Frederick T. Pyter
It has been an awfully long time perceptually since the day the reality of COVID crashed into my house like an angry wildebeest on Hunter S. Thompson levels of stimulants. The day was March 5th, 2020, and my gaming friend John of decades had come over anticipating hanging out and possibly a game session. My wife had not counted on him being there. After John had left, I got excoriated by an infuriated Celtic-American woman I married about the pandemic and that no guests were to be in the house any further until we all knew better what was happening. Toilet paper on the brain and panic buying has prominent, and we all knew we were headed where our society in its modern incarnation had never been. Unease and anomie ruled those days.
Our game of Call of Cthulhu with John aka JDH, Billy and Ekan set in 1926 Providence RI had to be put into cryogenic storage since no-one was going to come over. As Zadie wrote, we were, “confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do in it.” John could not drive for pay through Uber or Lyft with everyone “sheltering in place.” The restaurant Ekan served at shut with no warning, just an email not to go to the restaurant because work was halted that day. Bill still worked as a specialty food distributor representative, but his industry was in a flop sweat panic due to the grocery industry exhibiting the same. I had left my retail job of over twenty-two years due to the mental effect it was having on me, about eighteen months before COVID Wildebeest Day. This meant I was the one out of the Quantum Mustard Gaming Society’s current four member least left in an anomic state of financial uncertainty and as to what to do with time. For years I had, like Mr. Denton on Doomsday, dreamed of all the time to read, write, and take in culture I pleased to have instead of punching a clock and breaking my body parts moving organic produce. I made it happen and grew. I had a cushion of adjustment to a life at home mostly with no job and a semi-hermetic life for a year and a half before we all were told to isolate, and the ridiculous legal wrangle began in this state over masking and Emergency Orders took over. Like Zadie, I did not have a “firm place to be at nine a.m. every morning or “boss who tells you what to do.”” I had my own Circadian rhythms take a complete move to chaos over those days in March and April, achieving a semi-nocturnal but still semi-random sleep/waking split, and when my Astronomy class was moved completely online after Spring Break, I knew I had to DO something. More than something.
With no RPG night at my house, my in-person seclusion except for groceries and prescriptions took hold. I pined for the conviviality of game night and the interaction of that most sublime of things, practiced people putting a story together line by line improvisationally for the sheer fun and catharsis of it.
Since Providence was in the chiller as a story, I put the word out to Billy and Ekan that I could be convinced to write a different game to run for them over Zoom. Ms. Smith says that “Art stands in dubious relation to necessity.,” but it was clear to me this was not true. Bakers stayed home and made banana bread, Zadie authored essays, and I asked my two friends what kind of story they wanted to play. The answer was they wanted to play eighties art-rockers in the Call of Cthulhu horror RPG.
“We wanna be 80’s rock stars!” – Ekan and Billy on Zoom
Soon my mind bubbled with various awful ploys and plot tricks to arm myself with. Girding myself with a copy of T.E.D. Klein’s “Nadelman’s God,” a lifetime’s worth of Call of Cthulhu gaming supplements and much coffee and seltzer, I started off my plot with,” What if the garbage golem that is chasing his father-figure Nadelman (a nasty man who deserves it even though he didn’t call him up) kept chasing Nadelman after he has to leave his refuge in a Manhattan temple?” Klein’s garbage-strewn 1982 New York fit right in with David Cronenberg’s most fertile period as a horror film director temporally and thematically. I started thinking about what forms of body horror effects I wanted to create and install upon my poor Investigators as the plot went on, and how I wanted to avoid the player knowledge effect by choosing a Great Old One with such a scant background in literature and gaming I was free to do as I willed with it; Arwassa, the Screamer in the Silence.
“The green fog rolls low and thick off the stage into the crowd pressed at the front of the security line. As you watch from backstage left, Blind Idiot God takes the stage and Albrecht Eigen approaches the mic, hungrily beginning the spoken word introduction to the band’s lead single from their second and latest studio album, “Nova Implosion.” Xander stands behind his triple face, triple decker keyboard rack like a priest about to preside over a service, and that numbskull Donny starts the sonic bombardment with his Ibanez bass just a bit before Eigen finishes his intonement. Holm’s double footed bass drum pounds tachycardically through the first measures, and the REAL noise begins.”
I named the scenario, “The Opening Act,” as that is what the players’ characters’ were hired to be by the oddly piscine, disturbingly bald, and massively obese band manager, Enos Milken of Birmingham, Eng. I also named it such due to that being what Blind Idiot God wanted to perform. A series of “opening acts” or “gate summonings” to bring “the Host of Arwassa from the Court of the Daemon Sultan,” also known as “Azathoth’s playpen at the ‘un-center’ of the universe.” The interstellar sonic awfulness that is the members of the Host of Arwassa range from mere Baronets to a mighty Duke; all seeking to escape their service keeping Azathoth in its’ idiot trance rather than wakeful and expanding…and expanding.
The PC (player characters’) band, Anathema, was made up of Gabriel (Ekan), a dour goth-ish highly artistic rock composer and multi-instrumentalist with a wide knowledge of pharmaceuticals; and Anna, a sharp, more punk style guitar player, both with a hunger for occult knowledge. Yes, horrifically, a drum machine was involved. B.I.G. and Mr. Milken offered them a tour contract with more money and benefits than they had ever seen before to open for them, and being admirable players, their characters took the bait.
Weeks rolled on and masks became de rigeur, along with shortages and paranoia at the grocery store and more canceled events than I cared to count. The environment politically had started to get to new levels of “good trouble” as John Lewis put it and bad as I saw offence after offence perpetrated on protestors and journalists alike, as well as Portland OR’s mayor. My friend John had asked to get on board as he again had wi-fi signal in his apartment, and he was incorporated as Dex, a friend of Gabe and Anna’s along on tour to make sure their heads did not get too swelled. Dex was a lucky guy, fit, and familiar with the world of touring rock. I had placed Dex in as a reserve character since the mortality and insanity rates are quite high in Call of Cthulhu. I chose to break him out for player status and told John to generate him as a player character.
“Here is this novel, made with love”- Z. Smith, Something to Do
In echo of the above, out of my own time I carved an area not just to do something, but to do it with “L” Love. With my friends short on games and social entertainment combining with my need and routine of creating plots for speculative RPG scenarios, it was transparent to me this effort was not just about keeping one night a week as a social bond; but about providing them with the best story my abundant time and “L” love of genre and their entertainment. When they are entertained, I am pleased. It is a very synergistic audience-performer feedback loop. Zadie writes about writers, “the work must be done;” but these are my close friends, and they deserve the best I have under these awful Covid-stances.
Later in the story, when Eigen had cast a Shriveling spell and turned Gabe’s right arm into a wizened, dried, puckered mass; I took the spell from the game and jumped up the effect one more level. One might think that a Shriveled arm might smell bad, but I decided to be a more painful sort of C of C Keeper by describing its smell as delicious, like smoky spicy jerky.
“Oh my God, that’s SO disturbing”- Ekan, on his PC’s jerked arm after game
This is amongst the highest praise in the land a C of C Keeper can obtain. Double Bullseye. As the tour dates progressed on through the weeks and the players found out about B.I.G.’s plots to call increasingly of Arwassa’s court over after the first ritual in San Fransisco, the deeper the became enmired with the band and its mysteries. An encounter with a summoning horn by Anna at the first of B.I.G.’s grand scale “cookouts” or mass after arena gig party and mass sacrifice to the Screamer in the Silence left her connected to the dimension she called the host member across from. Eventually she pulled in another interdimensional being weeks later in the game that began cohabiting her body against its will. Bodily changes soon occurred with Anna as well. The planned effect of the combination of rock and roll tour format storytelling, Cronenbergian body horror, Klein’s garbage golem chasing Nadelman, now B.I.G.’s occult guru, and the layers-of-the-onion method of writing investigative supernatural horror all combined for profound effect and entertainment as we all watched BLM, rioting, George Floyd, COVID madness, dauntless activism and mass chaos descend that summer. Outside, all was real world madness. The kind people do awful things to their minds, bodies, and nervous systems to escape from perceiving. But within Zoom and the QMGS we had our own private madness as divinest sense (Thanks E. Dickinson) to play through and embellish. Smith’s quote that “the most powerful art is an experience and a going-through” could not be truer about RPG scenarios as an art form.
By autumn no-one had doubts that we were in for one of the bleaker winters Wisconsin had seen. “The Opening Act” had progressed along to the point that the characters were now fully aware the band had malign sorcerers as half its number, and they were strongly considering ditching the tour completely and getting outside help. Anna’s slow transformation through dimensional link with a silicate entity was punctuated with its declarations of disgust at the biological monstrosity that was Anna’s meat-shell and all the bacteria residing in it. Body horror for NPC’s as well, a door swings both ways. There were yet more heartwarming declarations of disturbance at these and more shenanigans that winter as I doubled down as a Keeper on slowly whittling away at their Sanity scores and providing the next stages of the onion with my own “Unspeakable Text” in the Weird tradition, “De Occvltam Vis,” by “An Excommunicate.” The tome was full of spells and secrets to be employed in the coming Battle of the Bands.
Isolation through that period we jestingly still refer to as “the holidays,” better and more realistically known as “the 4th quarter”, got very deep. Cold and snow came right early, removing any chance at Bay View having a Trick-or-Treat. As more people got online, Zoom became harder to use during peak periods. The federal election loomed, kept looming while we voted absentee, counted, loomed some more, and just kept looming like an insane weaver until Georgia was finally done and it was all over but the Presidentially induced treasonous riot. A creeping bitterness emerged from rural white America, incapable of comprehending that the fact-optional period of Federal government was over, and their man had lost fairly and clearly in a cleaner than ever documented set of elections. The harbinger of minority-white America was the Georgia decision, a bellwether clear as the ring of Waterford crystal, and denial reigned and reigns now over conservative America because they just cannot come to grips with it mentally to our collective shame and woe.
By February Anathema had completely taken off from the tour and was working actively co-operating with an organization called the Randolph Pierce Foundation to stop B.I.G. from summoning Arwassa and a few of the Host at a dairy farm “cookout” outside of Cleveland after the Richfield Stadium show. They players took a couple of weeks to plan the final push against the band, while the garbage golem and his surrogate dad melded into one entity and B.I.G. put Awassa’s Duke in the flake Donny the bassist’s body, leaving Donny as the least talented new member of the Court of the Daemon Sultan. The players took an IMMENSE amount of Magic Points collected by B.I.G. at their gigs they had liberated and turned it against the Duke at the Cleveland show, but the enormity of the energy blast left the arena filled with the mad, the rent, the dying, and dozens of stunned law-enforcement types there responding to a “riot call.”
March 370th, 2020, aka March 5, 2021, came around, and then April, and the players had finally finished putting the Grand Kibosh on B.I.G. at awful personal cost. Anna developed a huge crystalline sonic blasting organ around her throat because of harboring a being not of this dimension, Dex flat out died when Eigen spoke the Dread Curse of Azathoth at him, and Gabe is insane and bereft of Anna, his only cold comfort that they stopped B.I.G. and the Host of Arwassa.
Today is the day my second Moderna shot’s waiting period is over. May the 4th be with us, I have A New Hope. I can leave the house now as an obese diabetic with high blood pressure and not wonder whether I will die two weeks later, wind up on a ventilator or become an asymptomatic carrier. The first MU The One Ring RPG group game session in person happens Thursday in my basement, new blood after 30 years of many of the same friends for decades. I will be extremely glad to have guests again, even if I feel setting up the snack buffet is still something that should wait. John has moved to Austin, Texas now after yet more strokes of abominable luck, Billy is in with me in the 1st ed. Advanced D&D game John is running over Zoom, and Ekan will go back to running his Pathfinder game soon I suspect. I will be playing in two games without running any, a position so attractive after 40 years of storytelling I almost feel guilty NOT writing and “merely” playing, freed of the weekly routine of “what if” and “they’d lose at LEAST 1d6 SAN for seeing…”, or kingdom politics, or whatever plot tropes the system I would be using needed and selecting them like a carpenter with a toolbox.
All this COVID time on our hands collectively as a society, and one of our biggest pitfalls is dealing with “time and what to do in it.” A populace so starved for decent entertainment that “Marbula One” marble racing (check YouTube) caught on, and so inept at creating their own they had no choice but to adopt new-to-them frames of entertainment or starve mentally.
I had a better set of choices. I chose the Love of my friends and our collective need for interactive entertainment, as well as my need to spin off story ideas as a dynamo spins off voltage for synergistic use to better all our group’s isolation time during COVID. I think Marcus Aurelius would be proud.
Marquette University Intimations Project 
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