Story hooks for X of Cthulhu and other weird horror games
[yog-sothoth.com thread "101 adventure hooks" for X of Cthulhu or other weird horror games.]
268. A geophysicist asks permission to explore your property. He's been mapping gravitational and magnetic anomalies throughout the region and boy, does your place look weird. Also a good way to bring some party members together.
269. You're having some work done on the basement (house, business, church, anything). A workman disappears, then an animal. You knew about the 17th century crawlspace under the proper basement, but it appears there's yet another layer.
270. An engineer, scientist, or tinkerer dreams of a large, convoluted circuit diagram. Plug it in to some heavy juice and laissez les bon temps roulez! It's not just the neurasthenic artists suffering for their latent telepathy after all.
271. The monks at the temple of Bo Ran De are famous throughout Burma for their ongoing liturgy. At all hours, some portion of the brothers are inside the seventeen-sided chamber chanting the densely-layered microtonal meditation. Many lay visitors, including several British colonial officers & scholars of sectarian Buddhism, have joined the monks, reporting that they are simply transported to another reality during the service.
277. A rattled colleague (police, doctor, anatomist...) calls you for a reality check. "Come down and take a look at these three stiffs. They've had surgery. Crude surgery. Weird stuff. They should be dead from it. Well, they are dead, but not from this..."
278. A contact in some other adventure has what looks like a glass paperweight on his desk. Within it is a faintly glowing conical blob that remains pointing in the same direction, about 30 degrees down and east by south east. Is it a pointer to something buried? a star below the horizon? or just a red herring?
279. The investigators begin encountering each other in dreams, to be mentioned and role-played out in little bits over several adventures. The dreams increasingly center on an enormous structure floating over their city or countryside.
305. After several weeks of a very popular exhibition of artifacts at your museum or university, there is a break in and a bronze age helmet, shield, and spearhead were stolen. They weren't the focus of the exhibit, but they were anomalous for the site...
306. A mental patient (an NPC or investigator) takes on a new persona. At first they slip in or out of it, but very soon the Egyptian princess Annephis will be running things. This may seem like a good thing, as she has useful mythos knowledge. However, she and her deity are not all peaches and cream... [thanks to Keith Herber for Annephis in "The Sanatorium."]
307. There's a new fad among rich, jaded young party people. It's a drug that acts like a mild hallucinogen. Music and sound becomes rich and immensely significant. Wouldn't it be charming, says one fellow, to sing THIS song...
310. An innocuous beginning to a hideous conclusion. Cash, stock, and bonds are disappearing from safes around town without their being opened and without visible break-in onto the premises. But the walls and safes show strange discoloration and corrosion. The first break comes when a guard sees a shadowy, translucent human figure walking through a wall!
311. Everyone in town is so happy these days. So, so happy. We just don't feel like doing anything, just enjoy the day. So happy. Looks like Amos Haldaine just fell over dead from his veranda. That makes a dozen doesn't it Frannie? Well we've all got to go sometime. So happy.
312. A gentlemen meets the investigators in a rural hotel or club. He obliquely mentions his desire to get back to a lovely site he saw in his youth. His two trucks of equipment head up the mountain. A day later, the drivers come back. The oldster was setting up those machines just outside some cave, they said. Is there a gamer yet breathing who can resist poking his nose into this?
319. Doctor Earnest Crank has a machine that he demonstrates for fellow researchers and potential investors. What it does is absolutely unclear; his explanations make no sense at all, but many people become just as fascinated with the project as he. Once they're involved, nobody can understand what they're saying either. Once anyone's spent some time away from the machine, the affect goes away.
320. Take any clues leading to some mysterious mythos monster. It is up to nothing intelligible. It hurts no human, well away from any human, doing nothing that makes sense. It is too powerful to be attacked with less than artillery, and entirely unbothered by even that (it gradually reforms & continues being baffling). Any drama comes from humans going nuts, reading something lies into the situation, or exploiting others going nuts.
334. It all starts in a dusty antiquities shop. Again. The fellow has a dusty contraption on a shelf. Mounted on a fine wooden stand, it is an arrangement of crystal, ceramic, and metallic rods and spheres. The large central sphere reflects the room, but not the people in the room. None, except for Miss N______...
348. A gang of eldritch gatecrashers show up out of nowhere at the Governor's Ball. They have a series of ornate spines driven well into their skulls in an asymmetrical pattern, each spine wired to another or ending in a faintly luminescent gem-like substance. They shoot a random few guests, then grab the Lieutenant Governor, his daughter, and her fiancé, and disappear into thin air again, as if stepping around unseen corners.
349. A visit to a moldy bookstore. Charming! Wait, what is that dribble of grey fluid from the corner of the proprietor's mouth? His wide, jaundiced, and vacant eyes, why do they focus above the heads of you and the other investigators? And why has the back room — glimpsed before he shuts the door — been plastered into a round warren with pages torn from books?
350. A twist to any adventure. Take a group of memorable investigators your group played in the past. Use 'em as the malefactors. Bonus confusion if they died or were marooned at Aldebaran.
268. A geophysicist asks permission to explore your property. He's been mapping gravitational and magnetic anomalies throughout the region and boy, does your place look weird. Also a good way to bring some party members together.
269. You're having some work done on the basement (house, business, church, anything). A workman disappears, then an animal. You knew about the 17th century crawlspace under the proper basement, but it appears there's yet another layer.
270. An engineer, scientist, or tinkerer dreams of a large, convoluted circuit diagram. Plug it in to some heavy juice and laissez les bon temps roulez! It's not just the neurasthenic artists suffering for their latent telepathy after all.
271. The monks at the temple of Bo Ran De are famous throughout Burma for their ongoing liturgy. At all hours, some portion of the brothers are inside the seventeen-sided chamber chanting the densely-layered microtonal meditation. Many lay visitors, including several British colonial officers & scholars of sectarian Buddhism, have joined the monks, reporting that they are simply transported to another reality during the service.
277. A rattled colleague (police, doctor, anatomist...) calls you for a reality check. "Come down and take a look at these three stiffs. They've had surgery. Crude surgery. Weird stuff. They should be dead from it. Well, they are dead, but not from this..."
278. A contact in some other adventure has what looks like a glass paperweight on his desk. Within it is a faintly glowing conical blob that remains pointing in the same direction, about 30 degrees down and east by south east. Is it a pointer to something buried? a star below the horizon? or just a red herring?
279. The investigators begin encountering each other in dreams, to be mentioned and role-played out in little bits over several adventures. The dreams increasingly center on an enormous structure floating over their city or countryside.
305. After several weeks of a very popular exhibition of artifacts at your museum or university, there is a break in and a bronze age helmet, shield, and spearhead were stolen. They weren't the focus of the exhibit, but they were anomalous for the site...
306. A mental patient (an NPC or investigator) takes on a new persona. At first they slip in or out of it, but very soon the Egyptian princess Annephis will be running things. This may seem like a good thing, as she has useful mythos knowledge. However, she and her deity are not all peaches and cream... [thanks to Keith Herber for Annephis in "The Sanatorium."]
307. There's a new fad among rich, jaded young party people. It's a drug that acts like a mild hallucinogen. Music and sound becomes rich and immensely significant. Wouldn't it be charming, says one fellow, to sing THIS song...
310. An innocuous beginning to a hideous conclusion. Cash, stock, and bonds are disappearing from safes around town without their being opened and without visible break-in onto the premises. But the walls and safes show strange discoloration and corrosion. The first break comes when a guard sees a shadowy, translucent human figure walking through a wall!
311. Everyone in town is so happy these days. So, so happy. We just don't feel like doing anything, just enjoy the day. So happy. Looks like Amos Haldaine just fell over dead from his veranda. That makes a dozen doesn't it Frannie? Well we've all got to go sometime. So happy.
312. A gentlemen meets the investigators in a rural hotel or club. He obliquely mentions his desire to get back to a lovely site he saw in his youth. His two trucks of equipment head up the mountain. A day later, the drivers come back. The oldster was setting up those machines just outside some cave, they said. Is there a gamer yet breathing who can resist poking his nose into this?
319. Doctor Earnest Crank has a machine that he demonstrates for fellow researchers and potential investors. What it does is absolutely unclear; his explanations make no sense at all, but many people become just as fascinated with the project as he. Once they're involved, nobody can understand what they're saying either. Once anyone's spent some time away from the machine, the affect goes away.
320. Take any clues leading to some mysterious mythos monster. It is up to nothing intelligible. It hurts no human, well away from any human, doing nothing that makes sense. It is too powerful to be attacked with less than artillery, and entirely unbothered by even that (it gradually reforms & continues being baffling). Any drama comes from humans going nuts, reading something lies into the situation, or exploiting others going nuts.
334. It all starts in a dusty antiquities shop. Again. The fellow has a dusty contraption on a shelf. Mounted on a fine wooden stand, it is an arrangement of crystal, ceramic, and metallic rods and spheres. The large central sphere reflects the room, but not the people in the room. None, except for Miss N______...
348. A gang of eldritch gatecrashers show up out of nowhere at the Governor's Ball. They have a series of ornate spines driven well into their skulls in an asymmetrical pattern, each spine wired to another or ending in a faintly luminescent gem-like substance. They shoot a random few guests, then grab the Lieutenant Governor, his daughter, and her fiancé, and disappear into thin air again, as if stepping around unseen corners.
349. A visit to a moldy bookstore. Charming! Wait, what is that dribble of grey fluid from the corner of the proprietor's mouth? His wide, jaundiced, and vacant eyes, why do they focus above the heads of you and the other investigators? And why has the back room — glimpsed before he shuts the door — been plastered into a round warren with pages torn from books?
350. A twist to any adventure. Take a group of memorable investigators your group played in the past. Use 'em as the malefactors. Bonus confusion if they died or were marooned at Aldebaran.
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