Horror on the Orient Express in a post-apocalyptic setting? Call of Cthulhu to Yellow Dawn conversion, a case study.
This is a quick article about role-playing games, and the challenge faced when converting one scenario genre into another, whilst leaving the essential plot intact.
Horror on the Orient Express is a unique and fantastic product, published by Chaosium Inc for 1920′s Call of Cthulhu.
For the uninitiated, Call of Cthulhu is a role-playing game based on the cosmic horror fiction of the sublime and gifted American author, H.P. Lovecraft; where players take on the role of characters in a 1920′s universe dogged by crackpot spiritualists, insane cultists and mad scientists bringing steampunk inventions into existence to break down the barriers between us, and the Outer Chaos.
I bought Horror on the Orient Express back in 1992 and played it once in its pure 1920′s flavour, and then several times with a home-grown RPG system, blending Cyberpunk and Cthulhu Mythos genres; a system based on the shared fictional universe of my sci-fi and dark fantasy novels, and something that ultimately evolved into the post-apocalyptic world of Yellow Dawn.
A major campaign for 1920's Call of Cthulhu
Yellow Dawn’s full nomenclature is “Yellow Dawn – The Age of Hastur”. It’s currently on version 2.1 and is going through a massive re-write because as critics have pointed out, for a game with Hastur referenced in the title, there’s very little of the Tattered King within the rulebook. My fault for trying to be too clever about how subtle the influence of Hastur is within the world of Yellow Dawn. This monstrous Great Old One hasn’t gained a solid footing in our world; it is not roaming around the planet corrupting the state of reality and infecting information and structures with a maddening form of entropy, but, particles of the thing have been transcripted into a pathogen that was released by deluded and insane worshippers of Hastur (see the campaign book, Shadows of the Quantinex to discover how and why).
This pathogen left more than 70% of the human population dead and another segment Infected by a compound that turned millions of victims into what the orbital-based media, and other survivors, call Zombies. In the wake of such a catastrophe, most of the landmass reverts to wilderness peppered with small, impoverished settlements, a few high-tech survivor compounds, and a handful of massive, fully functioning Living Cities.
Consider then, my desire to run the Horror on the Orient Express campaign in this shattered world? A luxury train travelling between cities that are now dead and overrun by creatures mistakenly called “zombies”, through abandoned terrains where weathering and the riot of Mother Nature left unchecked has wrecked buildings and transport infrastructure.
Not really possible, right?
I got my thinking cap on and came up with the following concept.
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The current player group has a bunch of characters who have been through a major campaign where they thwarted attempts by the Outer God, Nyarlathotep to resurrect one of its human avatars. This was a direct sequel to the conclusion of the swift and action-packed novel, God Seed.
However, prior to being beaten Nyarlathotep was able to force several of these characters to “bow-down before me and submit yourselves to my authority”. As a consequence, the Outer God was able to work its terrible mischief into their minds over the next few weeks, and influence their actions to the point where they opened a portal within their settlement one night. This could have spelled disaster for everyone there; as a furious storm rolled in from the hills and blasted the settlement with shrieking winds, explosive flashes of lightning and booming thunder, everyone went into a panic.
And then an abrupt fading out of vision and sound to a white hissing emptiness, before rematerialising in the plush office of a solicitor, in London, in a version of Earth as it would have been if Yellow Dawn had not occurred.
I transferred the character group to an alternate version of reality. Still real. Still valid. They looked out of the window of that office and saw hope in the shadow of great terror. Why had they been brought here.
This was when I inserted the “hook and introduction” to the Horror on the Orient Express campaign.
I’ve also made minor changes to the storyline that I felt improved things, and to preclude players digging for clues on the internet.
The solicitor sent them on their way, across Europe, on the Orient Express, stopping off to collect pieces of a statue: Michelangelo’s Carthusian Man.
New version coming Winter 2011
The opportunity for roleplaying was fantastic. The characters are now in a world that they’ve not seen since it was destroyed (in their subjective reality) ten years earlier. Now they’re in London, and Paris, with fabulous restaurants, the chance to drink real Coca Cola with ice, or munch through a MacDonald’s burger. Simple, almost trivial things, but which take on great significance when the characters haven’t been able to enjoy them since their world became post-apocalyptic.
They were also to locate loved ones who perished when Yellow Dawn happened; but this desire for contact was checked by the fact that they too, an alternate version of themselves, was alive and well and living with (formerly) dead wives and girlfriends and children. And none of these people know anything about the horrors of Yellow Dawn.
Speaking of which.
Just as the characters settled into the comfort of this alternate reality, I plunged them back, without warning into the Yellow Dawn universe – their true reality. They were riding a taxi through crowded London traffic, heading down into an underpass, when suddenly everything became dark and quiet and they realised all the traffic around them had stopped, and even the driver looked a little strange slumped over in his cab, as if asleep. At first the characters assumed their location had been compromised by hackers (as they were transporting valuable gold), but then with a rapidly dawning horror – visible on the players faces and giving me, as GM, a tickle of fiendish delight – they understood what had happened. Unarmed and dressed in nice executive clothing, they found themselves in a post-apocalyptic version of London, on the fringes of a protected boundary but very much in the depths of a Dead Zone. I bought them back, of course, after they’d had the chance to encounter a zombie without their normal precautions, and following a rubric that I’d rather not reveal here (so my players don’t get wise to it).
The look of relief on their faces was a picture; and so was the subsequent fear and paranoia about the if and when they might get plunged back into their Yellow Dawn universe.
So the campaign is set to continue for a few months of real-world play; with characters hunting for something across Europe in a non-Yellow Dawn, purely Cyberpunk Horror context with the perpetual risk of being plunged back into the horrors of the Yellow Dawn world at any moment.
It’s working beautifully.
A couple of points to note:
- The few items of technology that came through with them, works, but is considered a decade out of date, and any stored information is garbled, scrambled and nonsensical. It means they can’t show pictures or files from the Yellow Dawn world to people in this alternate reality; and visa versa, unless they’re somehow able to make analogue copies of such information. Possible but bulky and tedious.
- The prices of many items in the Yellow Dawn rulebook (2.1) are high due to their luxury status within a post-apocalyptic world. In the alternate reality, where such a catastrophe hasn’t occurred the price of these things is more in line with what you’d expect to pay. GM’s planning on using this concept should bear that in mind and adjust prices as they see fit when characters decide to buy things.
Edit (11th July 2011): I’ll be adding more detail to this as time goes by, and as the player group get deeper into the campaign; I’ll be explaining the nature of the statue, plus the powerful Mythos cult and the abilities of its followers.
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Related Information:
- The new version of Yellow Dawn (2.5) is due to be released this winter – 2011. You can follow progress of the overhaul here – click
- Official web page for Yellow Dawn The Age of Hastur – click
- Exploring influence of Hastur – King in Yellow – on post-apocalyptic world of Yellow Dawn through sci-fi & dark fantasy short stories – click
- Gaining a clearer view of a Cthulhu Mythos apocalypse – click
- Session notes for Horror on the Orient Express [HotOE] as it’s currently being played within Yellow Dawn universe – click
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See more posts like this – click
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Horror on the Orient Express in a post-apocalyptic setting? Call of Cthulhu to Yellow Dawn conversion, a case study http://wp.me/pTAKk-1q4—
David Rodger (@davidjrodger) July 03, 2011
