If your players aren't scared of deep ones you aren't running this right. Deep ones aren't dumb animals or savage brutes. They're intelligent and have access to sorceries and sciences that humans can only dream of. They're also an ancient race on the verge of extinction and getting desperate. One scenario I'm going to run for Call of Cthulhu is what I call the Clinic of the Drowned. The players were terminally ill patients in the postwar 1940s who're receiving miraculous treatment at the Marsh Memorial clinic. Tumors disappear, neural degeneration reverses itself, and decayed flesh springs back to life and health. The strange bug-eyed doctors are insistent on everyone talking their pills, however. Patients who leave always seem troubled as if they've been told a horrible truth, and a few have needed to be institutionalized. If the players break into the mental ward they discover a perfectly ordinary mental hospital. Better actually. This place has won awards for patient care. There isn't anything strange going on in the mental ward.
When the players get into the basement what they discover is a massive tank of fish flesh tended by strange fishman scientists. After they've been restrained and stopped screaming a deep one with gold-rimmed coral encrusted spectacles explains that they've been implanted with healthy regenerative cell culture harvested from Dagon's bone marrow. The pills are to prevent their full transformation and will be cut off if they tell anyone about this. As for why they're doing this "Humans fear death more than anything. As the years pass you will voluntarily forsake the weakness of prairie ape meat for the eternal strength and youth of the Ocean folk's flesh. The final pill bottle will sit unopened and you will join us beneath the waves to dance in splendour and joy forevermore. Our race will rise again, and the towers of Ghudigbx will above the ocean and make the cities of New Yahk and San France-Sisko seem as the mud huts of the Etruscans."
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
You have a start and an end.
What is going to happen in the middle? Why should they even visit the mental ward? Why not go to the basement directly?
I also have a problem patients just leaving. That means every patient is "in" on the plot and only cares to stay alive? That doesn't seem human to me - especially when considering Lovecraft. So many of his characters prefer suicide over what is to come, so the threat of "we no longer give you pills" doesn't seem harsh.
Honestly I like the idea in general, but I would probably rather prefer the investigators be some "outside" force that hears about strange things happening in the hospital. Maybe make only one or two investigators patients - this also adds a conflict of interest between the investigators. The "blessed" ones, who might want to keep living, and the normal ones, who might want to destroy the facility. You should then make sure that the final reveal only happens at the very end of the scenario though - so if there's PvP happening that the session ends shortly after it.
And this reminds me that I really need to watch Gyeongseong Creature.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
A few of them go barking mad and get contained in the mental ward. This includes several patients on suicide watch. Also the pills are the only thing keeping them human. The flesh of Dagon is already within them. They'll live even if the facility gets shut down, but if you tell on them they'll just sneak back into the ocean and you'll end up mutating into a deep one and either going insane, going to live under the sea, or getting locked up somewhere like the elephant man. The patients are being threatened with the transformation to keep quiet. As for hooks I have three additional ones.
They kidnapped a snoopy reporter who saw too much and, because the ocean man with the golden spectacles is a bit of a softie, are dosing him with salt wine and the flesh of the juju clam so that even his friends and family think he's crazy as he keeps ranting things like "God has been driven mad because the devil drove a spike into his brain. The gods must play the pipes and bang the drums to keep him calm for his mad thrashing would otherwise destroy galaxies and extinguish dimensions. They cannot help us or answer our prayers. ", "there's fishmen in the basement tending to the bonescrapings of a god. They inject this holy flesh into the sick and dying and they are made whole. " ,"the highest form of life in the universe is a living gas, and the universe was made for them, not man. humanity is just a happy accident. We do not exist on purpose and no one created us. ", and "Lumley was wrong. The sleeper under the sea has no brother. That's just him later regretting the destruction of humanity and trying to prevent himself from doing it." Everything he sees is either metaphorically or literally true, but it just sounds like gibberish to the uninitiated. If he survived the events he may be a useful source of information in the future.
The local drunk saw a horrible dog man breaking open the medical waste bin behind the clinic. He's been ranting about it down at the Black Hound tavern and the regulars are treating it as the height of comedy. Then he turns up with his face ripped off and his brain eaten. If the players investigate they'll discover it's a ghoul who discovered the secrets of the hospital and desperately wants to eat the god flesh in the basement. He's suspiciously cooperative and offers to help them. If the players are stupid enough to ally with him after he just killed and ate a man, and he's going to deliberately be giving them false information at every turn, he tries to kill and eat them at the first opportunity so he doesn't have to share the flesh as well as to learn what they know. Because ghouls are like people: some of them are just buttholes.
The deep ones have an old smuggling cave beneath the clinic they use to sneak in and out. A picnicking couple saw them emerging so the deep one clumsy enough to get caught grabbed them and injected them with a special opioid tincture that causes memory loss. Of course, it's strange that a beloved picnic spot collapsed into the sea and the couple who last used it woke up right next to where it used to be with no memory of what happened but with all their lobster rolls, cheese, pie, and sodas gone, but not the macaroni salad or pickles because that particular deep one doesn't like pasta or pickles, as well as a couple of odd bruises. It's a fair distance away from the clinic, just far enough away that the local constabulary see no connection, but a thorough search of the site may lead to a connection. A fishman thoughtless enough to endanger a major repopulation operation by stealing a pic-a-nik basket is also going to be careless with properly disposing of hypodermic needles and clinic stationary.
If you wanted to take it full pulp you could have a German spy trying to steal the secret of the fishmen. A proper lovecraftian twist is that he's actually an immortal evil sorcerer of the Clark Ashton Smith ilk allied to Hitler out of convenience and none of the secrets he obtain are going to help Hitler. Instead they're going to help him overthrow Hitler once he sculpts a kaiju out of the dagon flesh and uses the false god to destroy entire armies. In Lovecraft wizards are either charming, eccentric, and about to be eaten by something unspeakable, or immortal monsters with power rivaling the gods.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Yeah, that fills the gaps that I had when I initially read your post. If you move out of the clinic & into the surrounding area it makes more sense. Didn't know you initially planned that due to the players being patients.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context