Cthulhu Alternate History Timeline

**Welcome to my version of reality!** In my real-world setting for Call of Cthulhu, history progresses much the same but takes some turns in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some of the most interesting periods of history are: Old England and the Vikings in Vinland; New France in the 1700s; the Wild West in the 1880s; Fresh Lake City in Hope County Montana; Ironwood in North Dakota; Europe in the 1930s; and the frostpunk landscape of southern Hope County in the 1970s.

For a list of all the martyrs who laid down their lives, see Cthulhu Deaths.

## The Danelaw

> *Note - all of the history surrounding Cordelia was written deliberately to be diary-style ramblings, and as such, dates may be malleable.*
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* **c. 840** - **Cordelia**, eldest daughter of Lerion (thegn of Acemannesceastre / Bath) is born. She is trained in war by the shieldmaiden Soekje van der Velde of Frisia, and in politics and rhetoric by Mairwena Uí Ynyr of Powys.
* **860** - Cordelia is attacked by a Briton druid in a grove. She awakens a vampire, with ram horns on her head. Hungering for blood, she attacks Shire-Reeve Wihtman and rips out his throat. She falls in love with the Mercian envoy Eadwynn who comes to warn of a danegeld. Afraid she will be found out, Cordelia and Eadwynn flee to Tamworth where Cordelia takes the name Leowynn. Almost found out one day by Soekje, Cordelia kills her to silence her.
* **860s** - Cordelia is inducted into an all-female sect under Tamworth called the Daughters of Hibernia; Christian Britons, Gael and Pict pagans. They scheme to take over Tamworth. Cordelia gains dominion over fire after communing with the goddess Brigit. They scheme for decades - the sisters learn Cordelia is a vampire and worship her.
* **870s** - Due to pressure from the Danes, King Burgred of Mercia flees to Rome and is replaced by Ceolwulf II.
* **890s** - Cordelia overthrows Ceolwulf II and installs herself as Queen of Mercia, with the Daughters as her vassals, advisors, and warriors.
* **890s** - Cordelia's schemes come to fruition as she forms allies and puppets of all the local kingdoms. Her schemes are inspired by a group of sages from Europa Major who teach her in politics.
	+ She herself is Queen of **Mercia**
	+ She funds the defence of **Frisia** to gain an ally there in King Roethe van der Velde, descendant of Soekje.
	+ She marries Vargha, one of the Daughters, to the king of **West Francia**
	+ She funds the **Picts** (*who become her allies*) to attack the **Great Heathen Army**, whilst she has Mercia invade **Northumbria**, exterminating both forces. She believes she has killed Halfdan Ragnarsson, her mortal enemy. The **Danes** and **Northumbria** are subsumed by Mercia.
	+ She has her fellow Daughter, Vargha, assassinate Alfred the Great, and installs Morghan (granddaughter of her original favourite Daughter Séarla) as Queen of **Wessex**.

* **900s** - For a century, **Queen Cordelia of Albion**'s network of alliances and power holds firm.
* **990s** - Halfdan Ragnarsson resurfaces, supernaturally alive, and leads a Gael army out of Dublin to ally with the Picts and raid Mercia's west coast. He founds a base in Jorvik/York. Meanwhile, William of Normandy raids England's Kentish coast. West Francia is subsumed by the Carolingians. There are enemies on all sides of Mercia; Norse to the east, Danes to the north and west, and Normans to the south. Cordelia holds the heir of the Welsh kingdom of Powys hostage.

## The Vinland... ...saga

* **1000** - William of Normandy reveals Cordelia as a vampire to the English, so she flees. Taking the fake name Riis, she boards a boat to Stavanger in Norway and uses her grasp of Danish and Frisian to get by.
* **1002** - The immortal Halfdan Ragnarsson returns to Stavanger, so Cordelia flees. She uses her grasp of Cymraeg to gain favour with **Thorfinn Karlsefni**, who owns a Welsh slave, and he takes her on as part of his crew.
* **1003** - Thorfinn and Cordelia sail to **Reykjavik**, Iceland. She kills and feeds on an Icelandic man named Hastur Udvaldsson. Meanwhile, King Roethen of Frisia helps Mercia repel the Danes. The Normans begin preparing to mount a full scale invasion of Wessex and Mercia.
* **1003** - Thorfinn and Cordelia reach **Estryibyggð** on the east coast of Greenland, then hop another few weeks to the **Vinland** settlement (the modern site of L'Anse Aux Meadows). They settle in **Eiriksbýr**, the landing site of Leif Eiriksson.
* **1004** - Cordelia and the Vinlanders capture a Cree skræling man named Kitchi, and she learns Nehiyaw from him. Cordelia is exposed for the murder of Udvaldsson, and exiled from Eiriksbýr. She frees Kitchi and they go into the woods. Kitchi sings Cordelia songs in Cree, and she falls asleep in his arms where she slumbers for decades.
* **1021** - Cordelia awakens. Shunned by the Cree for resembling a Wendigo, she feeds to regain her human appearance and integrates with the Kanien'kehá:ka, people of the flint. Cordelia heals the elder woman of Ahkwesásne, named Niawentóko, and gains favour. She moves around between many places - Kaʼnehsatà꞉ke, Ahkwesásne, and Kahnawá꞉ke. The lumbering evil spirit Stone Giant **Atenenyarhu** stalks her through the woods, so she keeps moving.
* **1020s** - Cordelia is by now known to the Kanien’kehá:ka as **Enskáhi’onwa:té** (She lives once). She leads raiding parties to attack the Norse Vinland settlements, killing Vikings and freeing captured Kanien'kehá:ka hunters.
* **1040** - In a raid, Cordelia herself kills **Thorfinn Karlsefni** with her spear. She falls in battle, and the Kanien'kehá:ka bury her respectfully in the woods. She awakens in 1712.

## The High Middle Ages

* **March 1261** - In the Moloc Valley, several adventurers begin their journey within town of Voynič, capital of the Adriatic kingdom of **Voynich** located in modern day Croatia/Slovenia. Brought together by the Holy Roman Paladin Yekaterina to meet in the Swan pub within the Ljimin suburb, they were a rag-tag bunch tasked to travel to the town of Grâneštad and find out why the village had stopped supplying grain meal.
	+ Baba Voss, the oldest man in the Adriatic at 90 years old
	+ Dr. Wiktor Dziac, a plague doctor and mortician
	+ Piotr Szvyk, an engineer who pioneered techniques then only known in the Orient
	+ Fjord, the Swan's barkeep
	+ Arven Escarlata, a chef from West Francia
	+ Malakai Black, a monk from Mount Osrys
* **March 1261** - Along the route toward the hills of Ternholm, Malakai kills and robs a group of Venetian bandits. The group meets the local hermit Nestor Vosla. Nestor is only days later killed by Piotr's poorly calculated explosion whilst trying to fight off a pack of wolves. The group find evidence of what they weeks later learn is the Colour Out Of Space.
* **March 1261** - At the Cavershury monastery in the old growth forests, Wiktor finds the silver sword of the Slavic hero Ilya Muromets. Piotr goes insane whilst the group is trapped in the monastery infirmary by a huge, shambling beast with eyes within eyes and ribs within ribs, and detonates his own contraptions, killing him and 'Ribs' the beast.
* **March 1261** - Malakai and a bear-hunter named Aleksander rush to Cavershury having heard the explosion, and find the group sheltering in the basement. Fjord tries to claim ownership of an old, hot-to-the-touch manuscript full of eldritch ravings that briefly had sent Malakai mad, leading to a confrontation and the book being burned.
* **April 1261** - Reaching Grâneštad, they find the town empty. Wiktor finds Ilya's shield, emblazoned with the heraldry of the Rus'. They speak with two lone scared Grâneštadni survivors; a mother (Dzada) and daughter (Yena), who tell them that a star fell from the sky into a place called The Blasted Heath nearby. They journey over, meeting a faulkner named Erik Vosla on the road into the Magyar kingdom of High Molor. Aleksander kills two hunting hounds with a bear trap, and a Molor Magyar hunting party negotiates for compensation.
* **April 1261** - At the Blasted Heath, the party finds a semi-collapsed mine with one survivor inside; named Lazhla, she is mad, and runs off elsewhere. As the Colour Out of Space fills the tunnels, Aleksander is overcome by madness and shoots Baba Voss in the foot, pinning him as the Colour consumes him. Aleksander comes to his senses and strides into the mist with torches, fighting it back until he reaches Voss's body. He discovers silver repels it, yells this, and is consumed. Escaping the tunnel, Erik is hit in the nose by Lazhla, but Malakai comes to his aid and spears her through with his khopesh. Wiktor stood against the Colour with the weapons of Ilya in hand, as Malakai is overcome with mad fear and throws the last of Piotr's molotovs at the Colour. He misses, but Fjord leaps in front of Wiktor and is immolated, allowing the others to escape as the cave collapses.
* **May 1261** - The party returns to Voynič to a hero's welcome. They rest, allow Dzada and Yena to take over the Swan, and spend time enjoying themselves.
* **October 1261** - The party journeys to the Adriatic port of Adriaue, near modern-day Trieste. They meet two Adriatic pirate brothers, Marrek and Varrun, who try to rob them on the road but later are revealed to be part of their crew for the Venetian trireme Paladin Yekaterina is giving the party as a reward. Erik secretly hires the assassin Korren Spektor to pose as one of the crew to get close to Varrun. They name the trireme the Fjord Fiesta.
* **October 1261** - Arriving at the Adriatic island of Chrysaetos off the eastern coast of modern-day Italy, the party is introduced to the luxurious despot of Chrysaetos, the Greco-Sicilian tyrant Hepatos Philopater 'the Cruel'. He welcomes the party and promises them riches and a place at his side if they do something for him - to kill an invading Greek general named Anaxander, who is landing on the other side of the island from the beautiful town of Chrysaepolis. The party recruits a local hoplite and hunter named Jack Scarmor.
* **October 1261** - The group finds the remains of Anaxander's expedition, who landed but fell foul of the flesh monster Ghatanothoa. Marrek is killed by Ghatanothoa, and Jack is injured, but Wiktor painfully cures him with holy water. Korren stabs and kills Varrun and dumps his body in the Adriatic.
* **October 1261** - The party returns and reports to Hepatos, who propositions Jack for sex but is turned down. The party meets the Polish wildman Jestem Krzakiem. Malakai finds a diary of a sorcerer from the Cult of the Hydrax Mithridates and attempts to intone a spell, which summons a living mass of writhing eels that consumes him whole.
* **October 1261** - Jestem completes a zombifying ritual he read in a Hydrax cultist book and sets it on the party and Hepatos inadvertently. The group kill it and Erik pursues Jestem into the forest but loses him. Later, Jestem is spat on by a cobra and in an attempt to stop the pain, claws his own eyes out with a dagger.
* **December 1261** - The Norse gladiator Troy Ullrheim, the Polish librarian Plom E. Kowka, and the dubiously-origined big-boned gladiator Theodore 'Thump' Umpah join the party. They help drum up support for the party's new plan - a reopening of the Greek-built Kythera Fighting Coliseum, hoping to assassinate Hepatos there where he is less defended and in public view to show their power.
* **January 1262** - At the fight night at Kythera, many of the party fight. Hepatos is assassinated by Thump and the crowd goes wild. The coup goes smoothly, most the soldiers bowing except the most loyal to Hepatos's memory; riots are rapidly crushed. Under Hepatos's palace, Korren, Plom, and Erik find an underground chamber full of ritual lines, constellations, scrolls and knives dedicated to Hydrax. An emissary from the Voynich, supported by Venetian money, visits Chrysaetos to threaten invasion and assimilation into Voynich's empire. Thump laughs at this.
* **February 1262** - A spearhead of Voynichni forces invade the island, leading to fierce fighting on the beaches and through the city of Chrysaepolis. Thump duels the very same Paladin Yekaterina, and she kills him, but he releases a vial of the Colour Out Of Space that Wiktor (only one who was there and alive now) gave him. Plom and Erik channel a ritual that is too powerful for one but survivable by two, and summon Cyhaega the One-Eyed Black Sun in the sky. Many of the party fight the invaders. A local kid and wannabe pirate, Pockets, leads the civilians to safety to the north, but they are consumed and eaten by Ghatanothoa and he runs away in fear. As Cyhaega lets out a deafening call whilst picking up soldiers and dashing them into the sky with its tentacles, it seems to draw every horror on the island toward the centre - **Cyhaega** itself, **the Colour Out of Space, the Writhing Eels,** and **Ghatanothoa**. The party realises the island is doomed. Erik, Plom, Patches and Wiktor fled aboard their trireme westwards accompanied by their palace guards. Jack and Paladin Yekaterina shelter in a dwelling in Chrysaepolis scared for their lives, united in survival, and finally flee under cover of darkness as the four horrors begin a kaiju-style fight. Troy and Korren steal a ship and flee.
* **Spring, Summer 1262** - The party goes their own ways. Chrysaetos is left a cursed and barren isle.
	+ Plom, Erik, Pockets, and Wiktor end up in Ferrarra, in what is modern day Italy. Plom writes an in-depth **tome** about her experiences - **Of Mythos and Monsters**. Wiktor works as a doctor for the Duke of Ferrarra, Pockets helps at the orphanages, and Erik becomes a hunter and run a book club.
	+ Jack and Yekaterina wash up near Split, modern day Croatia, penniless, and build a new life.
	+ Arven returns to Voynič where he franchises his restaurants.
	+ Troy and Korren end up in the Republic of Venice, becoming high-profile warriors. Korren works as an assassin and Troy a gladiator.

## Early Modern History

* **1582** - Witch-hunter **Henri Guerreloup** sentences nineteen men and ten women to death in the Aix-en-Provence witch trials. He writes a diary about the devil worship he dealt with.
* **August 1 1589** - King Henri III of France is assassinated by Jacques Clément, a Dominican friar turned devil worshipper. Clément pretends to deliver a secret message to the king on the eve of a battle, then stabs him when his bodyguards have stepped back. Clément evades capture by throwing a torch from a sconce into a barrel of powder, and flees in the ensuing chaos.
* **1589-90** - Henri Guerreloup, the witch hunter, hunts down and kills Clément and his fellow members of the **Ordre du diable le plus profane** (Order of the Devil most Profane); known as the **Ordre**.
* **1590** - Henri Guerreloup goes missing on a voyage across the sea to **New France**.
* **1586** - The nun **Evadnia Più Domenica,** part of the Sardinian convent *Compagnia delle Figlie Evaristiane* acquires a copy of Guerreloup's diary and translates it from *moyen français* to Sardegnian, naming the occult devil-worship tome as the **Vénérée Diable**.
* **1683** - A pirate ship captained by **Captain Flint** sinks after an incident with some kind of ghosts at sea. The captain and the ship's young female specially-hired translator wash up on a mysterious ancient isle, site of a Great Old One artifact.

## Adventures in Nouvelle-France

* **1712** - Cordelia / **Enskáhi’onwa:té** awakens in the woods in what is now **New France**. She is caught in a hunting trap and mistaken by French fur trappers for a Métis or mixed woman, and taken prisoner. They plan to take her to Québec, but she slices their throats and eats their flesh. She goes by the name Enská Couer-de-Lion, and lives with the Métis community.
* **1717** - A French fur trader from Acadia, Emile Reuvere, has an altercation with Enská in the streets of Québec. Enska stalks him back to the inn (L'Auberge Louis XIV) he is staying at, breaks in, and kills him before drinking his blood.
* **1717** - The enigmatic investigator and witch hunter **Élodie Le Février** investigates alongside Nouvelle-France army peacekeepers led by Captain Thiboult. She joins up with the Métis tracker **Zoë Resve**. They attempt to track down Enská down at Englishman's Creek after, north of Québec, but she attacks them in beast form, knocking out Zoë. Élodie shoots her and they flee forty kilometres upriver by boat overnight.
* **1717** - Élodie and Zoë return to Québec alongside a band of ten Scottish Hebridean fur traders led by Douglas Fhearghaill.
* **1729** - The Dutch slave ship **Windhoek** dredges up the **Heart of the Sea** off the coast of Florida. A few weeks later, only five miles off the coast of Trinidad, it sinks in a freak fog incident near The Devil's Cove island. Its silver guilders become the subject of much treasure hunting.

## The Shadow Down Under

* **10th May 1802** - A cart delivery carrying crates of grain and beef meat, as well as a box of silver bullion and an Aboriginal stone tablet does not arrive in Sydney Town after leaving Parramatta. To find it, Captain John Murray of the New South Wales Corps and Magistrate Margaret Tennyson enlist a small group of civilians. Paid in pounds and given their mission, they are:
	+ A thieving Irishman named **Shea** - caught stealing bread from the English, he was sent to New South Wales. He was enlisted nearly instantly after becoming a freeman in the colony, having served his sentence.
	+ **Saxton Hale**, a huge hairy burly sweaty fireman. He was gay - having been outed in England, he moved to NSW to find a new life
	+ **Robert 'Rob' Banks**, an aspiring oil tycoon - very far off being one - a small fancy man
	+ **Eleanor Woods** - a very, very tall and muscular carpenter and shipbuilder
	+ The four of them purchase flintlock pistols, dynamite, camping kits, and leather body armour, then head off on the route of the lost delivery.
* **12th May 1802** - Halfway to Parramatta, the group is passing between red rocky cliffs and a billabong (watering hole) in a crater, when they notice scattered crates of maggoty beef and broken shards of a cart wheel. Shea finds some flint arrowheads which points to the involvement of local Aboriginal peoples (most likely Dharugs). The group hitch the horses. Whilst everyone else goes looking for a flatter way down into the billabong, Robert just climbs down. Everyone eventually realises he's gone down and join him - the rope snaps by Shea and Saxton but the thick mud softens their fall. Eleanor cuts through the brush and the group finds that the cart ran off the road and into the billabong, and is laying in the mud at the clear blue water's edge.
	+ Eleanor goes and searches the cart in the water. She finds the crate of silver bullion - 6 unstamped thick ingots - and pockets two. Meanwhile, the others find the two rotting horses laying on their side, one being scavenged by a skittish vulture, the other being eaten by dingoes. Saxton scares all but one of the dingoes off. Rob prepares to shoot it, but Eleanor lobs a plank at it and it runs away. The quartet looks around for clues. Shea looks at the blood trails from the flint arrowheads in the horse's flank and realises they were lodged in once the horse already died and was laying down, not when its heart was pumping or it was standing. They realise it was staged to look like the Aboriginals attacked the caravan.
	+ Rob finds a huge flat box and cracks it open. Something bites his cane, but he shakes it free. Inside is a large chubby Goana (monitor lizard) which relaxedly saunters out, takes a few bites out of the dead horse, and waddles away completely unbothered. Eleanor finds a damp manifest for the delivery. However, none of Eleanor, Shea, Saxton or Rob can read or write. Rob knows numbers, and realises that one box is unaccounted for - something curious. Shea and Eleanor follow some more tracks northward from the crash site, realising that the guards and driver are nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, Saxton and Rob bring the horses round. On the northern lip of the crater, they find tracks that suggest three horses trotted or cantered into the outback with a person walking behind each - i.e. prisoners. They follow.
	+ That evening, the quartet finds the small village of **Barramundi Flats**. With about ten houses, a well, and a large farm, it is a very modest homestead. They chat to a young man about the town - he knows nothing about the leads they ask about, but points them to the **Blackthorn Ranch** on the hill ran by Mary and Davo Blackthorn. The group gossip with an old lady about the Blackthorns and this furthers their plan to investigate them. Using Eleanor's expertise, they repair the roof of a local bricklayer, Johno Sinclair - this nets them a place to stay at Johno's that night. They dine with his wife, him, and their kid.
	+ That night, Shea steals the box of four unstamped thick silver ingots and escapes into New South Wales, never to be seen again.
* **13th May 1802** - Pretending to be a group of travelling carpenters, Eleanor leads the group up to Blackthorn Ranch. They chat to a guard who introduces them to Davo, the balding drunk bogan, and his practical-focused wife Mary in a green petticoat. Davo contracts Eleanor to build him two new cattle pens, and gives them a shack to stay in for the duration of repairs.
* **16th May 1802** - Over the few days of their work, Eleanor, Rob, and Saxton investigate the farm. Rob finds a trapdoor in the barn where Mary keeps disappearing to, and hears whimpering and pained noises inside. After a few days, on the night of the 16th they organise a gambling night with some other ranch hands. The two of note are the tough English **Lily Hawkes** and the literate Dutch (New Hollander) **Johannes von Berg**. Johannes and Lily tell them that there are frequently weird things going on round here. Johannes also says that he saw three men being led by guards into the barn.
	+ Johannes also reads the manifest for them - he is literate and can read his native Dutch. He reads it out and the party realises that the shipment was also transporting one Aboriginal artifact in the form of a stone tablet. Saxton, Eleanor, Rob, Lily and Johannes decide that the next day, they will meet again and storm the barn during the dead of night to find out what really is happening at Blackthorn Ranch.
* **18th May 1802 - 1am** - Eleanor, Rob, Johannes, Saxton and Lily gear up with shovels, flintlocks, and clubs. Johannes pickpockets a key to the barn from an overseer and gives it to Saxton. They sneak across the farm and into the barn - Lily keeps watch as everyone else opens the trapdoor. Below is a worked stone room with a circle of carved writing (they can't read), and desk, and several cages.
	+ Amongst the desk, Rob finds a stone tablet. When he touches it, it glows with a pale blue-green light. He throws it and the papers in a nearby bag which was full of flint arrowheads - confirming the theory put forward earlier that the 'Aboriginal attack' was staged. Johannes reads the names of the guards from the signatures on the manifest, and Rob calls them out. In two of the cells, two men respond - one (**Mick**) slumped and asking for help, the other (**Harry**) in the fetal position whimpering. Saxton spends some time breaking the cage locks and first frees Mick, who is hoarse and thirsty but thanks them. He tells them that some of the ranch guards ran his cart off the road and kidnapped him, Harry, and Thomas - who is nowhere to be seen. Saxton cracks open the second lock before climbing out into the barn when Lily hisses - the lights in the main house are on now, and guards seem to be on their way to the barn.
	+ Eleanor goes to pick up Harry, who is curled up and whimpering, He wriggles out of her grasp and turns around, gurgling in pain. Where his face would be, there is a bloody gaping wound round his neck, almost like the rim of a mushroom, and out of it is growing his new head - a huge blue-green fractal mass of crystals that has replaced his face. He tries to grab her but she slams the door and climbs the ladder out.
	+ Now in the barn as Mary and overseers bang on the door and threaten to break it down, they think fast. Eleanor, Johannes and Lily climb out a window and run toward the stables. An overseer on a horse spots them and shoots Eleanor in the side - she lands wounded but surprisingly fine. Johannes helps her up. Meanwhile, Rob wedges a lit stick of dynamite on one side of the south barn door where the overseers and Mary are pounding, and then he and Saxton (carrying Mick) kick open the north door. Saxton is met by an overseer who is crouched about to pick the lock, and gives him an almighty wallop with his great club. The wounded overseer pistol whips them back, but Saxton overpowers him and Rob shoots him - he stumbles back and collapses.
	+ Just then, the dynamite blows up. It instantly incinerates Mary Blackthorn and several overseers. Saxton and Rob run for the northern cattle fence, where an Overseer charges them with his unloaded musket using it like a lance. Its heavy metal body smacks Rob in the head. His jaw is dislocated and he is concussed, and nearly killed from the force of the speeding horse. Saxton shoulder-barges the horse when it stops to turn, and knocks it over - it collapses and pins the guard to the floor in immense pain. Saxton cracks his head with the club like a ripe watermelon. The pair leap the cattle fence and return back down to Barramundi Flats.
	+ In the chaos, after the explosion, the overseer who shot Eleanor falls off his rearing horse. She takes the chance to rush him and decapitates him with her carpenter's axe. She, Johannes and Lily begin saddling horses in the stables. Eleanor hears the other horses whinny and nicker in terror one by one closer, as something in the night approaches from the darkness. Terrified, she saddles up just as she hears Lily yelp and then a wet thud ring out. Johannes leaps to Eleanor's horse after something gores a hole in the side of his own - in terror, they gallop across the farm, leap the fence, and return to town.
* **18th May 1802 - 3am** - Back at Johno Sinclair's house, the group reconvenes - Eleanor, Saxton, Rob, Mick, and Johannes. They apply first aid to one another. Just then, they hear noises outside. Davo, the ranch boss, and two overseers are outside next door, where Eleanor left the horse tethered deliberately to throw them off. Davo threatens and hits the innocent woman who answers the door and begins preparing to burn down her house. Spurred on by this injustice, the group opts to act.
	+ They climb silently onto the roof of Sinclair's house. Eleanor leaps down on one overseer with her axe, but he spots her and she lands badly, twisting her ankle. Saxton lands on the ranch boss Davo, hitting him in the shoulder and landing safely. Just then. Rob shoots with the flintlock Shea left behind, aiming for the overseer holding the paraffin who was going to burn the house down. The overseer combusts and begins screaming, running on fire to the nearby well before falling down it sizzling. The overseer by Eleanor pulls a knife and stabs her square in the gut - it damn near kills her, and she begins bleeding out in the sandy dirt. Saxton bearhugs Davo and dislocates his shoulder before slamming him into the ground and subduing him.
	+ The overseer prepares to stomp on Eleanor to finish her off when Rob uses his own flintlock to blow the back of his head open, and the man dies. Saxton leaves Davo crumpled on the ground and rushes to help the bleeding Eleanor up, who barely pulls through. With both overseers dead and Davo grievously wounded, Saxton's firefighting training kicks in and he smothers the small paraffin fire on the porch to save the day. They quickly interrogate Davo and learn that his wife was the leader of whatever cult was going on up there and he didn't know much. Either way, they realise he needs to pay for his crimes. They decide to let the people of Barramundi Flats pass judgement. They use rope to tie Davo to the well in the town centre and ride off into the Outback sunset joined by Johannes and Mick, successful in their investigation and miraculously alive.

## The Regency

* Autumn 1812 - At the Château d'Avigny in the Vallée d'Écarlate in northwest Switzerland, many English and French nobles are gathered to celebrate an engagement. The betrothed are Lady Isabella Fontaine de Burgundy, to Victor Blackwood, Earl of Northumberland.
	+ Two guests of note at the party are Jane Dallowe, a 32 year old musician and fencer, and Henri Phillipe 'The Phantasma', a 35 year old stage magician. Jane and Henri notice some strange goings-on, like spooky painitngs crying blood, a white wedding dress is found bloodstained, and noises of digging in the grounds. They sleep that night but are awoken at the 13th chime of the clock past midnight. There, a terrifying slasher adventure unfolds, where a huge, mute, hulking suited figure stalks the castle and murders several guests - Jane and Henri on several occasions only narrowly escape from him. They also hide from a shrill, wailing, walking corpse of a bride in white. They conclude these are the previous owners, Lord and Lady Ironwood, and begin to gather clues to understand that Lady Ironwood was killed on her wedding day and Lord Ironwood was turned into a hollow man from this. Jane and Henri gather significant personal items throughout the castle - a locket from Aldric Fontaine's room after he is murdered, a tarnished ring from beneath Jane's floorboards, a bloodstained dress and veil from the scullery, and a broken rusted heirloom sword from the armoury. They bring the pieces first to the oak tree by the lake in the raging storm and Jane successfully uses the incantation in the Lord's diary to banish the undead wife and set her at peace. They then bait the Lord into approaching them at the hedge maze where there stands a huge black obelisk. Henri, now wearing one of the castle's suits of armour, fends off the Lord in a daring and bloody scuffle as Jane rushes to complete the ritual. Just as Henri is being choked to death, Jane completes it, and the Lord collapses into a pile of worms and old cloth. Jane and Henri take egress from the castle, shaken by all the death and otherworldliness they have seen.

## The Age of Outlaws

 —Bly Irving's last words as he passed away in the arms of his friends, succumbing to the wounds inflicted upon him by Dr. Linn Gothenberg.

* **1870s** - the Garland Mining Company, chaired by the tycoon **Amos Carnegie Garland**, sets up several mines in Arizona and Utah, and funds the unsuccessful boomtown of **Dusquesne, AZ**.
* **Early June 1881** - At **Yuma Territorial Prison, AZ**, several inmates begin laying the groundwork among the prisoners for unrest. The notable proponents are the Navajo **One-Shot Bly Irving**, the saloon owners **Benjamin** and **Lucía Arrazola-Carter**, and the rancher **Redford Ford** (oldest cousin of Henry Ford). Lucía befriends the guard **Ramón García**.
* **11 July 1881** - The Civil War veteran **Dafydd Willard**, the serial killer **Silas Payle**, the stereotypical Spaniard **Jeremiah Harrison** and the cowhand **Charlie Sawyer** break out of a sheriff's jail in **Tombstone, AZ**. Dafydd equips himself with the late Sheriff's badge. Dafydd and Charlie shoot a supernatural pale white horse, as Silas beats it with a barrel. They find the town they're in devoid of life and stuck in a state of perpetual darkness, with living shadows that are only held back by paraffin lamps as the group escapes to the Arizona desert. They flee and begin journeying to **Tucson, AZ**.
* **14 July 1881**, **Daytime** - Dafydd, Silas, Jeremiah and Charlie reach Tucson. At the seedy saloon **The Long Shot**, they hear tell about a bank robber named **Hattie Holcomb** and her gang who stole a gold bar and several thousand in bonds. In the saloon, they also meet and decide to join forces with timid Confederate ex-preacher **Archibald Withers**, black New England-educated prospector **Requise LeBron**, and stylish Spaniard **Fernando de Aragón**. They speak to the auburn-haired lady in charge, **Sheriff Thorne,** for intel. Silas is kicked in the head by a horse he was trying to steal, suffers Blunt Horse Trauma, and spends a stint at the doctor's in town.
* **14 July 1881, Evening** - The Yuma riot reaches a boiling point and a prison break is mounted whilst Bly rides alongside **Warden Vasquez**, **Miss Amelia** and seventeen guards to a nonexistent Apache ambush - he lays a dynamite trap for the guards and kills them all, before fleeing. The rioters are held down by the use of a Gatling gun, and the escapees' friend **Oscár** is shot dead by a sniper. A six-foot black man named **Tommy Freedman** and the Hispanic prison gang **Los Diablos** help mount the riot as twenty prisoners, Red, Lucía, and Ben escape to Yuma town.
* **21 July 1881** - Silas, Dafydd, Jeremiah, Charlie, Requise, Fernando and Arch reach the tiny mountain village of **Wolf Creek**. Here, after questioning an ex-Confederate settler named Hugh and learning that the Holcomb gang passed onward to **Thunder Peak**, Silas murders him in his study and cannibalises him to sustain his craving. Dafydd, masquerading as a Union sheriff, defuses the townsfolk's tension by explaining that Hugh took offense to him as well as to seeing Requise, who is black. They ride out of town, but Requise leaves behind a long fuse of dynamite inside the abandoned Hugh's house, collapsing it. Jeremiah heads back to Tucson.
* **22 July 1881** - Out in the Arizona desert, Bly, Red, Ben and Lucía find the prospector Christian Keats and his bodyguard sister Isabella. Bly threatens Christian into giving him some of his newfound gold. *“I just want the One Piece” -* Bly Irving to Christian Keats*.*
* **23 July 1881** - On the *Colorado Plateau*, Silas, Dafydd, Charlie, Requise, Fernando and Arch meet the travelling musician **Unity A. Spire** and the master miner **Jackalope 'Jack' Whitman**. The posse finds the Dutchman settler **Everett van der Rouel** and Charlie nurses his wounds. They ride to Everett's farm and find it occupied by **Hattie Holcomb**'s gang of six.
	+ Fernando, Requise and Jack ride up Thunder Peak, known in Navajo as *ii’ni’dził*. Up there, they find a Navajo ritual site. There were totems covered in very pure gold, silver, and copper, placed in male-female pairs and painted with red, orange, blue and green. There was also a medicine bundle (pipe, eagle feathers, tobacco, ochre, knife) that they accidentally defile and desecrate. Requise says the taboo skinwalker name *yee naaldlooshii*, one of the types of '*ánti'įhnii*. They are spooked by a dark shape moving on the mountain and leave.
	+ Meanwhile, Arch shoos the gang's horses as Dafydd provides sniper fire with his Springfield rifle. In the barn, A sniper0wounded Hattie shoots through the floor and through Arch's heart, leading him to stagger out and try to drink from his hip flask before collapsing dead. As Dafydd guns down the gang in the open and Silas throws a fire bottle at van der Rouel's house, Charlie and Unity approach the barn.
	+ Charlie gets into an intense gunfight with the wounded Hattie, but Hattie catches her whilst she's reloading her shotgun and shoots her in the cheek with a Winchester, killing her. Silas burns two members of the gang to death, and Dafydd snipes Hattie as she issues a challenge. The group requisitions the gang's stolen money, takes personal effects to prove their deed is done, and stays to help van der Rouel rebuild.
* **24 July 1881** - Bly, Red, Ben and Lucía arrive at **Terrence Rodell Duke**'s ranch, meeting his farmhands Gilbert, Stanley and Millicent. The quartet help him with farm work for several weeks.
* **31st July 1881** - Silas and Dafydd run away with the gold and the money from the gang. Requise, Fernando, Jeremiah, Unity, and Jack leave van der Rouel's homestead.
* **7th August 1881** - Jeremiah, Unity, Jack, Requise, and Fernando receive the reward for their bounty from newly appointed *Marshal* Lola Thorn, and set off for Montana. They spend two months travelling, as Unity makes a name for themselves as the banjo musician **Banjo Unchained** in Utah dancehalls and among the Mormons of Salt Lake City.
* **10th August 1881** - After finding a Garland Mining Corporation uniform cap washed up in the river, the group investigates the GMC mine two miles north, finding it abandoned. They realise all of the workers have fled or died after the Swede **Dr. Linn Gothenberg** went insane from staring into the water and became some sort of horrific Mythos siren-like being, capable of moving instantly through water. Linn sets off dynamite to collapse the cave, kills the last remaining worker, and chases the group through the claustrophobic caves. She rakes the flesh from Red's arm and almost drowns Bly by smashing his head into the flooded cave floor. She attempts to mind control Bly, but Ben smacks him out of it. Linn flays Bly's head, and whilst all four of them make it to the surface, Bly succumbs to his wounds and passes on.
* **10th August 1881** - Ben, Lucía and Red work on Duke's ranch as Red slowly recovers from his infected wounds and regains his strength over a three-month stint. Duke seals the mine entrance with dynamite so that no one ever befalls Linn's wrath again. They also bury Bly beneath a great oak tree and return his pipe and belongings to his Navajo family at the waters north of **Naatʼáanii Nééz**.
* **20th October 1881** - In the mountain town of **Big Sky, Montana**, Fernando, Jeremiah, Requise, Unity, and Jack meet three English folk. They are the brother and sister **Professor** **Harlan Cress** (Professor of Anthropology at Royal Holloway College in Surrey) and **Doctor Madeleine Jones**, a surgeon. Madeleine is masquerading as a man named **Dr. Richard Dickman**. They both are here on a hunting trip with the son, **Maxwell Hammond**, of their late friend Obadiah Hammond. Fernando recognises Maxwell, having shown him around Spain on a business trip some years earlier. ('Maxwey Khammond, as I live and breathe!') As a group altogether, they receive a land grand from the Big Sky City Hall and go to find a beautiful place to stay,
* **29th October 1881** - The large group from Montana stakes their claim in a beautiful spot in the shadow of the Madison Mountains at 8000ft up, by a large lake, river, rapids, and rolling forested lush hills. It is the first town in **Hope County, Montana** (after the establishment of two prior failed settlements including Green's Crossing). They name it **Fresh Lake City**, and name the river **Thames**. They meet the Ojibwe trapper **Wolf**, who gives them dreamcatchers but Jeremiah accidentally snaps one. Jeremiah begins planning for his business. **El Tropico Five Star Cigar**.
* **13th November 1881** - Ben, Lucía and Red meet the Iron Riders gang boss **Donovan Beck** and his two goons, the brother and sister **Lemmy** and **Jodie**, in **Albuquerque**. They purchase books such as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They also attend a lecture by **Oscar Wilde**, who offers them a job as bodyguards in the near future. Lucía and Jodie give a false tip off **Sheriff Bass Reeves** and the **Pinkertons** about Yuma escapees in the area. Red is offered a job with **Roald Amundsen**'s Northwest Passage expedition.
* **14th November 1881** - Out in the New Mexican badlands, Red, Ben, Lucía, Don, Jodie and Lemmy use dynamite to force **Amos Carnegie Garland**'s private **484 Iron Horse** train to stop, where they rob it and blaze a path of destruction.
	+ Lucía and Ben first murder a driver and a young boilerwoman by shooting them and leaving them for dead. They then blaze a path through the sleeper cars. Lucia slits the throat of a struggling old lady, Garland's wife Maureen. Ben smothers Garland's uncle Obadiah with a pillow in his bed. They find the bedroom of Wyatt Earp aboard the train, but he is elsewhere.
	+ Red and Don attack a security guard in the caboose. She uses a Springfield rifle to shoot Red in the cheek, immediately killing him. Don obliterates her up close with his shotguns, before travelling through the freight cars. After killing two more security guards with his shotguns (one of whom he turns into a mincemeat from the waist up), he cracks two safes and loots several thousands in gold and bonds, plus Garland's own 24-carat cold LeMat revolver. Don then gets into an intense gunfight with legendary lawman Wyatt Earp. Earp heavily wounds Don, but Don blows his left arm off with a sawn-off.
	+ Earp flees the train, and on his way out, finds Lemmy and Jodie scouting. Earp shoots Lemmy in the heart, killing him. Meanwhile, Don, Lucía and Ben meet in the middle and confront Garland, who begs for mercy and tries to pay them to spare him. Confronting him over his deliberate failure at the town of Dusquesne and his culpability for the death of their daughter Abigail, they shoot him fifteen times before Don blows his skull into fragments with a shotgun. They destroy all the bodies and ride off into New Mexico to take up Oscar Wilde on his offer.

## Fresh Lake City's Age of Settlers

* **1st January 1882** - Having delved into their assets to fund it, the homestead of **Fresh Lake City** is completed, with two gigantic houses and about four or five small ones, a couple barns, a stables, a well, and many fields. The population as it stands is nine- Maxwell, Harlan, Madeleine, Requise, Unity, Fernando, Jackalope, Jeremiah, and Wolf.
* **January 8th 1882** - Maxwell, Harlan, Madeleine, and Jack meet the enterprising oil barons and siblings **Mary** and **Romeo Bridleton** in Big Sky, and form the **Hammond-Bridleton Oil Company**, or **HB Oil** for short. Meanwhile, Fernando and Requise lead seven feral pigs back to the homestead.
* **January 10th 1882** - Mary, Romeo, and their butler Morris move to Fresh Lake City. On the route back, the group is spooked by a watcher in the trees, cryptic carvings, and a raccoon impaled in a tree. Wolf makes a statue of Maxwell and many booby traps.
	+ Later that night, Harlan is awoken by a watcher outside his window. The group investigates. They find footprints leading into the barn, and one of the pigs is drowning on dry land, bloated with water. Jack puts it out of its misery, whilst Unity finds more carvings that Jack works on. Maxwell spots the interloper and fires, but his Martini-Henry jams and breaks. Wolf uses arrows and a spear to bring down the interloper, who is revealed to be a clammy, pale human with smooth skin instead of a nose and mouth, and flipper-like hands.
	+ The sight of this creature sends Harlan into a bout of insanity, and he shoots it dead, before freaking out and almost breaking Maxwell's brandy flask, believing that the water is coming for him. He descends into hysteria. Jeremiah, Richard(Madeleine), and Jack restrain him, and they take him to the grain cellar to spend the night and calm down from his madness.
	+ Romeo tells Maxwell "*You already came back an hour ago, I thought?"* Maxwell, Jack, Wolf, Jeremiah, and Unity sweep the house, finding damp footprints and carvings on the ceiling, but nothing else untoward. Suitably unsettled, they and their new guests all spend the night at Madeleine's house. Jack ventures into the woods to look for any final carvings, and is knocked out by cultists and replaced by a dopplegänger. He is found by an elderly pair of hunters (Jane and Leonard) who walk him home.
* **January 13th** - Jack's dopplegänger, Richard(Madeleine) and Jeremiah travel to Green Carp Lake to fish for a huge, emerald green carp that taunts them by leaping out of the water several times. Jack's dopplegänger and Richard take a canoe out and hook it, but then Jack's dopplegänger holds Richard underwater despite being shot by Richard in self defence, causing the good doctor to lose consciousness and drift downriver. Jack's dopplegänger follows the emerald carp into the depths and disappears. Jeremiah finds Richard's body and attempts to perform chest compressions, but ends up killing Richard by rupturing the doc's lungs.
* **January 15th** - Maxwell, Romeo, Mary, and Morris return from Big Sky with the **Colorado Land Survey Company**, a group of twelve surveyors including their leader Tina Broadbent and their frizzy-haired photographer **Sherman Kodak Shutterstock**. Requise is haunted by dreams of a library and finally opens a book, met with the name of **CTHULHU** and wakes up able to commune with the spirit world.
* **20th January 1882** - Don, Ben, Lucía and Jodie accompany Oscar Wilde to the town of **Deadwood** in the **Dakota Territories**, where he acquires a copy of the book **Vénérée Diable**. They then settle in the Thousand Acre Woods near Mount St. Katherine, founding the homestead of **Ironwood**.
* **January 22nd** - A hunting party of Ojibwe men led by a young man named *Gibagadinamaagoom Thunderbird* chase the shirtless priest **Connor MacRhyde** away from a sacred clearing. Connor seeks refuge by diving through Jeremiah Harrison's window in Fresh Lake City. They have a shouting standoff but then everyone calms down. Wolf speaks to Thunderbird and learns that the frozen lake in FLC, 'Lake River', is actually called Sawtooth Lake by the local Ojibwe people - the place where real Jack is being held. Connor holds a funeral for Dr. Richard but the group finds the grave empty. Unity plays a banjo dirge. Connor burns a bible and says a drunken prayer in Gaelic.
* **January 23rd** - Wolf and Fernando go into Big Sky to stock up. Richard(Madeleine) rises slightly rotting from their grave, spooks Connor, and stands over Jeremiah in the night, who has a huge fright. Connor blows the door off and everyone has a second standoff in Jeremiah's cigar shop - it ends calmly again, yet quite tense since Richard is slightly rotting and has gills.
* **February 1st** - Wolf, Fernando, Maxwell, Connor, Unity, Richard, and Jeremiah delve into a nearby cave to find Jack. They are met with a claustrophobic mess, and the stress of the cave (plus an anti-Native slur being thrown around) causes Wolf and Jeremiah to enter a standoff and threaten one another. Unity and Connor's guide-ropes fail and they both fall down a cave sinkhole, suffering heavy injuries. Richard has to shuffle through a crawlspace to reach them and treat their broken bones. The group uses dynamite to blow a path through the damp cave and find a second starfish-human hybrid, which Maxwell executes with his Martini-Henry rifle. The final cave's chamber contains a delirious, unconscious Jack clutching a stack of Cthulhuan writings on slimy parchment, and the walls are covered with carvings upon carvings. Wolf hits Jeremiah with a dynamite arrow, so Jeremiah unloads his revolver into him. Jeremiah is blown to mincemeat, and Wolf bleeds out in Dr. Richard's arms.
* **February 1882** - After Unity's and Harlan's pleas fall on deaf ears, Jack puts the rotting Dr. Dickman out of her misery after they have been continued to rot, now reduced to mere flesh loose on bones and a puddle of organs. Fresh Lake City continues to grow in population.

## Montana's Age of Oil

* **July 1883** - Fresh Lake City by now has a population of some 3,000 people; 70% of them employed by HB Oil. Maxwell Hammond has become something of a local legend. The local wildlife has begun to die, and the local Ojibwe, Arikara, and Lakota people have moved north and east, leaving a few scattered Ojibwe, Crow, and Shoshone settlements in the vicinity. The streets are tight, tall, and full and there is smog in the air. The local refinery and several drill sides with derricks and jacks pump black gold.
	+ Requise, Fernando and Maxwell spend weeks analysing the writings that Jack had clutched to his chest. Unity returns to her memorial garden as well as performing. Sherman sets up a kiosk and the **Fresh Lake City Gospel Truths Newspaper**.
* **24th July 1883** - Four strangers arrive in FLC. **Vanessa Adams**, the British Canadian journalist; **Delphine Ell,** an Acadian drifter from Trois-Rivières; **Isabella Harrison**, a Mexican-Texan conwoman and mother of the late Jeremiah; and **Quentin Oswald King**, an unknown Aussie archaeologist and first generation resident of Perth. The newcomers meet Unity, Requise, Harlan, Jack, Fernando, Maxwell, and Sherman.
* **Late July 1883** - Requise dreams again of the library at the bottom of a deep pit. Delphine falls into a similar sinkhole with oil and the skeleton of Dennis, a local CLC surveyor. The group spends a day at Green Carp Lake and gathers reagents for several rituals that Maxwell, Fernando and Requise plan to undertake.
* **Late July 1883** - Fernando carries out a warding ritual on his house, which has reality-altering consequences - in that area, the universe finds some way to discourage violent or evil acts. Testing it out, unphased, Sherman smashes the window by jumping in, then runs out the door and breaks it. Oops.
* **Early August 1883** - Maxwell, Fernando, Sherman, and Harlan go on a fishing trip! They head overland to **Minot**, Dakota , where they bump into Unity who is seeing Delphine and Connor off at the train station.
* **Early August 1883** - Delphine Ell and Connor MacRhyde journey away south together looking for adventure and their calling.
* **Early August 1883** - Unity, Harlan, Fernando, Maxwell, and Sherman arrive in **Portland** Oregon. Fernando pretends to know French to score the group a spot aboard the mutton-chopped Bristolian Cpt. **Rob Stratten's** whaling vessel, the **HMS Cavalier**. The group has a quick swimming lesson with an Olympic swimmer to prepare.
* **August 1883** - Aboard the HMS Cavalier, the group sights a pod of bowhead whales, including an albino bowhead whale that Sherman spots off a reef using his camera. The Cavalier pursues the pod along the coast northward, finally catching up with them in the North Pacific, around 100km. south of Haida Gwaii and 100km west of Vancouver Island.
	+ Harlan, Maxwell and Fernando spook the pod with gunfire to get them to scatter. Sherman joins three rowboats of whalers who strike the white whale with harpoons and draw blood, but it breaches and hits them with a wave from its tail. Sherman is almost pulled under, but cuts himself loose. Fernando launches a harpoon straight through the white whale's eye, killing it. The Cavalier harvests its goods, and Maxwell is allowed to take a test tube full of ambergris.
* **Late August 1883** - The Cavalier makes landfall in Vancouver, Canada. After having Fernando barter with a French merchant, Cpt Stratten bids them adiue. The group shops for some goods - including Fernando purchasing a US Army Maxim Gun, and Unity purchasing a Kazoo - before taking the train back to Minot then riding back to Fresh Lake City.
* **Late August 1883** - Maxwell completes his ritual, the Ziggurat of R'lyeh. Using obsidian, ambergris, a feather of a bird that's travelled over 7 mountains and 7 seas, and a silver knife, he calls down a lightning strike. The ritual summons a small triangular hole in space-time, which Unity, Harlan, Fernando, and Sherman agree to keep quiet, and order it to fly up into the sky for later use.
	+ Fernando and Sherman replicate the ritual on a much larger scale. The great effort causes the ground to shake and night to fall briefly. The ritual is too powerful, and Sherman is pulled into the space between stars, where a trillion eyes in the darkness stare at him as he melts into the sea. This summons a much larger version of the triangular space-time hole which seems to be very defiant. After it causes a workman, Jonah Smith, to go mad and throw himself in it, the group builds a billboard in front of it to hide it from the townsfolk.

## The Shadow Over New England

* **Late August 1883** - The shirtless Gaelic priest Connor MacRhyde returns to FLC, finding it an industrialised hellhole. Requise LeBron completes the ritual Inhabit Flesh and steals the mortal shell of Marcel Matthews, a black triathlete, transferring Requises's consciousness and memories into Marcel's body. At the El Tropico shop, Connor busts down the door and meets Maxwell again. Requise joins them, as does the Frenchman Alexandre DuBois, a store clerk looking for work (but secretly an FBI-esque agent).

* **September 1 1883** - Maxwell, Requise, Connor, and Alexandre travel to Innsmouth, Massachusetts, for an auction of a gem known as 'The Heart of Atlantis'. They find the town foggy, gloomy, and fishy. They investigate the otherwise glamorous and luxurious Dagon Hotel and Casino they're staying at, finding all of the locals to be bulging-eyed slack-japed hunched fish-like people. Alexandre spies on the staff whilst Maxwell, Requise and Connor scout out the vault with the Heart. After Requise sets off dynamite as a diversion, security confronts them in Maxwell's room, and the party kills the two guards. As more and more fish people come to give chase, they blast through floors with Connor's 4-gauge shotgun and get to the vault, where they kill another two guards before grabbing the Heart and running. Maxwell pays a valet to drive them to Boston.
* **September 1883** - A homeless man gives Maxwell and Alexandre an old map detailing the lost treasure of the Patriot Thaddeus B. Burton from Dunwich. Back home in Fresh Lake City, Quentin King mails the original spell papers over to the British Museum.
* **3 September 1883** - Maxwell, Alexandre, Harlan, Jackalope, Fernando, and Quentin check on the large black triangle-hole in reality behind the hill sign. It is gone, the hole in the floor is smoothed over, and the cabin is furnished and empty. Meanwhile, Vanessa is sent by a local seamstress named Prudence to find her missing husband, Job Stedman.
	+ The whole group finds Job and two local labourers dead at a campsite, completely untouched except for triangle-shaped holes through their flesh but not their clothes. The shadows at the campsite begin moving unnaturally, so Maxwell and Fernando sprint away. The shadows slither into a hand that tries to steal the Heart of Atlantis - Quentin lets it smash the vial and try to drag it into the darkness, but has second thoughts, grabs it, and the others and Quentin run to Fernando's house.
	+ Fernando threatens to shoot the others if they come near his house. The dead corpse of Job, piloted by shadow, appears and tries to steal the heart from Quentin again, so Quentin subdues him. Quentin then hurls the Heart through Fernando's window, bypassing the ward, and it begins flooding the house with seawater. In doing so, Quentin suffers what seems to be a stroke and collapses, so Vanessa and Jackalope rush him to hospital.
	+ Fernando flees his house as Harlan wades in to retrieve the Heart. He is dragged down into an endlessly deep vision of the sunken city of R'lyeh, but swims out of a gate within one of the thousands of basalt obelisks with glowing green runes and finds himself (despite going downwards) ending up two floors up, in Fernando's attic. Harlan seizes the Heart and wraps it in the original copy of **Van Gogh's Starry Night,** then flees as Fernando's house collapses due to the inundating water. Harlan yells at the Heart to stop gushing water, and it complies.
	+ Enraged after his mansion has collapsed, Fernando storms to the town hospital with his *Maschinepistole* loaded in his pocket, seeking revenge. However, hospital staff force him to leave. Meanwhile, whilst the heart is left unattended, Alexandre steals it and places it in El Tropico then sends it to the **PBI**.
* **Mid-September 1883** - Maxwell, Alexandre, Unity, Harlan, Fernando, and Vanessa travel to **Boston**. They rent a wagon and pay the weird Englishman **Baldassar Chedman** to drive them to **Dunwich**.
	+ They plan to find the lost gold of Thaddeus B. Burton, the patriot. On the ride over, something invisible and large kills one of their horses and makes big footprints, and they witness a lightning bolt strike *Sentinel Hill.*
	+ In town, they chat to "half-wit in-bred" locals, investigate the public library, and the Gold Rush Museum. They learn of the Whateley family, and pass Lavinia and Wilbur when they visit Sentinel Hill. They learn of the power the hill holds.
	+ The party goes to the Whateley home and interviews Wilbur as they hear banging upstairs. Harlan hears Lavinia's death as the bluebirds twitter in unison. Alexandre sees Old Man Whateley with his book talking to thin air. Old Man Whateley shows Alexandre what remains of the patriot gold he used to purchase more cows to feed his malformed evil other son.
	+ Maxwell, Harlan, and Fernando investigate and realise the presence of the giant, invisible, hungering evil Whateley son, who is a child of Yog Sothoth. Fernando unloads several clips into it as Maxwell tosses cocaine over it to highlight its presence, but then he is knocked out by the monster collapsing a wall on him. Unity convinces Wilbur to surrender, whilst Alexandre duels Old Man Whateley, stops him casting a spell, and knocks him out.
	+ Harlan begins losing sanity rapidly as he bends reality by shooting faster and better than a human should, and stands firm against the monster until he is tossed several meters into a barn door and barely stays alive.
	+ The group leads the Whateley monster up to Sentinel Hill, but Harlan goes mad and has second thoughts. Alexandre tries to knock Harlan out, but Harlan shoots him in the arm to fend him off. Unity's banjo dirge distracts Harlan and the monster enough, and Fernando activates Sentinel Hill's stone circle. Harlan is just barely too slow to dive out the circle, and both he and the monster are seemingly completely immolated by the otherworldly fire. The group returns to Boston shaken.
	+ Corbett Jansen, an Innsmouth drifter, delivers a letter to Maxwell and Alexandre at Boston Central Station. It is from a lady named Constance Jardin in Halifax. It reveals that Alexandre has inherited a manor, Chevalier's Prior, the seat of the De Le Verendrye family near Halifax. Baldassar Chedman and Corbett both sign on as El Tropico employees. Maxwell spends a month in care until his back is better.

## The Halifax Saga

* **October 1883** - The **Bureau of Paranormal Investigation** raids the town of Innsmouth and destroys the Dagon Hotel.
* **October 1883** - Unity Spire (Banjo Unchained) tours New England's musichalls and ends up in Canada.
* **16th October 1883** - Corbett, Maxwell, Alexandre, Fernando, Vanessa, Isabella, and Requise take the train from Fresh Lake to Boston then on to **Halifax, Nova Scotia.** It is a drizzly, cosy port town, very developed and comforting, with cosy houses and fresh battered fish and chips.
	+ At the Three Fathoms Inn in Richmond, they meet Constance. She tells Alexandre about his new estate. The group also researches it, and learns that the estate was once owned by the De La Verendrye family who were gifted it by Louis XIV in the 1700s after their exploration of America. 20 years ago, the woman of the house disappeared, and her husband and two children were found dead dashed on the rocks.
	+ Maxwell rents the luxury Mississippi Paddle Steamer known as the **Queen of Egypt** and the group sails to Beacon Isle where the estate lies.
* **17th October 1883** - They find First Nations carvings and a collapsed farmhouse. The group enters the grand neo-gothic French castle and finds it full of mould, damp, and structural holes. They are also haunted by noises of scurrying rats, and occasional rats that are aggressive and always moving further downwards.
	+ Requise is spooked by rats and shotguns a china cabinet. The group finds the railing that the family jumped off, 20 years earlier. Whilst split up, Corbett goes insane and is dragged by a seething horde of rats down into the cellar where Alexandre happens to trip and fall. They find Corbett has found a silver key. As the storm outside intensifies, the group resorts to staying the night in the foyer of the mansion.
	+ Overnight, Requise and Fernando hear scurrying rats, and witness the painting of Louis XIV bleed. Alexandre and Maxwell experience strange dreams of a silver-locked door and a porcelain bath. Alexandre cuts a rat in half when it wakes him up, and Maxwell does cocaine.
	+ The next morning, the group finds the silver-locked door and it is revealed to be a spiral staircase leading to an infinitely huge room full waist-deep of countless human bones, and a **rat king**, millions of rats tangled together. Corbett goes **completely and utterly, inescapably and permanently insane**. "*I think they're hungry"*. He is dragged under, his guts are gnawed out, and his hair becomes tangled in the rat king which rises like a tsunami. Requise tosses a bundle of dynamite at it and the group runs, leaping across cracks and chasms as the whole castle falls from the cliffs into the rocky roiling sea. They run to the Queen of Egypt and sail back to Halifax. Fernando shoots a rat hitching a ride on driftwood.
* **19th October 1883** - Quentin receives a thank-you letter from the British Museum which includes tickets to a medical science conference in **Halifax**. He and Jackalope board the train without a ticket at FLC. They throw the conductor overboard somewhere after **Minot**. They commandeer the train along with the young eager driver, **Melvin**. Jackalope (now taking the identity of Conductor **Neil J. Ball**) separates the train cars and they ride in the engine and coal car at breakneck, legendary speeds through New England until they reach Boston, including riding through a herd of cows and pancaking a few. Whilst trying to stop the train, Melvin is struck by debris and knocked out. Quentin invokes a miracle by suffering a heart attack but stopping the train. Jack carries him to safety, and Melvin commandeers another engine so the trio can take the train to Halifax.
* **21st October 1883** - The medical undergraduate **Clarissa Brahman** from **Mt. Saint Vincent University** stalks Maxwell and Vanessa to a local drugstore after **Dean Professor Halsey Allan** warns Clarissa that their university is seeking funding. Clarissa gets Maxwell to agree to come to the university for a 3-day medical conference where she hopes he will be wowed.
* **23rd October 1883** - Jack, Quentin and Melvin meet up with Maxwell, Vanessa and Clarissa in downtown Halifax. They go to the conference and get given rooms in the uni halls. They listen to some talks given by the Dean, by the transatlantic phrenologist **Professor Emily Jones**, and by the Franco-Prussian war doctor **Dr Claire Écrit**. They also meet the drawling **Dr. Jameson Smith** as well as the blonde, calm mortician **Dr Herbert West** and the timid brunette dentist **Dr Olivia Harvey**. A Sports Studies jock named Butch invites Vanessa and Jack to a local back-alley pit fight.
	+ Quentin complains about his recent heart attack of which he is still hurt, and Herbert and Olivia sinisterly take him to a secret basement lab in the sewer of the building, saying they will cure him. Olivia disarms Quentin of his gun through sleight of hand. In the basement is a morgue cabinet and a body beneath a sheet. Meanwhile, Maxwell talks about investments with the Dean. Vanessa, Clarissa and Jack follow Herbert, and make their way down the scissorlift to the basement. This alerts Herbert, who stops administering some green liquid he was about to, whilst Olivia distracts Quentin with the guise of a check-up. Thus follows a tense few moments until Olivia gives Quentin a pill and a lollipop and sends the quartet back upstairs. They decide to return later. Quentin takes the blue sugary pill.
	+ That night after dinner and after alerting the Dean, the group sneaks into the faculty building and goes down into the basement. They find the lab gone - the papers incinerated, the bottles smashed, the tables moved, and the incinerator still warm. The body beneath the sheet (a fat old white man) breathes once every few minutes, so Quentin and Jack strap him down. Clarissa finds the remains of a local boxer, **The Kid O'Brien**. The room is dark and very spooky and atmospheric. Quentin finds the neon green syringe and injects it against everyone's better judgement, and passes out.
	+ The body disappears and the fluorescent light shatters. Suddenly, his corpse crawls forward, writhing in pain and recounting the moment of his death - "*HELP! GET THAT DAMN NEEDLE AWAY FROM ME, DOCTOR!".* Maxwell unloads both barrels at the corpse and eviscerates it whilst Clarissa descends into a bout of madness. The group flees as fast as possible. In the scissor-lift on the way up, Vanessa's arm becomes trapped between the door and the ceiling, and it is almost completely ripped off, but Maxwell pries the cage open to save her.
	+ In the store room above, now clear of the hellish basement below, Quentin suddenly drops out of Jack's arms. His heart stops entirely, and he lurches out and tries to attack Clarissa and Maxwell. Maxwell and Vanessa shoot him several times with their Martini-Henry and .45 Magnum respectively, whilst Clarissa screams and beats him with the empty shotgun. Quentin begins screaming his final words again - "GREAT DIDGERIDOO! MY BODY, MY BLOODY CHOICE, MATE" Jack runs to find help, and steps out to bump into none other than Herbert West. Herbert fends the hysterical Jack off and Jack eventually agrees to show him what's going on in the storeroom. Herbert sees the now-undead feral crawling Quentin and drops to his knees, wailing "What have I done?", seeming remorseful for Quentin's pain, and surprised that Quentin took both the blue sugar pill and the neon green injection. As the tension mounts and Vanessa demands answers, Herbert draws a pistol and shoots her lantern. In the ensuing darkness and chaos, he flees the scene.
	+ Jack, Vanessa, and Clarissa jump out the window into a hedge just as security arrives and Quentin attacks a guard. They don't know what happens to him, but they make it back to Melvin's hotel room and break the news to him.
* **24th October 1883** - Dean Halsey Allan cancels the medical conference after the reports of shooting, Herbert & Olivia's disappearances, and - more worryingly - Quentin is nowhere to be found, and two security guards were killed. Maxwell, Clarissa, Vanessa, and Jack (I'm calling him Jack not Neil it's easier) return to the Queen of the Nile boat and tell Alexandre about what happened. Clarissa tries to perform surgery on Vanessa's arm and accidentally infects the wound.
* **25th October 1883** - Vanessa learns of the local decrepit waterfront pub, **The Dying Gull**, and how its owner is looking to sell it.
* **26th October 1883** - Maxwell, Alexandre, Jack, Vanessa and Clarissa buy the **Dying Gull** off its owner, **Basil Elton**, who runs away happily the second the contract is signed, so happy to be free of this accursed place.
	+ They investigate the property after closing for the night, finding it full of mould and damp. They find old documents revealing there was a house on this site with one inhabitant and full of damp and mould, which was demolished. They move a cabinet in the basement and find a door covered in ravings and writings about banishing 'the foul hungering thing' below. Behind the cabinet there are several items of clothing.
* **27th October 1883** - Maxwell gives Melvin the clothes from the cellar (except Jack who keeps a sharp suit). The Halifax redcoat Police apprehend Melvin and question the group after the clothes are found to be parts of the last outfits of many missing people including that of the unsolved case of the 'Blue Blouse Killer'. Jack and Melvin are about to be taken to the station but Alexandre reveals himself as an FBI agent to get them off the hook.
* **November 1883** - Fernando and Requise spend time in the Spanish Embassy in Halifax.
* **3rd November 1883** - The quintet delves behind the door in the Dying Gull's basement. It is a maze made of volcanic rhyolite with quartz veins, piles of household debris, and creeping darkness.
	+ The group finds slime trails and hears slurping. They find the previous owner of the demolished house, unmarked but without any bones whatsoever, and Clarissa takes his bronze ritual dagger. The group is separated by a wall of intense darkness - Jack is isolated. He uses granola bars to misdirect the darkness. The group meets up again in a large room with three circles of quartz on the floor and lots of ravings. They realise the creeping darkness cannot pass over quartz, so Jack mines it out and they carry it with them.
	+ Coming to a large pit, Jack tries to jump it but is stranded halfway down. The darkness approaches. Clarissa tries to command it by crying out *tekeli-li*, but this summons some amorphous blob with a hundred eyes, each opening into a mouth with teeth, slithering tongues that split into strands of eyes, that creeps up. Jack tries in vain to get out of the pit. Clarissa cuts off part of the amorphous blob, but it then engulfs her and dissolves her bones, leaving her to suffer immobile in agony. Jack makes it out the pit. Alexandre cuts off Clarissa's leg then stabs her in the heart and head, believing her to be a dead corpse - she feels it all, and would spend the next week or two succumbing to the growing dark and madness, unable to die until her mind is broken. The group flees the basement, seals it up, and GTFOs.
* **3rd November 1883** - Fernando, Requise, Isabella and Unity happen to bump into Alexandre, Vanessa and Maxwell. Also, Alexandre hires a rat-exterminator, **Verm Ernie**. They plan for the future, and Maxwell contracts builders to repair the Dying Gull.
* **Winter 1883/4** - Everyone returns to their homes and their significant people and places. Maxwell and Alexandre undergo therapy for their experiences.
* **January 1884** - Verm wins tens of thousands at the finest casino in **Halifax** but is suspected of cheating due to just how unlikely his win is. Two security guys confront him in an alley behind a gallery and beat him up, but he shoots them both dead and flees the scene.
* **February 1884** - Isabella runs the only other pharmacy in FLC out of business.
* **1st March 1884** - The group meets up at the new bar, the Emerald Carp, along with four *Paranormal Bureau* agents - Murphy with a shotgun, Weaver with a flamethrower, Flint with a telephone and radio, and Burns with tools and a camera.
	+ They prepare large amounts of quartz to fend off the monster and delve into the labyrinth beneath the cellar. Moving as a unit with arc lamps to light their way, they see flashes of movement and hear things. They spot evidence someone has been moving around down here. Agent Burns disappears quietly, leaving behind his crowbar. Alexandre orders Flint to call the fire brigade and have them prepare to flood the tunnel
	+ Requise spots a wall of darkness which tries to bisect the group. Agent Murphy is swamped by it and disappears. The group runs away from the chasing dark and spots the walking form of Clarissa Brahmer, and decides to flee back to the pub.
	+ Agent Flint tries to call the fire brigade to tell them when to begin pumping water into the tunnel, but the fireman alludes that Burns is with him and they already begun - unbeknownst to the fireman, Burns is possibly a body double or a zombie, the group theorises. The line goes dead as the tunnels start flooding.
	+ Alexandre uses the flicker of a match to find another way out and comes to the chasm Jack fell into. Verm twists his ankle and falls into the hole. He is only saved when Maxwell uses his Martini-Henry rifle to fire a harpoon, so the group can cross the gap and tug-of-war Verm to safety. The group finds a passage into an old mine that Unity confirms, but it is only big enough for Verm, Unity, Maxwell, and Fernando.
	+ Verm flees to the surface via the mine and eats ice cream relaxedly. Maxwell, Unity and Fernando run into the mine as Requise, Alexandre, Isabella, Murphy and Flint set dynamite to widen the hole. They blow it and the cave begins collapsing unforeseenly. Fernando makes it out of the old mine and joins Verm on the beachfront. Unity and Maxwell hide under an upturned minecart as the mine collapses.
	+ Alexandre is struck by two slabs of rhyolite and collapses, whilst Agent Weaver is completely flattened and killed in a rockfall. Isabella and Requise leave Alexandre to bleed out, but Isabella returns after watching Requise swim through the collapsing dirt and mine, something she won't be able to do. She sucks it up and revives Alexandre from his injuries.
	+ Verm runs to the Emerald Carp to see 'Agent Burns' having been killed and first responders on scene. He tells them to stomp pumping water, then opens the cellar door. Finally!
	+ Meanwhile, Isabella, Alexandre and Flint flee into the labyrinth to dress wounds. They feel cold breath on their necks and Flint turns around, screaming in fear and being killed by something. The other two don't look back and sprint, imagining what could be behind them, dodging some creepy clone of Fernando and making it to the final tunnel. Something, sounding like 'Flint', grabs Alexandre's leg but he fights it off without looking. Both of them make it out onto the street with Verm to be taken care of by the brigade.

* **2nd March 1884** - Isabella, Requise, Verm, Isabella, and Fernando recover from their wounds. Requise helps Alexandre direct the digging efforts to search for the buried-alive Unity and Maxwell. Unity suffers fits of traumatic laughter (Pseudobulbar affect) whilst Maxwell survives off cocaine and crumbs, and hallucinates his dead friends Harlan and Dickman. They both have shared hallucinations of animals and noises outside the cart.
* **9th March 1884** - After 7 days stuck underground in a tiny upturned minecart, both having gone incredibly mad, paranoid, and traumatised, the Halifax dig team saves Unity and Maxwell.

## The Ironwood Mystery

> *“You need to step off the communion wine” - Logan*
>
>
>  *“I was told it was free!” - Miles*
>
>
>
> *“Yeah, free FOR EVERYONE” - Logan*
>
>

* **September 26th 1886** - In Ironwood (now pop. 1500), three inn-goers are recruited to help old Natasha Linden find her goats. They are the local reverend **Logan McKenzie**, the town's only surgeon **Dr. Victor Krieger**, and one of the chief hunters/trappers, **Miles Dwyer**. They find 13 sets of burned goat bones, save for the skulls, in a pit in the Thousand Acre Woods.
	+ In the pit is also a skeleton of a human, which Krieger has the town dentist confirm (the following day) as the remains of Tyler Merchant, a boxer who lived on the outskirts. Lodged in his skull is a shard of a custom knife that reads "CT".
	+ Jodie Bilford, the deputy, and acting sheriff whilst Donovan Beck is in Winnipeg, enlists the trio to help solve this case.
* **September 27th** - Margaret Annesfield, a church cleaner, confesses to Logan that she left the church door unlocked at the orders of Lawrence Miller, a local baker. Logan searches the church and realises Miller took the *Librum Equites Templarii*, a medieval book about the Knights Templar, devil worship, and their idol-god Baphomet.
	+ The trio breaks in to Miller's shack, finding a cross painted in blood and a note pointing to the post office clerk, Cobb Thursday.
	+ At the post office, they meet Cobb's pale raven-haired daughter Rina, and Cobb answers the group's questions. He shows them his lockbox, but his knife is found to have gone missing, much to his distress.
	+ The trio breaks the news of Tyler's passing to his blind father, Old Man Merchant. They find he has been sent a letter, which bears Cobb's handwriting, reading *in nomine diaboli*.
	+ Jodie calls the trio to the sheriff's office at nightfall, having received a threat by post - again in Cobb's handwriting, the remainder of the bloody knife, and the note *sic semper curiousus*.
* **September 31st** - The amazonesque stranger **Prof. Florence Lyons** walks on into Ironwood. She joins Miles, Logan and Victor. Donovan Beck sends the group a gift parcel from Winnipeg. Logan intercepts a letter meant for Margaret Annesfield and reveals it to contain *MATTHAEUS XXVI:IIIL-L**,*** the passage where Judas Iscariot betrays Jesus Christ.
* **October 2nd** - Miles has a few drinks with Pawel Kowalewski (a blacksmith), questions him about Cobb's motives, and invites him on a hunting trip. Later, Victor gives Cobb a doctor's check-up and chats with him.
* **October 3rd, 1886** - Whilst at Natasha Linden's farm, Deputy Jodie is knocked out by Lawrence Miller with a plank of wood and dragged across the river. She is crucified by Miller and dies of cold, asphyxiation and exhaustion.
* **October 4th** - Jodie is found a day or so later by Logan, Florence, Miles, Mara Bergen, Pawel, and Victor.
	+ Florence and the others take her body back to town, but keep her death a secret.
	+ Logan rips off his cross necklace. Incensed and having lost his faith, he storms up Mt. St. Katherine and stumbles upon Lawrence Miller's camp. He fires in the air to scare him, then pistol whips him into submission. Victor and Miles arrive, having heard the shot, and the trio delivers Miller to a jail cell, where he confesses the identity of the other cult members - Janis Kowalewski and Caterina Thursday.
* **October 10th** - Pawel Kowalewski turns his son Janis in to Logan, Miles, Florence and Krieger. Janis and Lawrence are sent to County Jail in Bismarck.
* **Late October** - Donovan Beck returns from Winnipeg. He, Logan, Miles, Florence, and Krieger locate Caterina's frozen corpse in the Manitoban wastes north of the town. They burn her *and* the Librum Equites Templarii to seal away the forbidden knowledge forevermore. Ironwood thrives.

## The Tunguska Event

* **1895** - The famed Greek historian **Aristo Efstatiades** goes missing in Nicosia, Cyprus, looking for the tomb of Alexander the Great.
* **1900s** - The University of Fresh Lake is set up, with its flagship course being **Occult Studies** taught by **Professor Fernando Aragón**
* **1901** - **Ironwood** is named as the capital city of North Dakota. Bismarck had suffered an unexpected and seismically impossible earthquake that levelled half the city five years earlier, and it was struggling to return to its former prowess.
* **1901** - Fresh Lake City is named as the capital of Montana and the 'Heart of the Mountain West'.
* **30 June 1908** - The Tunguska impact event occurs, theorised to have been caused by a huge meteor airburst in remote Siberia. An extraterrestrial object of unknown origins, the event releases an infectious, pathogenic affliction known as **the Burn**, or **Tunguska Plague**. The Burn will burn an afflicted person's eyes out, replacing them with burnt shadowy remains. It burns their brain away and turns them slow but ravenous and animalistic, aggressively trying to spread their condition. The condition remains relatively hidden, confined to a few cases in Siberia, who are all killed by the army and *buried beneath the ice* by the local government of *Yeniseyesk guberniya*, part of the contemporary Russian Empire.

## The Elysium Incident - August 7th, 1911

* **August 2nd, 1911** - The Liverpool-built ocean steamliner **SS Elysium** sets off on her maiden voyage from Bristol, bound for New York City. Two thousand passengers and crew are aboard, including several people of note - **the party is bolded**.
	+ Lars Jensen, a Norwegian whittler in 2nd class
	+ Colt Parker, an Idahoan photographer and flirt in 2nd class
	+ Agatha Farquhar, an English pianist in 1st class
	+ Chang Wei, a Cantonese labourer and chainsmoker in 3rd class
	+ Eijk Van Pelt, a trainee doctor from Holland, in 3rd class
	+ Fifth Officer William Locklane, a dependable Irishman
	+ Govinder, a Sikh window cleaner
	+ Heidi Hessekassel, a Prussian magician in 2nd class
	+ Jacques Montefort, a Parisian socialite in 1st class
	+ Captain Eva Falkenhayn, the Austro-Hungarian ship's captain.
	+ **Chief Navigator Bartholomew Wellington, a map expert**
	+ Jeeves, an ever-suffering English butler
	+ **'King' Edward Hastings, a washed-up English noble**
	+ **Dr. Reginald Williams, a physician and cardiologist**
	+ **Dominic Booker ('Booker the Blade'), leader of the Scarecrow gang which terrorised Eastern Europe**
	+ **Ethansname bro will tell me tomorrow hopefully**
* **August 7th, 1911** - Out at sea in the middle of the Atlantic at *45° 54' 14'' N, 31° 35' 18'' W,* a fairly normal-seeming day begins.
* **4am to 8:30am** - Bartholomew wakes up for his morning shift. He chats to Fifth Officer William on the way to the cabin about the weather, then spends a few hours on shift doing dead reckoning to locate their position, forecasting the wind, and doing other general navigation work. By 8:30, he finishes up, then chats to Captain Falkenhayn about closing the promenade deck this evening so no one loses their hats to the wind. He heads to breakfast.
* **8:30am to 9am** - In 3rd class, the Cantonese labourer Chang Wei goes for a pre-breakfast cigarette. Over his porridge subsequently, he suffers a pulmonary embolism and collapses. The medical student in 3rd, Eijk Van Pelt, is unable to resuscitate him, so Eijk tries to trespass into 2nd+1st class's breakfast hall and is forcefully removed by security. Meanwhile, everyone in 1st and 2nd class is getting ready for breakfast or heading into the hall when Captain Falkenhayn gives her daily announcement and weather update. Agatha, after finishing a piano performance, receives a bouquet from Jacques, who is secretly jilted having been rejected and thus has included a highly toxic Angel's Trumpet in the arrangement. Agatha sniffs it and dies in a few hours time.
* **9am to 10am** - At breakfast, the American gambler Colt Parker steals a personal knife from the Norwegian woodcarver Lars Jensen, as well as stealing a guard's watch and scamming Jeeves for a fake silver brooch. Bartholomew tries to locate and stop Colt but he escapes. Whilst the party tries to find him and Bartholomew tries to calm down Edward who is freaking out about 3rd class passengers being allowed to sit nearby, Eijk Van Pelt escapes from being detained and begs Dominic and Reginald to help him save Chang's life. Reginald and Ethansname head down to 3rd with Eijk. Reginald diagnoses the issue and gives Chang some medication plus chest compressions and helps him survive cardiac arrest. Swearing off cigarettes, Chang hands his tin box to the nearby Heidi, who was entertaining the 3rd class kids with a magic show earlier.
* **11am** - Reginald and Ethansname follow Colt into the workshop in steerage on the lowest deck, and find Lars there. Colt is returning Lars's knife (after using it to scrape photo plates). Colt talks his way out of Reginald's accusations and he slinks off. Reginald purchases one of Lars's wooden figurines. Lars accidentally cuts his thumb with his knife - unknown to everyone, this introduces potassium cyanide into his blood which was in Colt's photo plate fixing chemicals. Lars dies an hour or so later.
* **2pm** - Dominic is robbing jewellery from a cabin in first class when he sees a window cleaner (Govinder) fall off his balcony and drown in the sea. Bartholomew sees it too, but there is nothing he can do. On the deck, Reginald and Ethansname notice Agatha succumb to sudden paralysis, blistering round the nostrils, and foaming at the mouth, then she dies in a matter of minutes (as a result of the poison flower). William, who she is currently courting with, is stricken with grief. At the same time as everyone reconvenes, a deck officer reports that Lars has been found dead - Reginald ascertains it was cyanide poisoning. Now with several unlikely accidents having led to several unfortunate deaths (and some avoided ones like Chang's), the group is worried and has Cpt Falkenhayn order all passengers to remain in their cabins for the evening.
* **7pm** - Edward is in the hallway complaining to Bartholomew about the events of the day and the terrible service whilst the rest of the party is nearby. Suddenly, an explosion rocks First and Second. They rush over and find Heidi the magician's room has exploded in a gas leak after she lit the cigarette Chang gave her. There is nothing they can do to save her - another unlikely death. Bartholomew takes the group to where he has found Colt's room is, but when they get there, they find him bleeding out and bloody, having been beaten up by debt collectors. He admits he stole thousands from a Soho casino, and two thugs followed him on the boat. He and the party realise Lars died because Colt borrowed Lars's knife and accidentally contaminated it with fixing cyanide.
* **10pm** - Disturbed by their findings, the party all sleep in Bartholomew's crew room.

#### 7th August 1911 - 2

* **4am** - Bartholomew wakes up and goes to work. He asks 5th Officer William how he feels (about Agatha's death) and William is confused. Bartholomew repeats a same conversation with Eva and the second officer, and also realises that the ship's position has reset. He comes to the conclusion that the 7th of August 1911 is repeating day after day for everyone whose memories are wiped, except only the party is aware!
* **8:30am onward** - The group uses this opportunity to try to fix all of their mistakes and everything they were too late to fix. Edward pays Govinder to take a day off, before Edward also decides to go off and relax instead. Bartholomew encourages William to court Agatha early this morning. Reginald warns Lars to keep his knife close, which thwarts Colt's theft attempt. Dominic and Reginald stop Chang smoking and prevent his heart attack. Dominic intercepts Jacques, crushes his bouquet, and follows him to the bow of the ship, where he brutally blows Jacques' head off with a Russian sawn-off Obrez pistol.
* **7pm** - The party convenes outside Colt's room to hopefully intercept the thugs. They show up, and Dominic shoots one in the gut and kills him instantly with his obrez. Ethansname strikes him with a throwing knife but the thug manages to crawl away and avoid Bartholomew's gunshots. Guards arrive, and apprehend the party, throwing them in the brig just to be safe about it. They spend a night in the cells.

### 7th August 1911 - 3

* **9am** - The quartet wakes up in the brig and the loop has reset again - they are the only ones who remember they're in an infinite loop. Every one of the four goes absolutely and inconsolably insane after realising this. Dominic grabs a few kilograms of food and jettisons a lifeboat, and begins sailing away from the Elysium in panic. Reginald places his shotgun in his mouth and commits explosive suicide, blowing his brains all across the lower cabin windows. Ethansname chugs his vial of arsenic poison, begins vomiting and feeling nauseous, but stabs Captain Falkenhayn yelling *'Nothing is real'.* She tries to beat him with a telescope but he twists the knife and rips out her guts across the steel floor. Bartholomew shoots Ethansname several times and pistol whips him into a bloody heap before executing him. Bartholomew staggers out on deck, leaps overboard and begins swimming, but loses sight of the Elysium and of Dominic's life raft.
* **Later that day**... Dominic escapes the singularity around the Elysium and signals a fishing trawler from the Azores for help. He is taken aboard by Portuguese whalers and they tell him it is 7th August 1921 - 10 years since, well, earlier that morning. He is given a tinfoil blanket and some tea, and the sailors bring him back to Lisbon on **8th August 1921**.
* **Later...** Meanwhile, Bartholomew wakes up on a beach in Cadíz, Spain, tangled in fishing nets on **8th August 1921**. He begins mumbling about the Elysium and is taken to hospital, then transferred to a mental asylum where he is locked up for being mad.

## World War One

* **Late 1914** - Requise LeBron, having body-snatched a string of six or seven black athletes in the past thirty years, inhabits the body of **Tyreese Antoine**, one of the **369th Harlem Hellfighters.**
* **1st January 1915** - In a canal-side café near King's Cross Station in London, several people meet to help the D.E.A.D. (Department of Eldritch Asset Destruction) with a case. The D.E.A.D. is the next iteration of the 1880s Bureau of Paranormal Investigation. Some old faces and new ones return, more experienced and having moved on in life a little. They are given several telegrams by DEAD Chief of Fieldwork **Alexandre DuBois**, and opt to prepare for a trip to the Sinai Desert to find a missing British archaeological expedition near Ottoman territory.
	+ Maxwell Hammond, now 9th richest man in the world with a net worth of almost 100 million dollars
	+ Fernando Aragón, now a professor of the Occult at Fresh Lake University
	+ Vanessa Adams, now one of the biggest newspaper tycoons in the Midwest
	+ Dani Rojas, aspiring young footballer
	+ Cirillia Zigrin / Dubois, adoptive Polish daughter of Alexandre DuBois and a trained pilot & sniper
	+ Requise LeBron, now in the form of Tyreese Antoine, a corporal in the 369th Harlem Hellfighter regiment, carrying a *Kleif* flamethrower.
	+ Neil J Ball, even more trained in rocks and train driving
	+ Unity A. Spire, now one of the best-selling jazz & banjo musicians in the States, and equipped with a portable Morse station
* **5th January 1915** - The group arrive in Cairo aboard a private airliner. They use their credentials to acquire a four-engine biplane bomber from a Cairo airfield and begin the two-hour flight to Al-Sanfar Encampment deep in the Sinai desert. They are tailed after some distance by a German dogfighter manned by Ottoman pilots, but deceive them via radio to stop a confrontation. A large sandstorm with magnetic properties descends on the desert and causes the Ottoman fighter to crash. Lightning in the storm gives Vanessa, Fernando and Requis a glimpse of a huge, kilometres-tall shambling segmented being made of iron-like metal. The storm picks up with unnatural fury and damages the wings and tail of the plane. The being in the sandstorm attempts to slowly stomp a huge limb, but Cirillia performs evasive maneuvers as the plane rapidly loses integrity.
* **Midnight as it becomes 6th January** - The plane goes down just outside of the dust storm and Ciriliia performs an emergency landing in a sand dune at midnight. The group works out they are deep in Ottoman territory. A patrol of two cavalrymen arrive to investigate the crash - Mehmed Abbat and his commanding officer. Cirillia snipes Mehmed after Maxwell pretends to be German and asks him for assistance. The officer surrenders and reveals himself to be Frank Hoff, a British spy in deep cover pretending to be an Ottoman overseer. The group set off back toward Bayezid Relay Outpost where Frank came from, with Dani assuming Mehmed's identity, whilst Cirilia and Maxwell pretend to be German crash survivors.
* **1am, 6th January** - Frank, Maxwell, Dani, and Cirillia witness a dogfight above them in the night sky. High above, the beefy Russian pilot Igor Sikorsky and his spotter/cameraman/radio operator **Tartarov Konstantin** are being harassed by an Ottoman dogfighter, which eventually disables the plane. Tartarov manages to bail with the only parachute after Igor tells him to "give them hell" and leads the fighter away from Tartarov's drop. He lands near the party, and initially fumbles for his pistol after seeing the Ottoman uniforms, but Frank and Dani reveal themselves. The group takes him on and travels to Bayezid Relay.
* **3am, 6th January** - The five arrive at the relay after Frank uses his rank to get them past the lookout. The group stocks up on food, water, uniforms, and grenades. Frank calculates and angles a Howitzer cannon shot toward Ottoman rear command several hundred km away, whilst Maxwell, Dani and Cirillia surround the barracks of the outpost with gunpowder. Maxwell and Cirillia spill gunpowder under the door when a barrel splits, so some half-asleep soldiers start to shout. Frank fires the Howitzer assumedly on target toward rear command, which wakes the soldiers and deafens most the party just as Cirillia lights the powder. Everyone bundles into an armoured car and flees as the relay explodes in a glorious fireball behind them. Cirillia spots two wounded soldiers and one unscathed lookout survive, but the group decides to flee through the dunes toward the southern foothills of Mount Sinai. They sleep in shifts, and Dani sees two Ottoman planes circling the desert looking for something.
* **6th**-**9th January** - The party drives through the desert by night in the armoured car, then covers it in a tarp and foliage by day to sleep in. It's cramped and hot, but eventually by sunrise on the 9th they arrive at the edge of Wadi Canyon. They use the telegraph and receive a cryptic unidentified message - COME DOWN. By getting the car stuck in the sand as a weight, they climb down with ropes into the canyon and use the telegraph to try to contact British intelligence again. In between Ottoman chatter, they hear EZKL 37114, which Frank realises is Ezekiel 37:1-14.
	+ Maxwell reads aloud the passage titled "The valley of the dry bones". The group then finds and follows a trail of lizard bones and animal skulls to a small pyramid of 8 skulls. Their feeling of being watched is confirmed as ten or more men and women in brown and blue robes and headdresses with jezails and Martini-Henry rifles aim down at them. A British officer dressed similarly in light brown linen with a silver revolver questions them from his position up on the canyon. His right-hand woman, Zara, checks Cirillia's D.E.A.D. papers and orders the rebels to take them inside. In the caves, the man introduces himself as Thomas Edward Lawrence, a British spy leading a small scale Bedouin and Arab revolt against the Ottomans in Sinai. He scrutinises Frank closely, but seems to brush something off. Ordering his rebels to keep an eye on the newcomers, he offers them sustenance and respite in the caves, and warns them that the Ottomans destroyed the British camp south of the ravine only a few days prior in a surprise attack.
* **9th January** - Whilst Vanessa is practicing her shooting along with Zara, they spot something in the distance and investigate. They find none other than **Mohammed Hamza Abdullah Abdullah Bin Suleiman Saulman**, the *richest* man in the world, a Meccan oil baron. He explains to them he and his entourage were on their way to find the original 10 Commandments, but one by one his camels and entourage died of dehydration, until his final camel collapsed just now. They take him on as part of their group.
* **10th January** - Lawrence gives the group a mission, to help prove themselves - assassinate two targets within Al-Jana fort in the Ras Mountains. They are the indomitable Ottoman Persian general Darius Mirzah, 'The Titan', and the unknown sadistic torturer 'The Butcher'. They set off on horseback into the desert.
* **13th January** - In the dead of night, Requise, Vanessa, Maxwell, Dani, Mohammed, and Tartarov come upon a small Ottoman outpost on the Canavar line and raid it.
	+ Maxwell pretends to be a German treasure hunter and talks to one of the watchmen after switching the points. Requise sneaks behind the watchman and busts his head in using his trench club. Mohammed and Maxwell search for information in the offices whilst Requise hears a noise near the barracks and investigates, narrowly avoiding a booby trap. He comes upon an Ottoman soldier who tries in vain to flee as Requise hoses him down with the flamethrower and cooks him alive.
	+ Tartarov spots a scout on the water tower and sneaks closer - he catches the man by surprise and fan-fires his revolver, ducking for cover before reloading and firing again. He hits two out of nine shots and manages to kill the man as he dives behind some crates.
	+ Dani and Vanessa prepare to raid the barracks. An Ottoman wielding a kilij (curved sword) leaps out of the door, and whilst Dani hits him, he manages to lunge at Vanessa and stab her in the gut, causing her to collapse. The last soldier at the outpost, a man wielding a rifle, emerges from the barracks as Dani runs and fetches Requise, who approaches spraying fire everywhere. The swordsman ducks for cover, but the rifleman is caught in the flames and barbequed alive.
	+ Dani bandages and revives Vanessa. The group convenes outside just as the final, heavily wounded soldier fires a flare out of the window, illuminating the outpost. Requise recognises it as a last-ditch effort - 'Overrun, shell this position'. Requise puts the man out of his misery as the Ottoman chuckles about having already won. The tracks rumble as the Ottoman armoured train approaches and fires a shot at the barracks, collapsing it. Maxwell tries to blind the driver with a flare but misses, so the group flees as the train demolishes and levels the outpost.
* **16th-26th January** - The group returns to Lawrence and takes some time to rest and recuperate, and plan their next move - the train captures their thoughts. Mohammed finally learns some Arabic. Meanwhile, at the biplane crash site, Unity finally manages to wake up Jackalope/Neil. She and Jack begin working on a rudimentary buggy using the salvage from the plane, like a tarp roof, full flight deck control panel, booster seat, propellors and big wheels. They name it the **Jackmobile** and set off to find their friends. On the way, they find the amnesiac Brit **Harold Skip**, who they take with them after he offers them some rum.
* **27th January** - Cirillia finds out that the last transmission made on the telegraph was to a very faint, crackly line with German morse. That night, Jack sees a shooting star land on the nearside of the mountains.
* **31st January** - Cirillia, Dani, Unity, Jack, Vanessa, and Harold travel in the Jackmobile (or as Dani nicknames it, the Sloppy Jalopy).
	+ They find a huge crater almost a kilometre across in the sand, with the meteorite in the centre and two tents. Cirilia slashes a tent open and the others fire on the Ottoman soldier within, who stumbles away and almost collapses. From the other tent comes a soldier touting a machine gun and a bundle of grenades - Dani tackles him, but by an extreme stroke of luck he clutches the grenades. Jack takes the wounded soldier hostage as the other soldier threatens to blow them all sky-high.
	+ Tense negotations ensue until the party agrees to let the soldiers go. They limp away, and as they are at the top of the ridgeline, Unity strums her banjo to call for a kill order. The party shoot, and hit both soldiers, but the one with the grenade is able to lob it backwards before collapsing. Everyone is hit pretty badly, and Vanessa faces certain death - but Unity jumps in her way, taking the blast but being killed herself! Cirillia executes the bleeding-out soldiers trying to crawl away as the party mourns the loss of Unity - she had survives her adventures since 1881.
	+ Jack awakens from being knocked out and splits the meteorite with his pickaxe - black powder spreads out through the sand wondrously around everyone, forming complex and intricate otherworldly geometric patterns that shock everyone. The group finds a soldier's grave and dig him up - he is face down and bearing a ridiculous amount of gunshots and stabs. They quickly rebury him and flee the scene in the Jackmobile.
* **3rd February 1915** - Whilst Maxwell is looking for signs of oil in the desert near the canyon, the group spots a slowly approaching British landship tank flying Ottoman colours. They prepare for the worst but it turns out it is being driven by the mad armoured Scotsman **Duncan** and the escaped German war objector **Elmer** (Erik). Realising they're friendly, the tension is defused. Duncan shows them a scrap of a report he found whilst stealing an Ottoman's hat, and the group decides to follow the cryptic directions on the paper aboard the tank.
* **7th February 1915** - Arriving at a small pyramid and old ruins, the group investigates. By finding gasoline, tire marks and a concrete floor painted over, Maxwell and Jack ascertain that there is some kind of base or bunker inside one of the ruins. Jack nearly gets trapped inside some ruins but is freed by Tartarov using a cable and the tank to dislodge the rock. Fernando and Duncan lead an exploration into the pyramid and find old texts and scrolls, including several that warn *whosoever opens this tomb, he will unleash a plague of fire on the world*. They decide to let it be.
	+ The group delves into the bunker after Fernando guesses the pinpad code after only a few tries. It is dark, dingy, and abandoned. The door closes behind them and they look for a control room to ensure their exit. They see empty, bloody, burned hospital beds and signs of struggles. Some of them see a shambling man approaching in the darkness who then disappears. Duncan and Tartarov loot the armoury, and Duncan finds a man who has been clawed to death - he stomps on the corpse's head to ensure he will not rise. The group continues hastily on, hearing screams inside the tunnels after Elmer yells 'Hello?' which alerts the horde.
	+ The group runs past stretchers and corpses with gas masks on and white sheets over them, lockpicking their way into the control room whilst Duncan stands guard. Elmer sets to work fixing the controls valiantly whilst the others find a dead scientist chained to a pipe. Fernando begins consecrating the control room with his ritual. In the hallways, a shambling shape approaches Duncan with its gas mask on and tries to claw at the gaps in his armour - though it rips into him, he chokeslams it into the wall several times to daze it and lops off an arm before jogging back to the group in his clanking armour.
	+ The group barricades themselves inside the magically consecrated control room whilst tens of these shambling corpses with gas masks claw and bang on the door. Elmer fixes the controls and uses the tannoy system to lure the walkers away to elsewhere in the complex, before the circuits overload and he is unable to flip the lights. Most of the walkers leave - when the group opens the door eventually, only two remain, unable to enter the silver mist's area from Fernando's ritual. Jackalope tries to test the limits of the consecration and somehow nullifies it, allowing the gas-masked burnt corpses to lurch in and attack people indiscriminately - even though one's head is lopped off, the severed head bites Elmer whilst the bodies attack Duncan, Fernando and the others. The group shoves them aside and makes a break for the door.
	+ Duncan marches alone down the corridor where the rest of the shambling dead are whilst the party flees. He covers their escape, marching toward ten or twelve of these burned corpses firing off bursts from his Villar Perosa SMG to fill several full of holes. When it is empty, he swings his sword like a bat and dismembers several more. The horde overcomes him and they rip his armour off piece by piece to devour him, but he pulls the pin on a grenade Dani gave him. The group hears the explosion and gets out of the cave, then uses the tank's guns to collapse the entrance. Fernando ritually consecrates the ground, and the group hopes the burnt within will never escape...
* **February 1915** - Eager to leave the lethal warzone and hellscape of the Great War, Fernando, Requise, Vanessa, Jack, Cirillia, Dani, Maxwell, Elmer, and Tartarov drive their British tank to Cairo, fly to Alexandria, sail to Marseille and then back to Fresh Lake City.
* **August 1917** - The Russian monarchist **Vasily Obrezhov** uses a sawn-off Mosin-Nagant rifle (obrezh pistol) to assassinate the Bolshevik-sympathetic minister Matvei Muranov in the streets of Tsaritsyn.

## The Tropical Twenties

* **1915 to 1921** - During their time spent relaxing and travelling, Fernando & Requise visit the overgrown ruins of Dunwich and the heath where Innsmouth once was, as well as the old site of Richmond, Halifax, seeking memories and meaning. Dani Rojas becomes one of the top football players in the Americas. Vanessa's paper grows to one of the best in the Midwest. Elmer and Jackalope begin a car company, the **Jalopy** line. Maxwell moves to a mansion on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and becomes a ludicrous arms dealer to the British.
* **5 July 1921** - Fernando, Vanessa, Jack, Cirillia, Dani, Tartarov, and Elmer are staying at Maxwell's $5 million mansion on Trinidad's west coast - Requise has moved in next door. A local old woman, Nalini, comes to them and begs for their help. The fishing village of Matelot, miles east of the port of Carenage, has gone quiet, and Nalini's son Victor went to investigate weeks ago.
* **7 July** - Elmer and Jack build a raft to be towed behind the boat Maxwell rents. Cirilia drives it with the help of a hired sailor, a belligerent rum-loving drunk woman named Latoya. The group rounds the headland at the crack of dawn and comes upon Matelot by afternoon.
	+ Matelot is recently abandoned, with fish rotting in boats left adrift, meals set on tables, clothes on washing lines, and doors left open.
	+ In the lighthouse, Vanessa alerts everyone to a noise which turns out to be Victor, with broken and atrophied legs stuck in the oil storage basement - the wooden ladder gave way and he was trapped down there for two weeks, drifting in and out of consciousness. Elmer, Cirillia and Dani investigate movement on the houses in the hills and find a deaf old man (named Ramjohn, but they didn't ask), who communicates to Requise (who knows ASL) that everyone in the village just got up and walked to the sea one day a month ago, and he's been alone and afraid since. Fernando realises the similarity to a story of a siren.
	+ Returning to the boat, all but Tartarov plug their ears. They find Latoya and Victor have disappeared, and spot them swimming toward a triangle-shaped rocky isle on the horizon. Cirillia honks the boat horn, and something rumbles a reply, causing Tartarov to jump overboard and swim toward the rock.
	+ Fernando recalls a ritual he copied down in an Egyptian pyramid in 1915, the Grasp of the Pharoah. He intones it toward Tartarov, hoping to pull him closer - instead it wracks Tartarov with pure agony and intense pain whilst he swims and almost thus drowns, cracking his ribs and contorting his flesh within him as Dani pulls him overboard and Vanessa begs the horrified Fernando to stop - he is unable to control the ritual. The power of the mythos flows through Fernando as he rips Tartarov's beating heart from his wracked form with an invisible force, tearing the poor Russian's chest wide open and killing him in an explosion of gore. Requise witnesses this atrocity and falls into an amnesiac state, whilst Elmer quietly loses his mind and begins painting crosses and writing German folk snippets in blood everywhere.
	+ Cirillia and Dani drag Latoya and Victor aboard and shake them out of their trance, give them earplugs, and sail back to Carenage. The group covers Tartarov in a sheet, and tells Victor, Latoya and Ramjohn that the cover story is a mudslide killed the inhabitants of Matelot. They return, deliver the news and Victor, and recuperate.
	+ Maxwell sends a telegram to D.E.A.D. HQ in New York telling them what happened; they scramble to send an agent at once. The party chastises Fernando for his actions.
* **21 July** - **Agent Chase Liberty** from the D.E.A.D. in California touches down on the tarmac in Trinidad. The local police Sgt. Wendy drives him to the police station whilst the young eager Officer Trevor gives him the local low-down; they believe him to be here on behalf of the Department of Ecology, his cover story. They tell him about how they found Tartarov's body, and about the 'mudslide' in Matelot (they believe the story and the government has declared an exclusion zone). Meanwhile, the old Ramjohn tips off Cirillia, Dani, Maxwell, Vanessa and Fernando that he lip-read a fisherman boasting about catching something unusual.
	+ Vanessa causes an accident involving a broken chandelier at the Port-of-Spain Library. Meanwhile, Dani becomes good friends with the bartender of Maria's Bar in Carenage and learns about The Devil's Cove, the island to the north.
	+ Chase Liberty arrives at Casa del Maxwell and lectures the team about their sloppiness and the dangers of eldritch anomalies. He also puts in a request to slow the coroner at Guadeloupe so hopefully Tartarov's body can be released without an official inquest that might reveal eldritch anomalies to the police force.
* **22 July** - Maxwell, Fernando, Chase, Cirillia, Dani and Vanessa go fishing off the northwest of Trinidad and catch some eels, crab, bluefin, and Vanessa finds a Dutch silver guilder in some mud. Dani Rojas shares a drink with the fisherman Marlon of the Kingfisher's Angling Company in Maria's Bar, and Marlon invites him to a private poker game in a few days time.
* **23 July** - Vanessa knocks over several shelves in San Fernando Library and is arrested for property damage, and fined $2000.
* **Saturday 24 July** - In the basement of the Carenage mechanic's, the party attends the illicit poker game. Dollars are splashed, El Tropico cigars are shared, and rum flows freely. They meet Marlon's sister Diana and their business partner Old Man Desmond. After some hands, Marlon confides that they fished up a 'mermaid' off the north coast and Diana speared it. Desmond brings it in an ice chest - the groups beholds a yellow-eyed, green-skinned fishy humanoid with long clawlike webbed hands and slender flippers. On its person are several more silver guilders.
* **25 July** - Vanessa takes the silver guilders to the Port-of-Spain Colonial Museum and asks the elderly Dutch woman there about them. They are worth about 200$ a coin, and are 1700-minted Holland silver guilders, which were carried on the Dutch slave ship 'Windhoek' which sank off the north coast carrying silver bullion, amounting to nearly a trillion in modern currency.

## The Plantation Bloodline Curse

* **28th July** - Chase Liberty and Officer Trevor Miles respond to a report of a break-in on Nantucket Island just off the coast of Trinidad. Arriving by boat at the Gladstone Plantation, they meet the owner, Percy Gladstone, and he explains to them his study was broken into. Chase finds chalk markings and the family's hidden safe behind the bookshelf and tells Percy to report if anything else happens. Chase also has a coincidental run-in with Philippa Gladstone, the sulky and brooding daughter of the house. Percy invites him to his retirement drinks party the next week.
* **30th July** - Whilst doing paperwork at the police station, Chase overhears Lionel Gladstone, the young preppy Oxford-bred son of Percy and next in line to the plantation fortune, drop off a gift basket to the station as thanks for their swift response checking on the villa earlier.
* **6th August** - Chase, Trevor, Officer Carmen, and Commissioner Georgeanne go to Percy's retirement party with many other socialites. On the boat over, Chase sees Maxwell Hammond again, who is enjoying lobster, cocaine, and gin.
	+ The pair chat to several artists, writers, journalists and more on the ride over. At the drinks reception, they meet more and more people whilst Trevor feels out of place and Maxwell secures business deals. Chase helps the Maitre D', Molina, resolve an incident where the study has freshly been broken into a second time. Chase acquires a room key from Henrietta (Percy's old mother) and guesses the combination of the safe based on the plantation founding year. Inside he realises something large is missing, as well as one of the vintage cowboy revolvers.
	+ During Percy's speech, Chase spots an Indian journalist with a cowboy revolver in her handbag. Percy begins explaining the importance of legacy, but before he reveals something he wanted to tell everyone, he begins choking and drowns on dry land, lungs full of seawater. He dies in Chase's arms. Chase orders and Carmen to lockdown the party as guests scream.
	+ Maxwell and Chase interview Henrietta, Philippa and Lionel. They feel as though the sulky Philippa is hiding something, and Lionel keeps appearing at inopportune moments and saying 'Am i interrupting, chaps?' suavely. In the hallway, Maxwell and Chase see a portrait of Percy, his late wife, the two kids, but also another older kid who seems to have been erased from history. In the corridor, Maxwell uses hypnosis to fool Philippa into revealing the older brother's name was Oswald and he died of typhoid a decade ago.
	+ Maxwell confronts the Indian journalist they saw with the revolver, Ms. Patel. She seems surprised to be in possession of it. The gun randomly goes off when Maxwell is holding it, almost hitting him at close range, so he denounces it as cursed.
	+ After Henrietta alludes that there is something in the jungle, Maxwell and Chase delve into the woods where they saw a guest be turned away earlier due to 'renovations'. They find a giant stone tablet with a coral snake forming an ouroboros around it - Chase misses it with a stomp and it bites his leg. Maxwell shoots it and they take it back to the party, where a woman trained in medicine (Doc. Walters) gives him some elixir oil to slow the numbing effect for now.
	+ Tasking Trevor to watch Lionel and Philippa, they return to the stone tablet and briefly see carvings of some snake-fish-human figure and many stickmen, plus some kind of writing. However, the tablet is suddenly chiselled over before their very eyes with some invisible telekinetic force. Just then, a heavy branch snaps above and strikes Chase very roughly, almost breaking some of his bones. The two conclude something is out to get them and stop them investigating.
	+ Returning back, the pair task Carmen and Georgeanne with moving the civilians off the island. Meanwhile, they check the building's attic. They find the 'lost son' Oswald chained to a wall, smelling like excrement, blind and alone. He is somewhat transformed into a scaled fish-person with yellow eyes (blind from being locked in the dark). Despite Maxwell's protests, he mistakenly believes Maxwell to be his father Percy, because he has gone slightly insane. Chase finds notes from Percy containing things like '10 years, he takes every firstborn', 'there must be a way to break the curse' and 'I must come clean, maybe a doctor can save my boy'. They conclude every firstborn of the Gladstones is born cursed, and Percy wanted to try to cure Oswald of it.
	+ Whilst Maxwell loosens Oswald's restraints and fetches food, Chase speak bluntly with Henrietta, confronting her about her family's legacy. She comes somewhat clean. She seems very ashamed of the curse they bear - her great-great-grandfather made a deal with 'something' to ensure he would stay prosperous and rich after the Emancipation Proclamation where they would lose all of their plantation slaves. However, the cost of the deal was that every firstborn would be 'taken' by that 'thing'. Henrietta also implies that 'some of us are ashamed of it, some of us want to try to fix it, and some are proud of it', implying herself, Percy and Philippa/Lionel. Before she can reveal more information, she suddenly suffers an abnormal and sudden heart attack and collapses. Doctor Walters is called. Trevor, the dying Henrietta, Doc Walters, Maxwell, and Chase move to the empty master bedroom and the Doc administers CPR but Henrietta passes away.
	+ In the master bedroom, Chase finds Percy's speech draft for the evening and realises Percy planned to come clean about his family's curse to try to get help and end the cycle of pain their bloodline has suffered when seeking power. They conclude that Philippa and/or Lionel silenced their father because they feared losing their wealth and being ostracised or worse for their bloodline.
	+ Whilst Trevor, the Doc, Maxwell and Chase deliberate and wrap Henrietta in a sheet, they hear Oswald gurgle upstairs - unbeknownst to them, Lionel kills him with a kitchen knife as Lionel does not know what Oswald has revealed or if he will reveal more. Chase climbs into the loft and Lionel hides from him successfully.
	+ Chase and Maxwell confront Philippa on the balcony. Midway through, Lionel walks out smugly - the pair believe but cannot prove he has just been in the loft. They send Trevor and him to go into a side room so Trevor can watch him. Whilst continuing to confront Philippa, they finalise their suspicions when Lionel walks out with bloody knuckles and Trevor gives no reply from inside - Lionel has knocked him out!
	+ Philippa slowly begins to hypnotise Officer Carmen into a trance. Maxwell quickdraws on Philippa and shoots her in the gut - she screams and scrambles inside as Carmen reawakens. Chase swings a glass bottle at Lionel and he dodges, then Lionel rugby tackles the both of them off the balcony, a several metre drop. Both of them are grievously wounded from the fall, and Lionel stumbles off into the woods bleeding as Chase lays there - Commissioner Georgeanne helps him up, gives him a derringer, and then he administers himself an adrenaline shot.
	+ Maxwell and Carmen chase Philippa downstairs - she emerges and grabs a servant as a hostage with her empty tensed hand ready to cast a ritual. Chase and Maxwell aim at her, but neither are confident in their shot. Philippa throws the hostage forward as she motions with her hand and the swimming pool bursts in an explosion of water, knocking Maxwell, Carmen, and Chase over. Philippa runs into the woods toward the mountains.
	+ They take some time and are given first aid by Doc. Walters, who Maxwell pays $500 for her troubles. Trevor reawakens, bloodied, and joins them. With Lionel somewhere in the jungle and Philippa in the mountains, but the investigators, wounded, they have a ship captain fetch backup from the mainland.
	+ After an hour or so, a squad of five Trinidadian armoured heavy police show up, led by the huge Caribbean unit Sergeant Roy. They, and Trevor, Maxwell and Chase, venture to the mountains following a blood trail. They find Philippa stood in front of them on a cliff. She threatens to strike them with lightning, and she is too far for the riot police's shotguns to reach. Chase shoots his police bolt-action rifle, and lands a longshot, sending Philippa down into the sea with a splash. Something pulls her under and she is no more.
	+ Returning to the dock, they realise Lionel has commandeered the Maxim gun on the riot police boat. Chase sneaks up on him and misses a shot, but scares him into going inside the boat with just a pistol to protect himself. Maxwell talks Lionel down and lies by saying they have caught his sister alive. Roy slaps him in chains and Maxwell tells him the truth. He yells 'You bastard!' as Roy and the riot police take him away, whilst Maxwell, Chase, and Trevor finish the abandoned buffet and drive home.
	+ Speeding through the water at sunset, as the credits roll, Trevor asks Chase, 'Sir, respectfully, I'm beginning to believe you're not from the Department of Ecological and Agricultural Development'. They laugh and offer him a role with them which he accepts.
* **8th August 1921** - In Cadíz, Bartholomew Wellington washes up tangled in a fishing net - and in Lisbon, Dominic Booker steps off a Portuguese whaling trawler. Both are the only escapees from the ship SS Elysium, which disappeared in the Atlantic in 1911.
* **14th August** - Maxwell, Cirillia and Elmer are having a bicycle-powered barbecue when a shipwrecked fisherman washes up half drowned. Maxwell administers cocaine but the fisherman's heart gives out and he died. They find on him a diary detailing the location of a temple in the Amazon rainforest - the diary is dated from the 1530s (they figure this out by reading that the owner left the court of King Philip II of Spain).
* **15th August** - Cirillia and Elmer investigate the diary at the library and realise that it refers to Puerto Sombrio on the Venezuelan coast, and it is the diary of an English explorer who accompanied conquistadors.
* **17th August** - Maxwell, Cirillia and Elmer sail their yacht to Puerto Sombrío, Venezuela. They chat to the local fishermen in the market and Maxwell fills the boat full of herring to stop it being nicked. Cirillia gets scammed by a jewellery seller selling 'authentic' Aztec necklaces, and Elmer learns about a local crazy man named Ricárdo. Cirillia interrupts a robbery at the market by members of *Los Avaros* cartel and scares them away - they threaten to find her. At the town's main inn, the group rents a room before chatting to Ricárdo over a drink. He is batshit insane, talks about the radio waves, the goblins in the machines, etc. He tells them some good information about the lost conquistador expedition that found a temple in the Amazon and how most of them died mysteriously.
* **18th August** - Los Avaros come causing a ruckus in the inn. At 4am one of them tries to lockpick the door - Cirillia kicks the door down on him and he is knocked out. Maxwell hypnotises him into revealing the cartel's motives before sending him off. The trio, eager to go, sets off into the Amazon rainforest following the map in the back of the conquistador's diary.
* **20th August** - The trio climbs a rocky hill as a vantage point and continues onward.
* **21st August** - In the Amazon, the trio finds a huge (20m tall) terrifying golden statue of what they later assume is Cthulhu - ten elephant legs, hundreds of smooth tentacles, a giant head with eyes within mouths within eyes, and huge umbrella-like wings. Anything that touches the statue becomes pure gold (and things that don't touch it but tap into the otherworld like Elmer's dowsing rods!), as evidenced by the pure gold conquistadors, flies, frogs, and birds attached to it.
* **23rd August** - Whilst trying to cross a fast-flowing river on a raft Elmer has built, Cirillia snaps the rudder and the raft shears. The trio hangs on for dear life down rapids and bends until they are launched over a huge waterfall. Maxwell receives a concussion upon impact and breaks a rib, but Elmer and Cirillia are mostly fine and the group gets to safety.
* **25th August** - While crossing a rope bridge over a huge, deep chasm, a small number of Los Avaros catch up with the gang. However, they cross all five at once, and Cirillia and Maxwell cut the ropes - they fall hundreds of metres to their untimely demise.
* **27th August** - Maxwell, Elmer and Cirillia delve into the ancient temple in the centre of a circular crop circle. They traverse traps like dart plates, a quetzalcoatl false floor with icon tiles, and more, finding conquistador skeletons. In the main chamber, they find hundreds of skeletons of cultists, conquistadors and Maya, reaching to the centre of the room where an obsidian slab reads R'LYEH FT'AGHN. A mass ritual grave. Whilst looking at it, Maxwell says the name 'Cthulhu' in a sentence - the ground shakes, the air changes, and all the skeletons suddenly crumble. The group checks the final room - it is full of gold idols, cups, chalices, figurines, weapons, and more. They know it is equally cursed as the statue in the woods, and as such they leave the temple as fast as possible.
* **2nd September** - Back at Puerto Sombría, Cirillia shows Ricárdo the text of the slab. He intones it aloud and begins floating, and is pulled up into the clouds screaming and flailing. The trio returns to Trinidad.

## Shackleton's Last Expedition

* **Early September 1921** - The renowned polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, along with 20 crew and his ship HMS Endurance, go missing somewhere around Larsen Bay, King Haakon Land, Antarctica.
* **Mid-October 1921** - The Royal Society in London funds a small expedition to try to find him. Arriving aboard the steamer HMS James Cook, piloted by the Norwegian Cpt Astrid Torsvik, three intrepid British explorers gear up and venture to the bay. They are the grizzled ship’s cook Barnabas McShell, the mad old sailor Roland Atkins, and the Brummie geezer John Gibbon.
* **16th October 1921** - Barnabas and Roland make landfall on Larsen Bay and hike inland with John asleep on their sled. Barnabas finds evidence the Endurance circumnavigated Larsen Bay. The pair hikes to a rocky crag in King Haakon Land and camps for the night. They see a distress flare far off, but katabatic winds bring about a sudden snowstorm. Finding themselves in near-whiteout conditions, they manage to retrieve items that threaten to fly away, and head into the storm to try to break through it. They cross a frozen lake, but Roland falls in and nearly succumbs to shock and hypothermia, barely escaping with his life. The pair make it out and after another day’s travel, reach Hope Station, in the shadow of **Mount Terror**.
* **17th October 1921** - At the abandoned and eerie Hope Station, the pair are not alone. They find one of Shackleton’s crew, Arthur Fairfax, stabbed dead only hours ago, and deeper in the station they avoid the crazy derringer-shots of his killer, Old Bill Cooper. Bill has drawn triangles all over the wall. They try to shoot and grab Bill, who is ranting and raving and insane, from fleeing - Bill stabs Barnabas in the gut and runs into the snow alone, never to be seen again. The explorers find clues to the Endurance’s location, beset in ice across Scott Inlet.
* **18th October 1921** - Reaching Scott Inlet the next day, they find a colony of king penguins. The explorers realise they need to cross the ice floe to reach the beset Endurance on the horizon - it takes them quite some effort, but they do so, narrowly avoiding freezing water and hungry orcas. The trio makes it across and investigates a corpse near the Endurance, a sailor who stripped to his undergarments before dying. Sharp objects begin smoking nearby, unsettling the trio. Aboard the ship, they find clues to what happened, then break into the cabin and find one survivor, Godfrey Carpenter, half-mad but alive. Roland is bitten by a half-corporeal materialising set of smoky jaws, coming from all the sharp angles of the objects nearby. The group realises they need to find Shackleton and put these beasts to rest. They run inland and find him and his closest companions frozen to death, and in Shackleton’s hand, a chunk of weird eldritch black stone possessing non-euclidean geometry. They head on to find a huge landscape of inky black pyramids, so dark they look like perfect equilateral triangles. As the smoky jaws - the hounds - harass them and almost kill Roland, Barnabas passes the black rock to John, who climbs a scaffold and replaces it from where it was taken by the crew. With that, the hounds of Tindalos stop, but the infinite pyramids rise into the cosmos in unison. It is too much for Roland, who goes insane and flees. He paddles down Scott Inlet in a dinghy, into the Southern Ocean. Meanwhile, John, Barnabas, and Godfrey return, and unwilling to impart this dreadful knowledge, report the expedition as all died due to the elements, sealing their secret among the mountains of madness.
* **Late October 1921** - Roland Atkins, mad and lucid, is picked up from his dinghy by whalers off the British South Sandwich Islands. He is brought to the islands' capital harbour of Grytviken, a Norwegian-British whale processing port, where he is institutionalised in an insane asylum.

## The Three Keys

* **4th November** - At Port-of-Spain Seaport in Trinidad, a cruise ship docks, having travelled from Hispaniola along the Eastern Antilles. One of the passengers that steps off is the wild-haired Cypriot marine biologist Dr. Aphrodite Coral. She walks to the Seaview suburb to the house of her academic contact, one Dr. Charlotte Roper. Aphrodite finds the house silent and no reply. She opts to climb the balcony and clambers down into the courtyard. In the study, she finds Dr. Roper dead of a head wound, the glass door smashed, and water on the floor. She phones the police.
	+ Meanwhile at Trinidad Central Police Station, Trevor is trying to figure out a particularly fiendish goat theft as Agent Liberty relaxes when the phone rings. The two of them rush to Seaview ('rush') and speak to Aphrodite. The three of them together investigate the crime scene, ascertaining an intruder killed Dr. Roper with a blunt implement. Aphrodite knocks down the medicine cabinet on her own head, but is fine. They find a fake box of Tylenol with a rolled up treasure map inside it. Liberty suspects eldritch forces are at play, noting the similarity of the scene to a Deep One attack, so he knows just the man to call.
	+ Meanwhile at Casa del Maxwell - Vanessa, Maxwell, Cirillia are having a pool day and BBQ when Liberty, Aphrodite and Trevor arrive. They tell them about the murder and exchange some friendly chit chat before investigating Dr. Roper's tylenol document and realising there are three leads on it leading to keys. Library searches dig up some leads - a fabric pattern from the market, the floorplan of an old bookshop called Ramkissoon Librarie, and a sketch of a favela courtyard in San Fernando.
	+ Later that afternoon, they visit the Carenage market, matching a fabric seller's pattern to that on the document. They try to ask for it and even try to smuggle it out of the shop but the shopkeeper catches them. Maxwell distracts her whilst purchasing tablecloth and Cirillia is able to steal it. On the back is sewn PALM BEACH 1412.
	+ The group drives Maxwell's Bentley to Palm Beach, the most popular tourist destination at Port-of-Spain. Cirillia and Vanessa go scouting on the streets whilst Aphrodite and Maxwell walk up the pier. They spot a beach locker rental service and realise 1412 isn't an address, it's a beach locker. Aphrodite uses her knife to crack open the locker and the group finds a copper key.
	+ They then go for ice cream at the Rockabilly American Diner in Port-of-Spain and wait for the evening to search the second clue.
* **Night of 4th-5th November** - The group idles in the Bentley outside Port of Spain Nitrate Factory, knowing it to be the location of the second key. Cirillia breaks the lock with her sword and the group enters. They search the managers' offices and gather the keys, plus find some documents explaining they moved the contents of the demolished Ramkissoon library to the workhouse basement. As they're moving to the workhouse, the fat security guard pulls up and investigates the damaged fence and looks for the party. Aphrodite tries to climb a building but slips and hurts her ankle really badly.
	+ Maxwell, Cirillia and Vanessa hide at the portaloos whilst Aphrodite gets under a truck and Liberty hides behind the truck. The guard seems to hear Aphrodite and approaches, calling out in his deep voice - she throws gravel in his eyes and climbs up the factory facade whilst he yells at her to come back. Liberty pretends to arrive in a hurry and puts on an act of being Aphrodite's carer from an asylum, 'coaxes' her down with the promise of popcorn, and this seems to fool the guard who tuts and goes off to write his report about the broken gate. The guard ties the gates shut, says bye to Aphrodite and Liberty, and leaves.
	+ Liberty attempts to start Maxwell's Bentley and move it to a nearby street. He realises he does not have keys, so tries to hotwire it, but the engine overheats and something sets on fire. He and Aphrodite scramble out, as the Bentley suddenly blows up. Maxwell sees this from inside the factory and is inconsolable, serving Liberty an invoice for £50000. He and Liberty argue about it through the now-shut fence whilst Cirillia and Vanessa search the factory basement and find lots of old books. Two, written by Donald A.Gon catch their eyes - about the history of fish hooks and an encyclopedia of candle making. Dull and boring. However, from red wax in the dust jacket, Vanessa realises they should look for a red candle - they find it in the chandelier. The group returns up out.
	+ Liberty watches Aphrodite as she is about to jack an oncoming car, which turns out to be Trevor investigating the explosion after being phoned about it. He gives them a lift, picks up the other three from the Nitrate plant, and drives everyone home.
* **5th November** - Aphrodite spends the morning in hospital because of her ankle. Meanwhile, Maxwell, Cirillia and Vanessa, now Bentleyless, take the Greyhound bus down to San Fernando. Maxwell has a fit due to the *public* transport being too scary. They listen to ska and arrive at San Fernando that afternoon, meeting Liberty there - he is sat on a step eating tacos calmly. The group finds graffiti in the favela courtyard and realises that it contains runes hidden in plain sight relating to Roper's document. They crossreference and realise Roper wrote RED CHIMNEY. Spotting a red chimney several stories up, Liberty runs to the post office, negotiates with a very blunt postman, and uses their payphone to call Aphrodite, who comes to the town via bus. She climbs the roof and breaks open the fake red chimney - a key is inside.
* **6th November**- Back at home, the group holds the red candle from the Nitrate plant over a fire and realises a key is set within it. With all three of Roper's keys, Maxwell recognises the illustration as the cave on Nantucket Island near the plantation cliffs. They drive Maxwell's yacht, the Salty Spittoon, round the point and to the isle, finding it abandoned, the plantation falling into disrepair since the events the Gladstone retirement party. In the cave near where Philippa fell into the sea, they find a rock wall with keyholes, and unlock it to reveal a chest. Inside is a huge, thick tome titled ON DAGON, by DOCTOR CHARLOTTE ROPER. It contains notes on Dagon throughout history, its motives, information on the god, and more. It will take some time to understand the contents of this tome. Near Chapter 27, the party read a passage about a successful ritual carried out at Eldgard, Norrland' in Sweden near the town of Norrbacka, where scientists summoned something stronger than Dagon and possibly capable of destroying him, and managed to then banish this thing. The party endeavours next to travel to Sweden and uncover this way perhaps to stop Dagon, whose control, connections, and looming presence is becoming more and more apparent.

## In the Land of the Swedes

* **November 1921 - January 1922** - Maxwell, Chase, Cirillia and Vanessa fly to Barbados then travel by cruise liner to Lisbon. They then take boats up via Rotterdam to Copenhagen. In Copenhagen, they buy a metal detector and Geiger counter from a curio shop before taking a taxi across the Öresund bridge to Malmö, Sweden. Then, they take a trail from Malmö terminating in the rural town of **Norrbacka** in Övre Norrland, right on Sweden's northernmost reaches upon the Gulf of Bothnia.
* **9th January 1922** - Maxwell takes everyone to the house in Norrbacka he won gambling on the transatlantic voyage in first class. The group eat älgsteken (elk steak) and drink a little, relaxing by the fire as they plan how to find 'Eldgard' - no one at the library or records office seemed to know earlier, and in fact Vanessa managed to once again get banned from a library by knocking a book out of a glass window.
	+ That night, Chase is about to head to bed when he sees glints in the trees. He grabs his shotgun and coat and sneaks across the ski-slopes to investigate. He finds footprints and follows them around into a clearing, circling wide until he comes behind two well-armed soldiers with blue and gold burnt tree badges that read **SÄPO**. He calls out to them and shows his DEAD ID. They take him and put a bag on his head, then drive him off in their jeep, offering him granola and water on the 4-hour drive.
* **10th January** - After realising he is gone, Maxwell digs a grave before Cirillia urges them to go find Chase. They find tracks leading on the coastal road north and rent a military jeep to follow. After 4 hours they see a fortified bastion island and a long 5-mile bridge running to it from a small camp. Driving carefully through a minefield, they are spotted and told to approach the mesh gate of the command post and leave the car. They manage to pretend that they are a surprise inspection force. Greeted by Captain Ingrid Hellstein, she shows them around the facilities as part of the inspection, before taking them on the bridge to the fortress, which is named **ELDGARD.** The group reveals that this is SÄPO - Svenska Äldritch Projekt Organisationen. At Eldgard, they are reunited with Chase. They all see the tanks and train, inspect the barracks and offices, and then receive demonstrations in the SÄPO project labs. SÄPO uses life sentenced prisoners to test recovered materials on. They see a copper orrery device that freezes a prisoner solid and then he is shattered by a hammer, and they see a large cube of blue gelatin with a paleolithic hunter preserved inside, moving at about a half-millimetre every year and frozen in time since 12,000 BC.
	+ The scariest thing, and that which Professor Roper wrote of in her tome, is the **Eldgard Projector**. A black canister with a fabric strap, no photos or videos of it can survive. The party is shown pictures of its effects - opened for mere seconds, it eviscerates all living tissue nearby with razor-sharp black tentacles, but leaves objects unharmed, except for lead which completely stops it. They see images of fifty dead convicts with perfectly bored holes in their chests and the projector in the middle of the room blurry and out of focus from its energies. This, they conclude, might be something capable of defeating even Dagon, if he has flesh, he can be killed. Chase says the name **DAGON** in conversation. After the inspection, a guard is found dead on the ice just outside Eldgard of raking claw wound at the throat. He is retrieved from the thin pack ice, when on the horizon, the group spots legions of Dagon's shambling fish people approaching Eldgard intent on surely storming it.
	+ A hand breaks through the ice and almost drags the soldier Jon Lundvik down. Cirillia shoots at it whilst Chase retrieves the dead guard's flare gun and fires it, alerting the base. As the soldiers man the walls and begin unloading machine gun fire, Cirillia finds an old naval deck gun and sets it up. The three of them use their rifles to snipe the incoming thousands of Deep Ones - they kill 9, 10, and 15 each, but even with this, the riflemen, and the Swedish machine gunners, there is barely a dent in the tide.
	+ The trio delves into the labs intent on taking the Projector. Cirillia is able to ask Cpt. Ingride for her authorisation card - she agrees because she knows the chances of them making it to DEAD are greater than SÄPO surviving. This is treason for Ingride. Maxwell hypnotises a guard. Chase knocks out a scientist who challenges their credentials, and Cirillia enters as a third is about to call for help - she knocks him out. They rush in and take the Eldgard Projector, wrapping it in lead-lined cloth. Some SÄPO guards burst in to stop them - the trio hides in a closet and surprises two of them. Maxwell shoots one with a speargun. Cirillia panics and blows one's jaw off with a shotgun, prompting the other to surrender. Ingride enters and chastises her for this. The group boards the Eldgard supply train as the Deep Ones breach the wall and begin slaughtering the guards, who fight back with clubs.
	+ Cirillia aims the naval gun at the huge, emerging avatar of Dagon, covered in tentacles and shells and bits of sea creatures. She blows one of its arms off but it has several more. She boards the locomotive as Chase decouples it and they speed across the bridge.
	+ The avatar lumbers out of the water, sending Chase into an insane spiral. He tries to escape the speeding train as Maxwell pushes it to over 300kmh, far beyond its stress limits. Cirillia keeps him put as the group narrowly speeds past the avatar of Dagon ripping the bridge in half - they uncouple the coal car to survive. They whizz through the outpost and off into the north of Sweden on the track, burning red-hot wheels on the sizzling snow. They run out of speed by night and sleep in the wilderness.
* **11th January** - Ingride gathers firewood and her, Cirillia, Maxwell, and Chase run the locomotive-only train up to Djurö on the Norwegian border. They meet the meterologist Olof Bengtsson and borrow the meterological dirigible. They set off on a polar voyage over Greenland to northern Canada where they hope they can ditch and head to Fresh Lake before Dagon makes it there.

## The Battle of Fresh Lake City

* **January - February 1922** - Maxwell, Chase, Cirillia and Vanessa cross the Arctic circle in the 'Bumblebee' Swedish dirigible, with the Eldgard Projector. Meanwhile, their friends convene on Fresh Lake City, preparing for Dagon's inevitable attack when the Projector hits soil. The mood in Fresh Lake is dire. Elmer, Dani, Isabella Harrison, Alexandre DuBois, Sgt Trevor, and Baldassar Chedman help spearhead an evacuation of the people of the town to Denver, Colorado. People leave town in droves aboard Jalopy-brand trucks, leaving Fresh Lake a ghost town, only inhabited by the D.E.A.D., Montana sheriffs and police, and the local army garrison. A rainstorm begins over the city and does not let up for weeks on end.
* **February 21st 1922** - Maxwell, Chase, Cirillia and Veanessa arrive in Fresh Lake City on an otherwise empty train and find the town empty. Elmer and Dani greet them. As the rainstorm grows more dire and the tension builds, they all go to Maxwell's mansion and prepare the panic room.
	+ Elmer, Vanessa, and Cirillia drive to Fernando's house through the intense thunderstorm, almost crashing due to mud and a flooded road. They take the Maxim gun from Fernando's balcony and bolt it to the back of the truck.
	+ The group gathers the local sheriff, mayor, police, and general, and draw out a complex plan of action. Over the next few hours until midnight, they set up. They rig dynamite in three large skyscrapers by the city centre on the riverbank, as well as rigging many smaller buildings around to blow too. In three different skyscrapers across the main square, they set soldiers up inside the buildings with machine guns and rifles. They commission two ironclad battleships, the *USS Boston* and the *USS Massachusetts*, to moor upriver and ready their deck guns.
	+ Maxwell holds the Projector in the truck as bait whilst Elmer gets ready to drive. Chase sits on his motorcycle with a megaphone ready to set things off. Cirillia and a sniper team are on the 40th floor of a large company skyscraper, whilst Dani and several machine gunners are on the first floor. Vanessa and a small contingent of soldiers wait near a bank and drydock on the north side of town, closest to the ironclads, with the detonators for the traps.
* **February 21st - Night Time** - Chase kicks it off by calling Dagon's name through the megaphone as the storm swells and the Thames river bursts its banks. The legions of Deep Ones begin emerging from the water and marching into town toward the direction of the truck - the trap is set.
	+ Vanessa witnesses the USS Boston list and then sink suddenly without warning. In the main square, the Deep Ones begin advancing through the gunfire, and Cirillia signals with a flare for Vanessa to blow it - she does. Many of the approaching deep ones are buried in rubble, and the gunfire begins. Elmer drives the truck to maintain the bait at a good angle, whilst Dani and Cirillia's squads mow down their foes.
	+ Vanessa's position begins being overrun, so she shoots a flare for help. Chase hops from his motorcycle into the truck, and he, Elmer, and Maxwell speed to the docks to help Vanessa. Elmer runs over a horde of Deep Ones and Chase mows more down with the machine gun, lessening the pressure on Vanessa.
	+ Suddenly, a huge hand from the river picks up the USS Massachusetts and hurls it at the central skyscraper. It rips a hole through floors 5 up to 20 or so, destabilising it. Dani and the soldiers on the lower floors fall back to a roadblock. Meanwhile, Cirillia climbs down the wreckage of the building as it threatens to fall - she and most of her soldiers just make it with moments to spare as the skyscraper collapses and strikes the neighbouring building.
	+ Chase taunts Dagon aloud again. The air crackles with ozone and sparks. Everyone in the truck (now including Dani and Cirillia who have been picked up after escaping the tower) hangs on as Elmer drives through a door into a parking garage. An impossibly huge lightning strike hits the town square, and causes all six-and-a-half surviving skyscrapers to collapse outward like the petals of a flower, on a simply unimaginable scale. Vanessa and her soldiers, who have now retreated into the foyer of a bank with the detonator, are disoriented and deafened for a few moments. She sets off the dynamite for the dockside traps, some of which let out small explosions, but the buildings they hoped to topple and fence in their foes are already down. The rain suddenly stops. Everyone is on edge.
	+ The truck drives over to pick up Vanessa, now with everyone reunited for the final time. Cirillia and Maxwell don the lead-lined hazmat suits and take the Eldgard Projector. Maxwell leaves a letter on the passenger suit. They march down the street. Chase calls out to Dagon one last time, and Dagon emerges. Dagon stands hundreds of metres tall, with a great gaping mouth up its belly, thousands of insectile legs under its carapace as it rears up, the horror of the deep sea.
	+ Everyone manages to prepare their minds and braces as Dagon arrives and their ears ring, but Elmer is not so lucky. He passes out in the truck with his foot on the accelerator, and begins speeding down the empty streets toward buildings ahead. Dani and Chase leap out of the truck at sixty miles an hour. Dani lands softly on some bodies, but Chase lands heavily, hitting his head and breaking his arm on a lamppost and beginning to heavily bleed to death for a few moments - Dani awakens him and bandages his head momentarily.
	+ The rain begins again. Vanessa climbs into the passenger seat and shakes the now-insane mute Elmer awake, and they manage to avoid being splattered against the wall as the truck grinds to a halt and they are both jolted with whiplash. Meanwhile, Chase draws his flaregun, terrified of Dagon, and fires at him - but fumbles, and sets his leg on fire with the flare. He begins burning to death in the street, and Dani just barely extinguishes him. Chase is about to fade away, but clings on whilst thinking of his lost platoon, and Dani is able to bring him back from the jaws of death a second time.
	+ Maxwell looks up as Dagon looms down over him, its full attention fixed upon him and Cirillia. Maxwell shoves Cirillia to safety - she leaps into a bakery and takes cover - as he cracks the Eldgard Projector up to the red dot. It rattles and shakes, and tentacles and shadows begin ripping out as he dives to the ground. Rapidly, a huge being emerges - hundreds of metres tall, with tentacles from its head, thousands of eyes, elephant-like legs, and huge umbrella-like wings that blot out the rainclouds.
	+ Maxwell is somehow fine at the sight of this looming above him, and Cirillia faints in the bakery. Chase, now bloody and barely alive standing with the roughed up Dani and the shaken Vanessa and Elmer, witnesses **Cthulhu** in all its glory and his mind cannot handle it. He loses all semblance of sanity and goes completely and inconsolably insane. He tries to grab Vanessa's grenade (which Elmer gave her for a last stand). She shoves him back, so he pulls a shotgun out on her. Dani tackles it out of his hands, so he draws his rifle and jams an adrenaline shot into his own side, then fires. He shoots Vanessa in the shoulder, utterly lost and mad. Dani draws his SMG, and with no other options, fires two short bursts, killing Chase instantly.
	+ Chase's body begins floating down in the street-flood toward the river Thames. Elmer, who has been sent into a spiral after seeing Cthulhu, believes the corpse of Chase to be the body of his sister, and tries to get to her - Vanessa holds him as he cries and apologises in German to the hallucinations. Dani and Vanessa are able to survive the mental and psychic onslaught of Cthulhu's arrival. Dani runs to Maxwell, who is shying away as Cthulhu and Dagon begin fighting in a huge duel of lightning and tentacles. The two of them drag Cirillia out of the rubble and revive her, and everyone runs into town, fleeing the path of destruction between the two titans. Elmer, Maxwell, Cirillia, Dani, and Vanessa hijack a sedan car and drive up to Maxwell's mansion. They tell all of the soldiers to flee - the city is lost. As they crest the final hill and look back before heading south into Wyoming, they see Cthulhu reach down and blast Dagon with a cone of sonic force, then rip his city-block-sized body into bloody wriggling halves and raise it to the sky with a roar.
	+ Cthulhu flies off into the atmosphere as the group escapes Montana and drives onwards to Wyoming, to Colorado, and to pick up the pieces of their lives they have escaped with.
* **Mid 1920s** - Fresh Lake City is too ruined and possibly dangerous for human life. It is declared an exclusion zone by D.E.A.D., and the craters begin filling with water from the Thames, until it soon just becomes a huge lake the size of Rhode Island. The people of what was Fresh Lake City (1881-1922) and their once-booming industry move to the sunny California coast, and found the large city of **Liberty City**, named after Chase Liberty, north of San Francisco.

## The Pulpy Thirties

* **5th July 1936** - Doctor Vivian Bayliss, Professor Shirley Sloane, Professor Vincent Riley, and Zeus Morozov meet at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College in Egham, England. There, the historian and philologist **Professor Dahlia Kristiansen** sets them on an investigation to find the lost diary of the historian Aristo Efstatiades, having received a cryptic telegram from Vasily Obrezhov.
* **12th July** - The quartet arrives in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, aboard Zeus's airplane Titus. They narrowly avoid getting dragged into a riot between the Soviet orator **Vara Miravich**'s fervent Bolshevik crowd, and Serbian nationalists. The group meets Vasily, and investigates a local antiques store, finding a Soviet hideout behind the bookshelf. Shirley manages to steal a calendar, and the group reconvenes at Vasily's apartment in the Čukarika quarter. After finishing dinner with his girlfriend Antalya, he gives the group his Obrez pistol and his blessing.

## The Funky Fifties

* **Summer 1952** - At Camp Crystal Lake in New Jersey, four teen campers awaken and realise they're alone. They are **Jadaughter Vorshees**, **Finn Spire, Ulf Bengtsson** and **Jon Catsoc**. They evade, and fend off Jason Vorhees whilst repairing a pickup truck. Jon is knocked out by a meat hook but saved from certain death by Jadaughter who then judo flips Jason. Jon bites Jason Vorhees, but has his neck snapped. Ulf, the Swedish cryptid kid who can walk on water, gets pulled out of the pickup and has their spine broken against a tree. Jadaughter is choked to death. Fin guns it and escapes camp as the sole survivor.
* **1954** - The Águaprofunda Deepwater Oil Rig, located in the Gulf of Guinea, 260km SW of São Tomé and Príncipe, is taken over by Gulf pirates. The Portuguese paramilitary organisation **Salvamento Marítimo e Corporação de Segurança** (SMCS) sends a squad to investigate. Shots are heard on the radio. Hours later, some survive being trapped in claustrophobic underwater conditions like a windowless metal submarine whilst some being's tentacles assail them. They do not return to SMCS.

## The Outbreak of Nuclear War

 —The Swedish Quartet seeing the Soviet nuclear silo in Norrland firing., (This will be bad for the Swedish economy)

* **1960** - To combat the much-talked-about dangers of fossil fuels warming up the atmosphere, global scientists release great quantities of a compound known as **CW-7**. It is able to cool the atmosphere and protect from global warming for "a thousand years", according to scientists.
* **27 October 1962** - *"The Day Everything Went Wrong"* - A **Soviet B-59** submarine moored beneath **Cuba's** waters is struck by a US depth charge. Captain Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky and his Political Officer both have prior orders to return fire with a nuclear torpedo if fired upon. Commander Vasily Arkhipov of the submarine Flotilla, who is also aboard, is struck by a ceiling beam when the depth charge explodes, and as such is knocked out, unable to be consulted. The Captain and P.O. decide to return fire, launching their nuclear torpedo at the US Navy blockade. Several ships are sunk by the *third nuclear explosion used in history*. Immediately, the US returns fire.
* **1am on 27 October 1962** - With reports of nuclear war nigh, the Siberian missile silo **Sozhenoye Nebo** located along the **Podkamennaya Tunguska River** launches its first nuke. Its guidance system fails upon launch and the facility detonates itself in a large explosion, killing all personnel. However, the explosion melts a radius of nearby permafrost, beneath which the Siberian peasant sufferers of the **Tunguska Plague** were buried. This event releases the plague of the **Burnt** back unto the world, which spreads rapidly to North and Eastern Europe within the day.
* **Evening of 27 October 1962** - In Sweden, the lover **Noah Karlsson**, the occult Professor **Erik Eriksson**, the bouncer **Elias Mikalsson** and the reporter **Ansgar Nilsson** are travelling by train from **Stockholm, Sweden** to **Rovaniemi, Finland** when the train is overrun by the **Burnt**. The passenger train is then derailed after being struck by a military train. The *second most famous quartet of Swedes* escape to a nearby family's house, where the old couple help them use the telephone to alert the nearby Norrbacka PD. A squad car is sent, but it has been afflicted by the **Burnt**, its headlights black. After destroying the squad car, the family lend them a pickup truck to travel to Norrbacka and seek help.
* **28 October 1962** - President **JFK** orders the bombardment of Cuba, and the nuclear launch of US-controlled Turkish nuclear silos to fire upon Moscow and Leningrad. A chaotic doomsday ensues, with global powers firing their nuclear weapons encircling the globe.
* **29 October 1962** - The Soviet Union returns fire with its last few unused silos located near **Norrbacka, North Sweden**. Meanwhile, the *2nd Most Famous Swedish Quartet* reach Norrbacka after some Russian soldiers help repair their engine and finally hear news of the imminent nuclear war. They see the Norrbacka missile silo launch and flee in terror in the pickup.
* **After 1962** - The copious nuclear explosions and airborne radiation seems to react with the **CW-7** in the atmosphere, turning it from a temperature control buffer compound to one that causes an artificial worldwide ice age, incredibly potent. The world is slowly plunged into the cold.
* **1960s** - Ansgar Nilsson and Elias Mikalsson chart a path across the frozen North Sea and Atlantic Sea from Norway, ending up in Montana, US. On the way they live out of a converted RV, play rock music, and roadkill the **Burnt**.

## Freeze and Burn

 —Matthias Mandrake to Tex.

* **April 1971** - At the abandoned **Montana Hills Medical Facility** in Hope County, Montana (near the site of what was once FLC), the preacher **Matthias Mandrake**, the billionaire oil baron **Sir Raymond Garland**, the McCarthyist farmer **Wilbur Houston**, the drugged up drifter **John Harrison**, and the combat medic **Doc Winchester** awaken after a manual release ends their cryosleep. They sneak through the building looking for answers, and scuffle with two **Burnt**, before escaping into the wasteland in a Soviet BTR-80 armoured patrol carrier named **THE BEAST**.
	+ Montana Hills is a government hospital and research facility founded quite close to where Fresh Lake City was founded in the 1880s.
	+ Notably, John Harrison and Raymond Garland are each respectively the descendants of Jeremiah 'Dirty' Harrison from 1880s Tijuana, MX, and of Amos Carnegie Garland from New York in the 1870s.
* April 1971 - The group arrives at a redneck town inside an intact American Football stadium, called **Gridiron**. Led by a gunslinging woman named **Tex** and a grillmaster man named **T-Bone,** they spend some time among the survivors. There, they meet **Brandon 'Chad' Shutterstock**, the son of John Harrison's best friend from before the freeze, as well as **Dr. Saulman Suleiman Sullivan**, a geeky zoologist who was trapped in a locker. Matthias learns the Mythos spell *Insidious Nightmare* from a book looted by a Gridironer off a dead Los Diablos cultist, which he fast talks the Gridironer into handing over.
* **May 1971** - The large group embarks on a mission to the **Babylon Water** treatment plant to find important water purifiers and ensure Gridiron's survival. The Doc survives stepping on a landmine. They stab several paramilitaries to death and threaten a manager into giving up the purifiers, but a sniper from the Burnt-worshipping cult **Los Diablos** takes out the manager and forces them to scramble. The cover for the infiltration is given by the other half of the group, who sic a Burnt horde on the front gate, forcing Babylon Water's garrison to fight them off. Matthias kills two people with *Insidious Nightmare*, forever scarring his psyche and giving him symptoms of *The Burn*.
* **May 1971** - Setting out to find **Los Diablos**, the group makes their way toward **Nova Braga Airport** but on the way, finds a bunker full of supplies. It turns out to be a trap - the group is gassed, and brought whilst unconscious into the airport's underbelly, where they are chained to chairs alongside **Ansgar Nilsson** and **Elias Mikalsson**, who were also captured earlier that day.
* **May 1971** - The group fights their way out, surviving cultists with huge swords, and makes their way through the labs, holding scientists hostage. They witness the human experimentation that Los Diablos is performing, mangled half-Burnt subjects pumped full of chemicals that can be used to slow the mental decline of Burning whilst keeping their strength and speed. After finding out that Los Diablos plan to crash a Goodyear Blimp (*the Redemptor*) into Gridiron to kill them and themselves, they steal a Russian biplane and give chase, shooting down its fighter jet escort. T-Bone scrambles his Cessna to come help, but is shot down and killed as the final fighter jet spins out.
* The group boards the blimp, fighting their way through serum-enhanced cultists and into the control room, where the leader Léona and a cultist with Mythos magic abilities wither the Doc's arm to a bony husk, causing him to collapse and die of blood loss. Léona uses magic to force Matthias to execute Dr. Sullivan with a sawn-off shotgun. John Harrison is almost killed by being bodyslammed, but Sir Raymond clips a parachute to him and throws him out of the window. Sir Raymond steers the blimp off-course and detonates a suicide vest made of iodine bombs to kill Léona and the mage as Matthias leaps out the window. John and Matthias are the only survivors of the blimp, but Gridiron is saved.
* **1976** - After having travelled the icy States for some years in the **BEAST**, now renamed **T-BONE**, John Harrison, Matthias Mandrake, Elias Mikalsson and Ansgar Nilsson return to Gridiron to see Tex and Brandon again, before setting off to Nevada to free John's best friend, Shelby Shutterstock, who was captured and taken to Area 51 in the fifties..