Our War of the Dead game has taken a hiatus a few weeks ago, now that we reached the end of a chapter, so our gaming group has started something different: Achtung! Cthulhu. This is a World War 2 setting that merges the Nazi obsession with the occult with the Lovecraftian Mythos. Player characters are members of a secretive branch of British Intelligence (though they can be from a variety of countries or backgrounds), tasked with investigating and stopping the Germans from learning ‘Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.’
My character is Nadya Gorodetsky (I stole the name from one of my favorite book series), a cryptographer with the Russian Intelligence Agency GRU. She is the daughter of a party apparatchik with two older brothers, both in the Soviet army, and she is eager to prove herself as capable as her siblings. Despite a persistently surly attitude, she has a talent with words and excels at languages, ciphers and code-breaking. After joining GRU, she worked in the office in her home town of Omsk monitoring German communications, until one day she decoded a set of messages about a strange, possibly unearthly power being pursued by a clandestine force within the German military. She became obsessed with discovering more about this power, and recovering it for herself. Below are journal entries covering the events that happened during one of our gaming session, from her point of view.
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18-05-39 : I reached London today with my falsified papers. One would think with tensions on the continent so high that all transfer papers would receive extra scrutiny, but in truth, the customs officer gave them only a cursory glance. Foolish Englishmen… Soon I will make contact with SIS and insinuate myself into the secret division I have uncovered. It has taken over six months of painstakingly decoding British cables, but if I am correct, this may be my best chance to delve deeper into the mysteries of this occult power for which I have been searching.
22-05-39 : I have successfully infiltrated Section 6 of the SIS. No one seems to question my presence (at least not openly). As far as GRU knows, I am monitoring communications at a remote outpost in Kamchatka, but as far at the British are concerned, I was sent here by the Soviets as a goodwill gesture to help ensure their messages are secure. It is a strange team I am joining. For our current mission, there are 5 men, some military, some civilian; 4 Americans and a British colonel. Colonel Willoughby seems to be the de-facto leader of sorts, despite being retired from the military. Sergeant Peter Morris is an American signalman, quick to make a joke and seems to take little seriously. Jim Boffins, claims to be an inventor, but he is easily distracted and prone to clumsiness, so it seems unlikely he will ever produce anything of value. There is an American agent of their FBI, which seems to be roughly equivalent to our Ministry of Internal Affairs, who insists on going by the name ‘Lefty’ Heimlich. While my grasp of English is still imperfect, I believe this is a highly usual moniker. Finally, there is an American Corporal by name of Zeke Loveless who seems very focused and business-like.
The new mission is thus: we are to travel to the island of Madeira, off the cost of Portugal, in search of a German ship rumored to be sunk near there. We are to investigate to try to determine what caused the wreck and what, if any, important or illicit cargo it may have been carrying. I can only hope there will be something relevant to my search aboard.
25-05-39 : The team arrived in Madeira, at Ponta de Sol with little incident and we dispersed to disseminate our various cover stories. Unfortunately, we seemed to immediately catch the attention of a unsavory figure who appears to loiter around the wharf looking for tourists to swindle. The American army man moved to intercept and distract him, and I made my way to a taverna down the street for a glass of wine, as befitted my tourist persona. Shortly after, Sgt. Morris and the ‘gentleman’ (whose name turned out to be Pasquaal) entered the same establishment. I strove to ignore them so as to maintain our cover, but then the stranger tried to drug the drink of my compatriot and I was forced to intervene. As I went to refill my wineglass, I ‘bumped’ into Morris, while slipping him a note warning of the attempt at befuddlement. After finishing the next glass, I left to avoid further suspicion and later found out that Sgt. Morris was able to slip out a back door. Although it was still somewhat early, I retired for the night to pore over my notes again. Ever since I first decoded those Nazi cables making mention of the mystical power for which they were searching, I have been consumed with the thought of finding it. I must discover this power so I can harness it for my own ends!
26-05-39 : We gathered in the morning to leave on our ‘expedition.’ The colonel has contrived a story of a search for the lost city of Atlantis and he has loudly spread it about the town. Although it is a ludicrous notion, it should keep the locals oblivious to our true purpose. I was recruited as a “Greek speaker” to help them translate any ‘findings’ since the locals can apparently not tell the difference between a Russian accent and a Greek one. We piled into the truck rented by the colonel and set off down the bumpy road towards the north shore of the island and our mission.
As we rounded the eastern shore of the island, we were set upon by a sport cars and a truck which both roared behind us in pursuit. Soon after, men began to fire shots at us, and a short gun-battle ensued. As I braced to fire, Lefty tried to lean out the passenger door of the truck, but a bump jarred the door open, nearly plummeting him down the sheer cliff-side. I grabbed a handful of his shirt and hefted him back inside the cab and our truck veered slightly away from the edge, slowing slightly to try to maintain control. Between the five of us, we made short work of the assailants, killing three outright when the truck was forced off the cliff and wounding the two in the sports car to stop the attack.
We soon found out that Pasquaal was leader of these thugs, and in fact he was a German agent endeavoring to discover our purpose on the island. Although we attempted to interrogate him, we were unable to gather much more than that before he expired. The other hired gun was badly mangled, having been run over by our truck and also quickly perished. We pushed the corpses over the cliff and left the car to appear abandoned. The bodies disposed of, we continued down the road, reaching the north side of island by mid-afternoon.
Our mission notes indicate the wreck was believed to have washed ashore near the town of Santana. We stopped in a small fishing village just outside the town to try to charter a boat to take us the rest of the way down the coast. However, as soon our destination was mentioned, the locals blanched and refused to discuss the matter. The most coherent answer we could get was that there had been a terrible plague in the city and it ‘was a place of death’. Morris and I radioed to headquarters in London with our situation. Afterwards, we gathered to try to form a new plan, when a lone fisherman approached our group and beckoned us to follow him a short ways away. He said he knew of the wrecked ship and would take us to there, but only at night and that he would not go ashore nor stay longer than dawn. He asked for an outrageous sum of money, but since it seemed our only option, the colonel reluctantly paid him and we made plans to meet on the shore outside the village after nightfall.
After darkness fell, we gathered in the small but sturdy boat and our mysterious new friend navigated along the shore towards the apparently abandoned town of Santana. Before long, the wreckage of the German ship loomed ahead from its resting place on the beach, run aground, though by the tide or crash we did not know. As we approached, we saw a large gash had been opened along the side of the hull, exposing the inner-workings and leaving little doubt that something terrible had happened to the vessel. The fisherman would not go ashore, but dropped us off the in shallow water and again warned that he would leave by sunrise, whether we were ready to go or not, before motoring back into the deep water to keep silent watch. The buildings beyond the beach were broken down and over-grown; it was clear the town had been abandoned for some time, so we turned our attention back to the German vessel.
The great ship jutted out from the shore like a knife, the hull torn open by an unknown force. Despite the twisted metal lining the opening, we quickly determined it was the easiest way to access the ship’s interior and gingerly climbed up into the boiler room. There, we were met with a grisly scene. The boiler had obviously exploded at some point, and there were dried blood splatters scattered across the room, though no sign of any actual bodies. We resolved to climb up to the command deck, carefully picking our way through the dark water and listing ladders.
We reached the dining hall just below the top deck, when we heard footsteps above us. The colonel, who had been in the lead, motioned for silence and several of the men readied weapons at the foot of the stairs. Suddenly, a shot rang out, accompanied by a shout down the stairs. ‘Lefty’ readied a grenade, but fumbled it, sending it rolling along the floor without the pin. We rushed up the the stairs to escape the explosion and found a hallway with door cracked open directly at the top. An arm with a pistol waved wildly out the door, shooting at seeming random down the hall. I pressed into the corner of the wall and the floor, slowly sliding along the wall until the arm was in reach, then lashed out, knocking the gun from the hand. The rest of the group sprang forward, yanking the door open and pushing the shooter back into the room.
From his uniform, the man appeared to be the captain of the ship and was clearly not in his right mind. He babbled semi-incoherently and blood trailed from his ears; his eyes were wild and darted around rapidly. As Loveless and Morris wrestled him to the ground, the man screamed ‘I will not let you take me’ and thrashed weakly about. A pen stained with blood lay on the desk. It seemed he had used it to rupture his own eardrums, though at first we could not comprehend why. I located the captain’s log, translating from the original German for my compatriots. The ship was indeed carrying a secret cargo in the forward hold, something that seemed to make some of the crew uneasy. Several days before the crash, there were reports of strange noises coming from the hold and then a crewmember had gone berserk and attacked other sailors. After that incident the captain believed the boiler may have sabotaged, causing the explosion which crippled the ship. As the damaged ship drifted, the log described irresistible, unearthly noises and inhuman figures that seemed to come out of the mist and that was the point at which the log ended. By this point, the captain was catatonic and would be of no further use to question, so we searched the rest of the cabin. There was a small safe whose lock I picked and yielded a few papers, a little money and a book made of golden plates. The book was a curious contraption with no obvious latch or opening and elaborate sigils carved into it. This, I tucked away for safe keeping. It may contain clues to aid me in my search.
Some of these others wished to investigate the forward hold to try to determine what it held. We clambered toward the bow, and found the hatch of the hold to be locked. Several of the men tried to wrench the door open, but it would not budge. Zeke carried a few explosives still and set the charges along the lock. We braced behind crates as the charges detonated. Loud roars, as if from some terrible beast, emanated from behind the hatch. Alas, my nerves failed me, and I could not stand my ground. I ran, terrified, towards the stern of the ship, while shouts echoed behind me. As I ran, I caught a glimpse of some sort of… creatures climbing out of the water and up the sides of the ship. They stood like men, but had faces like fish. Their skin was bluish and they wore only scraps of cloth, ornamented with golden jewelry. The sight of these monsters only made me run faster, sprinting along the deck. Once I reached the stern of the ship, I jumped to the sand below and scrambled towards the cover of ruined buildings of the village. The others soon joined me, having also fled the strange creatures who swarmed the ship. We could make out some movement along the deck of the ship, but before long the figures seemed to vanish and quickly and silently as they had appeared.
Just before dawn, our ferryman returned as promised and we climbed into his boat to return to the village. We made no mention of our encounter, but sat in exhausted silence. I am unsure how our report will be received by our superiors once we reach London again. The only proof we have is a few bits of gold jewelry that we recovered from the shore and the agreement that we all saw something come out of the water.
serquet 