NECRONOMICON ADVENTURE IDEAS

This is a kind of Commonplace Post for the ideas I've had so far for Necronomicon adventures. They are listed in no particular order, and you'll soon see that most of them are just a bare skeleton or a simple bunch of ideas. If things go as expected, someday these plots will be expanded; until then, here you have what my insane mind has come across after one too many Lovecraft stories and horror films.

· HAVE YOU SEEN THE YELLOW SIGN?
This adventure will begin with the disappearance of a young woman, in the city of San Francisco. Her sister Kitty (first PC) will go to the police to seek help. There, the case will be given to veteran detective Frank (second PC). Together they'll begin the investigation by searching for the former boyfriend of the girl, a scum named Baker (third PC). Only thing he'll know is that she has met some new friends some months ago, and spent more and more time with them, until they split up about a month ago. Said "new friends" are actually a sect, leaded by a decadent "artist" that has fallen under the influence of the Yellow Sign, and has rescued some of Erich Zann's unearthly compositions, by means of which he has created strange melodies that have drug-like effects, to which his acolytes are totally addicted. The bad part is that the music has the effect of heightening sensory input, leading to more intense pleasure, but ultimately to extreme and excruciating pain too; and worse, it's drawing the attention of some entity from far beyond. It's up to the PCs to find about the sect and locate them before it's too late, so they can rescue the missing girl before she dies or goes irremediably mad.

· BELOW THE SANDS
Unlike most of my projected Necronomicon adventures, this one will be on the pulpy side of the mythos. Basically, it's a dungeon crawl across the sand-buried Irem, City of Pillars, that has just appeared from below the sands in the Sinai peninsula. There's gonna be five PCs: two Jewish brothers working for a secret section of Israel's Mossad service, the Cabala: they want to uncover and rescue the secrets of the practitioners of dark arts from Erim. Next we have an English female archaeologist and adventuress, who just wants to explore this mythical locale. Finally there's an American tomb raider and plunderer and his Arab guide, both caring only to get some valuable treasures. I hope to get these three parties to confront each other, to add to the tension of the adventure. Regarding Ir em, they'll soon learn that old Ir em actually was built over an even older city, not of human origin. The deeper they go, the more they'll learn about this, but the closer they'll be to releasing forgotten monsters best left alone.

· PHANTASM
This adventure is based on the movies of the same title (four of them so far). A strange and very sinister mortician has come to a small town; in itself, there's nothing wrong about that. A close relative to one of the PCs will die, and when he visits the cemetery will spot, by chance, the mortician performing something weird with the corpses. After recruiting some help, the PCs can watch over the mortician, but they'll finally be discovered and attacked; they'd better run away. The mortician is, in fact, a creature from some other plane of existence, that came to being when a lone scientist from the beginnings of the XX century devised a machine that allowed him to perceive different realities separated from ours by their different vibrations; too successful, he actually opened a door, and a golden sentient sphere seven inches across crossed it, grossly replacing his brain. He's become an immortal being, that has been amassing an army made with animated corpses, and floating steel spheres. If the PCs survive to learn all this, they may conceive of a plan to imprison him for good in an alternate reality, or even destroy the golden sphere that is his core.

· ALTERNATE SCIENCE
The idea for this adventure was born when the new Large Hadron Collider was created some months ago in Europe; and the stupid controversy regarding the possibility of creating a black hole that would swallow Earth. The device is intended to provide better knowledge of the first stages of the universe, just after the Big Bang. And then I thought: Azathoth is the pure nuclear chaos; what if He actually were everything our universe is not, the sum of every alternate universe created by every bifurcation in the path of existence, all of them coexisting simultaneously? And what if some mad scientist, a secret follower of the mythos, planned to alter the experiments to recreate not the Big Bang, but the opposite, i.e. Azathoth? That would result in the destruction of our universe. Maybe he's been inspired by Nyarlathotep, who likes cheating, and will "only" create a black hole that would destroy our solar system. Either way, his early experiments would create disturbances strong enough for weird phenomena to happen in the region where the hadron collider lies. That's what would draw the attention of the PCs, a series of little unconected "adventures". If they're clever enough they'll find only thing they have in common is being close to the collider, which will lead them to the final confrontation to stop the final fatal experiment.

· THE OLD WAYS ARE BETTER
There's a village in the Basque Country, the Valley of Carranza, that's the closest to Dunwich that you may come across; the most rural town of a very rural region. In many ways, civilization has not reached them. There's an interesting geological formation there, and absolutely enormous cave. It's logical to think that a village that still lives from cattle would give big importance to fertility; and there's a fertility goddess in the mythos, Shub-Niggurath. Whom, for some reason, it's worshipped by the mi-go, the fungi from Yuggoth, who come to our planet for mining. So that cave is not natural, is a mine that the mi-go exploited centuries ago. Those fungi met the people from Carranza and taught them the worship of Shub-Niggurath. And that cult has survived to the present days, in that secluded place. But when some infants disappear (to be used as a sacrifice in a ritual that's repeated whenever the stars are right to retain the favour of the black mother) the police decides to investigate. The PCs will be these policemen, of course, who will have to fight against the wall of silence and the cultists.

· MYSTERIES OF THE WORM
I had the desire to write an adventure about ghouls. I also had some ideas regarding the alien secrets of the book De Vermis Mysteriis. And I had the desire to create an adventure about vampires, reimagined the Lovecraft way. Now all three sources are joined in a single adventure, based on the following background: Nepfren-Ka, the black pharaoh, summoned something, some "worm", from the stars, that merged with him and transformed him into the devourer of souls. After he was dethroned and executed, from his corpse exuded some things that needed human blood to survive. Provided to them by human servants, these immortal vampires hided in the dark corners of Europe. Yet the corruption that emanated from them created the first ghouls, no longer human and not exactly alive, infested by worms from the crypts; that spread like a plague all across the world. Regarding the adventure itself, it will begin when some books are stolen from the library of the Miskatonic University. The PCs will be two professors and three students. Chasing the suspected robber, a guy named D'erlette, they will come to Europe; and there's a plot twist here, for when they confront him they'll realize he's not a bad guy, but someone who is searching for a way to exterminate the ghouls, reversing the original summoning spell, becoming one of the PCs. In a second plot twist, one of the professors will be revealed as a bad guy, of ghoul heritage, that will try to stop them and release a horde of ghouls.

· THE HOUSE
Haunted houses are a well established horror cliche, and they too have been given the mythos twist in stories such as The Rats in the Walls or The Dreams of the Witch House. The background is about a house that was built upon unholy ground, one of those places where the fabric of reality is somewhat thinner; and it was built using arcane non-euclidean geometry, to allow for extra-planar connections. The builder died now more than two centuries ago, and his last descendant has just inherited the house. Trying to inhabit it, he's seen a number of strange phenomena and had wild nightmares, so he gets the aid of the rest of the PCs to investigate what's wrong. And that's that from the arcane gateway a strange ooze is leaking, that's impregnating the house and giving it its own conscience, and also infiltrating people's minds. PCs better discover this and abandon the house and set for its demolition) before they go mad.

· TO SLEEP, PERCHANCE TO DREAM
I have always loved everything oniric, so I have fond feelings for Lovecraft's Dreamland, and feel like directing an adventure set there. But it won't be a light-hearted one, as it will revolve around an evil leader of a sect, a very powerful dreamer that's conquering the Dreamlands and getting increasingly more power; a power that he hopes to be able to retain in the waking world, something that may be viable if he keeps syphoning his followers' souls. PCs will be other dreamers, who must travel the Dreamlands undoing the evil guy's biddings, and finally confronting him (perhaps in Carcosa?). I may create some special rules for this adventure, to govern how mere willpower is able to affect the Dreamlands, or even allowing the expense of Sanity Points to gain powers, at the risk of losing sanity and becoming a permanent inhabitant of the Dreamlands.

· OPERATION FISHERMAN
Cthulhu's best know worshippers, the deep ones, deserve to appear in a Necronomicon adventure. I've thought about giving the players some fun with a pulpy scenario, happily killing deep ones. This adventure is inspired by the finale of The Shadow over Innsmouth: government agents raid said town and destroy Devil's Reef. I'll translate that to the present times, and so the PCs will be federal agents and/or soldiers putting an end to the nefarious history of Innsmouth. Of course, things won't be too easy because it's a whole town we're talking about, and the sheer number of hideous hybrids may overcome the army forces; should they be able to push the PCs to the shore, the aid of true deep ones may make survival a little though. And the desperate rash attempt made by the Marsh family to summon Mother Hydra to possess their matriarch can unleash hell on earth rather literally.