The website www.orother.com was cryptic, obscure, yet otherwise unremarkable. But then suddenly an update came then swiftly disappeared, and everyone who looks into it ends up missing or dead. That is where the Program comes in.
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Table of Contents
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The Case:
The website www.orother.com had been online since the early 1990s, never offering much in the way of content, aside from the words “Or Other” in a plain, black, Times New Roman font. Rumors rose as the years passed: it was placeholder for something much bigger that would appear later. It was hiding a trafficking ring. It was a government experiment. Nobody really knew for sure, and eventually people stopped thinking about it.
That was, until 48 minutes ago. Or rather, just before that. At 1448 hours, www.orother.com had actual content in it, for a manner of seconds, in the shape of a cryptic message and certain sketches. A few moments later, the website went down and when it came back online it had the same old “content”. People tried to take a screenshot or a picture, but that didn’t work. Nothing was saved in any browser’s cache, either.
Several hacking groups had over the years tried to hack this website in order to solve its mystery, but nobody ever managed to. Today, their number grew exponentially, but rumors online suggest that people who try to hack in end up missing or dying.
Worse yet, rumors of one specific hacker that managed to get in and is going to release everything appeared on a message board, including things that, in their own words, humanity was never meant to see.
A Delta Green friendly within the FBI’s Cyber Crime unit came across this disturbing piece of news and tipped the Program about it. The agents’s goal is clear: find out whoever is hosting this website and force them to take it down so that no more hacking attempts can be made, find who is responsible for the site itself, and make sure no further information goes out. Finding out what exactly this website was is a luxury that the Program doesn’t have the time to afford.
Background:
The website www.orother.com was created in 1994 by a former member of the Cult of Transcendence called Robert Pierce. It was used for internal communication and file transfer during a much simpler time for the Internet. A quick Internet search will reveal that the WayBack Machine has been disabled for this website and there is no possible way to find any previous incarnations of this site.
Robert Pierce left the Cult in the late 1990s, but retained the site for his own personal research and business operations. In recent years, he came across a Yithian in human skin, and became fascinated once he realized exactly what he was dealing with. He made a long and detailed analysis of what the Yithian had told him, and posted it privately on his website. This post had exact details of how humanity is going to end, and even had pictures of otherworldly beings, such as Yithians, Shoggoths, and Mi-Go.
It was this exact page that Pierce, in a moment of weakness, decided to make public. It was him and not a hacker that also took it down, in a quick change of heart. Hounds of Tindalos are going after anyone who saw too much, but there is nothing that can be done about them. By the time the agents find out who these wannabe hackers are, and where they live, the Hounds will have gotten to them first. The Case Officer should suggest that the agents’s focus is the website and its owner.
Case Flow
The first thing the agents need to do is take the website itself down. Finding out its hosting company is a simple task, especially with the Program’s resources at hand. A skill of 40 in Bureaucracy or a successful roll will allow the agents to find out in about two hours’ time that the hosting company is called Passacaglia, a small independent company owned by one Phillip S. Dort.
Dort is a Libertarian, and wouldn’t want normally cede any of his customers easily, but he too has become unsettled by today’s news. Convincing Dort to take down the website will require a fundamental understanding of Bureaucracy (30) or Law (30), or if these traits are missing, Persuasion (50) is also available. If all this fails, another possibility suggested by the Case Officer would be to temporarily cut off electricity to the company itself, either by legal means of a Bureaucracy (50) or Law (40), or… less legal ones, such as a home-made EMP bomb. Dort’s house doubles as his company “offices”, and his servers are found in his second basement. Agents (and Handlers) are encouraged to improvise.
Finding Robert Pierce is not going to be that simple. If the agents spend too much time trying to hack their way into the website, a Hound of Tindalos will likely go after them as well (set this up with shadowy figures appearing in the corners of the screen every now and then), and online message boards on the matter are a mess of misinformation and trolling. An agent can try to access Dort’s database (if they haven’t fried it already), but this will take several hours, if not days.
Alternative ways to find Pierce include Accounting (40) and 12-16 hours of work to find where the money that kept www.orother.com going came from, or Criminology (40) in order to find the right people in the Dark Web that have associated themselves with Pierce in the past, and are willing to share that information for the right incentives. While researching the Dark Web, agents may come across images associated with www.orother.com that are deeply unsettling; decapitated human heads in vats filled with liquid, recordings of strange chants in unknown languages, sketches of horrible beings (0/1 Sanity -Unnatural).
If all else fails, have the Case Officer suggest the agents contact a Friendly, a hacker by the name of Clockwork. He can find the IP address of Robert Pierce within a couple of hours, but his life might be in danger -it’s up to the Handler’s discretion to convey this information to the players.
Robert Pierce lives in a small cottage just outside of town, as off the grid as one can in the modern world. Solar Panels for energy, his own water supplies, a personally customized version of Kali Linux as his operating system and his homebrew proxy server. Two large guard dogs guard the entrance to the farm, and they won’t go down without a fight.
Once inside, the agents come across a myriad of different sketches, all otherworldly. Detailed notes on the autopsies of a cone-shaped being and a living fungus, and the effects of several alien substances on the human body, all in gory detail (Sanity 1/1d8 -Unnatural).
Pierce himself is surprisingly lucid, and claims that he was expecting that someone would come to visit, hoping it would be a fellow believer. He asks the agents if they are part of the conspiracy or the Twelve, but before they have the time to reply he claims that it was he that wanted to share his knowledge with the world, even though people online thought it was a hacker. He quickly changed his mind, though, realizing that humanity isn’t ready yet. He intends to make us ready, however. He says that much like the great sea beasts (i.e. whales) were used to propel humanity forward two hundred years ago, so too will these space beasts be used to pave our way into the stars.
He will then try to convince the agents to assist him (roll Pierce’s Persuade +10 Vs all agents’s HUMINT -10). Agents that are convinced may turn on the others, as they are captivated by this man’s vision for the future. Other agents can try to dissuade them using their own Persuade roll.
Taking down Pierce aggressively shouldn’t be much of an issue, but taking him out alive will be more of a challenge, as he will try to fight back, to the death. He has access to a medical scalpel, and if there’s enough time, a hunting rifle.
Agents that decide to search his cottage (Search 40 or two hours of in-game time) will find the bodies of a Yithian and a Mi-Go hidden in one of the rooms (Sanity 2/1d8 -Unnatural). It is unclear how they ended up there, but they are the likely source of his autopsy reports.
Resolution
With the website down and Pierce restrained or dead (and the Hounds taking care of any wayward hackers), all vectors are contained. All surviving agents get a bonus 1d8 to Sanity, with an additional 1d4 if they destroyed the bodies in Pierce’s cottage.
Characters and Antagonists
Phillip S. Dort
Stats: STR 6 CON 9 DEX 8 INT 15 POW 15 CHA 12 SAN 62 HP 8
Skills: Computer Science 60, Bureaucracy 40, Law 30, HUMINT 30, Persuade 30
Robert Pierce
Stats: STR 10 CON 9 DEX 7 INT 7 POW 12 CHA 16 SAN 18 HP 10
Skills: Unnarmed 60, Firearms 40, Persuade 50, HUMINT 30
Tools: Medical Scalpel (1d4), Hunting Rifle (1d12, 10% lethality)
Guard Dog
Stats: STR 12 CON 13 DEX 13 POW 10 HP 13 WP 10
Skills: Alertness 70%, Detect by Smell 80%
Attacks: Bite 30% (1d6)
Hound of Tindalos
Stats: STR 25 CON 25 DEX 20 INT 15 POW 20 HP 25 WP 10
Skills: Alertness 90%, Stealth 50%, Track: 95%
Attacks: Shard Sweep 65% (2d6), Shard Swarm (Lethality 10%, no damage otherwise)
Credits
This was an entry to the 2020 shotgun scenario contest. Written by George Kavallos