This post is a summary of a Call of Cthulthu session I ran with some friends last month. It’s intended as an introduction for new players at our next session, or a refresher to the players from the last session. A subsequent post will introduce important background for the next game.

At the deathbed of respected Misaktonic University literature professor Rupert Merriweather, 4 of the professor’s acquaintances met and learned the professor’s secret: years earlier, he and a group of 5 other naive students, under the guidance of an older mentor, Marion Allen, formed a group dedicated to the study of spirits and the occult, called the Dark Brotherhood. After several failures, a new artifact (and associated ritual) provided by Allen gave the group its first and last success: they were able to summon an otherwordly Thing in a farmhouse outside Allen’s Corners, Massachusetts, which promptly beheaded one member of the group and drove the other insane.

Fleeing in terror, the group concocted a plausible story for the death of one member (and the catatonic insanity of the other) and vowed never to speak of the night’s events again. Nearly 40 years later, as Dr. Merriweather reached the final stages of terminal lung cancer, he summoned the 4 investigators to his hospital room, knowing that after his death any binding magic on the Thing would fade and it would be free to roam the countryside, unchecked. Giving them Marion Allen’s artifact and journal notes from the Dark Brotherhood, he urged them to help dispel the Thing he had so recklessly summoned years before.

The 4 investigators were drawn from various backgrounds, linked only by their mutual acquaintance to Dr. Merriweather. They included:

• Thurber Upton, a veteran and former battlefield medic, handy in a pinch with a revolver and schooled in the treatment of the serious physical trauma likely to be encountered in a war zone. Equally at home shooting a hobo through the femoral artery or treating the wound to prevent him from dying.
• Stanley Clark, snake-oil salesman extraordinaire, skilled in the art of misdirection, persuasion, and outright lying. Claims to have sucessfully sold an icebox to an Eskimo acquaintance. Valuable when you need a diversion, to convince someone to take a cheap bribe, or a shot of an “all-natural, fantastic, homeopathic elixir to cure hair loss, vapors, the gout, and rickets”.
• Cale Graves, a businessman who operates a successful bookstore dealing in rare volumes, while drawing the bulk of his finances from a private (and equally successful) bootlegging operation. Having both legitimate and illegitimate business, Graves possesses a wide variety of skills, including a working knowledge of chemistry from his bootlegging business as well as unparalled library research skills gathered while establishing a successful rare book emporium.
• Dr. Thelonius Doom, academic and respected professor of Psychology at Miskatonic University, skilled with ancient languages and gifted with a working knowledge of the fledgling skill of Clinical Psychiatry.

The investigators accepted Dr. Merriweather’s request and handily succeeded in dispatching the Thing lurking in the farmhouse attic. Along the way, the investigators explained the disappearance of Maggie McPhirter, local farmer’s wife, ensuring her soul could rest at peace when Cale Graves destroyed her reanimated body with a shotgun blast at close range. An unlucky hobo, Red Jake, had a more frantic meeting with the investigators, and ultimately sealed his own fate after bolting from the protection of the farmhouse to be subsequently killed and reanimated by the Thing and then killed again by a second blast from Graves’ trusty boomstick.

Over the course of the investigation, the group discovered several odd pieces of information that continue to defy explanation. While most of the original Dark Brotherhood died after the farmhouse incident due to natural causes, Marion Allen’s case was not so simple. During the investigation, the group discovered that the existence of the mysterious artifact Allen provided to the group, a small Egyptian sarcophagus originally containing an insect trapped in amber, was not a secret known only to the Brotherhood:

1. Before Allen’s death, he complained to police that he was being pursued by a group bent on recovering the artifact.
2. Soon after, his body was found near the docks, his clothing showing signs of being in or near a fire, and his tongue cut out with a sharp-bladed knife.
3. Strangely, neither the fire nor a bladed weapon were the cause of his death; the coroner was unable to find a definitive cause, citing foul play via coronary arrest, induced by unknown means.

The artifact itself is now safely locked in Cale Graves’ safe, although since the creature once contained in it has been dispelled, it possesses no occult properties. However, it is still a curious and valuable piece of antiquity, being made of solid gold. In the course of their investigation, the group learned the following facts about the artifact:

1. The inscription on the artifact’s case is Middle Egyptian, cryptically referring to a “Seeker of Wisdom”; after translation, the text is best represented in English as:
   

   "Seeker of Wisdom, Servant of Yoag Setheth,
   Deliverer of the people of the water,
   Bearer of the spirits of Nyar-loth-hotep,
   child of Thoth, Seeker of Wisdom."
   

2. Another inscription on the inside of the artifact’s lid is not Egyptian at all, nor is it a language any of the investigators can identify, despite thorough attempts with the aid of local libraries and academics. As best as they can identify, the language is similar to script found on artifacts that are claimed by less-reputable scholars to be from the ancient continent of Mu, said to be the location of fictional lost cultures such as Atlantis.

Returning to Boston after dispatching the Thing (and respectfully disposing of the rather messy remains of Maggie and Red Jake), the members of the group struggle to understand and explain what they saw in the farmhouse.

Unable to let the mystery rest, some begin to search for clues to the history of the artifact and how a mere dilettante in the occult like Marion Allen came to possess it…