Call of Cthulhu 1920's - Episode 3 - A Stormy Nightmare - Part 1

Call of Cthulhu 1924. 

Episode 3 – A Stormy Nightmare Part 1. (Spoilers)

It begins one night after our other episodes had concluded. We are making our escape and find a woman in a red dress on the road, she had a ghostly outline for a second. She collapses. We picked her up on the road. We arrived at the Orchard Gas Station, Jack selling pies of uncertain origin, Mary, Ethel and Teddy. Teddy eats a pie and gets ill, goes to the loo and is fried by a blue light, leaving only his wedding ring. The waitress pretends to use the phone, but it is not working. She and Jack are now suspects in all of this, whatever THIS is.

The radio reported that we are now wanted for the murders at the hotel. But they did not mention the mutations of Zeke or the thing in the corner room. Maybe it was just an illusion or something. We forgot to scrub our names from the hotel register. Did they not find Charlotte there?

Who was the person I saw being tied to the rock? Martin?

Emilia Webb is her name. She has a fit while we are about to take her to her dad, at exactly the same time the blue light was happening in the loo to Teddy. Possibly, she is controlled by something, or she is in control of something.

She comes round asking for her grandad. We tell her to wait in the diner.

Ferb drives us to the doctor's farm, where Hank looks through the window, sees one, possibly 2 dead bodies that could have been electricuited, the first two victims of Emilia?

Hank sees male bootprints on the floor, with a crowbar outside. Hank gets the crowbar.

We decide to leave the house and get out of here. We see a chap with a partly burned face with a blue energy field coming after him. We tell him that Emilia is at the diner and to go there. We try to flee the blue thing, it chases us. Hank throws the crowbar at it, but it just turns it to ash. It tries to swipe at Ferb but misses, and we outpace it, but a telegraph is struck by lightning and blocks our path.

We go back to the house and search it, and Ferb finds two large tomes of rambling arcana, plus some diagrams from Mr Tesla about some electrical experiments Emilia was doing. I wash my hands in the kitchen and give them a good scrubbing.

(May be slightly out of sync there).

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Hank's thoughts on the way back to the diner, where we can read those tomes in peace.

1. Did something go wrong, and she was somehow charged with some electrical power?

2. Is this Mr Tesla involved in this strange weather we are having, or is it something else to do with the night's events?

3. How does Billy, the chap on the road, know Emilia?

4. He does not seem frightened of her. Does he not know she has been altered somehow?

5. Did the blue thing kill the two people in the house?

6. What was in the basement?

Hopefully, some of the answers will be in the two tomes.

    After reading these two journals when parked up somewhere,-

Hank speaks his mind, "If I had read these documents a few days ago, I would have thought them utter drivel, a story outl ine for a comic, but after what we have seen and experienced over the last few days, I can only suppose the doctor had been to some far-off land and in his wanderings had come across someone purveying the 'Black Arts' or Devilishness.". He was obviously performing some sort of rituals on his patients to get rid of unwanted pregnancies."

      He continued, "Mr. Teslas diagrams do make a bit more sense, in the way of some of the parts, but as to what the outcome would be when you assembled them, I would be at a loss to guess. It seems that some sort of curative or enhancement field or ray could be generated. How long that may last would depend on the power source."

     " Possibly the effect he hoped it would have on the human body was incorrect, and something else was manifested in Emilia. Could that have been the wispy thing surrounding Emilia, or that chased the chap and us? Was a ghostly manifestation given a gateway to the human plane of existence? Whatever it was, it consumes bodies, just leaving ash behind".

        Can Emilia control it? Very doubtful, I think, but we cannot let her roam loose and just keep turning folk to ash?"

      He gripped his lucky rabbit's foot,

 " The question is, what to do about it? We cannot keep murdering folk all over the place. They think we killed three people already. At this rate, we are going to be strung up for mass murder! I have never been much of a churchgoer, but this sort of stuff might change my mind. If only Granny were here."

      He looked up at Ferb, "This is more of your territory than mine, since you are a God-fearing man. What do you think, Ferb?"

"Do we stand any chance of stopping it? Now that we know about the equipment, should we go back and see what is in the basement?"

Regards all,

Ivor Cogdell

Call of Cthulhu - Episodes 1 and 2 "People on the shore" - Not the correct adventure title (Spoilers)

Hi Everyone,

                     Here is the first episode of a 1920's Call of Cthulhu RPG, I have just taken part in -         7th February 2026, with John and Richard as GM.

18 April 1924 -

Hank (myself) is an athletic scholar at a university. Frank is a Zoroastrian priest (John), and Caroline is a reporter (Richard).  Our Patron is a Mr Will Corbett, of Corbett Industries. His son, Master Mark Corbett and a Miss Emily Danvers have both run off from their parent's, and plan to meet up at a secluded location, and are coming from different locations.

Will has been tracking their movements by calling the gas stations in the area and seeing if they have passed by or got gas. Emily has passed Peabody and gone through Lynn. We think that they are heading for a stop in the Peabody area, according to the gas stations on the route, and then to a nearby Hotel, "The Swimming Hole". It is next to a lake, with a Stone Circle and half flooded church in the grounds.

    Frank has a sawn-off shotgun with 6 rounds, and I have a pistol with 6 rounds. Harry and Caroline have a knife each.

We follow the two lovers in Mr Corbett's roadster, with Henry, the chauffeur, at the wheel. When we arrive at "The Swimming Hole". The owners of the hotel are Zeke, who is in a wheelchair with a blanket covering his legs and Ned Garvey. Both are very powerfully built.  There is a shotgun on the back of the reception wall. The hotel is T-shaped, the reception and private owner's area are along the top, the first 4 rooms are on the front, and the other three are around the back, facing the lake. Further down is the wood and stone circle; the church is further around the lake.  

We check the register and find that Emily has booked in and is here in room 7, with another name crossed out for an unknown reason, presumably Martin's. There was no sign of his car out front; Emily's was still there.  A Mr Grant Jones is staying in number 4, with a local IronInn Fisheries van parked at the bottom of the T, probably his.

Glancing back through the register, while Ned is getting our towels, I notice that males seem to go missing on the night of the full moon, which unfortunately, is tonight. Emily Room is in room 7, Caroline and Henry take Room 2, Frank and I take Room 1. Looking around, we find tracks of something that has been dragged into the rear section of the hotel, we think either Emily or Mark. 

 We discover a spyhole in the wall, and Harry sees an octopus in the loo. John shoots it and blows the loo to bits. Frank then hears Zeke coming through a secret trapdoor in the floor, and Zeke now has Octopus legs. Frank shoots it, rolls 4d6 = 18, kills it/him. It falls back down the hole. Frank thinks he saw his backbone explode towards the lake. The rest of us think it's rubbish.

 Somewhere, a bell chimes midnight.

A slug slithers through the spyhole, crawls across the floor and bites me on the leg, for 1 point of damage. I kill it, and another one is trying to do the same thing. I manage to stomp on that one without too much trouble. 

Looking into the reception area, we see that Ned has armed himself with his shotgun and has vanished.

As we are passing room 4, the door opens, and a shadowy figure appears. 

 "Blub.alub.alub. Hallo, Blub.alub.alub. Hallo".

Already scared stiff by the night's events, I kill the creature with a pistol shot to the body. On searching the body, we notice that he has webbed hands underneath his gloves. We take his ID and keys to his van.

Episode 2, 

On seeing the recent events, Caroline had a psychotic episode, panicked, and ran off into the woods, and we chased after her. We hear chanting from the stone circle. As I approached the lake shore, I saw a sea monster and had an episode and froze in place, watching something or someone being chained to a rock by robed figures. Harry had an phyycotic episode, and his mind was taken over by the creature, and he started coming for me.

I broke free of my trance, turned to run away, yelling, "It's coming for me, Hank's coming to get me!"

Ferb took cover in the trees, and I ran past him. He jumped out, shot Harry with 1 barrel, and turned him into red mist.

"Let's get out of this mad place!"

 Ferb burned the fish truck, and we set off in the roadster up the driveway, where we got stuck in the mud. I jumped out and managed to bump us free. We went to Perdue to get more petrol. The gas station was locked up and deserted when we got there, so we had to break in and, with a bit of figuring,  manually started the pumps. We left some bills on the table to cover the gas and the lock. We filled up the tank, then looked around for some spare gas tanks and put them in the boot, where an "octopus child" leapt out at us. 

 I grabbed it by the throat and launched it up the road, like a football, where Ferb shot it with the last of his ammo, but it had launched a detachable hand at me and tried to strangle me with it. Ferb pulled it off me, and we squished it. We made sure that there was nothing else in there, slammed the boot lid and got out of there fast.                                                                                                             

Missing in Action - Martin, Emily and Caroline.

Casualties - Hank.

Enemies dealt with - Zeke, Gary. Ocopus Child, 2 Slugs.

Opposition Forces - Ned, the Chanters in the wood, your actual, real-life Sea Monster.

Ferb and I were the only witnesses to survive. We wondered how we were going to explain this to Will when we got back, certainly not with the truth, whatever that was. I am now a germophobe through the shock of it all.

The end of the beginning.....

There you go, that was about 5 hours' worth of fun and dice rolls, over two sessions, squashed down into a few lines. We were using luck points and losing sanity points all the way through that chaotic romp. Many thanks to John for saving my neck and Richard, acting as Harry and Caroline, along with being the all-powerful GM, for putting it on the line in the first place, splashing out for the rules and his time collecting additional pictures of props and stuff to flesh out the story for us. This was only one of many ways the story could have gone. 

We have played the third episode, which I will post soon.

Call of Cthulhu (C) 2026 Copyrights. All rights reserved. All persons in here are fictitious and are not meant to portray anyone living, dead or in any other plane of existence.

Regards all,

Ivor Cogdell

P.S. Hats off to the Silurians (C) Copyright Dr Who, just in case they are related.