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

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 introduction to Vivian Endicott here.

Vivian will be wearing the Mask of the Guilty. I based this on the fact that she’s literally haunted by her mother, Claire, who died in alone, in poverty of an overdose.

Vivian followed the map she’d found stuffed into the stacks of Ballingrud’s Occult Books. It happened while she was thumbing through a facsimile reprint of Codex Maleficus, the slip of paper fell out. 

Carcosa. 

That name again. 

The last month had been composed of interrupted sleep. Her dead mother screaming in pain from the acid heroin burning her veins still was driving Vivian towards madness. The last stay in a mental hospital had helped, but she had no desire to ever return. Expunging Claire’s specter from her life was essential. All roads seemed to point to Carcosa.

That brought her to the rest stop on I-95, outside a seemingly unimportant town, Dell North. She stared at her face in the filthy bathroom mirror. She flexed her shoulder and arm muscles under her jacket. The feeling of physical strength settled her nerves for a brief moment. Two white pills sat against the black of her gloved palm. 

Swallow. A handful of water pushed the pills down. Through the door with its squeaking, rusted hinges, Vivian stepped out into the cool night, pulling up her jacket collar. White pines danced in a wind that came up over the Appalachians. 

She began her walk towards the treeline, boots crunching in the gravel. Her phone was left in the cupholder of her car. She couldn’t have Pascal contact her during this time. 

Pushing through the trees, Vivian felt a sudden wooziness overcome her. She began to think that that veil between sleep & dream was drifting. Falling into it was a momentarily terrifying choice. Unmoored from anything she knew, floating in a void of complete darkness. 

Then awake. Not lying down but still standing among trees. The same trees? They smelled like it. Felt like it. 

Vivian pushed through them, emerging onto a sandy lake beach. In the distance, across the water, she saw a towering ruin that would have blotted out the moon if there had been one. The sky was devoid of stars, and two orbs ringed with light hung in the shadow. Beneath the tower was a sprawling city and then a bit to the…Vivian guessed – East? A neighborhood like the suburbs Vivian didn’t grow up in but always imagined an alternate life within.

Listening closely, Vivian noted the absence of a single sound of people. A city utterly devoid of life? Or perhaps it was a type of life she should steer clear of. All she needed to do was find the Mist Projector…wherever possible. She could trap Claire’s ghost in Carcosa and be done with this mess. 

Vivian began her walk toward that neighborhood but quickly realized the road made her pass through the city. That doesn’t sit well with her. She remembered the ghoul attack in the basement of the art gallery in the North End. Big cities weren’t her style. But she shuffled on.

Walking along the shore, Vivian looked for anything of value that might have washed up. 
[Spot Hidden Check – Fail]

The water bubbled a few meters from the beach. Something emerged from the water, a tumorous mass of pseudopods. They moved quickly, and Vivian prepared herself.
[Dodge roll – Fail, STR roll – Success, Brawl roll – Fail]

The tentacles wrapped themselves around Vivian’s legs, and she immediately felt the squeeze, her blood flow getting cut off. It started to drag her towards the water. 
[STR roll – Fail, Spend 12 Luck for Success, Swim roll – Success]

Vivian was going under, thrashing as best she could, slipping into sleep again. Darkness. Then gasping for air. It took her a moment, but Vivian oriented herself based on the landmarks she had spotted before. Whatever that thing was, it had dragged her across the lake to the other shore.

[The Overlook]
From here, Vivian could look back at the lake shore she’d been standing on moments before. It was also a panoramic view of everything in the area. Something was moving across the lake. Vivian’s eyes adjusted in time, and she could see multiple rowboats piloted by blurry, indistinct forms making their way toward this outcropping.

[Run – Explore: The Theater]
Vivian runs across the stone walkway that leads into the Metropolis. The first building that stands out to her is an ornate theater. The outside reminds her of the movie palace in downtown Kingsport, where she would go as a child to get distance from her mother. This one bore a sign; some bulbs that lit up letters appeared to have been smashed. The sign read The Twilight Palace.

Vivian rushed inside, past the empty box office, through double doors into a carpeted lobby. The concessions counter glowed in an eerie white underlighting. Through another set of doors, she found herself in the theater. Rows of seats before her. Everything had been maintained by an unseen hand. The curtains are drawn. Music spilled out from somewhere deeper in the theater’s recesses, a ghostly hypnotic tune.

[Take a Seat]

Vivian felt compelled to take a seat. She picked one near the center of the theater and watched as the curtains rose. A painted sheet hung from the rafters depicting a palace. Through the tall windows the skyline of a vast city could be seen. Actors stepped out on stage. Many were dressed as queens and princesses. One was a priest. Vivian listened closely. She could tell it was French but an old dialect. She did catch many double entendres, but the plot and details were extremely difficult to follow.

Vivian could make out the following: It was the final days of a royal dynasty. A stranger appears after being asked to attend by the priest. There is a masked ball. Then, in the middle of the ball, the arrival of the King in Yellow sends the royal family into turmoil. A sudden pounding vibrated through Vivian’s temple, the onset of a headache from nowhere. Vivian felt moisture below her nose, wiping it away; she did not notice the blood staining her hand.

[Sanity roll – Success]
She shrugged off the feeling in her head, thinking about her meditations as a member of the Builders of the Twilight. Sanity is simply a tether to the material realm that can slacken or tighten based on the mind’s will.

The play’s climax came when Princess Camilla approached the Stranger and said, “You, sir, should unmask.” The Stranger asked if she was sure of this. Camilla replied in the affirmative. Queen Cassilda entered the scene. She adds, “We have all unmasked, and now it is your turn.” The Stranger cocked his head at a weird angle and responded, “But I wear no mask.” Someone above killed the lights. Camilla could be heard screaming, “No mask? No mask?” Things went dark for Camilla, too, and sometime later, she came to her senses, unable to remember if there had been more to the play, feeling that a considerable amount of time had passed.

[gain +1 Cthulhu Mythos]
Vivian stumbled out of the theater and back into the streets, carefully watching through the glass doors for any of her pursuers. When she determined the coast was clear, she continued to explore.

[Explore – The Choir Room]
Now that Vivian had a moment to get her bearings, she realized this must be the Arts District. There was the theater, a few galleries, and up ahead was a building marked with a sign that read Sparrow’s Roost. A chorus of voices came from inside, singing in a language different even from the play. Vivian entered and found a slightly smaller room; she could tell this was a music venue. Seats were in rows, and all of them were empty. There was a choir of people on stage where the music would have come from. But how could it? Vivian spied that every choir member had eyes and ears sewn shut with razor wire. 

Vivian found herself frozen in place, unable to walk away. The song unfolded, the choir’s voices revealing their tortured nature as their mouth strained against their bindings. The song changed in Vivian’s head from something resembling the pained squeals of animals into words. It was a song about her. It is accusatory. 

[Stay and listen]
A dirge on Vivian’s abandonment of her mother Claire. It told the story of Claire’s childhood, how her parents neglected her, and she ran away to Boston to become an artist. There, she was impregnated by a man who said he would stay but disappeared one day. Claire was all along in Kingsport until Vivian was born. And then she watched how her daughter became like a distant memory in a series of short years.

[Break a chain]
Vivian’s mouth opened, and the words inside her head began pouring out. She’d never taken choir in high school or sung much, but a perfect pitch vibrated from her throat. With eyes closed, she kept singing and began to see images of the choir members float through her mind. One singer stands over a hospital bed as a doctor pulls a sheet over the body of a motionless child. Another singer slumped over a coffee table in a dingy motel room, white powdery lines smeared across the surface, residue ringing their nose as their eyes rolled back into their head for the final time. A third vision is just a limp wrist hanging over the edge of a bathtub as a dark red, syrupy drip of blood pools on the floor. 

Image after image, Vivian realized she was part of this never-ending choir of guilt & pain. Something deep in her mind told the woman she had been a citizen of Carcosa her entire life; she had just not realized that until now. She almost didn’t notice the needle and wire threading through her left eyelid.
[Lost -1 Sanity]

Vivian found her left eye was sealed shut. She panicked and tried to run from the choir stage, away from the other bound singers. 
[STR roll – success]

Vivian built distance between herself and the horrible song. Her mind raced, one of the chief thoughts being if she could restore her vision in the sewn eye. The choir immediately stopped singing once Vivian’s feet were on the carpet of the aisles. They began to step in perfect synchronicity toward her, moving as a single being. Blind but knowing just where she was. Vivian reached out for anything she could move and pushed down to block the hunting mass of people.
[INT roll – Failure]

They caught up and swarmed Vivian. Coils of barbed wire materialized out of thin air, binding her arms, legs, face, slicing into skin, rivulets of blood pouring down. They moved Vivian backward and up. She saw the hook hanging from the ceiling through her one good eye. The choir wanted to hang her from it, a new ornament for the room. 
[Take 6 HP damage, APP score reduced by 5]
[Sanity roll – Failure. Loss of -4 Sanity]

Time passed, and like the play, Vivian could not tell how much it was. In the dream realms, time was fluid, so it felt like seconds, but it could have been millennia. She could hear the choir sing from her hook. Over and over. Consciousness came and went. 
[STR roll – Success]
Vivian flexed her well-toned muscles, arms, and legs and then began to slip a finger loose, then another, and eventually an entire hand. The barbs sliced into her flesh as she wriggled, but the woman focused her mind on the goal of escape. When it was clear that the choir had exited, Vivian allowed herself to fall from the last binding, striking the floor with a heavy thud. She felt like a limp, bloody rag on the ground but pushed herself up, limping to the door and back out onto the streets.

[Explore – The Lounge]
The scent of tobacco caught Vivian’s attention. She could see a glowing building up ahead, and when she reached it, she found it was a lounge or bar. Soft jazz piano floated out through the brown leather padded doors. Perhaps she could rest here. Inside, thick clouds of cigar smoke obscured most things. The small stage in the front center of the room could be seen through the haze. Staff seemed to emerge from the fog and gestured Vivian toward a table right in front. 

“Oh, I’m sorry to say, I’m not made up for the occasion.” Vivian wondered why she had said that while sitting down at what was apparently her table. A staff member came by with a silver tray. On it sat three drinks: a glass of water, wine, and a dirty martini. Beside them was an opium pipe. The waiter said nothing but looked from Vivian to the tray with a rictus grin.

[The Opium Pipe]
The pain throbbed through every inch of Vivian’s body. She remembered reading about the opium dens that had sprung up in secret along the New England coast. Weary travelers found a blissful escape there. Perhaps it could soothe her pain, too. It was even her mother’s choice of pain relief from the world. She reached out and took the pipe from the tray. The waiter nodded and disappeared into the smoke. Vivan took a hit off the pipe, lungs filling with an unfamiliar, musky, flowery mist. The pain diminished, still lingering on the fringes. She felt her senses not sharpen but focused on something out of sight, aware of a lingering presence.

A figure stepped on stage, a sickly-looking man. He wore a straightjacket with cut-off sleeves, The unmistakable stench of piss & sweat wafted out in continuous waves through the lounge. Vivian gagged. She did notice a name stitched into the jacket’s collar. “H. Castigane.” A dented tin crown sat on his head. He began a recitation:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical – naked,
dragging themselves through the streets of Carcosa at dawn, looking
for themselves – burned
under twin suns of black in search of a heavenly connection to the
machinery of – night,
Their hollow-eyes bared their brains to Heaven and perceived yellow
angels – illuminated,
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, incomparable blind
streets of – shuddering
cloud and lightning in the mind illuminating all the motionless world
of time between.”
[Sanity roll – Success]

Vivian pushed herself up from the table. She couldn’t listen to any more of this. It took searching, but she found the door back onto the street. The tittering laughs of mockery came out of unseen staff as she exited.

Read the conclusion to the journey here