Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa Part Three

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Carcosa
Written & Designed by Heinrich D. Moore
You can purchase it here

Read our previous adventure into Carcosa starting here

Today we introduce a new character to enter Carcosa. Once again, I used Heinrich’s Guide to Character Creation which made an even more fascinating person than my last run. I cannot get over what a great tool this is for making complex, layered characters with backstories just as interesting as any adventure they get into. Without further ado…

Vivian Endicott stared into the grimy mirror in the rest stop bathroom, her broad muscled shoulders nearly going outside the reflection, knowing precisely what she would do next. Her life had been a preparation for this journey, and unlike others, she’d read the files on it and knew the risks and the rewards.

Life started in Kingsport, Massachusetts. From the start, it seemed that the poor girl was born unlucky. Vivian was the child of a free-wheeling bohemian type, Claire. Her father was still unknown, and with the death of her mother (by the needle) ten years ago, Vivian supposed she’d never know the answer. The artist made her home in a cramped apartment over an antique store on Ship Street. Excellent for that type of work but nasty for a little kid. While Viv loved her hometown – she lived there to the present day – her orientation during those formative years threatened to make her hate it. The stench of the fish market wafted down the block early in the morning, a fetid alarm clock that forced her to get ready & depart for school to escape it. Claire remained in bed until noon, and Viv, who was so young, took on most of the responsibilities of the home.

The most memorable period of Vivian’s life in the early years was a school field trip to the Arkham Zoo & Botanical Gardens. Her teacher had to pull the girl away from exhibit after exhibit when she became entranced watching the animals go about their caged, contained lives. There was a kinship the girl saw in these creatures. She, too, felt like someone trapped from birth, unable to glimpse an authentic world that lay outside the bars of this one. She paced in her enclosure, growing restless, desiring a change to illuminate her young mind.

Things took an unexpected turn when, at the age of nine, Vivian witnessed a car accident while walking to school. Driver #1: The good Reverend Gunther Woodville. Intoxicated out of his gourd. Driver #2: Aurora Wyman, a nurse at Langan Memorial Hospital, was on her way home after a late shift in the ER. Viv was present at the corner where the collision occurred. She could still remember how the body was deconstructed, how easily the parts of human beings were split apart, and how their gory insides were on display.

What happened next surprised the 4th grader more than anything she had seen in her short life up to that point. The lifeless nurse Wyman blinked her eyes, slowly raised an arm – bone jutting out – and pushed one of her eyeballs back into the socket. Then she found the rib that had punctured her sternum and drove it back beneath her flesh. This continued so that in a matter of moments, Wyman was alive & well. Little Viv was shocked beyond belief, frozen in place.

Years later, now-adult Vivian and an aged Wyman were sharing a drink in the airport bar before the nurse departed for the trip to Thailand, from which she never returned. The older woman told her protege that for a brief moment when she saw the child standing there, clutching her backstraps and eyes wide, she thought for a short moment about taking the little girl to the woods outside of town and slashing her throat. But her better angels intervened, and Wyman saw this as an opportunity. She approached Vivian and said she was so blessed to have survived such a horrible wreck and that the child was probably feeling lightheaded. Might she check Vivian’s pulse? Probably having hallucinatory spells. Do you know what those are, dear?

The friendship was formed. The shock never calcified, fading to a fascination on Vivian’s part. This grandmotherly woman possessed something her pathetic mother never did, a power, a control over this world. Afternoon visits to Wyman’s home overlooking the sea became a regular after-school occurrence. Conversations began about the spirit realm through these snacks of cookies & milk. It was a topic Vivian had never thought much about; her mother never took the girl to church, but she’d heard the other children at school talk about it.

Wyman belonged to a congregation called The Builders of the Twilight. Vivian presented a blank stare when the old woman told her this. The nurse continued, explaining that her family were some of the first to make a home here in Kingsport, and part of making that home was understanding the conflict between man & nature. The Builders knew that when the end of all things came, it would destroy the material world. Thus, they needed to build a sort of new world that would survive this eternal darkness. That world would exist in the realm of dreams. Their prayers happened in their sleep, constructing a society where, while their bodies crumbled away in the waking world, their minds would exist for eternity. Vivian thought that sounded pretty alright, and that night, when she dreamed, the child tried to find where Wyman and her friends were working. She didn’t.

Eventually, Wyman introduced Vivian to the Builders, and she became their youngest member. Most of their children discounted the middle-aged and older group as crackpots, enabling each other’s delusions. Vivian couldn’t disagree more and, at the age of 11, was inducted a Neophyte of the First Order. By thirteen, she was a Zelator. In addition to attending the meetings of the Builders and honing her dreamscape, Vivian realized that she still had to contend with the material world. As a girl and a small one, it made her vulnerable. She began frequenting the local community center gym, teaching herself how to use the weights. By sophomore year, Vivian stood out from the crowd at first glance due to her broad shoulders and muscular build. If you managed to get into a conversation with her – a rarity due to her quiet, observant nature – you’d learn her mind, like her body, was unlike most.

Vivian became convinced that the more dreaming minds working as Builders, the more real that dream space would become. There was interference in the form of other belief systems. How do we remove them from the equation? The young woman struck upon the idea of weeding her way into the largest system of them all, Christianity, by enrolling in a seminary. The Barron Theological Seminary became her spiritual home of study & subterfuge. Located along the winding Miskatonic, Vivian stood out at the college even more than she had in high school. Barron was attended mainly by wispy, willowy men with aspirations for the priesthood. Vivian would be questioned occasionally as to why she didn’t just go to a convent, and her reply was typically wordless and often involved crushing an object nearby. The questions ceased.

In these first formative years of seminary, Vivian became interested in her sudden access to esoteric texts & tomes. The ones that had the longest-lasting effect were the Zanthu Tablets. These were said to have been transcribed by Zanthu, the resident of Mu, a rumored lost continent in the Pacific. Zanthu’s writing droned on & on about his worship of a god named Ythogtha, a cyclopean frog-like entity who wrought terror upon the enemies of Mu. What shook Vivian most profoundly were descriptions of Mu that matched the details of the dream landscape she would visit nightly. This discovery caused her to wonder if Mu had not sunk to the bottom of the ocean but become part of the dream realm instead of the material one.

Vivian absorbed as much as she could about her competition and began devising ways to usurp it once she graduated. One thing happened that would forever reshape the trajectory of the woman’s life. That was meeting Professor Reese Pascal. He was visiting the Barron Seminary, giving a lecture. “Exploring Unity in Diversity: A Comparative Study of Creation Narratives Across Major World Religions.”

In this full-day lecture, Professor Pascal detailed the ways all the major religions of the world and many of the forgotten ones hint at creation coming from the same nebulous source. It didn’t hurt that Pascal was a handsome older man. Vivian was riveted. She’d never been one for social norms in high school. She’d never been on a date, not because she was scared, but because every boy she encountered seemed pathetic. Pascal was different. She approached him after the talk and asked him out for dinner. A short drive, and they were dining at the Moonlight Coast Bistro, chatting about their interest in religion. Vivan argued that all life was born out of a dream, an idea that intrigued Pascal.

The romance moved quickly. Viv met Pascal’s two children from a previous marriage a month later. Corbin and Nina. Sweet children but of very little interest to their father’s new girlfriend. She fascinated them with her bodybuilder’s physique and curious manner of talking, dropping words that sent little Nina flipping through the dictionary pages in her father’s study.

Vivian was shocked and forever grateful when Pascal agreed to pay the rest of her tuition at the seminary. She’d confided her background to him and her worries about finishing. Then he suggested she move in with him. How could she say no? Months later, he gave her a ring, and just after graduating, they married at a little cobblestone chapel overlooking the ocean. He even gave Vivian the honeymoon of her dreams – visiting famous spots linked to the esoteric and the occult. They made love in the desolate field of Nahum Gardner (long dead), and Vivian conceived their first child, Edith. On this same honeymoon, while visiting an art gallery in Boston’s North End, the couple became lost and found themselves in a dank cellar beneath a tenement where the paintings were supposed to be. Instead, they found a nest of nasty, ghoulish things, and it was Pascal surprised Vivian by producing a firearm she had not known about and saving her from their clutches.

Before being able to fully begin her mission, Vivian learned she was pregnant and decided to wait until the child was born. The first person she told was Aurora Wyman. It was only at Wyman’s insistence that Vivian made the trip to Ship Street to tell her mother, Claire. She hadn’t seen her mother since leaving for seminary. Only a solitary & brief phone call home during the holidays linked them during this time. When Vivian arrived at the old apartment, she found it unoccupied. She learned from the store owner (and the landlord) that Claire had been discovered with a needle hanging from her arm six months ago. He had no way of contacting Vivian, but he expressed his condolences to her. Vivian asked if she could see the old apartment one last time. He took her up, reminding her that he’d removed her mother’s things; they were being kept in a storage facility he had already used for other things if Vivian wanted to pick them up. She didn’t.

He left her alone in the room. Vivan stood in the middle of the dusty space, so much more prominent now that everything was gone and smaller now that she wasn’t a child. How had she made it through those years in this single space with such a troubled woman to care for her? She closed her eyes for a moment and dreamt. It might have been a minute or an hour, but a crash woke her. A mop and bucket pushed into the corner had fallen over. Vivian stood and walked over to put it back in place. A sudden voice spoke up: “Leave it be, Viv.”

She turned to see her mother, a bit older than she remembered, standing in the beam of sunlight that spilled forth over Kingsport Head and across the town below. Vivian realized she was looking at a specter. A closer inspection showed festering track marks along the ghost’s pale arms and legs. Vivian shuddered and looked away. “I need you, my girl,” her dead mother pleaded. “It burns in me. Like fire through my veins. Help me, please!” Vivian ran from the apartment and the street; she didn’t let herself settle until she returned home to the estate outside of Arkham. None of this was mentioned to Pascal until it became impossible to avoid. Claire kept appearing.

Eventually, Vivian agreed to check herself into a mental health hospital, but the visions of her addict mother wouldn’t stop. The doctors would never understand, but Vivian did. She was being haunted. Her mother had clung to her when she got the chance and even plagued the woman’s dreams. Some research led Vivian to the description of a device called a Mist Projector. It was mentioned in the journals of some mad dreamer from decades hence – a device of alien origin that could produce a field of cold so powerful it even froze spirits in their place. In Vivian’s dreams, she searched for it, but only one place seemed to call to her. It was over the mountains of her dream world where the sun’s light died, a place she had avoided. The other members once told her its name and warned her never to go there. They called it Carcosa.

Vivian’s journey into Carcosa begins here