pay, retraining, medical aid, and good places to live. Those who gather to listen are asked to imagine a life of satisfaction, free from distraction from what is important. No need to drown sorrow in vice and addiction. No need to let frustration lead to lawlessness. No need to lower one’s head in shame. No fear of lending a hand, nor in asking for one.

Once they can agree to at least imagine such a thing, they are shown the proof of it in action.

Come with us tonight and see how your troubles can be lifted off of your shoulders. Fill your bellies with hearty food. Find that there is work for you and that your work is valued not just in praise, but in pay that recognizes the fundamental truth that life is nothing without love and family. You will find the satisfaction of work done well. You will find that work is rewarded with payment on which you can build a family in a community of families where charity is the language of success, not greed. Where ambition is a fuel powering the joy of all, not a demon pushing a polluted few into despair and sin. Come for one meal, and see your life change before you have had time to clean your plate.

Come with us tonight.

You have nothing to lose but an empty belly, and nothing to risk but an hour of your time.

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