RED THREAT

RED THREAT

Occult documents have been smuggled across the Pacific to Detroit via commercial aircraft, exposing hundreds of travelers to the unnatural - or maybe just one.

SUMMARY

U. Michigan Ann Arbor Asian Languages & Cultures Professor Frank Bellows has been corresponding with colleagues at Beijing University's Archeology Department. They've acquired an ancient scroll bearing the character for "Six", transcribed and emailed it to Bellows, and Bellows has flown to pick it up as part of a document exchange. On Sunday DEC01, Bellows flies home, reads then eats the ancient document, becomes crazed, kills the person in the adjacent seat barehanded, and opens an emergency exit, sending him and three crewmembers flying out into the Michigan night over Kalamazoo. The crewmembers don't survive the fall, but he does and he's heading home. The damaged plane landed at DTW. All passengers and the three remaining crewmembers are housed at the airport hotel for witness statements. Sergeant Pamela Barnes (Michigan State Police) overheard talk about Bellows eating an old document and calls her contact at Delta Green. Agent Ezekiel tells her to sit tight - the calls go out at 2000 December 1st.

Bellows has received a copy of volume 6 of The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan. Drafted in the Dreamlands, his mind is overwhelmed with the urge to become one with the document. Once ingested, it begins his mutation into a Hunting-Horror. His motivation is to get home, nest, and feed.

BRIEFING 0800DEC02

In a private hangar, Ezekiel provides the FAA's preliminary report and an unremarkable profile of Bellows - a tenured professor with a slight build and kind eyes behind round owl-like glasses looking every bit the gentle academic. His 10th floor campus office is in Weiser Hall and he lives alone at 3586 E. Huron River Drive, 20mi east of the airport. His cellphone reconnected to the network once he fell to earth and has been triangulated moving slowly east from Kalamazoo towards Ann Arbor, but the signal is erratic. Find out what's going on, and keep anything unnatural under wraps, no matter the cost.

Ezekiel leaves a GPS tracker and a key to a Green Box locker in the corner, holding firearms, ammunition, 2 incendiary grenades, a flak jacket, and a postcard scrawled "MADE IT TO LENG - WISH YOU WERE HERE!" Closer inspection provides the details of the ritual The Closing of the Breach. Barnes is a Friendly and can provide local LEO resources. The rest of the agents are given flimsy FAA inspector and FBI credentials. A hunter green early 2000 Camry is parked in the hanger for the agents.

The plane sits on the tarmac in the distance, cordoned off by stanchions with Barnes guarding it in a police SUV. Agents can retrieve Bellows' briefcase and luggage from the plane. If they choose not to, interviewing the crewmembers will reveal the location. The briefcase holds a travel journal and an ancient ornate scrollcase. An agent who picks up the case loses 0/1 SAN from unnatural. Failing the SAN roll triggers a brief vision of the desolate Plateau of Leng. The suitcase is unremarkable.

HUNTING BELLOWS

If the agents go after Dr. Bellows first, the GPS triangulation is unreliable, but they have access to a car and using ALERTNESS vs. SURVIVAL/STEALTH tests to find him. He's not fully turned and can be more easily killed here - use reduced stats for the Hunting-Horror. There's still the mission of covering up the unnatural, and one of the agents will be compelled to eat the documents and start their own mutation, becoming the mission.

THE PASSENGERS

As of the briefing, passengers and crew are housed at the American Inn & Suites at the northeast edge of the airport. There are 62 rooms on three floors, double occupancy; the conference room has been converted into makeshift housing for the remaining passengers. All luggage has been returned and they are eager to leave. The crewmembers will tell the agents Dr. Bellows' luggage is still on board as part of the crime scene.

Interviews provide largely the same information depending on passenger seating and some passengers are quick to show LEO the videos on their cell phones. If an agent views the video, they lose 1/1d4 SAN from violence. The video is taken at an angle aft of Bellows, but he's shown clearly. Bellows is seething, standing in the galley between cabins then turning to pummel the person sitting next to them until their skull is pulverized. Three crew members attempt to restrain him; he screams unintelligibly, shrugs them off, and shoves the emergency exit open without using the lever. The rapid decompression forcibly ejects them from the aircraft. Analyzing the video shows Dr. Bellows eyes gleaming orange as his gaze sweeps past the lens of the phone. Seeing this costs 0/1 SAN loss from unnatural. An agent with 20% Language recognizes it as an Asian dialect; an agent with 40% Language knows this is an ancient Lhasa (Tibetan) dialect with no living speakers for centuries, costing 0/1 SAN loss from unnatural. Agents can try PERSUADE tests to convince the passengers to turn over their cell phones, but inevitably the video is going to get out.

INVESTIGATING BELLOWS

The House & Office are a 10-40min drive apart, depending on traffic..

The House is a 3 bedroom 2 bath single story home in excellent condition. Two pumpkins on the front porch have started to rot and the thermostat has been left at 50F. Next to the house is a large propane tank, recently filled for winter. The front door opens into a well furnished living room - fill in every detail. To the right is the kitchen, and to the left are the bedrooms. The master bedroom is painted in a trendy grey with a tile & glass full bath off of it. One bedroom is used as a guest room, the other is an office, furnished with a desk & computer, and bookshelves full of fantasy novels. Another arm chair with a floor lamp is here for reading.

His Office is a sunny room with a large window looking out on UM quad, filled floor-to-ceiling with academic books. On his desk are a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, a printout of the webpage, and notes about the Scrolls. The computer tower is under the desk and easily accessed..

Regardless of where the agents go, they discover:

Any agent with 40% Computer or a successful roll powers up the computer and gets past the rudimentary password, "Password". Agents can access his email account and travel itinerary, the inbox has correspondence with Beijing University about their discovery. An email contains a photo showing the scrollcase and where it was found, a desolate plateau surrounded by rocks and an open sky.

The browser history lists current events and upcoming academic conferences. A single bookmark bar shortcut says THE SEVEN. Pulling up the website, an agent with 40% Occult or a successful roll realizes it's a partial scan and translation of The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan. Reading the translation costs 0/1 SAN from unnatural. An agent with 60% Occult recognizes Nyarlathotep's name and the Dreamlands and loses 1/1d4 SAN unnatural.

On the desk is a spiral bound notebook describing Volumes 1, 2, and 6 of the Cryptical Books of Hsan, going into detail about the necromancy powers of Hastur, the prolonging of life via cannibalism, and an exploration of the Dreamlands with Nyarlathotep. An agent reading the notes loses 1/1d4 SAN from unnatural. A printout of the simple webpage is among the notes.

GODDAMN SOCIAL MEDIA DEC 03

Passenger videos have been uploaded and picked up by local media. Brainstorm with the agents on how they can repress the information or explain it away. The lead agent will receive a call from an unknown number directing them to the WXYZ-TV Channel 7 news. The anchor presents the footage and segues to the next segment about a dairy farm in Battle Creek's cows being torn apart by a wild animal overnight. Officials are puzzled by the lack of predator tracks but there are large drag marks in the snowy mud. Battle Creek is approximately equidistant between Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor. The GPS tracker pings to indicate he's between University of Michigan and his home.

THE FARM

If investigators choose to investigate and leave Bellows to return home, the farm is/was a cute homestead with a large barn that houses the cattle at night. The barn doors have been torn from the building, cow carcasses are scattered around.. No animal tracks are found, but the snowy mud shows something large was dragged around. Agents take 1/1d4 SAN loss from helplessness for observing this.

WRAPPING UP

Bellows returns home at night, a burbling mass of teeth and tentacles, his kind face petrified in a twisted grimace on the side of the monstrosity. Eating the document from Leng has connected him to the Dreamlands, and he's mutated into a Hunting-Horror. If the agents are surveilling the house, they'll see him approaching from the river to the northeast of the house; otherwise they'll have to deal with him inside the now torn apart home.

STAT BLOCKS

Hunting-Horror

STR 60 CON 30 DEX 13 INT n/a POW 21

HP 45 WP 21

ARMOR: 10 points of bubbling matter (see RESILIENT and THING OF THE VOID).

SKILLS: Flight 75%.

ATTACKS: Bite and rend 70%, Lethality 30%, Armor Piercing 5 (see BITE AND REND).

Seize 90% (see SEIZE).

ABERRANT FLIGHT: A hunting-horror can “fly” in any environment, moving as if beating its wings against some unseen current—even underwater or in space. In flight, a hunting-horror can move at any speed its instincts demand, passing through any medium without friction or difficulty, or traversing strange dimensions to appear out of nowhere. In pursuit of Earthly quarry, it can just as easily match the speed of a fighter jet as a running human.

BITE AND REND: The hunting-horror can extrude a bone filled maw that is spring-loaded with enough force to shatter bones, shred flesh and even crush metal, inflicting a Lethality 30% attack on anything unlucky enough to be caught in it.

NON-TERRENE: Hunting-horrors are at home in nearly any environment, as long as they are not exposed to the visible wavelengths of light (see THING OF THE VOID). Poison and disease are harmless. Unseen radiation, pressure, cold, vacuum, and other environments have no negative effects on them. They can move on the surface of Saturn, the depths of the ocean, or in open space with equal ease.

RESILIENT: A successful Lethality roll does not destroy a hunting-horror, but inflicts HP damage equal to the Lethality rating.

SEIZE: A victim seized in a hunting-horror’s writhing grasp suffers the same effects as being pinned. The victim can attempt to escape with a STR test opposed by the hunting-horror’s Seize test. A hunting-horror can continue to take actions while keeping a victim seized. It can also squeeze a seized victim once per turn with an opposed Seize vs. STR test, inflicting 2D10 damage (which ignores body armor). This does not count as the hunting-horror’s

action. It can fly while holding and squeezing up to two seized targets.

THING OF THE VOID: Hunting-horrors retreat from light that’s comfortable for human sight. Bright light inflicts 1 HP per turn. The dazzling flash of a stun grenade inflicts 3D6. The full light of day sears a hunting-horror to gray dust. Fire inflicts double damage. All these effects ignore its armor.

UNNATURAL BIOLOGY: The hunting-horror’s physiology would baffle any biologist. Making a called shot for “vitals” or another apparently vulnerable area inflicts normal damage, with no special game effect.

SAN LOSS: 1/1D10.

THE CLOSING OF THE BREACH

Complex ritual, 40 hours of study (SAN loss 0/1D8).

A ritual to break a connection with the unnatural. This could be the banishment of a Great Old One, one of their servitors, the ending of an ongoing hypergeometric effect, or the destruction of a gate. Knowledge of the ritual is usually not enough; the operator must extensively research the thing to be banished. Make a note of which effects the operator has researched. For example: “The Closing of the Breach (Glaaki, Tillinghast Space, Tsathoggua).” Whether the ritual affects any given situation is up to the Handler.

WP cost to remove shoggoth = 10.

HANDLER NOTES

Imagine you fell out of a plane, hit the cement, and what your body would look like. Now imagine that purple bruised broken body dragging itself home, covered in frozen mud, tumorous growths ballooning, popping, and weeping thick foul smelling pus. Keep this imagery in mind as the agents move through their investigation.

Haunting-Horrors are vulnerable to light and full daylight destroys them. Dr. Bellows navigates through forested areas and at night. If you need a reason for the erratic GPS behavior, he can blip back and forth between here and the Dreamlands as his transformation takes hold.