Tabletop Game / Trail of Cthulhu

Trail of Cthulhu is a tabletop RPG by Kenneth Hite, using the GUMSHOE Universal System created by Robin Laws and published by Pelgrane Press, for whom the GUMSHOE system was created. Like its acknowledged inspiration, Call of Cthulhu, it's a game about characters investigating the Cthulhu Mythos and very possibly losing their minds in the process; to differentiate it from the other game, by default it's set in The '30s rather than The Roaring '20s, that is to say, slightly later than most of Lovecraft's stories, but close enough to preserve much the same feel, and with the added human bleakness of the Great Depression.

One feature of the game is that the rulebook explicitly notes that it can be played in either of two distinct modes: "Purist", hardcore Cosmic Horror in which everyone is doomed to madness or death and victories (if any) are strictly temporary, or "Pulp", which is likely to feature more Action-Adventure plots and actual successes for the human heroes, maybe veering towards Lovecraft Lite, in the broader tradition of the Pulp Magazines in which Lovecraft originally published. After all, the Cthulhu Mythos features stories in both modes. Some rules and options are specifically marked as applying in only one of the two modes. There is a one-player, one-GM version of the game, Cthulhu Confidential, using the GUMSHOE One-2-One variant rules.

It's fair to assume that this game shares a lot of tropes with Call of Cthulhu, and of course with the Cthulhu Mythos in general, for which see those entries.

Oh, and remember Old Man Henderson? He originated in a campaign of this game.

NOTE: Tropes exclusive to a certain campaign frame like Dreamhounds of Paris or Cthulhu City should be put in their own folders, and noted as such when crosswicked onto trope pages.

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This game provides examples of:

General Tropes

• All Myths Are True: Each creature's profile in Hideous Creatures describes inspirations and parallels drawn from world folklore, suggesting that some awful truth might be masked by fairy tales and superstitions.
• Ascended Extra: Some monsters that received full 10-page writeups in Hideous Creatures, like the bat-thing and ultraviolet devourer, originated as nothing more than names dropped in H. P. Lovecraft's stories.
• Captain Ersatz: Project Covenant is one for Delta Green: a investigation group within the US government, formed by investigators from various law enforcement agencies and military branches after the Innsmouth incident.
• Chandler American Time: The game's 1930s USA setting, downbeat atmosphere, and character career options including Private Investigator, Criminal, and Police Detective place it somewhere adjacent to Chandler Time, although the central presence of Lovecraftian supernatural horror takes it away from the pure form of the trope. This tone is especially clear in Cthulhu Confidential, where PCs tend to be Chandleresque lone investigators.
• Devious Dolphins: Deeper Ones are to dolphins what Deep Ones are to humans: the result of a hybrid breeding program that produces a blend of the two phenotypes. Since dolphins are already aquatic, the transformation is mostly internal: gills emerge, pressure-resistant scales form beneath the blubber, the eyes distend, the flippers lengthen. The most visible difference is a thick bristly crest along the Deeper One's spine, but it can lay that down voluntarily. Deeper Ones are more brutal and ruthless than regular dolphins, with a much stronger and more violent sexual appetite — one not limited to the delphinoid species.
• Evil Versus Evil: The Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign is a cult of Hastur-worshippers dedicated to driving the mi-go off Earth. They track mi-go colonies and mines, destroying them where they can and offering their human servants (or convenient innocents) as sacrifices to Hastur.
• Extra Eyes: Lemurians have three eyes set evenly around the head for full 360-degree vision.
• Faint in Shock: Trail of Cthulhu actually creates an incentive for characters to faint occasionally, in best gothic horror fashion. Adventurers are prone to suffer a prolonged process of sanity loss as the Cosmic Horror of reality presses on them, but those who faint dead away as a result of specific shocks may at least avoid even worse sights that could destroy their minds.
• Familial Body Snatcher: Members of the Cult of the Skull transmigrate their minds down their own bloodlines, possessing children, wives, or whoever they need to increase their power. For ritual reasons, they traditionally jump only to new bodies related by blood or marriage, and often intermarry with other powerful lineages.
• Ghostapo: The Studiengesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte Deutsches Ahnenerbe (Society for Research into the Spiritual Roots of German Ancestral Heritage) was founded by Heinrich Himmler to establish academic support for Nazi theories of race, prehistory and folk belief. To Himmler, this research included topics like Atlantis, runic magic, song-sorcery, Druidism, the Holy Grail and Freemasonry. The exact nature of the Ahnenerbe activities on the fringes of Leng, Lomar and Irem can only be guessed at.
• Lovecraft Lite: The Pulp idiom or mode intends to focus on the struggle (especially the physical struggle) against the Mythos, doomed or noble as the case may be, and aims for a 'desperate action' feel. It also privileges character survival somewhat more than does the Purist idiom.
• Necromantic: After Mata Hari was executed, her admirer Victor Berthelot was able to secure her body, substituting another to be autopsied. A dancer and Mata Hari imitator, Helene Dabney, went missing at about the same time, and her friends have never been able to find out her fate. Berthelot turned to Cultes des Goules again to resurrect the dead. Mordiggian does not make bargains of this kind, but Berthelot was able to create something from his beloved's corpse, a thing that he now calls Mata Malam, the Eye of Night.
• Ominous Message from the Future: The Armitage Files, in the campaign of the same name, detail a series of investigations Armitage undertakes. These begin a year and a half in the future, and culminate in a Cthulhoid catastrophe about another year and a half later. As the players choose which leads to follow and which to leave on the backburner, the Keeper improvises a series of scenarios allowing them to avert the future cataclysms the files foretell.
• Our Vampires Are Different: When a powerful, cruel mind dies, the kinetic patterns in their brain continue to function as a vampirish vapour, focused within their corpse but capable of existence and action in higher dimensions tangent to our own. It must draw on the life force of the living around it, and keeps itself alive by draining the vital energies of other humans that its energy field either interpenetrates or fully possesses.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The K'n-Yani industrially mold the corpses of their slave caste into y'm-bhi, creatures that can perform any sort of work when directed telepathically.
• A True Story in My Universe: The Book of Smoke, Book of Ants and Book of the New Jerusalem companion volumes of Bookhounds of London, Dreamhounds of Paris and Fearful Symmetries, as well as the eponymous Armitage Files, are presented as genuine in-world documents published as-is.
• Unreliable Narrator: Information about monsters presented in the core rulebook and Hideous Creatures deliberately contradicts itself, blurring boundaries and erasing certainties in the name of the uncanny. In your campaign, these variant truths might be misunderstandings, legends, heresies or lies spread by the creatures to lull their foes into a false sense of familiarity.

Bookhounds of London

• Ancient Conspiracy: The Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh originates from the reign of Nephren-Ka, last Pharaoh of the Third Dynasty in Egypt. When Sneferu overthrew Nephren-Ka, his servants and priests went into hiding and exile, becoming a secret society devoted to his return.
• Cold Iron: The tylwyth corachaidd have a kind of psychic allergy to iron. Whether this is merely internalised taboo, actual chemical weakness, or psychosomatic compulsion is unknown.
• No One Sees the Boss: The Scorpion is the unknown, unseen Master of the Hsieh-Tzu Fan cult.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: A 1912 deep-sea ichthyological expedition headed by the late Professor von Lorfmon somehow snared the coffin of L'mur-Kathulos, undying sorcerer of sunken Atlantis, off Senegal, awakening him from suspended animation.
• Super Serum: L'mur-Kathulos enslaves his minions with addiction to a golden elixir that massively accelerates and amplifies muscle, reflexes and mental acuity.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: In a Bookhounds of London campaign, the Investigators investigate books about horror and strangeness and become, seemingly inevitably, drawn into the horror themselves.
• Whatever Mancy: The occult art that uses the city as a sorcerous engine to accomplish magical effects is called megapolisomancy.

Cthulhu Apocalypse

• After the End: Cthulhu Apocalypse gives rules and scenarios for playing a post-apocalyptic setting.
• Alien Kudzu: The red weed is an alien plant that overwhelms all terrestrial life. It spreads rampantly and rapidly, smothering fields and towns. Where it finds water, it grows luxuriantly, choking rivers and harbours, spreading outwards into the sea.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The Martians are completely and unambiguously based on the invaders in The War of the Worlds.

Cthulhu City

• Ambiguously Human: Most Custodes are vaguely humanoid in outline, but each one is grotesquely unlike the next, a carnival parade of cannibal abominations. It's unclear if they're members of some unknown species of monsters who dwell in the lightness caverns deep below the surface of the earth, or were once human, reduced to their essential salts, adulterated with other powders, and mixed with the salts of serpent and salamander, a pinch of mole-thing and a dusting of shoggoth.
• Bigger on the Inside: Sump Marsh is much, much larger than it should be. On the map, it's only a few blocks across, yet investigators might have spent days struggling to cross it.
• Book Burning: One variation of the Historical Society casts it as a secret arm of the city council, where items that contradict Great Arkham's official history are sorted and destroyed. Hundreds of giant rats scuttle through the basement files, collating the true history; any Investigators who discover physical evidence that Great Arkham’s history is not wholly true and fixed are approached by the Historical Society.
• Breaking Out the Boss: Keziah Mason, leader of the Witch Coven, is lost in space and time. The cult seeks a way to retrieve her—by currying favour with Nyarlathotep, by obtaining aid from some supernatural entity, or by finding a way to embody Keziah, possibly by a mind-transference spell that would rehouse her consciousness in some living victim.
• Closed Circle: Some people appear able to leave Great Arkham without any problems; player characters are never in this group. There are four obvious routes out: by rail, by road, by boat, or by walking cross-country. All four offer plenty of ways for a cruel Keeper to make leaving the city dangerous or ominous. Keepers are instructed to first prevent them from leaving using what might be co-incidence or bad luck, and only later escalate to supernatural barriers once the escape attempts become more desperate and violent. Even if they leave, the Investigators will get drawn back to the city.
• Corrupt Church: The Church of the Conciliator, which has taken over most churches in Great Arkham, has various degrees of initiation. Low-ranking members believe that the Church is just another variation of Christianity, but even the exoteric rituals tend towards the gorier parts of the Old Testament; animals are sacrificed on important festivals, and priests talk less about love and forgiveness than judgement and the wrath of God. As members rise in the church's hierarchy, more and more of the Christian trappings are stripped away until they are fully initiated into the worship of Yog-Sothoth.
• Depending on the Writer: NPCs, both generic supporting characters and individual named individuals, are presented in a multifaceted manner. Each individual Keeper decides whether a person is an innocuous Victim of the city, a Sinister agent of the Mythos, or a Stalwart potential ally of the investigators.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: Ancient cyclopean skyscrapers made of a strange black stone stand throughout Great Arkham. Many are windowless and doorless, or have no accessible openings. Others have what might be entrances, but are strangely proportioned, built to an inhuman scale. Residents of Great Arkham do not look up, and speed up whenever they must cross the shadows of the towers.
• Evil Versus Evil: The Esoteric Order of Dagon despises the Church of the Conciliator, viewing them as the wrong sort of ghastly miscegenation of humans and eldritch horrors. The Order serves the Deep Ones, who are of a higher order of being than weak, blind humanity and are thus more worthy of the blessings of the divine. The Church is seen as a greedy upstart that needs to be taught its place.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Ever since the 1908 'typhoid' epidemic, the Great Arkham Police has operated a special unit, commonly referred to as the Transport Police, who wear heavy gas masks. Common typhoid is not airborne, so the purpose of the masks is obscure.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Zombies of the Halsey Fraternity suffer from a compulsion to consume human flesh.
• Interfaith Smoothie: The Church of the Conciliator's ghastly theology mixes the Mythos with Christian belief, making it more palatable to the city's general populace, although it appears that most church-goers are more than willing to accept the horrors as long as they are cloaked in familiar pomp and ritual.
• Lovecraft Country: Cthulhu City draws inspiration from all of Lovecraft's cities, human and inhuman. It's a mix of Arkham's quaint New England charm, the cyclopean architecture of the Elder Things, Dunwich's backwoods sorcery, the catacombs of the Nameless City, Kingsport's haunted streets, the creeping surrealism of Carcosa, Innsmouth's sullen, watchful corruption, and the unreal beauty of the Marvellous Sunset City that Carter remembered from his boyhood.
• The Mafia:
  • The Marsh family runs all criminal activity in Innsmouth; increasingly, it could be said that they run Innsmouth.
  • The Malatestas are a Mafioso family, who moved into Arkham in the 1920s, and therefore are comparative newcomers to the city, with only a limited understanding of the Mythos or the city's true nature. They are arguably more professional and organised than their Innsmouth-based rivals, the Marshes, but lack supernatural allies.
• Mentor Archetype: The heroic interpretation of Henry Armitage is a mentor for the player characters; he provides them with some vital revelation before dying. He's too frail or doomed to save the day as he did in The Dunwich Horror; that role now falls to the player characters.
• Ominous Fog: If the Investigators try to leave Great Arkham by car, they might find the car surrounded by thick, all-consuming fog. If the Investigators are lucky, they'll just take the wrong turning in the fog, or crash. If they're unlucky, something huge paws at them from above, buckling the car's roof and sending them careening off the road. Afterwards, they discover the metal roof is puckered and scarred in a pattern resembling the suckers on an octopus' arm.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Those killed by the Transport Police's poisonous 'disinfectant spray' reawaken the next day as placid zombies, good citizens of Great Arkham. Their skin becomes oddly waxy, and a close medical examination confirms they are technically deceased, but the reanimated victims are capable of acting and conversing normally, although they are unable to tell that there is anything amiss with either the city or themselves.
• Ret-Gone: Those who perish while covered in the reality dissolution spray cease to exist and are mostly erased from history, leaving behind only a few contradictory traces and fragments of memory.
• Revenant Zombie: Members of the Halsey Fraternity commit suicide by inhaling cyanide, and are then immediately injected with the West Formula. The Halsey Fraternity's method for resurrection ensures that the subject's mind usually survives intact.
• The Scottish Trope: It's rude in Great Arkham to ask too many questions about or show too much interest in odd things. Most people don't want to believe that they're trapped in an alien city, and resent discussion of strange things because it breaks their illusions. If your questions make it harder for them to maintain this illusion, then they blame you for their suffering. Other people have adopted ignorance as a survival strategy: if you don't discuss the topic, the topic is less likely to devour you whole. In game terms, asking too many questions openly will draw Suspicion and reduce your Credit Rating.
• Small, Secluded World: Great Arkham's relationship with the rest of the United States is vague. The city is undeniably insular: the newspapers are all concerned with local matters, few people travel, and there is little trade. Outside the city, no one has heard of Great Arkham, or if they have, they cannot quite recall where. A cousin went there once, perhaps. A name that shows up on old train timetables, or in the diaries of madmen.
• Swamps Are Evil: Sump Marsh is a dangerous, lawless place – a good place to disappear.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Yithians are trapped in Great Arkham just like humans are, and the psychic stress of their escape attempts has affected even their inhuman intellects, leaving some amnesiac or insane.
• Was Once a Man: The Chemical Works is not just where the city makes the spray used by the Transport Police—it's where they make the police. Step into the vats of noxious chemicals, and have your humanity dissolved in some unholy baptism of the Old Ones.
• Weirdness Censor: Great Arkham is obviously, obscenely wrong, even to people without knowledge of the Mythos, but most people deny the reality all around them, and delude themselves that they're living in a city governed by human norms. Others – the afflicted and eccentrics, or the Investigators who fight against the Mythos – have glimpsed the truth, but are unable to accept that reality, because they cling to their ideals of human morality.
• Wretched Hive: Great Arkham is a dreadful city, where the Mythos is already triumphant. Some members of the government are in the thrall of, or in league with, alien horrors. Residents know better than to go out at night, when the clouds roll in from the sea and shapes move in the sky. There are occasional, unpredictable streets, which come and go according to some unearthly schedule; strange black ships dock at Innsmouth to trade with the squat, ugly denizens of that neighbourhood. And not everyone is sane—or human.

Dreamhounds of Paris

• Acronym Confusion: Initiates of the CS, a secret society in the École Normale Supérieure, are told one of two cover stories: the CS stands for Compagnie du Saint-Azédarac, and it is a secret society of freethinkers within the Church; or it stands for Comité Synarchique, and it is a political-technocratic arm of Masonry. Only those who dig further learn the truth: CS stands for Culte de Sadoqui, or cult of Tsathoggua.
• Alternate History: Discussed. In gameplay, it is completely possible for a PC to gets fatally shot by a cultist or get eviscerated by a ghoul while awake, while history says that they died long after the game's timeframe. Two different ways to reconcile premature deaths with the historical record are provided: the character does not die but instead suffers from a horrifying near-death experience and never meddles with the Dreamlands or Mythos again; or the character dies, but their comrades' collective yearning creates a dream-form which escapes to the waking world and lives out their historical life but does not want to be reminded of its origin and wants nothing to do with the occult. In any case, the player selects a new character. Of course, there's nothing that stops your group from taking your campaign into the counter-historical if you want.
• Ambiguously Gay: André Breton, who in his personal life embodies the sexual repression his ideology opposes, despises homosexuality — and is often accused of it by his rivals. How much of this attitude is overcompensation is a matter for individual Keepers to decide as they portray him. Some suggest that his hero worship of his dead friend Jacques Vaché took on a homoerotic quality. There is no evidence of sexual feelings for other men.
• Ancient Conspiracy: Since coming to Paris from Averoigne in the early 13th century, the Culte de Sadoqui has placed and protected its members in the heart of power in France. The cult now infiltrates every branch of the French state, from the Académie française to the army to the government, and has survived centuries of wars and revolutions. Any French embassy or colony likely has a CS member or asset pulling strings and looking away.
• Ancient Egypt: Thraa starts off as a city of obelisks and pyramids resembling a fantastic Egypt, as romanticised by the symbolists during the Egyptology craze of the 19th century. A high priest rules the city in the name of Osiris and Anubis.
• Barrier Maiden: In 1939, Antonin Artaud addresses a spell to Adolf Hitler, cursing him if he does not heed Artaud's advice and insults. This spell will prevent Hitler from winning the war if Artaud can stay alive to keep it active.
• Bazaar of the Bizarre: The people of Dother travel across the Dreamlands to gather and sell exotic items dreamed into being by sleeping residents of Earth: irons with tacks jutting from them, cups and saucers covered in fur, telephones in the shape of lobsters, and suit jackets bursting with milk glasses. Though no more functional in the waking world than as art pieces in a surrealist gallery show, in the Dreamlands these contradictory objects exude magical power.
• Beast with a Human Face: When the surrealists change the Dreamlands, grotesque, distended faces appear atop the moon-beasts' mouth. In hideous fashion they represent specific noxious and oppressive persons of Earth. The main guardian of the moon-beast slave camp in Leng, for example, resembles Paris police chief Jean Chiappe.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: The Dadaist pugilist and provocateur Arthur Cravan disappeared at sea while attempting to sail to Buenos Aires in 1918. In fact, he was rescued by Deep Ones, who identified him as one of their own.
• Berserk Button: While it is always poor form to mention the Dreamlands at surrealist meetings, the merest whisper of his failed attempt to enter it in 1924 sends André Breton into a red-faced rage.
• Bird People: Man-Birds combine human and avian features, often surmounting a bird's head, wings and feathers over a human's naked body.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: In 1924, obeying a strange psychic impulse, Paul Éluard travels to Easter Island, leaving behind a letter warning of death to any who dare follow. Gala knows where he is all along, and, realising that the force that brought him to the South Pacific is a sinister one bent on his destruction, she snaps Éluard out of his quasi-hypnotic funk in Saigon. Afterwards, Éluard remembers little of what he did during these months alone.
• Brutish Bulls: Minotaurs embody the male principle; depending on the individual this manifests in a manner either dangerous or pathetic. They may be dominating bullies, bristling with the propensity for rape, or withered, sacrificial victims, still bearing the bloody marks of recent castration.
• Cannot Dream: André Breton knows about the Dreamlands and wants desperately to enter them, but, despite strenuous effort, remains too mentally constrained to make the leap. This leaves him forever separated from his dead friend and hero, Jacques Vaché.
• City on the Water: The surrealists cause the Sunken City to become the Risen City, a gnarled knob of dead coral four miles in radius, on which writhe ancient temples of impossible geometry, where a colony of Deep Ones dwells.
• Combat Tentacles: Lashing fleshy appendages ring a vitreal horror, attempting to seize victims and pull them into the jelly, which melts their flesh and nourishes the creature.
• Demonic Possession: During a trance in February 1923, a Dreamlands entity possesses Robert Desnos and impels him to chase Paul Éluard with a knife. In a second incident, either that entity or another takes control of Desnos and has him lock the other participants in a room, where they remain for hours.
• Dreaming of Things to Come:
  • After the Surrealist upheaval, the tunnels in the Plateau of Leng may lead to unfortunate episodes in the explorers' future lives.
  • The cylinders of Kadatheron display a sanity-blasting collection of moving images forecasting a horrible future of the human race: death camps in Europe, a mushroom cloud that obliterates cities, a polluted and poisoned planet, an international communications network devoted to the transmission of human idiocy.
• Erotic Dream: In his dreams, Salvador Dalí sometime has sex with Adolf Hitler, who appears in the form of a woman, her plump flesh whiter than white. A pernicious realization of Dalí's most perverse and intellectually dangerous fantasia, she/he personifies the sense of shocking psychic disequilibrium that accompanies fascism's rise. Sex Hitler takes the human desire to be led and protected and twists it to his own gratification and will to power.
• Evil Colonialist: Thraa, a city of clay huts and massive carved totems resembling an urbanised, fantastical vision of central Africa, is surrounded by pale would-be colonists armed with tanks and cannons, intent on its conquest.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Every once in a while, a French magus or hierophant attempts to weld the cult of Cthulhu into an instrument of sorcerous or criminal power, only to find himself devoured by his erstwhile minions when his devotion proves inadequate by their lights.
• Evil Twin: Antonin Artaud's dream-form achieves independent volition when he's not in the Dreamlands and figures out how to get to Paris to further disrupt his already precarious life. It tries to sabotage or take credit for his work, and succeeds in plunging him deeper into addiction. The motif of the double starts to permeate Artaud's work.
• Explosive Breeder: The surrealist upheaval causes the luminous floating animals in the Bnazic Desert, more and more resembling biomorphic blobs from a Tanguy painting, to explode in number, choking out all other life, forcing the Bnazie people to raid and displace their neighbours.
• The Fair Folk: The goblins of the Dreamlands, who steal children and play tricks, are the source material of Earth's folklore of hostile fairies.
• Food Chains: A favourite trick of goblins is to sell delicious but accursed food which enslaves or entraps those who ingest it.
• Full-Circle Revolution: In Teloth, city of labours, no one may frolic, or rest, or stop to think. After the oppressed workers overthrew and killed their king, Teloth, city of freedom, belongs to the people, and no one may frolic, or rest, or stop to think, for there is much work to do if the revolution is to be preserved. Teloth's fate may cause special distress to those surrealists committed to Stalin's Soviet Union.
• Gender Bender: Marcel Duchamp enters the Dreamlands as his feminine alter-ego Rrose Sélavy, which originates as a cover photograph of him in demure drag.
• The Ghost: Surrealists visiting the domaine de rêve may hear of its wondrous cats, who are intelligent, capable of speech and able to lend heroic aid to their allies. But no one ever sees one, as if the cats instinctively understand the dangerous implications of their presence, and avoid them at all costs.
• Ghostapo: The Ahnenerbe either enters the Dreamlands by bartering fresh corpses (of which the SS has no shortage) with the ghouls beneath Bad Kudowa, or through the mescaline experiments of Kurt Plötner, who leads the Department R at Dachau. Perhaps some powerful and enigmatic works kept back from overseas sale by the NSDAP have been weaponised for dream travel, possibly in connection with Weimar-era experiments in somnambulism. In either case, the SS occultists enter the dream game at a considerable disadvantage, due to the Nazis' approach to 'degenerate art'. The Dreamhounds are also likely to run into the Ahnenerbe while investigating more conventional occult groups who cross paths with the surrealists, as part of their political warfare campaign in Paris.
• Glacial Apocalypse: Between 1940 and 1944, when Paris is occupied by the Nazis, the Dreamlands freeze over, as seen in the portrait Leonora Carrington makes of Max Ernst. Ice encases its fantastical structures and many creatures. It is still possible to move through its snowy wastes, but the old wonders are locked beneath them. Dreamscapers find it impossible to do more than briefly thaw a small area, or for instants awaken a frozen Dreamlands entity. Nonetheless, the surrealists who remain in Paris can still marshal fragments of its power, and their knowledge of the Mythos, against the Gestapo and Ahnenerbe alike.
• Grumpy Old Man: Like many revolutionaries in their dotage, André Breton grows culturally conservative by the 1960s, decrying current art movements and new technologies. He dishes dirt on fellow surrealists, most of whom have passed away, leaving him to boss around a lesser generation of hangers-on. He exempts from his contempt the young leftist tel quel movement.
• Hellish Horse: As the Dreamlands are transformed by the surrealists, Baharnan hostlers replace their zebras with red-eyed origami horses, which only occasionally stop to rip a mouthful of flesh from the backs or shoulders of unwary passersby.
• Historical Domain Character: In Dreamhounds of Paris, players portray major figures of the historical surrealist movement, including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, among others. Much of the appeal of a Dreamhounds game lies in the chance to play major historical figures. Two other surrealists are depicted as NPCs: André Breton, who cannot enter the Dreamlands, and Louis Aragon, a fine antagonist figure who thwarts surrealist plans in the sleeping realm, after his break from the movement in 1932.
• Invisible Stomach, Visible Food: Post-surrealist gnoph-kehs become partially translucent, allowing appalled observers the chance to watch their twisted, spiraling, three-stomached digestive tract at burbling work.
• I See Dead People: Valentine Hugo can speak to and gain information from the spirits of the dead. Mostly she contacts an otherworldly discarnate entity, which does not identify itself. It claims to be able to contact the spirits of the dead, though they do not always fulfil its requests for information or respond in a timely manner.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: If a surrealist falls asleep somewhere else in the waking world, enter the Dreamlands, head to Hlanith, randomly walk its streets until it becomes a dream-Paris, then continue from its streets to the real city, those they interacted with forget their activities in Paris. Their memories rewrite themselves to explain away whatever the surrealist did, because clearly they were never there.
• Living Dream:
  • If your physical body dies while your dream-form is active in the Dreamlands, the latter may survive even as the former expires. This fate befalls Jacques Vaché during his 1919 opium overdose. The dream-form becomes a full-fledged Dreamlands entity, subject to dreamscaping. Dream revenants can move through the Dreamlands as they desire. They can have and remember new experiences but are never truly changed by them, their attitudes and personality frozen as of the time of physical death.
  • Marcel Duchamp's dream-form Rrose Sélavy has attained independent agency when he's not dreaming, and takes action without his say-so — including reaching through the veil of sleep to possess susceptible people like Robert Desnos.
• Man on Fire: Ghasts burst into flame when they enter the upper Dreamlands. The fire burns them painfully but needs eight hours to reduce them to ashes (if they do not retreat to a lightless place). Until then, they use the flames to slaughter their victims, wrapping them in fiery bear hugs.
• Mechanical Monster: Robotic constructions known as celebesians ranging from twelve to twenty-four feet high thunder and clank across the upper Dreamlands.
• Mind Rape: From 7 September 1937, Antonin Artaud's opium dreams feature infinitely more horrible demonic entities slowly and methodically killing and sexually violating him.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: The wondrous, one-off beasts of Dreamlands are generally chimerical, combining body types and natural weaponry of two or more incompatible Earth animals.
• Monster Town: Anyone hopeful enough to venture to Xura finds it a nightmarish labyrinth, hunting ground to pianotaurs, voracious bird-men, and soul-draining wooden mannequins. Xura is the City of Realised Doubts, where the midnight anxieties of the artistic personality achieve ruinous substance.
• Mortality Ensues: No ones ages within the walls of Celephaïs, until the surrealists start to change the Dreamlands. Immortals do not turn to dust overnight, but wrinkles begin to creep across faces, and faint liver spots materialise on the back of alabaster hands. Personalities frozen for millennia suddenly admit the possibility of change. Now responsible for their own evolution (or degeneration), the populace splits into two violently opposed factions: those who embrace transformation, even unto death, and those who would reverse it.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In 1916, Giorgio de Chirico discovers that his surrealist paintings are changing the Dreamlands, replacing its symbolist grandeur with his own weird motifs. He then decides to restore the Dreamlands by returning to an old-master style, but it was too late as a new generation of artists finds and reproduces his work.
• The Night That Never Ends: As the surrealists change the Dreamlands, the sky above Celephaïs permanently darkens to that of a cloudless, starry night. The city's blue spires stand out against this lightless background, for the city itself is illuminated by an eternal day.
• Non-Human Head: Bulbheads, as depicted in René Magritte's The Pleasure Principle (Portrait of Edward James), have lightbulbs for heads, perched on wooden artist's mannequin bodies. They represent both the horror and allure of dehumanisation.
• Not Where They Thought: In the 1890s, during a series of séances, the Geneva medium Catherine-Elise Müller (among other experiences) travelled astrally to Mars. In truth, Müller had visited the Dreamlands, falling under the sway of a sorcerer named Astané. The dream-self of a dead Hindu fakir named Kanga who died dreaming, surviving his physical death, he could reshape the Dreamlands, in this case into the flat towers and red earth that Müller believed to be Mars.
• Oculothorax: The vitreal horror is a single human-like eye, from eight to eighteen feet in diameter, slashed open, leaking vitreous jelly and ringed by fleshy appendages.
• Old Shame:invoked
  • As the surrealists change the Dreamlands, everywhere an artist looks in Sona-Nyl, he sees unfinished remnants of the works that got away — the paintings, poems and films he envisioned but could never quite complete, or that he released into the world though they were not what they could be. The sight of these failures drives even the most self-confident creator rushing from Sona-Nyl, the beautiful hell.invoked
  • By the 1960s, Giorgio de Chirico has long abandoned his so-called metaphysical style, no longer wanting anything to do with the Dreamlands. Should agents show up brandishing one of his old paintings, he declares it a forgery. He still occasionally slips back to the Dreamlands, where he tries his best to revert it to its pre-surrealist state. Nowadays that means removing the Oldenburg stuffed hamburgers and the field of Warhol electric chairs.invoked
• Omnicidal Maniac: At the head of Dylath-Leen's revenant column stands a faded memory of Guillaume Apollinaire, his head bandaged, still bearing the marks of his trepanning. In jingoistic celebration of the warplane and the bomb, he demands a war to truly end all wars, an apocalyptic reckoning that will roll across the Dreamlands until its every occupant is as dead as he.
• One-Gender Race: Female minotaurs do not exist; bull-men mate either with human or near-human women, or giantesses.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Goblins are spindly humanoids, three to four feet high, with improbable, asymmetrical bodies, that steal children and play pranks.
• Our Minotaurs Are Different: Bull-men in the mode of Classical Mythology roam the Dreamlands, in scarce numbers. They are peaceful when left to themselves, though prone to rampage in search of women. After the surrealist upheaval, they are suddenly everywhere, and sometimes retain their classical physiques, but just as often have bizarre physical shapes. One might have a chest of drawers gaping from its torso, while another precariously balances a bison-like head more than half his body weight atop an overmatched frame.
• Paper People: After the surrealist upheaval, goblins' bodies flatten and splay out, so that they exist only in two dimensions, becoming very difficult to spot when they stand sideways.
• Playing with Syringes: Bulbheads sometimes capture Dreamlands entities and subject them to vivisection or other gruelling and involuntary experiments. They then try to build improved versions of their victims from wood and spare parts.
• Politically Correct History: Discussed. The surrealists go down in history as a notorious boy's club, where women were symbols of eroticism first and collaborators second. Even though some women artists attached themselves to the movement and produced compelling work, Breton remained a chauvinist of the first water. That being said, the secret history of the surrealist Dreamlands needn't reflect the biases of the time or Breton's disregard. Depending on the tastes of your group, you might want to faithfully underline the scene's inherent sexism, or act as if it never existed in the first place.
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: Dreamers visiting Serannian may find bitter old loves, or at least their dream-forms, lurking around every corner. No matter how meekly they accepted their mistreatment in the waking world, here they burn for vengeance, which they might pursue through trickery or forthright, homicidal fury.
• Rage Against the Heavens: After casting down the eidolon Lathi and taking over Thalarion, the murderous, shapeshifting antihero Maldoror assembles an army to ambush and kill the gods at Hatheg-Kla.
• Rape Leads to Insanity: Victims raped by a pianotaur, as seen in André Masson's 1937 painting Le Pianotaure, develop a crippling phobia of furniture and other large inanimate objects. The victim expects them to come alive at any moment and commence a similar assault.
• La Résistance: When Germany invades France and occupies Paris, those surrealists who do not flee for America fight for the Resistance as Communist partisans, using their access to the Dreamlands to smuggle goods and people under the noses of the Nazis.
• Single Specimen Species: In the many murky corners of the Dreamlands indescribable or unique creatures dwell, waiting to pounce on careless venturers.
• Slave Liberation: Under the surrealists' influence, birds and bird-men descend to liberate the hunched, previously unseen workers who toiled to support the beauteous elite of Zais. Now they serve the birds, but do so in dignity.
• Smart People Play Chess: From 1929 to 1934, Marcel Duchamp scours Europe and the Dreamlands for chess partners, competing in top tournaments. His objective is not to win, per se, but to take it apart and re-understand it, as he has taken apart and re-understood art. In the 60s, the old Duchamp might be lured back to the Dreamlands by the opportunity to play a Grandmaster there.
• Spirit Advisor: In 1926, when René Magritte enters the Dreamlands for the first time, it is the spirit of his mother, who he dreamed into being, who acts as his guide. She tells him much about this strange place, but refuses to answer his most important question — why she killed herself.
• Stock Ness Monster: From 1936 on, a sea squirt-like monster becomes the Underground Sea's dominant creature. With searching tendrils it tries to snatch up anyone passing the shores of the lake. Anyone who knows earthly politics intuitively associates the creature with Francisco Franco, as envisioned by one of Picasso's surrealist protest poems.
• Tragic Villain: André Breton is the undisputed king of Surrealism. He wrote the manifesto, he chairs all the meetings, and disagreeing with him (even on little matters) makes you lose Instability, without which you can't create art or influence the Dreamlands. Official members loathe his capricious authority, yet find it hard to escape his orbit. Breton wields this power like a petty dictator, since he's unable to enter the Dreamlands himself. His attempts to codify and regulate surrealism have made him too clenched up to leave the physical plane. No matter how hard he tries, and what arcane rituals he dabbles in, he's unable to unmoor his spirit from his body.
• War Is Hell: As Dylath-Leen is transformed by the surrealist upheaval, wounds appear on the bodies of its cutthroats, and the reek of cordite and mustard gas emanates from their uniforms. These are dream reflections of the legions shot, blown up, or poisoned in the trenches of the Great War, which haunt such dreamscapers as Éluard, Ernst, Masson and Aragon, and which fuel the surrealists' furious attack on bankrupt authority. Joining them are the civilian casualties, those claimed by disease and starvation. Across their haunted faces are stamped the previously unimaginable violence of industrialised warfare.
• Was Once a Man: A few days after Georges Bataille's death, a hunched, snouted creature who looks oddly like him is spotted near the catacombs.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • If offended or endangered, the Gorgoniens kill a pet or child as a warning.
  • In 1934, Georges Monti forcibly initiates the fourteen-year-old Pierre Plantard into the Alpha Galates as a deliberate avatar of the King in Yellow, deranging him with constant talk of his royal blood.
• You Are Number 6: Membership in the CS is expressed mathematically: the head is n° 1, his first recruit n° 1-1, his second n° 1-2, etc.
• You Can't Go Home Again: As Kuranes confessed to Randolph Carter, the splendours of Celephaïs, the city he had so single-mindedly sought, dwindled with surprising rapidity. Now he yearns for the real paradise he ignored while alive: the Cornwall shores of his childhood. When the surrealist transformation ripples through Celephaïs, Kuranes finds himself torn. Does he trade favours with the surrealists in hopes that their unprecedented dreamscaping abilities might somehow send him home to the waking world?

Fearful Symmetries

• Age Without Youth: Having carried a Flora to term makes the wives who married into the Bradbury family immortal, but not unaging. Eventually they shrivel up, cease moving and talking and are buried in the cellar of Bradbury House by the family. If the right thing is done over her grave, on the right day, a wife disinters herself and converses with whoever gave her light.
• Alchemy Is Magic: Alchemy is a form of mystical chemistry and is about transformation between states of matter, transformation of the self and creation of life. The practical study of the world leads to a deeper understanding of the way the world works and the ability to effect change more directly.
• Animorphism: Witches can change their form into that of an animal. This includes their clothing and a few small items. It does not include backpacks, books or larger weapons.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: John Johnson, real name Jan Janszoon van Haarlem and also known as Murat Reis the Younger, an ex-Barbary pirate who disappeared from historical records in 1641, subsequently learnt the secrets of Al-chemia and regained his lost youth. He has lived in Bristol for more than 200 years, maintaining his life by extracting life force from the dead.
• Blob Monster: A byle, also called an ebullition or blob, is a malign being animated from some sort of slime or muck. Enemy alchemists might use them as guardians, or byles built by ancient sorcerers may lurk in a forgotten ley node until awakened by hasty Investigators.
• Creepy Child: Flora Bradbury, an avatar of Shub-Niggurath, is still a child and can be made afraid with stern words.
• Crossover: Fearful Symmetries is based on William Blake's personal mythology, a mixture of Christian and older myths, with inspiration from John Milton, Emmanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme.
• Dream Land: RII, the 29th Aethyr, is the source of dreams and the destination of dreamers. Perhaps it is the same as the Lovecraftian Dreamlands, or perhaps it is something less stable even.
• Eats Babies: Black Annis is a a hag with iron claws who haunts dark lanes in search of lambs and children whom she skins and eats.
• Elemental Plane: Our material world is surrounded by thirty Aires or Aethyrs in concentric spheres like an onion. Each plane represents a different aspect of the way the magician can use their abilities to influence the material world.
• The Fair Folk: Fairies, or Faeries, or the Fae or fay folk, are an amoral people with no interest in the pain and suffering of others unless it amuses them.
• Functional Magic: Fearful Symmetries amplifies the influence and effect of human magic more than even most Pulp campaigns do. There is a choice between four styles of magic: alchemy, spiritualism, magick and witchcraft.
• Hell Hound: Black dogs, barghests, Black Shuck and shugmonkeys are all dark hairy dogs, or dog-monkeys in the latter case, who stalk the living at night across moor and field with bright red eyes and doom-laden howls. To hear one is to be marked for death, in the same way as to see a Hound of Tindalos is to be doomed.
• House Fey: Hobs, Lobs, Lubberfiends and brownies, cofgod or puck—such are named the household spirits of England. They may be tempted with a glass of milk or a special place by the fire to protect the house from worse things outside, or to perform small services.
• Human Disguise: Faeries are not even remotely human, but they almost always appear so. They can choose how attractive they would like to be and most appear as beautiful, but not always. In the 30s, they might appear as landed gentry in a posh motor car, or in ratchatchers or hunting reds.
• Immortality Inducer: The cow that came to drink from the well in Saint Kenelm's Church has never aged, and gives two full udders of milk a day. Should you visit it today, the cow is still in the crypt.
• Land of Faerie: The land of Faërie is separate from our realm and is accessible by entrances, usually in magical places such as woods or caves. Such places have old legends of singing under the hill, stolen children, wild hunts and beautiful riders tempting travellers on old pathways.
• Language of Magic: Whilst English is the language of charms and hedge magic, perhaps even that of Faërie, arcane magics are brought forth with more primeval and erudite tongues. Latin, the language of the Bible for many, is seen as possessing power. Many tomes of power were written in Latin. However, these often claim to be translations of older works, suggesting that the original language holds more power. For the real magic, one must harken back to deeper mysteries. Hebrew, the language of the Torah, and hence of God, is seen as potent. To get from magic to magick, the signposts are in Enochian, the language of angels, the tongue with which the world was created, although forgotten by Adam during the fall. Finally in the world of Lovecraft, there is no more magical language than that of Cthulhu, also known as Aklo.
• Ley Line: England is crisscrossed by magical lines of power called leys which connect places of power. Points along these lines, or where they meet, are called nodes, and are places of magical power. Those attuned to a node may call on the magical power of the node when performing magic. The Serpent Folk set up the ley network 275 million years ago to transmit power over vast distances and to enable the performance of massively complicated rituals to move objects in space at vast distances in space and time. It has since been broken up by continental drift and fallen into disrepair and disuse.
• My Grandson, Myself: John Johnson's main trick for not attracting attention to his immortality is to have his only son go abroad in search of fortune, then fake his death and have his son return to take his place. Of course the son is himself, his actual son being paid off handsomely to be part of the ruse.
• Nature Spirit: The Green Man, Herne the Hunter, John Barleycorn, Lud, Nodens, the Wild Hunt, Cernunnos, Sylvanus are all various representations of nature in English folklore—the danger of being hunted, the allegory of the life cycle of barley, the wild strangeness of uninhabited places and more. They robustly punish the unwary for a transgression against nature and can only be placated with a steep sacrifice or death. Country folk know to avoid the places where they appear, or appease them with gifts should they think them displeased. In Mythos terms, such an entity could be seen as a representation of deities such as Nodens or Shub-Niggurath.
• Our Dragons Are Different: The Dragon is the most fearsome folklore creature harnessing the power of fire, earth and air. English dragons do not often have breath weapons, and if they do, it is more likely poison than fire. In the Mythos, these might be the lloigor. In Fearful Symmetries, they might also be the astral projections of Serpent People.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Spirits of the wild rocky places, dwarfs live underground. They like to boast of their forging and brewing abilities and happily contest all comers. They're also known for avarice, and will do anything for gold. Dwarfs make hard bargains and keep them. They are very proud of their beards and it would be shameful to lose it.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: Britain, as everyone knows, is a land of giants. In Mythos terms, a giant could be a terrible colossus of stone, but as an earth spirit might well be one of the walking trees, a dark young of Shub-Niggurath, or even that perennial workhorse, the shoggoth.
• Philosopher's Stone: The alchemist achieves perfection through the creation of the philosopher's stone, an alchemical working that transforms the alchemist into their perfect state of being.
• Plant Person: Flora Bradbury is clad in leaves which grow out from her body and her legs are made of twisted roots that trail into the earth and from which she draws power.
• Revenant Zombie: A revenant is an undead creature that haunts the lands near its grave. It has come back from death because it has died unshriven or because of evil deeds during the corpse's lifetime. Generally the corpse looks alive although perhaps more pallid than in life and often starts to bloat.
• Ritual Magic: Rituals are used for major effects such as summoning and binding entities, creating major magical effects, talking to powerful entities, scrying or moving across vast distances in space or time, permanent effects or effects over an area. A ritual also requires a contest, usually against a summoned creature or the fabric of space-time.
• Soul Jar: When K'Haath Ynn was killed with a faerie-forged spear by a hero, his body was destroyed, but he managed to move his consciousness at the last moment into an egg he had prepared.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Witches, with their affinity for animals, can influence their behaviour. This might be used to create panic among a pack of wolves or cause a herd of cows to protect the witch like it would a calf, but does not allow the caster to give the animals explicit instructions.
• The Spook: A bowler hat, a suit, and a mackintosh is all most people can remember about the elusive Mr Brothers. Tom Haddon sends his letters to Mr Brothers to Brown's and receives his with a St James's post mark, indicating that Mr Brothers' replies are sent from the same or nearby location, but there is no member of the club called Mr Brothers. There are a few competing theories as to the exact nature of Mr Brothers, several of which could be true at once.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Upper Quinton, Warwickshire hides more than one secret. To the sensitive the feeling of the village is dominated by Faery. If that door should ever be closed, or if the investigator is very careful, they sense worse things. Almost everyone in the village belongs to the ancient cult of the Queen of the Trees.
• True Sight: Mystic vision reveals the underlying nature of things. Looking at any Mythos item with mystic vision becomes much more dangerous, exposing the foolhardy investigator to the mind-wrenching truth.
• Tulpa: According to one theory, Mr Brothers is a tulpa, created by the thoughts of the lloigor which sits under the city of London. It was trapped here by Serpent Folk magicians and held in a nexus of lines, but its power was abated to the point it could only manifest Mr Brothers as its agent.
• The Underworld: Spiritualists talk to dead people. Perhaps they are unhappy souls trapped in the Astral Plane or Limbo, but the place where souls reside after death might well come into the game. It is probably best not to define it too tightly.
• Voodoo Doll: A poppet is a small doll that is the representation of the caster or someone known to them. Poppets must contain something which links them to the person. Once created, a poppet can be used for a single instance of sympathetic magic to help or injure the person being targeted.
• Was Once a Man: When a character's magical ability increases it affects them physically, and they begin to transform into a Mythos creature. In a Purist game, the change is irreversible. In a Pulp game, the character may revert back to human by spending their Magic rating down to 2 again.
• Weather Manipulation: A witch can tie or knit particular knots to capture weather. Ideally, the witch casts this spell during the type of weather they seek to capture. The trapped weather unleashes when the knot is untied or cut.
• Your Magic's No Good Here: No initiate magic—nothing tied to the Serpent Folk grid or Albion—works in Greater London. This prevents any magic incantations or rituals, any use of magic vision or the creation of magic items, or anything that requires spending any ability pool or rating to produce a magical effect. Attempting to cast magic into London from the outside can work but for only short periods. Mythos magic, Idiosyncratic Magic or Megapolisomancy, which are not powered by the Serpent Folk grid, still work.

Tomb-Hounds of Egypt

• City of Spies: Egypt attracts spies and covert agents from all over Europe and the world, both freelance and otherwise. They piggyback on the smugglers' routes in and out of Cairo and Alexandria, provide covert funding for expeditions (in exchange for planting a radio transmitter or just an accurate survey of a desert well), and cross paths repeatedly with fellow demimondaines such as the Tomb-Hounds.
• Living Statue: An animated statue is often enchanted to guard a grave or temple site, and almost never able to leave it. Within the precincts of its tomb or fane, however, it can show remarkable cunning.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: Crocodile-folk known as petesouchi dwell in the reeds and marshes of the Nile and Faiyum. Possibly related to the serpent-folk, they keep to themselves unless the hunger for meat or worship becomes too strong. Then another boat goes under, lured into the reeds and lost with all hands.
• Talking Animal: Predators imbued by their patron deity can understand Ancient Egyptian and may communicate (by signs, tracing hieroglyphs, telepathic hissing, etc).
• Thirsty Desert: The Egyptian desert, and the tombs and ruins secreted within it, burgeons with things that want to kill you.

Published Adventures

• Historical Domain Character: The four pre-generated characters in The Big Hoodoo are author Bob Heinlein, his wife Ginny, his friend Tony Boucher, and his protégé Phil Dick.
• Monster Mash: In Shadows Over Filmland, the player characters have the opportunity to battle Captain Ersatz versions of Frankenstein ('Doctor Gravenhurst'), The Invisible Man ('the Non-Euclidean Man'), and Dracula (a vampiric dream-spirit of the historical Vlad the Impaler) in individual adventures. In the adventure "The Preserve", all three are lured to an island where they can face off against their old foes, the player characters, in exchange for the Necronomicon.
• Ruritania: Shadows over Filmland scenarios are set in Backlot Gothic, a 'certain remote province in the dark heart of Europe'. Cultural markers, from costumes to proper names, mix German, Swiss and Austrian elements with hints of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. People are aware of the rest of the world, but are detached from the horrors slowly tightening their grip on it. Nature is as dark and twisted as the hearts of its villains.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: In the "The Final Revelation" Purist scenario, the player characters must piece together a series of clues that suggest a vague threat to all mankind. In the very end, the characters find out that the horrible and monstrous alien gods they were trying to stop had actually devoured the world long before they even started their investigation. Their minds are totally shattered as the world dissolves into a surreal nightmare from which there is no escape. Talk about a Downer Ending.

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