This campaign journal will detail the misadventures and gradual descent into madness of a group of Call of Cthulhu investigators, all of whom are underpaid and overworked deputy sheriffs in the (totally made up) county of Buzzard, Kentucky, sometime in those halcyon years of the early 1990s. For this campaign, I decided to serve up something other than the standard Lovecraftian fair and developed scenarios and a sort of sandbox around ideas expanded liberally from Operation Unfathomable by Jason Sholtis, wanting something more akin to a B-movie sci-fi/horror than anything akin to Masks of Nyarlathotep and whatnot. The campaign weaves between the ongoing mystery surrounding bizarre events within Buzzard County and the dysfunctional personal lives of the investigators. While the campaign retains some of the campiness and humor of Jason's work, it veers quite suddenly and often into real horror.
As of the writing of this entry, our campaign is 17 sessions old, and it looks like we have quite a while to go before reaching the end. I've designed the campaign to be open-ended but capable of reaching a satisfying conclusion (I think) at some point. I've done no real "plotting," instead designing NPCs and scenarios which emerge as play continues. Some of these scenarios have a predetermined time in which they will develop while others take shape out of the Investigators' actions. I may write an ongoing "Behind the Screen" series of posts, as well, to talk about how I handled things as the Keeper, combining a character-driven narrative with a sandbox approach to a Call of Cthulhu campaign.
(This campaign journal made possible by one of my player's obsessive note-taking efforts. Thanks, Andrew!)
Map of Buzzard County
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| Designed by Me |
Map of Peril, Kentucky
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| Also designed by Me |
Campaign Background
In Buzzard County, Kentucky, where the town of Peril is the
county seat, the sheriff's office remains the only functioning law enforcement
agency in the county after the closure of local mines and subsequent economic
downturns led to a lack of funding for local PDs. The county contains a
national monument, the Hyperion Cave, one of the longest, deepest caves in the
world, which remains mostly unmapped. As well, the county borders a
military base which houses a mountain where
the US government stores nuclear waste (this is not officially within the
county of Buzzard). Beyond those, however, the county is known for its once
abundant and profitable coal mines, 70% of which closed in the mid-1980s. Current issues facing the county: 1) economic downturns leading to
joblessness; 2) lawsuits against the mining companies for mercury poisoning;
and 3) the population the county seat, Peril, has shrunk
from ~70,000 in 1980 to ~35,000 (official residents, not including students or
transients) in the early 1990s. The recent county elections also saw the defeat of 35-year incumbent, Sheriff Logan Slatwell (D), by Sheriff Marla McFreen(R), who has, at the campaign's start, been on the job for only a few months.
The Investigators
Deputy Jeb Givens - Lives in Diamonds in the Rough trailer park in an old camper his mama gave him when he left the house. It has a bed and a gas stove, but he mostly grills on an old camp stove, also from his mama. The trailer is set at the back of the park, without any plumbing hook ups. Jed has a bucket he dumps in the creek at the bottom of the hill behind his trailer about once a week. His nearest neighbor is about a quarter mile from his place. The trailer is the frequent target of local vandals, with all sorts of graffiti tags all over it, to the extent people think he is an aging acid-head as the trailer looks like a psychedelic nightmare hanging around since the 60s. He drives a 1980 Ford Pinto.
Deputy Lonnie Ray Houston - Lives in a small ranch-style home at 706 Pucker St, in a small 1970s-style subdivision (Coconut Grove) built just inside the city limits of Peril. Since Bobbie Jo left, the house has fallen into some disrepair--the yard overgrown, the sink overrun with dishes, clothes piled in corners. Empty trays of Hungry Man Frozen Dinners litter every countertop. Lonnie Ray’s den is the only place that remains somewhat clean. It features his guns, gun rack, hunting gear, a large-screen projection TV, and a recliner in which Lonnie Ray more often than not sleeps. The house is floored in either shag carpeting or yellowing linoleum, and the walls are predominantly wood paneling.
Deputy Wilkes Booth-Smith - Lives in his family home--the old country place in the dark holler west of town. A little slice of heaven, if heaven is on one side of the mountain where the sun doesn't get to, and the scenery is partially a mountaintop removal. It's the Old Booth Place, and it's big and only vaguely modernized: the family used to be huge, and they've been there since before the mines, with several Booths having fought in the Revolutionary War. Lots of cabins of uncles and so on, now fallen into disrepair. He needs a 4WD to get there, if the creek rises.
Session 1 - "The Game is Ahead"
Tuesday, May 6
Making his usual late evening rounds in the Meddlesome Creek subdivision in Peril, Dep. Wilkes Booth-Smith is flagged down by an elderly woman named Edna Corbitt, a busybody who calls into the department at least once a week to complain about her neighbors. From her yard, hands on hips, she berates Wilkes Booth-Smith for having done nothing to help her find her cats, which she swears have been killed by some neighbor of hers. Wilkes Booth-Smith reassures her that he is on the case, parks his car, and after questioning her regarding the cats' disappearance, patrols the neighborhood afoot, his only goal in mind to appease Edna so she won't call into the department a dozen times in the coming days.
Edna is pleased, which Dep. Booth-Smith assures her is his only desire in life. Down the street, Wilkes Booth-Smith investigates an empty lot, thinking maybe if some teenagers had gotten ahold of the cats and killed them, they would've done so in such a locale. Instead of dead cats, he finds a campsite behind the overgrown brush covering the foundation of the demolished house, but no one is "home." Inside the tent Wiles Booth-Smith finds a sleeping bag, Coleman stove, and an expensive briefcase with a combination lock. As he pulls the briefcase out of the tent, he hears some movement in the woods behind the house and sees something moving through the underbrush. . .
Graveyard shift begins with Dep. Houston responding to a call at the Peril V.F.W., where a local man, Arthur Womack, an ex-miner and Vietnam vet whose son Kyle disappeared under mysterious circumstances 18 years ago (leading to a nationally televised search and rescue that came up empty-handed), has gone on one of his usual tears. When Lonnie Ray arrives, Arthur has wrecked the bar, throwing chairs, breaking bottles, and even flipped a pool table on its side.
As Lonnie Ray enters, he hears Arthur yelling, "Down in them caves. They took him down in them caves where they got them facilities!"
These sorts of claims aren't unusual for Arthur, who has accused everyone under the sun for the disappearance of his son at one time or another, including the sheriff's department. Lonnie Ray manages to calm Arthur down by humoring him about his current conspiracy theory. As Lonnie Ray drives Arthur home, he becomes remorseful, apologizing profusely, as he always does when Lonnie Ray drags him out of the V.F.W., saying, "I know this sounds crazier 'n shit, Lonnie Ray, but I know the truth now. It was the government. Don't you know why they put all that nuclear waste underground here? It's cause of them caves. Somehow Kyle stumbled onto something while he was playing in the holler. I know it. I know it."
Lonnie Ray drops Arthur off at home at his trailer without further incident.
Meanwhile, Deputy Jed Givens has something to prove and takes his patrol down the Old Penny Mine Road out past Redfield's Junkyard where he's caught more than a few teenagers over the years engaged in various illicit activities. On a night like tonight, Jed always gets the itch to keep the local juveniles in line. Unsurprisingly, he finds the '88 Mustang belonging to 19-year-old Ricky Skuggs parked down a sideroad not far from the abandoned Penny Mine. Jed and Ricky go a long ways back, Jed having arrested him more than once as a juvenile. Ricky lives a few doors down in the Diamonds in the Rough trailer park. He hits his lights and woop-woops them as he pulls in behind. The smell of marijuana gives him clear reasonable suspicion, bringing a shit-eating grin to Jeb's jowly face.
"Evening, Ricky," Jed says as he taps his nightstick against the car window.
Inside, Jed sees two girls with Ricky, whose wearing his acid-washed jeans and Dead Kennedys t-shirt, his hair styled in an outdated mullet. One of the girls Jed recognizes as a Peril city councilman's daughter. The other girl he doesn't know. She's quiet, looks guilty and nervous. Within 15 minutes, Jed has them all out of the car and separated so he can interrogate them regarding the marijuana. Jed enjoys himself, giving each of them, especially Ricky, absolute hell, threatening arrest, jail time, etc., and prolongs the ordeal for over an hour before letting them go. He watches them drive off, pleased with himself for his damn fine police work.
It's not a cat Dep. Booth-Smith sees behind him but an oblong cylinder of gross, undulating cells, yellow in color, standing about 4' tall in the undergrowth. Panic and bile rises in Wilkes' chest. The thing carries itself like a slug into the underbrush, but Wilkes Booth-Smith stands frozen. After a while, coming to his senses, he follows it into the woods for a ways, nervously, gun unholstered, but all he finds is a trail of yellow slime in its wake.
He carries the briefcase back to his patrol car and calls in to the station, talking to the night dispatcher, Wendell McCleary, saying nothing of the thing he saw but that he's only found a transient campsite in the Meddlesome Creek Subdivision. No cats, though. But before he's able relay everything, Wendell interrupts him and says, "All of y'all need to get down to Redfield's Junkyard. Something's happened out there. Mac Draper is real shook up."
Being only a few miles up the Old Penny Mine Road, Dep. Givens is first to arrive on the scene, finding Mac Draper, who manages the junkyard, talking to Ricky, who's pulled his Mustang up into the driveway. Ricky says Mac waved him down as he was leaving. Mac appears to have told Ricky everything that's happened. Yelling at Ricky that he needs to go home, Jed approaches Mac, who appears shaken, having gone pale. He's fidgeting with his overall straps (under which he wears no t-shirt) and keeps looking out toward the back of the junkyard. It's past midnight by this point.
Mac tells Jed what happened, with Ricky and the Girls still listening on, just as Deps. Houston and Booth-Smith arrive.
"I was over in the office," Mac says, "when all the sudden the damned TV reception just went out, no static, just out, blank. I was fussing with it when I heard all this commotion out at the back of the junkyard, where we got all that equipment from '62. Sounded like somebody moving machinery. The dogs were acting weirder than hell, too, wouldn't go back there."
The deputies know that Mac refers to the Crooner Mine Disaster of '62, which occurred outside the abandoned town of Bald Hollow. He goes on to tell them he sneaked out and saw about two dozen men and women out in the junkyard, gathered in a circle, wearing baggy coveralls. He says they weren't chanting or nothing like that, but one man kneeling in the middle of them and he saw, he says, something he couldn't quite tell, like a large man wearing an antennae on his head. He says as he was out there, he felt something in the air, like when you walk into a room knowing there's a TV on before you see it or hear it.
The deputies send Mac back into his office to make some coffee and tell Ricky to leave and take the girls home while they head into the junkyard. Mac is clearly upset. He says it must've been devil worshippers, like he's heard about on the news.
Wilkes Booth-Smith retrieves the department's K-9 officer, General Sherman, from his patrol car, and the deputies set out into the junkyard. As they get closer to the area where Mac said he saw the gathering, suddenly all of the deputies' radios go silent--not like they lost signal and the channels become riddled with static, but absolutely silent, as if a broadcast of absolutely nothing were coming over them. No effort on their parts fixes the issue. General Sherman begins to whine and seem confused. The deputies feel that same sensation Mac talked about, like walking into a room with a TV on.
Arriving, the deputies discover a grisly scene: a seat from a GMC pickup sits in the middle of an open area, surrounded by the rusting hulks of old mining equipment. In the seat, staring at them as they approach is a severed human head.
The head is middle-aged, male. Graying brown hair would've reached shoulders. The hair is not cut at the neck. The neck appears to be cleanly severed.
The deputies discover footprints in the dirt where people formed a circle around the seat and the head and two sets of prints which approach the seat. One person kneeled on the ground before the seat. A jet of blood covers the seat and the dirt around it. It appears that the individual who kneeled then stood and all of them, the entire group, walked away, leaving the junkyard by a hole in the fence on its north side.
The deputies are perplexed. After a fruitless search of the woods to the north of the junkyard (where their radios continue to malfunction), they return to junkyard offices and call for county coroner and the sheriff, who doesn't answer. Dr. Flournoy arrives and investigates the scene, but remains stoic and refuses to speculate as of yet regarding what might've transpired. After a few hours, they wrap things up.
Leaving the scene of the beheading, the deputies decide to get a late dinner over at the Sidewinder Truckstop, which Lonnie Ray complains about vehemently, claiming the food there is always terrible. The attendant, a young girl named Pepper has a crush on Lonnie Ray while the fry cook, envious of him because of this, always overcooks and over-salts Lonnie Ray's food. The deputies eat and speculate as Wilkes Booth-Smith tells them what he found in the Meddlesome Creek subdivision. They all go out and force open the briefcase. Inside, they find 3 VHS tapes, one of the labeled "Hyperion? Near Shudder Bluff," the others unlabeled. They also find an old map of a complex system of caves. The map is dated 1908 and appears to be drawn by a man named Max Kaemper. Various sections of the map are labeled thus: "Black Ooze River, tributary? Source?"; "Something on ceiling? Appeared primate"; "Dereliction Access?"; "Hyperion?"; "to Great Lichen Plain"; "membrane"; and "To Hyperion?"
They return to the station and dust the briefcase and tapes for fingerprints, intending to send them to the FBI database, after which they decide to watch the tapes.
In the A/V room, they find the first tape to be a home video recording of a spelunker's trip through a cave system. The date on the tape is April 24. The caves are unfamiliar to the deputies, although none of them are regular visitors to the areas caverns. Most of the tape consists of the individual walking or crawling through the caves, checking his map After an hour or so, a male voice on the tape says, "Fuck, fuck..." and he turns off his headlamp. The caverns are plunged into darkness, but after a few minutes, a violet glow appears far off in the distance, possibly hundreds of yards or a mile--it's unclear. The spelunker turns his lamp back on and marks "to Great Lichen Plain" upon his map. For another hour, the tape records only more wandering through the caves.
The second tape is unlabeled but has a date of April 24, as well. After a brief static, the entire tape appears to be blank. They fastforward, finding nothing of interest.
About this time, Lonnie Ray Houston and Jed decide on heading home.
Alone now, Wilkes Booth-Smith figures to watch the third tape, also unlabeled. Like the second tape, there is static. The timestamp reads 00:00:00. The date on the tape is likewise April 24. As he's watching Dep. Booth-Smith blinks and the static returns. As he's reaching to fastforward, he notices, somehow, the tape's timestamp now indicates that slightly over 120 minutes have passed. The tape ends and ejects itself. Dep. Booth-Smith checks his watch and the clock in the A/V room. Somehow he's lost two hours...
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