TTRPG on Vidi's Corner

Masks of Nyarlathotep - Prologue: Peru | Part 1

Fri, 18 Mar 1921 00:00:00 +0000

Content Advisory

This story may depict violence, disturbing scenes, and other mature themes. Reader discretion is advised.

Masks of Nyarlathotep - Prologue: Peru

Part 1 - The Dinner at Bar Cordano

Lima, Peru. March 1921.

"…shapeless lurkers and caperers in darkness, and vacuous herds of drifting entities that pawed and groped and groped and pawed; the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, that are like them blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts."

H. P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

It is 1921 - a golden age of discovery, of ambition, of a world still trembling from the wounds of the Great War yet pressing forward with trembling optimism. Aeroplanes cross continents. Radio voices leap between cities. Science promises to illuminate every last shadow the old world left behind.

And yet some shadows do not yield to light.

Somewhere between the newspaper pages celebrating technological marvels, a curious advertisement has been making the rounds in the international press. An explorer by the name of Augustus Larkin claims to have located a lost pyramid somewhere in the remote Andean highlands of Peru - a structure of unknown origin, possibly older than the Incan Empire itself, and reportedly filled with artifacts of incalculable value. He is assembling a small, select expedition. He is looking for the right people.

He found you.

The Investigators

From different corners of the world, fate - or perhaps something older and darker than fate - has drawn together a peculiar company.

Margaret Wyatt carries herself with the quiet gravity of someone who has known loss at close quarters. Daughter of the famous Wyatt family, whose tragic end is spoken of in hushed tones by those who knew them, she has reasons of her own for seeking the unknown. At her side, as always, walks Floyd Glover - the Wyatt family butler, loyal beyond the point where loyalty ends and something deeper begins. Where Margaret goes, Floyd follows. It has always been so.

Then there is Daniel Craft, a journalistic investigator with ink-stained fingers and the look of a man perpetually on the verge of the scoop that will finally turn his career around. Peru, pyramids, mysterious gold - there is a story here. There is always a story.

And there is Boris Zangif - a name that needs no introduction south of the Rio Grande. The famous Russian luchador, known from Mexico City to Guadalajara and reportedly beyond, brings to this unlikely gathering exactly what any expedition into the Andean wilderness could ask for: muscle, resolve, and a certain magnificent indifference to danger.

Later, as the expedition begins to take shape, they will be joined by one more: Dario Cáceres Quispe De La Cruz, a nurse working the emergency wards of a Lima hospital, a man who stumbled into the orbit of this expedition the way people sometimes stumble into things that will change their lives entirely - by accident, and then all at once.

Bar Cordano, Lima - 7 p.m., March 18th

The Bar Cordano is one of the better establishments Lima has to offer - wood-panelled walls, tiled floors, the smell of good seafood and warm bread, and the particular hum of a room full of people with money and ambitions. The investigators are shown to a reserved table where three men are already seated, waiting.

The first impression of Augustus Larkin is not what one might expect of an expedition leader.

He is not unpleasant. Quite the contrary - he is warm, self-deprecating, quick with a joke. He speaks enthusiastically of the lost pyramid, of Tiwanaku cultural parallels, of the golden artifacts he claims to have purchased from a local farmer as proof of the site’s existence. He produces them at dinner: a pendant in the form of a man holding two rods or staves, and a golden cup inlaid with turquoise, carved with geometric patterns. They are beautiful. They are also, for the archaeologically inclined, subtly wrong - the two pieces are from entirely different periods and cultures, which raises questions Larkin does not seem eager to address.

Because the second impression of Augustus Larkin is harder to ignore: the man looks ill. Profoundly, disturbingly ill. His skin is the colour of old wax. His white linen suit - expensive once, now hanging loose on a frame that has clearly shed considerable weight - is damp at the collar. He sweats despite the mild evening. There are shadows under his eyes that no amount of sleep seems to have touched. He laughs and gestures and reassures, insisting it is merely the long-term effects of malaria, that it will present no difficulty on the expedition - do not worry, not at all - but his hands tremble slightly when he reaches for his wine glass, and anyone watching closely enough notices that his veins, visible at the wrist, are oddly discoloured. Almost black.

He wears too much cologne. Not enough to hide the other smell, faint but unmistakable in the close air of the restaurant - something rotten, underneath.

Beside him sits his personal aide and bodyguard: Luis de Mendoza. A gaunt man with pronounced cheekbones and deep-set blue eyes the colour of old ice. He does not eat. He does not speak unless addressed. He watches everyone at the table with the still, patient attention of something that is not in any hurry whatsoever. When he does speak, his Spanish carries an accent no one can quite place - archaic, almost, like a language preserved in amber. A successful read of the room reveals a particular coldness directed at one person in particular: the third man at the table.

Jesse Hughes, introduced as a folklorist from New York City and a new addition to the expedition, seems pleasant enough - a compact, well-dressed man with a pipe and an easy sardonic smile. He listens to Larkin’s pitch with careful attention, asks the occasional pointed question, and says very little about himself. The tension between him and de Mendoza is present from the first moment - a thin wire drawn tight between them, invisible but almost audible.

Over the meal, Larkin lays out the expedition: three hired trucks leaving Lima on the morning of Monday the 21st, heading south toward the city of Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, then overland by pack animal into the highlands where the pyramid waits. He promises reimbursement for any supplies, answers questions about logistics with practiced charm, and manages throughout to make the whole enterprise sound entirely reasonable.

What he cannot quite manage is to look healthy. By the end of the evening, he is perceptibly paler than when he sat down, his hands shaking more openly now. He makes his excuses - early night, the journey ahead, the malaria acting up - and departs with de Mendoza at his heel, the bodyguard’s unblinking gaze sweeping the table one last time before they disappear into the Lima night.

After Dinner - The Truth About Jesse Hughes

With Larkin and de Mendoza gone, Jesse Hughes sets down his pipe and looks at the investigators across the candlelit table.

The sardonic smile is still there. But there is something more serious underneath it now.

He tells them his real name: Jackson Elias. The name may ring a bell - he is the author of Sons of Death and several other well-regarded books exposing death cults across the world. He is not a folklorist. He is a writer, a researcher, and a man with a very healthy instinct for when something is deeply wrong.

He has been in Peru for months. He came following a trail of something he initially believed to be a human cult - drawn here by stories of a local legend: the Kharisiri. In Andean folklore, the Kharisiri are pale-faced monsters - sometimes described as conquistadors, sometimes as priests - who ambush lone travellers in the highlands and drain the fat from their bodies, leaving behind emaciated, barely-living husks. Elias is a rational man. He does not believe in monsters. What he believes in is death cults, in human beings doing terrible things in the name of something they call sacred, and he is convinced that behind the Kharisiri legend lies exactly that: an organised group of killers, abducting and murdering people in the region around Lake Titicaca, probably for decades.

And he believes that Augustus Larkin is connected to it.

How? He is not certain. But Larkin’s attempts to recruit foreigners for this expedition are suspicious - locals have refused him, repeatedly, which suggests that people who know this area understand something about the pyramid and its surroundings that Larkin is not telling his recruits. De Mendoza, meanwhile, has been identified to Elias by multiple sources as a suspected Kharisiri himself - though Elias takes this as metaphor rather than literal fact. He is a dangerous man. A man to be feared. A man who has been asking questions in the wrong places.

Elias has a contact at the National University of San Marcos - a Professor Sánchez, an archaeologist who has been trying to reach Larkin for months and been rebuffed at every turn. Tomorrow, Elias intends to visit him. There may be documents in the university archives. There may be answers.

He would very much like the investigators to come with him.

The question, hanging in the warm Lima evening air, is simple enough:

Do you trust him?

And if you do - what, exactly, have you walked into?

To be continued in Part 2 - The University, and the Thing in the Storeroom.

The Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign was originally written by Larry DiTillio and Lynn Willis, published by Chaosium. This narrative account reflects our table’s playthrough and is written for personal, non-commercial use.

Masks of Nyarlathotep - Prologue: Peru | Part 2

Sat, 19 Mar 1921 00:00:00 +0000

Masks of Nyarlathotep - Prologue: Peru

Part 2 - The University, and the Thing in the Storeroom.

Lima, Peru. March 19th, 1921.

Content Advisory

This story may depict violence, disturbing scenes, and other mature themes. Reader discretion is advised.

The morning passes without incident - which, in retrospect, is the universe’s way of lulling you into a false sense of security before it shows you something you cannot un-see.

At two o’clock in the afternoon, the investigators make their way across the campus of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos - the oldest university in the Americas, founded in 1551, its stone corridors saturated with the particular quiet authority of a place that has outlasted empires. The Museo de Arqueología y Antropología is housed in a long, two-storey building painted a deep yellow, fronted by the University Park. Jackson Elias leads the way with the easy confidence of a man who has been here before, nodding to staff as they pass through.

Professor Sánchez’s office is on the ground floor - a tall-ceilinged, airy room with white walls and shelves that have long since surrendered to the weight of books, journals, and artifacts arranged in the organised chaos of a working academic mind. A large hardwood desk dominates the centre, barely visible beneath its burden of papers. The windows are open. Somewhere outside, a bird is singing.

Professor Nemesio Sánchez himself is thirty-five years old, neatly dressed in a suit, his hair oiled and his glasses precisely positioned - the portrait of a man who believes in order, in evidence, in the rigorous application of human reason to the mysteries of the past. He welcomes Elias with genuine warmth and extends the same courtesy to the investigators with the careful politeness of someone who is trying not to show how worried he actually is.

What the Professor Knows

Sánchez wastes little time. He has been trying to reach Augustus Larkin for months.

He saw the press coverage about the expedition - the lost pyramid, the golden artifacts, the appeal for recruits - and immediately reached out to offer his expertise and the university’s resources. Larkin never replied. Sánchez sent letters with specific archaeological advice about the region. No response. He even attempted to approach Larkin in person, and was turned away by de Mendoza with barely a word of explanation.

His conclusion is not a flattering one. Peru has no legal framework to prevent foreign nationals from removing archaeological finds from its territory. In the academic community, there is a word for people who exploit this absence: huaqueros. Grave robbers. Sánchez says the word with the controlled fury of a man who has watched his country’s heritage walk out the door in foreign pockets for the better part of his career, and who has learned that anger, however justified, does not change the law.

What he can do - what he has been doing - is research. If Larkin will not include him, Sánchez will simply find out everything he can about the site independently, so that when the time comes, someone will know what was there and what was taken.

To this end, he and one of his graduate students - Trinidad Rizo, a bright, energetic young woman with a gift for archival work - have been methodically combing the university’s library and storage vaults for any documents that might reference the pyramid or the surrounding area. Three days ago, they found something.

A document. Handwritten on vellum, dating to the mid-sixteenth century. The confession of a Spanish conquistador named Gaspar Figueroa, written in 1543 - a rambling, terrified, deeply strange account of something that happened to Figueroa and his companions after they left Lima following the assassination of Francisco Pizarro. They traveled south into the highlands in search of treasure. They found, in the mountains south-west of Lake Titicaca, a pyramid surrounded by a network of underground tunnels. The walls of those tunnels were inlaid with gold. The men pried a section of it free.

What happened next, Figueroa could barely bring himself to write.

Sánchez has been working with Rizo to produce a clean transcription of the document’s key passages - the original is old, the handwriting difficult, the language archaic. Rizo had taken the document down to the storeroom in the basement to locate a related artifact referenced in Figueroa’s account: a section of worked gold recovered from the same site, catalogued in the 1890s and largely forgotten in storage ever since.

That was some time ago. She has not come back.

She should have been here by now, Sánchez says, and the slight tension at the corner of his eyes is not the look of a man who thinks a student has simply lost track of time. It is the look of a man who is trying very hard not to think what he is actually thinking.

He asks if you would go down and check on her. He will wait here with Elias.

The Descent

The storeroom is reached by staircase and a long corridor in the basement of the building - a different world from the sun-filled office above. Down here the electric lighting is dim and yellowed, throwing more shadow than light across the stone walls. The corridor is perfectly, entirely silent. Not the silence of an empty building, but the silence of a place holding its breath.

The storeroom door is ajar. Rizo left it open when she went in.

The room itself is vast - eighty feet long and nearly half as wide, lined floor to ceiling with shelves packed with crates, boxes, and artifacts, each neatly labeled, everything meticulously catalogued. Or it was, once. Now, at the far end of the room, between two rows of shelving, several crates and artifacts have been dragged or knocked from their places, piled in a heap against the floor.

The light down here is poor enough that shadows move in your peripheral vision as you walk - following you, shifting between the shelves, vanishing when you look directly at them. The rational mind supplies explanations. The hindbrain does not entirely agree.

And then you find her.

Trinidad Rizo - twenty years old, brilliant, energetic, with an infectious smile that the people who knew her will describe for the rest of their lives - is buried beneath the fallen artifacts, half-covered by the debris of crates that have been pulled from the shelves around her.

You almost think, for a moment, that she might just be unconscious.

You look closer.

Her body is desiccated. Not decomposed - not the slow work of time - but drained, collapsed inward, her skin drawn tight over her bones like paper left in the sun for a hundred years. She has been reduced to something barely recognisable as human. Her clothes hang loose over the wasted frame beneath them. On the upper portion of her chest, roughly six inches across, is a wound unlike any wound a blade or bullet makes: a torn, bloody circle, the flesh ragged at the edges as though something attached itself there and pulled.

Her face is the worst of it. Her face is still her face - still young, still recognisable - but it has been frozen in the last expression she ever wore, and that expression is pure, wordless terror. Her eyes are open and staring at something on the ceiling above her that is no longer there.

Sanity rolls, quietly, around the table.

What Was Left Behind

Tucked inside Rizo’s jacket pocket, poking out just enough to catch the eye, is a small notebook - her research notes, dense with her handwriting. She never finished the transcription, but she got far enough. The notes tell the story Figueroa tried to tell: the tunnels, the gold, the thing that happened to his companions. What they became.

Translation:

According to the text, Figueroa set out to seek his own fortune following Pizarro’s assassination in 1541. He was accompanied by Hernando Ruiz, Diego Garrido, Luis de Mendoza, and Pedro de Velasco—fellow conquistadors who had served with Pizarro. They traveled into the southern highlands of the Andes, looking for treasure, hoping to make their fortunes before heading back to Spain and retiring in luxury. Hearing rumors of an ancient temple filled with gold, the men set off into the mountains southwest of Lake Titicaca. There they found a pyramid surrounded by a maze-like structure of underground tunnels. The walls of the tunnels were inlaid with intricate gold carvings. The men pried out a large section of the gold, exhausting themselves in the attempt. That night, as they rested, an evil sickness befell Figueroa’s companions; in the morning light they looked gaunt and deathlike. Complaining of agonizing hunger, they pursued Figueroa; de Mendoza caught up with him and started to devour him like a human leech. Figueroa shot his friend in the head and fled, pausing only to snatch up as much of the gold as he could carry. Figueroa eventually arrived back in Lima, hoping to get passage home, but he was too weakened by his ordeal. Figueroa describes himself as wasted, little more than a walking corpse. I read Final Confessions as Figueroa’s attempt to lift the guilt that his avarice had placed upon him. He believed that his fate and that of his companions was brought about by their desecration of a holy place, and his most fervent wish was that he could undo the damage he had inflicted. He describes how he can still hear his friends’ voices, crying out with inhuman hunger, and how in the dark of the night he can hear another voice, ancient and seductive, promising him eternal life if he returns to the temple. The voice told Figueroa how to contact it, but it seems Figueroa was too afraid to ever attempt this. A postscript written by the priest - who performed the last rites - states that Figueroa died a day after completing his Final Confessions. His last words were an entreaty to whatever gods were listening to forgive him his blasphemies.

And beside her body, partly buried under the debris of the shattered crate she had been examining, is the artifact she came to find.

It is a length of worked gold - approximately two feet long, three inches wide, its surface covered in non-repeating geometric shapes, squares and rectangles with no obvious meaning to them, its ends rough and broken as though it was torn from something larger. It weighs considerably more than it looks like it should. And on its surface, barely visible but unmistakable once you see them, are marks in the gold that look very much like the burned remains of skin - as if something, or someone, was driven away from it by touching it.

The gold is cold. The burned marks are fresh.

Someone else was here, not long ago. Someone who found this artifact and could not, or would not, take it with them.

And that someone left a trail.

Blood - barely visible on the stone floor in the dim light, an intermittent smear of footprints - leads away from Rizo’s body, winding through the storeroom by a circuitous route, heading back up toward the main building.

Back toward Professor Sánchez’s office.

To be continued in Part 3 - The Kiss of de Mendoza