I’m a fan of RPGs, and tomorrow I’ll be running a game of Call of Cthulhu over the internet for some friends. Below is the introduction for the scenario I’ve just made. Fans of H.P. Lovecraft might recognise the reference to “strange days.” And what do you think the stone house might be?

In recent months you’ve been hearing a lot of stories about the “strange days.” Eyes have been fixed on the countryside outside the old city, and experts have been trying to work out what happened all those decades ago, back in the ‘80s. And those experts have talked to reporters, and those reporters have written stories, and now the public seems obsessed with the tales of what happened in rural Massachusetts all those years ago.

Perhaps it’s because of the unnatural mystery in the air that you’ve all been having strange recurring dreams: each night a horrible picture in your mind becomes clearer and clearer, even as the vision becomes darker and darker. You see the thing in a strange subterranean light: the dream has given you inhuman eyes. You see the ancient stones of a house that could never have been built by human hands: massive stones of bizarre texture, strangely coloured, and of impossible dimensions. And much of the building is missing: you see its vast open jagged doorway like a mouth, threatening in its weird contortion and dark emptiness.

Weeks and weeks of the same dream, slightly altered, and you get a glimpse beyond the mad stone house to a building beyond that: this house itself stands in a bigger house. You realise now what you have seen in your vision: an ancient house standing as an exhibit in the University Museum.

This is madness, but you have an impulse you cannot escape: to visit the museum and see the exhibit for yourself. Perhaps by discovering something about it, seeing how closely it matches the object in your dream, you can put your mind at rest and be able to find a night of dreamless sleep once again.

(Image is from Pixabay.)