Warning: I'm about to majorly geek out on you and babble about things which you probably neither understand nor care about, which is the game I play based on the fiction of HP Lovecraft. It's my main hobby. You have been warned.
Today was a good day. Okay, so I didn't finish this week's notes despite a marathon session last night of six hours (but the game master was benevolent). And I didn't arrive when I was supposed to be somewhere this morning (I was a minute late). And I didn't finish some work I was doing for someone on time.
But the game absolutely rocked. For those of you who play Call of Cthulhu and intend to go through the campaign Beyond the Mountains of Madness, you should read no further. This is a friendly spoiler alert.
***************SPOILER*******************
So we've been playing the Antarctic adventure for MONTHS, from checking and re-checking the ship's manifest to exploring the citadel of the Elder Things. Last time we explored the great pharos tower in hopes of finding our lost comrades, only to find evidence of their deaths.
For years one of the non-player characters has had visions of this mission; she's insisted all along that she had to be on it and went to great lengths to assure this. She also insisted that she would die on the mission in order to save the world, although she didn't know how, and that is why she had the visions. Each day we got closer and closer to her doom, with her getting more and more depressed. She didn't want to die--but if she didn't, it would be the end of everything. One of the player characters is in love with her, and kept trying to find a way to save her. I have to admit, I did too. I didn't want Sarah to die--she's been in the game for years and we're very fond of her. But it couldn't be as simple as pushing her out of the way at the right moment; there was no way of telling if in doing so we would doom everyone, for if it didn't work, reality itself would be sundered and the world, the universe, would end (and the game, too, unless our game master did some sort of alternative timeline). The stakes were pretty high.
I'm an incredibly passive player, often to my detriment. My character on this mission isn't as fleshed out as the others, although he was slowly coming out of his shell and I've enjoyed that. It is only his second mission, although he'd survived a plane crash (yes, he was the one who fell out of the sky en route to his first attempted mission so many months ago). He has at least one dark mark on his soul due to his sword being used to kill someone after being stolen. He has family, but isn't married, isn't involved with anyone, doesn't have the ties that the others have (one is married; another is in love with Sarah). He has become fond of Sarah and has a lot of respect for her. Unlike the player characters, she never took an oath to protect humanity. He considers her an innocent to protect, along with the ordinary folks they have in tow.
So when the moment came, he took it. The character in love with Sarah showed his Elder Sign when confronted with a shoggoth and a couple of Elder Things. Now the Elder Sign was created by the Elder Things. It surprised them that lowly humans could use it. I had already considered that if we did show the Elder Sign to them, they might recognise us as sentient, and that is what happened. Sarah could read and write their language. They asked if she, too, had the sign, and my character urged her to show hers, which she did. I was thinking that if she were considered sentient, then they couldn't use her in their organic machine to contain the Outer God they'd snared so long ago.
She offered herself up to them to make the machine work, and they indeed, told her that they had never killed anyone within the Unity of the Elder Sign. Then they asked about my character, and he did not show his Elder Sign, and told her that there was no need for them to know he had it, too. The other options were for one of the three ordinary humans along with us to die, or our other compatriot, who was not there at the time. He told her to tell them that they offered him (the Elder Things assumed he was a normal human, and the others' food source) up to the machine to keep the great horror sealed inside the Pit. Reluctantly she agreed. He also asked her to seek safe passage for the rest of them in return for this, and it was granted. Then he was taken away, stripped naked, and fed to a shoggoth alive, going insane at the end. Then his head, with his brain and neural webbing were incorporated into their machine just as the horrible thing began to escape, the power of the creature being such that mountains toppled. But then everything quieted as my character became part of the machine, the central processing unit upgrade that could power it for years to come. Somewhere his soul, with its Elder Sign, will reincarnate eventually. But the remains of his body power the machine at the heart of the Antarctic waste, standing guardian on that which would burst from the Earth and destroy reality.
It was a good death. I have a martyr complex, and I guess it's times like this it comes out. It's only the second character I've lost in the 17 years I've played Call of Cthulhu. The first went insane when she saw Shub-Niggurath and was stepped on by the Black Goat with a Thousand Young. Oddly enough, both characters were Jewish. I feel good about it, although a little sad, too. You get attached to characters when you play them as long as we do. Ours is not the brand of Cthulhu where you run a game now and then, but a continual universe that has developed for nearly two decades, with an excellent game master to bring that world to fruition.
Of course, the campaign isn't over for the others. There's still the Germans to contend with, and getting back home alive. There's another 30 pages left in the module. But it's over for me, except for taking notes and cringing when I think of something that the others don't, and I can't address because technically I'm not really there as a character. But I like to listen to the story unfold even when I can't play, and I want to see the end of this huge, long campaign.
It's moments like this that I really love about roleplaying. How often in the real world do you get to make a difference on this scale, after all?
Want a taste of what we've been doing? Here is a faux trailer for a fictional movie for HP Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness' (upon which the campaign is based) put together by a game master for another group. I think the person did an excellent job.
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