02-13-2014, 04:23 AM
Apologies in advance for the wall of text. I used RPG Solo chiefly as a purely inspirational tool this time around as opposed to a gaming tool, and there was very little actual rolling or action involved, just setting up scenes and atmospheric descriptions. Next session, expect some actual meat.
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Okay. I had the game already set up using RPG Solo, and then I accidentally hit the Back button on my browser and lost it all. Whoops. So suffice it to say that I decided to play a Lovecraftian horror game using the Modern/Suspense genre thing and Mark's Adventure Glyphs to throw in Lovecraftian elements. I found that I was a "curious Portugese historian" (on my very first roll! Honest!) and that the game would start in a movie theater. The theater is playing a Fully / Rustic film, which I interpreted to mean a medieval film.
My story starts in a delapidated movie theater in an extremely disreputable Portugese town whose name I shall not disclose here. I had heard that the theater would play an obscure documentary on certain esoteric medieval rituals, and being a historian, this interested me greatly. Thus it was that, despite the town's unwholesome reputation, I found myself driving into town on a foggy Saturday evening.
The town's streets were mostly empty when I entered it, but the few residents that I did see on the streets did nothing to reassure me: they all had a malignant, saturnine look to them, and many of them leered at me so spitefully that I shuddered. I did not like my first impression of the theatre, either, for it had a particularly ramshackle appearance, even among the generally ill-preserved town surrounding it. Its windows were all broken or cracked, and the neon sign greeting me as I parked my car in front of it was no longer functioning, most of its bulbs having been smashed.
Upon entering the movie theatre, I found that its interior was even more derelict than its exterior. The cheap paint coating its walls was already half-peeled off, the wooden floorboards rotting, and to add to the effect there was an unpleasant stench around the place which reminded me of moldy meat. There were only a handful of people in the theater room, ghoulish types like the ones I'd seen in the street. Now that I could see them closely, however, I could distinguish their features, and did not like what I saw. They were emaciated, oddly grey-skinned, and their reddish-brown eyes were sunken in to an unnatural degree. I sat at the back of the theater, as far away as possible from them.
(What does the film show, exactly?)
[Glyphs: Vine, Octopus, Phoenix]
(I'll interpret these as meaning Shamanism/Druidism, Elder Evils, and Rebirth, respectively)
At last the film started and I was able to divert my attention away from the other inhuman-looking patrons. What I saw in the documentary, however, was even less pleasant than my surroundings. I was already knowledgeable in medieval occult literature, but this was wholly alien to anything I knew. It seemed that archeologists had unearthed medieval manuscripts indicating the presence of secret shamanic cults descended from the Gaelic druids, of whom present-day society knows so little about. Many of the archeologists had gone insane, and the others had tried to cover up the documents - more or less successfully, since only in this documentary have I ever seen the manuscripts referenced. These cults, apparently, worshipped nameless prehistoric beings, avatars of unimaginable evil. The documentary touched on other topics, such as the obscene and abominable rites of human sacrifice (and worse) performed by the cults to their blasphemous gods, and the possibility that the cults never actually ceased and could be still in existence today. What really sent a chill up my spine, however, was the prophecy made by the authors of the medieval text: that these beings would rise up again in an age where mankind erected for itself stone Towers of Babel, and where it dared journey into the heavens themselves.
When the documentary mercifully ended, I reflected on the portents of all this. It seemed perfectly clear to me that the prophecy predicted that the beings would rise in this age - after all, what could the Towers of Babel refer to but our skyscrapers, and the journeys into heavens could not but be interpreted as the space travel of the 20th and 21st century. The uncanny accuracy by which the prophecy predicted the doings of mankind was indeed eerie. As I left the theater, I laughed it all off as an elaborate hoax, yet there were certain facts alluded to by the film which gave a dreadful credence to the whole theory. And if the prophecy were to be true after all, the implications would be not only disturbing, but staggeringly terrifying!
---
Next episode: Will our hero be able to find out the truth behind the documentary? Will the prophecy come true after all? How will he fare with the town's inhabitants? And will the narrator find himself so overwhelmed by his own purple prose that he loses track of his own story?
---
Okay. I had the game already set up using RPG Solo, and then I accidentally hit the Back button on my browser and lost it all. Whoops. So suffice it to say that I decided to play a Lovecraftian horror game using the Modern/Suspense genre thing and Mark's Adventure Glyphs to throw in Lovecraftian elements. I found that I was a "curious Portugese historian" (on my very first roll! Honest!) and that the game would start in a movie theater. The theater is playing a Fully / Rustic film, which I interpreted to mean a medieval film.
My story starts in a delapidated movie theater in an extremely disreputable Portugese town whose name I shall not disclose here. I had heard that the theater would play an obscure documentary on certain esoteric medieval rituals, and being a historian, this interested me greatly. Thus it was that, despite the town's unwholesome reputation, I found myself driving into town on a foggy Saturday evening.
The town's streets were mostly empty when I entered it, but the few residents that I did see on the streets did nothing to reassure me: they all had a malignant, saturnine look to them, and many of them leered at me so spitefully that I shuddered. I did not like my first impression of the theatre, either, for it had a particularly ramshackle appearance, even among the generally ill-preserved town surrounding it. Its windows were all broken or cracked, and the neon sign greeting me as I parked my car in front of it was no longer functioning, most of its bulbs having been smashed.
Upon entering the movie theatre, I found that its interior was even more derelict than its exterior. The cheap paint coating its walls was already half-peeled off, the wooden floorboards rotting, and to add to the effect there was an unpleasant stench around the place which reminded me of moldy meat. There were only a handful of people in the theater room, ghoulish types like the ones I'd seen in the street. Now that I could see them closely, however, I could distinguish their features, and did not like what I saw. They were emaciated, oddly grey-skinned, and their reddish-brown eyes were sunken in to an unnatural degree. I sat at the back of the theater, as far away as possible from them.
(What does the film show, exactly?)
[Glyphs: Vine, Octopus, Phoenix]
(I'll interpret these as meaning Shamanism/Druidism, Elder Evils, and Rebirth, respectively)
At last the film started and I was able to divert my attention away from the other inhuman-looking patrons. What I saw in the documentary, however, was even less pleasant than my surroundings. I was already knowledgeable in medieval occult literature, but this was wholly alien to anything I knew. It seemed that archeologists had unearthed medieval manuscripts indicating the presence of secret shamanic cults descended from the Gaelic druids, of whom present-day society knows so little about. Many of the archeologists had gone insane, and the others had tried to cover up the documents - more or less successfully, since only in this documentary have I ever seen the manuscripts referenced. These cults, apparently, worshipped nameless prehistoric beings, avatars of unimaginable evil. The documentary touched on other topics, such as the obscene and abominable rites of human sacrifice (and worse) performed by the cults to their blasphemous gods, and the possibility that the cults never actually ceased and could be still in existence today. What really sent a chill up my spine, however, was the prophecy made by the authors of the medieval text: that these beings would rise up again in an age where mankind erected for itself stone Towers of Babel, and where it dared journey into the heavens themselves.
When the documentary mercifully ended, I reflected on the portents of all this. It seemed perfectly clear to me that the prophecy predicted that the beings would rise in this age - after all, what could the Towers of Babel refer to but our skyscrapers, and the journeys into heavens could not but be interpreted as the space travel of the 20th and 21st century. The uncanny accuracy by which the prophecy predicted the doings of mankind was indeed eerie. As I left the theater, I laughed it all off as an elaborate hoax, yet there were certain facts alluded to by the film which gave a dreadful credence to the whole theory. And if the prophecy were to be true after all, the implications would be not only disturbing, but staggeringly terrifying!
---
Next episode: Will our hero be able to find out the truth behind the documentary? Will the prophecy come true after all? How will he fare with the town's inhabitants? And will the narrator find himself so overwhelmed by his own purple prose that he loses track of his own story?
It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)
