[MH] Vile Vortices and Supernatural Threats

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Are any of your players veterans of the Jade Serenity campaign? We've got to know some of those characters quite well.

Yeah, Alice Talbot is played by the GM of Jade Serenity, Lucien Lacoste is O'Toole's player and the player who was Dr. Anderson in Jade Serenity is Edward Alvin Smith.

Very different PCs, though I guess you could say O'Toole's player is still playing a deeply flawed and messed up person whom the other PCs should ditch at the first opportunity. This time, though, it's not because he's a selfish, spineless paper pusher with no capacity for loyalty or friendship. It's just because he's Impulsive, Overconfident and On the Edge.

The plan was originally for 'Nonc' Morel to induce a dream state in himself and learn where the minor cold daemon was from and/or maybe take a careful peek into the dreams of the Girl With the Kaleidoscope Eyes. In themselves, still risky endeavours, as they were aware that her mind had touched Something truly horrible, but something that Morel genuinely (and probably accurately) felt he could handle without risking anyobe else.

The mission creep of using all the 34 cursed diamonds of Awful Nasty Badness to power an untested, poorly understood ritual that would allow the PCs to fight whatever possessed the incautious sorceress, as well as making use of at least one potential Chosen One / Omen / Destiny Magnet and the demonic-looking artifact athame she'd locked in a warded vault with three separate locks (none openable by the same person), well, that came after Lacoste found out that there was a theoretical way to do more than just gather some information.

The thought of righteously beating up some analogue of Cthulhu in a Dreamland version of Lake Vostok, no doubt located on the frozen plateu of Leng, was just too tempting to pass up. So, he became the loud and assertive champion of Plan Ragnarök (We'll Totally Stop It).

Morel eventually agreed because it's the only chance, however slim, of saving the mortal girl 'Gwen Delvano' must have been at one point. Teddy Smith apparently agreed because he suspects that this is finally it, the time when the Outsiders come for Earth too and he'd do anything to close the gates before the Earth becomes their playground. Also, if the other PCs were going to do such a spectacularly stupid thing anyway, he probably had a greater chance of survival with them, where he could try to contribute (most likely in vain), than waiting at ground zero, helpless to prevent the apocalypse. Alice Talbot seems to be operating with some kind of Prophecy /Destiny logic, though she hasn't been able to tell anyone else why she believes that.

Somehow, inexorably, the iron certainty of the absolutely mad won everyone over... or at least made them give up arguing. It may have helped that Lacoste had already started the ritual and drunk the hallicinogenic mushroom brew before telling them his plans for a slightly more ambitious 'look-see'. Stopping without inviting some sort of magical catastrophe didn't seem like an option any more. Granted, a much smaller disaster than going through with his Captain Crazypants stunt and failing, but it's amazing how little difference the size of the 'blast radius' makes to people standing at ground zero.

So I guess now they're hunting Cthulhu. Or whatever frozen cousin of his lives in a dreamscape version of the Antarctic, deep within a fantastic analogue of Lake Vostok.