Trail of Cthulhu - Eternals Lies moves into the endgame (minor spoilers)

Everyone smiling.

We returned to Eternal Lies on Tuesday night, some four years on from starting this epic Trail of Cthulhu campaign. We'd - more than luck than judgement - successful defeated one of the most dangerous cultist leaders we'd faced and were now stuck on an island off the coast of Thailand with access to a huge library but no boat to escape.

The session turned into a recap, as we had finally finished pulling most of the threads we had, travelling to Savannah, Los Angeles, Mexico City, the Yucatan, Malta, Ethiopia and Thailand with some shorter stops elsewhere. We have a destination - possibly our final destination - and something awaits us at a remote, forbidden mountain. It seemed the perfect time to recap our notes to try and work out what we're doing.

The campaign is built with a veneer of lies and obfuscations, with a global network of cultists who all have their own, very different agendas. However, we don't really know what the real mythos entity is that sits behind this. It's clear people were misled and key witnesses are dead or missing. We've ended up with a pretty scorched earth approach but we don't really know what the real truth is here. 

We know something bad was summoned. We know that it may not have left. We suspect that it wasn't what most of the people expected, but we rely on the testimony of cult believers and people broken by the events. Unreliable witnesses. Liars. The testimony of a godlike alien entity. Nothing is certain. Nothing seems clean or clear. Our characters face the failure of their personal lives and relationships, and are perhaps tainted in a way that they cannot return to how things were. Are we just puppets in a power play between forces we can't comprehend.

The campaign is deliciously done; it has a purist noir tone, but sometimes we have had to act as if it was pulp just to survive and move forward. It is perhaps one of the best mythos campaigns I've read (when it first came out) or played.

We recapped through our notes. I have 85-pages of scribbled jottings (well, 87-pages after the session) and Dr Mitch has something similar. We confirmed what we knew, and realised that we seems to have been scraping around at the surface of this mystery, albeit in different geographies. There were occasional moments of insight, but the big picture is not quite in focus, hidden by the Liar. Perhaps we'll never know, but we hope that the actions our characters have taken are justified and helpful for folks.

Rich and Pelgrane Press have woven a truly challenging and intense mystery, and one of the best campaigns that I have played. I think that one way or another, this will end in 2025. Death or victory, or perhaps both? I'm not certain the characters will come out of alive, but that's okay if their actions succeed to preventing a threat to the world. I think Dr Mitch and I have resigned ourselves to the thought that our characters won't get out of this alive.

23 January 2025