Trail of Cthulhu - Castle Bravo.pdf

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TRAIL OF CTHULHU
Castle Bravo
Credits
Publisher: Simon Rogers
Author: Bill White from an idea by Judd Karlman
Layout: Jérôme Huguenin
Art Direction: Jérôme Huguenin & Bill White
Art: Jérôme Huguenin
Photo : United States Deparment of Defense
Playtesters:
Thanks to Playtesters:
Danni Bayn, Phillipa Borland, Dave Byrne,
Joanna Corcoran, Edward Chiassan, Mark DiPasquale, Malcolm Edwards, Vincent
Fisher, Kevin Fitzpatrick, Sam Friedman, Frank Hablawi, Kev Hickman, Matthew
Higgins, Elizabeth Hill, Danny Hua, Aaron Jackson, Mick “Flossy” Jones, Belinda
Kelly, Angela Kemp, Ben Kemp, Dave Lodge, Chris Malone, David Petroski, Joel
Rojas, Jim Schmitz, Guy Sodin, OpalLisa Thrush, Dave Wiegal, and Sam Zeitlin as
well as the group from Ubercon IX
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TRAIL OF CTHULHU
Contents
CASTLE BRAVO
INTRODUCTION
The Hook
The Horrible Truth
The Spine
Victory Conditions
THE INVESTIGATORS
Pregenerated Characters
THE ADVENTURE
The USS Bairoko
1
3
3
3
4
4
6
6
8
8
Shot Bravo
The Son of Yog-Sothoth
The Immediate Aftermath
Anomalous Sightings
Shadows . . .
...Out of Time
BACKGROUND
INFORMATION
Military Characters
9
14
18
21
24
26
30
30
2
TRAIL OF CTHULHU
CASTLE BRAVO
INTRODUCTION
The year is 1954. The Korean War
recently ended in a hard-fought
stalemate. With the Cold War in full
swing, the United States is busily
conducting secret tests to determine
the explosive yield of different models
of nuclear weapons Some of these tests
are being conducted in the Marshall
Islands at Bikini atoll, where nearly
eight years before, in the aftermath
of World War II, a similar but highly
public test called Operation Crossroads
caused international controversy as a
display of American military might and
intentions.
This adventure draws heavily upon
Lovecraft’s stories “The Shadow Out of
Time” and “The Dunwich Horror,” but
it “re-reads” them so that the details are
homage rather than slavish imitation. In
tone, the game should play out much
closer to Purist than to Pulp, although
you can expect a fair dose of desperate
military-flavored action to break out by
the end of the adventure. One way to
think of this scenario is as an attempt
to do 1950s atomic horror without
descending into camp or kitsch. If
Lovecraft had lived, and seen the stark
horrors of World War II give way to the
subtler terrors of McCarthyism and
Mutually Assured Destruction, what
sorts of tales would he have told?
As Keeper, you should read through the
entire adventure first and make note of
the instructions provided for staging
the adventure, changing those details to
suit your play preferences and those of
your players. As the group progresses
through the adventure, it is likely to
proceed in unanticipated directions,
but you need only extrapolate from the
information presented here to judge the
likely consequences of their actions.
Some basic familiarity with military
protocol is presumed, but a brief
summary of military etiquette is
provided at the end of the adventure for
those who desire it. Otherwise, you may
fudge or finesse those details insofar as
your own knowledge requires.
Trapped in the past but possessed of
powerful mental gifts, the Yithians
subdued the flying polyps and
imprisoned them in their own basalt
towers. Rebuilding their civilization
and gaining control of the ability to
travel through time by temporarily
taking control of the bodies of cross-
temporal “natives,” the Yithians began
gathering the knowledge they needed
to complete their mastery of the space-
time continuum and escape the cone-
shaped bodies in which they’d been
imprisoned.
However, their interference with the
cone-beings’ symbiosis with the flying
polyps meant that their hosts were
dying out, their reproductive cycle
disrupted. The Yithians sought across
the timestream and found a new set of
potential hosts in humanity’s immediate
successor as dominant life form, blattid
communal insects from 5 million years
in the future whose sapience operates
via distributed intelligence—in other
words, a race of intelligent cockroach
hive-minds. To power their cross-time
migration from 65 million years in the
past, the Yithians diverted an asteroid
to impact with the Earth and captured
the energy of the shockwave, escaping
across time as they thought.
However, they did not reckon withYog-
Sothoth’s implacable and omnipresent
vigilance. In 1946 AD, the explosion
of an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll
during a public test called Operation
Crossroads created a small “tear” or
gap in space-time through which the
essence of Yog-Sothoth was able to seep
through. The cavalier attitude of the
military authorities toward radiological
exposure at the time helped ensure that
Yog-Sothoth could imprint itself upon
The Hook
The investigators are sailors and
scientists deployed aboard the Navy
escort carrier USS
Bairoko
to the South
Pacific as part of “Joint Task Force
Seven” to participate in a series of secret
thermonuclear test shots in the Bikini
atoll called Operation Castle. After the
first detonation, strange events begin to
occur, and the investigators must figure
out what is going on if they wish to save
the ship and themselves.
The Horrible Truth
Far in the future, an advanced race of
spider-like creatures calling themselves
Yithians tried to bind the cosmic entity
Yog-Sothoth to their will. Their plan
failed and their world—a far future
Earth that they called “Yith”—was
destroyed. They attempted to escape as
disembodied consciousnesses into the
far, far distant past, but were caught
by Yog-Sothoth, who imprisoned them
in the cone-shaped bodies of a species
commensal with the polypous flying
space-faring semi-material servitors
Yog-Sothoth had extruded into our
dimension long, long ago.
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TRAIL OF CTHULHU
Castle Bravo
one hapless crewman’s genes. The man
returned home shortly thereafter and
to him and his wife was born a Son
of Yog-Sothoth, a hybrid being who,
though seemingly and superficially
human, partook not only of normal
space-time materiality but also of
the hyperdimensional non-Euclidean
actuality of the Mythos. Grown to
nearly adult size in a mere seven years,
young Jed Whateley fashioned a false
identity for himself as one Earl Sawyer
(using the birth certificate of an infant
who had died at birth), and ran away
from his hateful and by-now insane
mother to join the Navy, volunteering
to serve on the very ship upon which
his father died in 1951.
Yog-Sothoth foresees that the detonation
of a second atomic bomb in the same
location eight years later—Castle
Bravo—will empower his “son” to
create a temporal singularity that will
trap the time-traveling Yithian minds in
a nightmarish loop and enable him to
recreate the strange symbiosis between
flying polyp and cone-being, restoring
them as servitors of Yog-Sothoth in
the material world. The Son of Yog-
Sothoth will use his newfound powers
to transform radiation-stricken sailors
into cone-beings capable of serving
the flying polyps and restoring them to
vitality once more.
visions. When the fallout cloud
settles, they are able to investigate
Anomalous Sightings
in the Castle
area of operations, while yet plagued
by
Shadows
out of time. Eventually,
however, they are
Out of Time,
and
the
Bairoko
must withstand an attack
of flying polyps in the service of the
Son of Yog-Sothoth as well as a mutiny
by sailors transformed into monstrous
cone-beings.
THE
INVESTIGATORS
Pregenerated Characters
Six pre-generated characters are
provided, though the “sweet spot” for
this adventure is probably 4 players.
The additional characters can be held
in reserve as replacements for those
lost in play.
Victory Conditions
The investigators may consider
themselves “victorious” if, minimally,
they survive the aftermath of Castle
Bravo with soul and sanity intact. More
to the point, however, they win if they
prevent the restoration of a symbiotic
commensality between the flying
polyps and the cone-beings.
Lieutenant Davis
The Spine
For this summary of the structure of the
investigation, text in
bold
indicates a
section of the adventure with the same
name.
The crew of
USS
Bairoko
awaits the
detonation of
Shot Bravo
in the Bikini
atoll. The bomb blast exposes them to
a massive fallout cloud, during which
some strange events occur, including
the awakening of
The Son of Yog-
Sothoth.
In the blast’s
Immediate
Aftermath,
the investigators witness
the crew’s erratic behavior and strange
2
nd
Lt. (O-1) Enrique Chahan
“Hank” Davis.
A young Marine
helicopter pilot assigned to the transport
squadron detailed to the carrier for this
project. He’s half-Chamorro, a native of
Guam (his adoptive father was a Marine
hidden by locals during the Japanese
occupation of the island in World War
II). After enlisting in the Marines during
the Korean War, he was sent to Officer
Candidate School and flight training
for helicopters. This is his first tour of
duty.
Occupation:
Military.
Drive:
Adventure.
Pillars of Sanity:
Faith,
Filial Piety.
Special:
Flight Status.
Davis can spend Bureaucracy in order
to gain access to a helicopter or plane
for “missions.”
Note:
Chamorro is a
Malayo-Polynesian language like that
of the Marshallese; the two tongues are
similar but not identical (Chamorro
has far more Spanish borrowings, for
example), but they are similar enough
that Lt. Davis can use his Language
ability as if it were Oral History when
dealing with the Marshallese.
Investigative Skills
Academic:
Anthropology 1, History 1,
Languages (Chamorro) 1, Law 1,
Theology 1 .
Interpersonal:
Assess Honesty 1,
Bureaucracy 2, Credit Rating 3,
Intimidation 2, Reassurance 4,
4

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