Witch Queen of Portmuck: Call of Cthulhu. Episode #30: 'Shadows of Yog Sothoth

With a sense of finality in the air (it being the last episode!?!), the party, aboard the airship known as the Roscinante, approach the co-ordinates for the mythical, newly risen island of R'lyeh. The fact that characters are now available for the airship pilot Jensen Molloy, his apprentice Ronnie Van Zant, and Professor Methridge, who has accompanied the characters, means that some of the die-hard characters that have made it thus far, could be lost to the dice...

Shrouded in green inky mist, darkness, patches or acrid smoke, and even yet emerging in clumps of hardly even corporeal and definitely non-euclidean rock...they eventually catch site of the dread island.

'We're safe, as long as no one rolls a 1 for Spot Hidden!'

Of course, the Prof rolls an '01' with his spot-hidden...and the plot becomes a little clearer.

The approach to R'lyeh...an 01 spot hidden secures the location of the blue monolith (brought to you today by Bushmills Whiskey)

The blue monolith, from which the 'closing' spell must be cast can just be made out, as can the mountain top from which Cthulhu will emerge. In addition, a roaming Shantak flies 'top cover' and spots the approaching airship.

Looks perfectly safe

Below, with a multitude of cargo ships and a submarine in the bay, hundreds if not thousands of the world's cultists have been brought as cannon fodder to show the true followers the path to the summoning site for Great Cthulhu himself. Had the characters not kept the Disk and the Arc of Vlactos, things might have been much easier for them..but you can't put a good cultist down, it seems, and they simply do things the hard way.

Having spotted 'critically', the party opts to go straight for the blue (green) obelisk tower via air, and thereby avoid the 'guardian thing' that lurks at the foot of the steps - great plan, so far.

As the centre of the island starts to shatter and something starts to emerge amidst the chants of insane cultists, the characters start to recite the spell - McLeoud first to cast, with McDade, the Prof and Jensen covering and firing at the incoming Shantak...who lands and kills Jensen with a single bite...but is eventually driven off...

...awake....and bloody grumpy

The spell appears to work..just as Mighty Cthulhu himself appears 'Look Away Look Away! I can't!!!'

'AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!'

Incredibly, most the characters pass their SAN rolls, and with the D10 loss, lose just enough to remain ok (that was lucky)...except for Methridge, who goes nuts and jumps off the airship and McLeoud has lost too much SAN, even though passing, and, completely paranoid now, is convinced that joining the cultists is probably the best idea, and goes racing off down the steps of the tower toward the guardian thing, as a dying Shantak falls past him.

The Prof and McDade opt to start shooting at their friend, with the seemingly 'sensible' plan of wounding him and stopping his flight...rather than actually chasing him, since the guardian thing is at the bottom of the stairs! It is a plan fraught with danger, but as with so many of the rolls in this final game, they get 'very' lucky, and McLeoud collapses on the steps...wounded, but not dead.

With 3 rounds to get to him and pick him up on the airship before Cthulhu reaches them - Ronnie drops ballast as the airship loses altitude fast down the pinnacle of the tower, the Prof rolls Dex x 4...and manages to grapple his wounded friend onto the airship.

With one round to go, the Roscinante - the airship that had become their home - gets away in the nick of time, the party trying not to watch as the massive elder god thing, and the island itself, complete with hundreds of remaining cultisits...is slowly sucked back into the sea...Cthulhu's great ear-splitting, unearthly dread-moan of frustration necessitates another SAN roll, and McDade loses it temporarily... the party is VERY lucky today...

It's over, they made it. They saved the world, and (in true Lovecraftian fashion) no one even knows...

...the camera pans back from an airship flying over the Pacific, then spins around the planet, to a crying baby, in Scotland, who stops crying for a short time...its black eyes slowly opening, and the dark voice of Lady Chantrayn in its latest incarnation, amongst many hundreds lost to the mists of time...'you fools, you fools, you think you've won? The game is never over..NEVER!', before the darkness in her eyes melts and crying starts again...

Phew!

The Professor, having promised to become the new Tangata Manu, dons the feathered cloak and lives in a cave for the next 100 years (he passed the mantle on just last month there...to a surfer bro)

Von Junzt - posing before his new 'feather cloak' wardrobe is presented to him

McDade returns to New York to marry Lady Thorpe, whom he met on the Mauretania, and sets up a successful photography empire...by 1963, he is commissioned to take a photograph of a Scottish heiress who seems very familiar somehow...

Marries into money; no wonder he looks so smarmy...

McLeoud, who realises that he was injected with Shoggoth protoplasm, becomes a successful Olympic athlete before retiring, winning everything due to some un-natural strength he finds. He becomes a a recluse before it becomes too obvious...the asylum where he received the injection in Los Angeles. becomes influential in turning out politicians for the next 100 years.

Before the extra shoggoth-eye kicks in

Ronnie Van Zant, one of the finest pilots on Earth, goes on to a chequered career composed of aircraft stunts, crashes and annoying the US Army Air Corps, before finally joining Chennault's 'Flying Tigers' and being killed in action in China in 1942...

The greatest pilot EVAR!

Sinead, who was consumed along with the dagger of Nyarlathotep - which of course, wants to be found again -- has her face remain in perpetuity on the flank of the Shoggoth that ate her...for the next thousand years or so... I mean, it could have been worse.