Many Mansions - Miskatonic Repository

This week's post comes to you from a state of exhaustion.

I've been working on a play for the past (I have forgotten how many) weeks and we unexpectedly lost a cast member this Thursday gone, so we're starting off on the back foot. Her replacement's working out but it's still a slog at the end and I shall not be sorry when opening night has come and gone.

However!

I've been working on a Many Mansions series to be published via the Miskatonic Repository and thought it time to boost the signal by posting about it.

There are three scenarios:

In Memoriam - In which the investigators may attend a funeral in a church that does not yet exist.

When Tides Are Right - In which the investigators may find themselves adrift on Pilot Island.

Your Number, Please - In which our protagonists chase up rumors of a fault on the telephone line.

All of these stories take place in Kingsport, South Shore, in the 1920s. It's part ghost story, part Dreamlands, with a dash of Jacob's Ladder thrown in for fun - and if you recognize that film reference then you know where this is all going.

Part of this will be recognizable to those of you who followed the Many Mansions posts a while back. This is an extension of that concept. It's written for Call, not Trail. 

I don't want to beat you down with references and trivia since the whole point of a teaser post is to, well, tease (you naughty thing, you). However, since we're here, let me tell you a bit about South Shore and the Underwood Park cemetery, where the action takes place.

South Shore

The Many Mansions scenarios all take place in Kingsport and are focused on Kingsport’s South Shore neighbourhood.

South Shore is mostly residential with a smattering of tourist businesses. Some of Kingsport’s oldest, most historically significant places are in South Shore. 

The oldest part of South Shore is that section which is closest to the sea proper. Merchants and families of merchants used to sit atop their houses’ sea-facing walks and cupolas, watching activity in the harbour. 

The most modern sections, built in the mid-1800s or later, are towards the south of South Shore. These are often large, with walled gardens, and are some of the more expensive pieces of real estate in Kingsport. 

It’s very rare to find a house in South Shore built later than 1900.

As this is a section popular with tourists, street lighting is more common and better maintained here that other sections of Kingsport. The roads tend to be paved and in good repair, often with modern sidewalks. Cars are often seen here, and there are plenty of places where interested persons can rent pedal cycles.

The public wharves and Coast Guard station are in South Shore, as is the rather exclusive Stratton Yacht Club. While there are some fishers that operate out of South Shore most of them are in Harbourside, along the Water Street wharves. The boats that call South Shore home tend to be more expensive, delicate creatures, not workhorse fishing vessels. 

1. You’ll find more out-of-towners in South Shore than anywhere else in Kingsport. It’s not uncommon to hear refined French, Russian or German spoken; refugees from war-torn Europe with money in their pockets.
2. There are plenty of ghost stories in South Shore but most of them are gaudied up for the tourists. The most gruesome centre on Underwood Park cemetery, though that’s probably because most of the graves and tombs there are the over-elaborate and evocative kind favoured by wealthy, lachrymose mourners. 
3. Lawyer Charles Bompas has his offices in a grand-looking building on Beach Street, not far from the Coast Guard station. He deals mainly in real estate disputes and wills and is well-regarded, if not well-liked.
4. Rome: nearly every house in South Shore has a witch ball hanging in the window. These small glass balls are supposed to ward off evil. At night, at about one in the morning, they glow with a peculiar greenish light and it is difficult to avoid the feeling that something inside the ball is peering out. SAN 0/1 penalty.

Underwood Park

This is one of the most recent cemeteries in Kingsport; the others are much older, but for the most part are no longer used. Underwood is practically the only cemetery in town with empty plots.

The cemetery is unfenced and well-maintained. Its groundskeeper and stonecutter is old George Cotton, who lives in a cottage nearby. Old George knows almost everything there is to know about Underwood; he was born the year the cemetery was founded and grew up alongside it. His father Hepson Cotton was the first groundskeeper. 

Underwood Park was created by the Underwood family back in the mid-1800s. The Underwood family vault is one of the grandest in the cemetery and was the first ever built. One of the very earliest photographs of Kingsport features the Underwood vault, mid-construction.

The Underwoods wanted a cemetery befitting them and made sure it would be sizeable, verdant, and visible. They took land from the Read House to build it, making sure that Thomas Read would have to look out over their cemetery, at their vault, for as long as he lived. 

Thomas Read is not buried at Underwood. Nobody knows where his corpse lies.

1. Underwood is overstuffed with gaudy memorials. Weeping angels, somnolent cherubs, elaborate masonry and saccharine epitaphs prevail.
2. Underwood’s trails are well-marked and wide, but it’s still possible to get lost in them. Old George has to rescue tourists now and again, who find themselves at a loss how to get out of Underwood. 
3. Underwood has plenty of ghost stories and Old George knows them all. Once a year at all-Hallow’s Eve, Old George hosts a nighttime storytelling session out at the Underwood vault. Invitation only, and Old George is quite particular. Money doesn’t buy you entrance; Old George has to like you.
4. Rome: Those who go into Underwood at night say that the cemetery is much larger then than it appears during the day. Those who go there when the moon is full say that, if you stand at the Underwood Vault and look out over South Shore, you see a completely different, alien Kingsport. SAN 0/1D2 penalty at night, rising to 1/1D4 at a full moon.

That's it for this week! Enjoy!

The Man Downstairs (Miskatonic Repository)

Well, I said I'd do it, and it's done.

The Man Downstairs, a CoC scenario set in Jazz Age Harlem, New York, is up on the Miskatonic Repository at DriveThruRPG. This is very much an experiment for me. I want to see whether it has legs.

If any of you buy it, I hope you enjoy it - a review would be appreciated!

The tenants at 224 Lenox Avenue, between W 121st and W122nd, New York City, have a neighbor they have never met, and never knew existed until a few weeks ago, yet he has always been there. Josef Voorzanger has been hiding for more than forty years, but time has eaten his once-sharp mind, and his wards are no longer strong enough to keep out the curious. Josef made a bad bargain a long time ago, and now the entity he bartered with is sending the Man with Lightning Flowers to collect - unless the investigators, hired by the owners of 224 Lenox, can find Josef first.

Miskatonic Repository Teaser

First this week, a teaser. You may be aware that, over at DriveThruRPG, Chaosium have opened up what it calls the Miskatonic Repository, an official online collection of user-made content. Sounds like fun. I thought I'd dip my toe into those unholy waters, and see what develops. Hopefully not some kind of fungal infection, but you never know ...

At any rate, consider this your official notice. The scenario's written, formatted, and almost ready for prime time. There's a few last tweaks I need to complete before sending it off into the great unknown. This is an experiment, to see just how viable the platform is. If it looks as if it's a winner, I may put more resources into this. Being more of a GUMSHOE fella, I'd love it if Pelgrane did something similar, but I'm a CoC guy from way back too, so writing this material is no great hardship for me.

Those of you who've got copies of The Long Con and The Many Deaths of Edward Bigsby, both of which were originally written to help fund YSDC and which are now available via Pelgrane, may wonder if this is a London-based scenario. No, not this time: the action is set in Harlem, NYC. I shan't say more than that; a full promo will be published here when the scenario hits the digital shelves.

Price tag provisionally set at $4 a copy for a 24 page document, which is broadly the same rate charged for The Long Con and Edward Bigsby. This is, I freely admit, a practical decision; the way DriveThru calculates who gets what from each sale means it's much easier to keep track of everything if we're all dealing in round numbers. So where $3.95 would be a sod to calc, $4 is blissfully simple.

Anyway, once it comes out, I hope you enjoy it! If it works, I will publish more via Miskatonic.