Eternal Lies - Saving the world at a cost (Significant Spoilers in final part)

 

After 48 sessions, our run through of the Trail of Cthulhu roleplaying game's Eternal Lies campaign came to an end. This was a journey we started in February 2021, and we had one hiatus during that flow. Sessions were all played out using Zoom, with character sheets on Google Docs. I mostly used Dice by pCalc and other folk used real dice. As a group we had a high degree of trust, having played together for a long time, and also knowing just how good a set of hands we were in with our GM, Rich. We're all GMs, and we all have a love for this kind of game and setting.

Inherently, there's no way I can write this without some degree of spoilers, so please be warned. That said, both Paul (my fellow player) and I had read the campaign before we played, but it didn't reduce the enjoyment and by the time we got the one of the big reveals we'd pretty much forgotten what it was. I'll flag when the big spoilers are going to land in the text below. 

Eternal Lies is an epic, sprawling campaign that travels from (in our case) the area around New York. to Savannah, Georgia, to LA, and then on to Mexico, Malta, Ethiopia (Abyssinia), Thailand (Siam), and Tibet. It is purist noir in style (the horror is genuinely bleak and terrifying) but we found ourselves having to adopt a pulp approach in some situations to get through, partly has we had two players. Although Gumshoe's investigative and general abilities scale reasonably well to a party size of two, the physical pools (health, athletics, fighting skills) are a little less well scaled, probably as we (as players) focused on getting hold of as many skills to investigate with as we could.

The ending came about a fortnight ago, but I didn't feel up to writing this post until now, as the ending came with a sting in the tail. It all happened in character and was incredibly good, but I - and I think Paul - were left feeling somewhat shocked. It was a stark reminder of why we use dice to randomise outcomes, and how they can flavour the feeling of the game. We'd had so many lucky escapes in the past, but this time it wasn't to be, despite us trying to stack the odds as much as we could in our favour.

Playing the game

I've mentioned to tools we used above, but it's probably worth discussing how the sessions and campaign played out. Our sessions were nominally 1945 through to about 2215 in an evening, so around two and a half hours. In practice, we usually played for around two hours as real life tended to mean that one or other of us arrived around 8pm. We didn't have a set day for the game, and organised ad hoc each time we met. I've played at home, from hotels and outside in the garden. Because we used Zoom rather than a VTT, it meant it was as easy to use my iPad as my MacBook. It kept you very focused on the other people in the game.

We tended to play through a chapter, then have a break for Rich to plan the next steps, then go again. There was a period in 2022 when things got a bit hairy, and twice Paul and I managed to have real life things mean we both missed the same day and told Rich late, and the game went on pause for a bit. I'm so pleased that we returned to it. 

The best campaign reference point I could give is Chaosium's Masks of Nyarlathotep (which I've part run twice), but that is much more epic pulp. This was epic noir for me. The flavour of each chapter was very different, and shades of other genres seeped in. Savannah felt Southern Gothic, LA terribly impersonal like you could be chewed up and spat out, and you could feel the heat as we headed out into the desert in Ethiopia to the hottest place on earth.

Having two players made it very intense, but it was one of the best roleplaying experiences that I've had. Paul had an antiques dealer called Ben, and I had a reporter turned society wife called Lotte, a refugee from Nazi Germany.

Our characters became Yin and Yang, and fiercely protective about each other. I think that there was probably a degree of love that built, but didn't really go anywhere because Lotte was married (albeit the events of the campaign were forcing that relationship into slow path of self-destruction) and Ben was too much of a gentleman. It would have been interesting to have seen how the fast forward scenes at the end may have changed if Lotte had survived the climax of the scenario.

Yes, Lotte died. Off screen. Quietly. In the company of someone she detested yet realised was as much a victim as a villain. 

The campaign is epic and sprawling with a huge number of clues and connections to be made. Gumshoe gives you the clues but you need to piece it together. I started by using Miro (Scapple as out as this was the period when I was using a Chromebook before I returned to macOS) but I rapidly realised that this was becoming too complex to map out easily so I reverted to taking just taking notes on my reMarkable. Looking at the app version as I write this, I have 105 pages of notes, some of it a travelogue, and some of it an attempt to make connections. 

In the last three chapters of the game (Thailand, India, the return home) both Paul and I extensively went back through our notes, as if our characters were going over the case. We were searching back to the start of the campaign to find out what we had missed. It was there, but there was real route back to it until we learned some things later on and made connections. On reflection, part of me wishes that I had continued to use Miro, but by the time I had those regrets it was too late (especially as I accidentally erased the shown flow above).

I'll move into spoiler territory following the next picture, be warned. 

 

The story.

From the start, the campaign doesn't pull any punches. We saw creeping horror and the consequences of becoming involved in this story in Savannah when we met people whose minds had been broken by the previous attempt to stop what was happening, including a mathematically gifted cultist. We were attacked on a road as we tried to leave by a group of Asian men whose significance we only realised when we reach Thailand.

This immediately made our characters realise that there was more to this than the simple challenge of 'find out what happened to my father and why he changed' that our patron, a Chemical Industry Magnate called Janet Winston-Rodgers had set us.

Los Angeles followed. We moved from the heat and languid humidity of the South to a clearer, sunnier place, but the horror was there just as much, touching into the glamour of Hollywood and corrupting it with sex and drugs. Lotte came very close to dying when a hoodlum was waiting for her with a gun in her hotel room (Gumshoe's point blank gun rules are pretty brutal if you're at their mercy). This prompted a change in her, a hardening and reversion of her character into what she used to be. Ben saw something horrifying and corrupting that wouldn't leave him. We found paths on across the world, and realised that something very big was happening. We met people with regrets and half stories. We killed for the first time, in defence, but it was a line passed.

Well, the sensible thing would have been to walk away, but with characters that have drives of curiosity and duty, we couldn't. 

Mexico City initially felt a bit like LA but more Latin America. This heat and light shifted again in my head from the descriptions Rich gave as our aircraft landed and we headed into town. We were tailed by a local private detective who later joined us (for a brief spell, we had a third player, Nigel, but health and the challenges of slipping into such an established game meant he dropped back out). A break in and search of an apartment again found traces of occultism and then were were horrifically attacked by birds. That was pretty terrifying. Shades of Hitchcock but worse.

We had confrontations with gangsters, as we discovered that a new drug being sold was intimately linked to this cult we had discovered, and then we saw the costs on those that embraced this icky decadent corruption. And killed again. 

We ended up in the Yucatan peninsula, not knowing who to trust, but finding an ancient religion, betrayal and hypergeometry. No, that's not the term that the scenario or Trail of Cthulhu used, but my character started with science education and it felt apt for a gate between space and time. I've loved the way that Delta Green uses that kind of terminology for years. We met an entity/god that told us the name of our enemy, Y******c. We had little reason to doubt the truth of this, but remained skeptical. We nearly died, several times. Someone tried to bomb our aircraft too. 

Returning to Boston and New York, we were faced with decisions. Lotte realised that she could lose her marriage if she continued with this. Her husband, Jack, wasn't taking it well that she was travelling the world with another man. What would it look like. But the need to follow the story consumed her.

Getting home showed what could be lost. Ben faced similar challenges.

We took a liner across the Atlantic to Liverpool, then a train to London. Ben looked up the entity that we had met at the British Library, I followed up details of the contact that we were looking for. Another liner to Sicily, then a ferry to Valletta in Malta. A photo for posterity of the two of us as we arrived. Lotte was ill when we arrived for a few days*, but it didn't stop us trying to find our path. Ben sketched details of what we saw, as he often did, and Lotte used her Leica to take a record. Both had journals that left details of what they'd found and both had left photographed copies with Janet Winston-Rodgers. 

*There was a point when I was toying for Lotte to have become pregnant with Jack when they met up but events ensued and I never really followed that through. However, as the time between the next few chapters isn't huge, she could have been pregnant when we came to the end game. 

We tail the suspect to his wife's tomb and find his child in hospital. We meet a Knight Templar, dedicate to fighting an entity called N***********. For some time we wonder if this is the entity that the cult is actual worshiping as we remained skeptical. A journey through catacombs underneath the city, and Lotte ends up with a ritual to open a hyperspace gate installed in her head after an encounter. Her mind becomes increasingly addicted to connecting these lines in her head to the hypergeometric principles she me before. If she ever does, a gate will open.

We destroy the cult's warehouse and source of the drug, at cost. Both of us get shot. We capture the person of interest and interrogate him. We realise the source of the drug is still there so return with dynamite. Ben feeds a thug with explosives into the source, narrowly escaping being consumed himself. We escape, scarred, scared and injured and the Knight Templar heals us although Ben does need a hospital. We let the person of interest live, hoping he will focus on his son, but partly fearing the worst.

We take a ship from Malta to Alexandria, where we spend some time recovering and studying. We discover that the potential contact in Ethiopia (Abyssinia) is likely at the hottest place on earth, Dallol. It also has a volcano that erupted in 1926. We take a boat through the Suez Canal to Abyssinia and disembark. The place is full of Italian troops and we pretend to be Spanish. We spend a night at the Hotel Internationale posing as a couple, sharing a bed but not touching each other. Lotte finds herself regretting that the day after but not saying anything to Ben. Transport is secured with an Italian NCO, and we meet an archaeologist who was involved in the earlier expedition, which the volcano destroyed.

A Dhow to Mersa Fatma, more photos. It was a potash port but mostly the trade is gone. We take a train to the end of the line, having found out that the professor we seek still lives. The railway hasn't run in years but we persuade the owners to let us use it, and get attacked on the way by raiders. We meet a native whose people have focused on containing what the expedition disturbed. There are suggestions they cause the eruption. We travel to the village and beyond to Dallol. Ben is not himself; Lotte doesn't know it but the connection that he has established to the entity is playing out. What we see there is best not repeated, but we have to turn back as we realise that the two of us cannot solve what we see here. The brutal heat, the beating sun just drains the life from the place and us. This is not a place for humanity.

Another boat, this time to Aden. Ben meets a strange old man who gives him and book and tells him "G*******h is a buffoon". That was the name of the entity that told us of our opponent. Passage booked five days hence. Ben reads the book. Horrific images. Lotte starts to doubt Benjamin. We burn the book and it corrupts the very room we are in. We sleep together again, but nothing happens.  On the boat to Siam, we see the Mexican who joined us. He has drowned. He wasn't really there. Was he?

Arriving in Siam (Thailand) we are met by a guide, arranged by our patron. We break into the house of the contact we know and find evidence of the cult, albeit with a slightly different form. The contact arrives home and we interrogate and intimidate him. We arrange to meet the head of the local organisation. I reach out to an old friend who lives here; Charles "Charlie Boy" Pierce. He gives us a safe haven. We head into the labyrinth around the club we are to meet at. Rich gives us a fantastic impression of the complexity, noise and feel of the area; I am lost before I know it. 

It's a fight club. We realise our contact has betrayed us, and we are taken behind, stripped and searched. Ben is beaten unconscious, Lotte pretends to faint, but is then drugged.

...

We wake, alone, naked in sandy pits with grates above to the sound of the sea and clear skies. Ben escapes, and manages to free Lotte. We find our clothes and items, including weapons. There's an old woman on a porch in a house on this island. She seems broken but we cannot speak Thai. At least, we think it's Thai. We realise we are being hunted. Our contact kept his promise, in a way. The woman were were to meet is here, but she has changed and is hunting us. We will be the menu.

Ben acts as the sacrificial lamb, just outside the library in the house. I shoot her in the back of the head. Ben makes sure she is dead. We burn the body.

...

We are on an Island in the Indian Ocean, the mainland of Siam isn't far off. 

Time is strange here and Lotte starts to obsess about Ben as he tries to build a boat, topless. There's a raw hunger here. Is it sexual? Is it cannibalistic? 

Lotte reads the tomes in the library. We need to go to Tibet, to a sacred mountain no-one has climbed. There are hints at N*********** again, and claims there is a lie at the heart of the ritual. Lotte skims a book called 'The Revelations of Glaaki', which points at 'Y*******'. There's more. The ritual was multilayered. Not everything was clear. Possibly the cult leader was the only one who knew what was happening.

...

Charlie Boy arrives in a boat and rescues us. He brought a policeman. We suspect him initially, but it seems genuine that he found out where we'd been taken. He translates the woman's notes. Ben sleeps on the couch. Lotte sleeps in the spare room. The notes reveal more doubts.

We return to our initial contact's house, toss a coin, and Ben shoots him dead. Lotte and Ben go for a meal as we are done here. The cult organisation is broken and there is no way we can practically get to the source of the drug here. On balance, more of a win than a loss. 

Then we leave for Tibet, via India. We aren't who we were. Lotte doubts that a return to normality is possible, even if we succeed.

We arrived in Calcutta and send letters home. Plus a set of films that have been developed with our journal notes in. We get first class train tickets to Delhi. Lotte feels strangely detached from the bustle, colours and noise of India. There's a focus here, find a guide, get to the mountain. We know that a team from Siam came here, climbed but couldn't find what they wanted. They came at the wrong time...

The only guide who will help us is a drunken man, broken by his past. 

We drive slowly through the countryside, but somehow the pressing deadline of getting there when the stars are right takes away all the curiosity and joy that we'd get from this pilgrim tale. Time presses. We reach the mountain, and the holy lake at the bottom. We all have a moment, bathing in the lake. For Lotte, it's a moment of peace, memories of hope and lightness. For Ben, it's a return of his curiosity and sense of beauty and wonder. Our guide finds his way again, turning from the addiction and rejection of life that his lost family triggered. He can go no more with us, just gives us advice, and we prepare for the climb ourselves.

We slip off the path early the next morning, loosing the rest of the pilgrims as we prepare to trespass on the mountain. The climb is arduous, but Lotte's experience of climbing and trekking from her youth helps, along with the advice she soaked up from our guide. As we reach to top, the earth moves, shaking as if to register the sacrilege.

We see signs of Y*******, and then face an awakening vision. Ben sees his sister betraying him with his rival, running his shop. His rival kills his sister. Lotte sees her husband Jack throw himself off a skyscraper in a geometrically wrong - and yet so right - New York.

A ravine opens and the scent of the drug wafts up, carried on an unnatural heat haze. We start to abseil down, but Lotte slips, only saved by Ben's second rope that she'd almost chided him for insisting on because they were hurrying. We are attacked, and fall. The spell is triggered to summon G*******. Toad-like it manifests, in shards of glass. Lotte falls to her knees and time stops.

The pretender is vanquished but the gaze of another has turned upon the world, a ritual worked through, and G******* flees. The earthquake starts again, Lotte freezes. Ben runs. Then falls. Awakens, looks for Lotte.

Back on the mountain summit. a strange sickly green tinted aurora covers the sky. Ashes begin to fall. Ben finds Lotte's hand buried in rubble, rescues her and somehow revives her. Was it the coffee from the campaign stove? We descend safely.

Below, chaos reigns. Dead pilgrims. Violence. Ashfall. Ben and Lotte at the end of the world.

We dream badly as we struggle back towards home, we see bad things happening at home. There is panic. There is violence. Unnatural lightning strikes. We manage to get a boat down river and then a ship that will take us across the Pacific to Long Beach, California. The journey is fraught.

Los Angeles is quiet, deserted streets, echoing to distance sounds of gunfire. Bodies and abandoned cars lie in the streets. We make it to mansion of the man who led what was left of the Hollywood sex and drugs rituals. We find him dead by his own hand, and the aspects of Y****** that had manifested ossified. We find a painting that we'd remembered while on the mountain top. It matches what we saw.  The library lets us know that the world is going to end. A paired ritual was cast. The mathematician in Savannah was the key; the focus of the coming apocalypse was him. 

Our patron does not answer calls, and nor do our family members.

We steal a small aircraft and Lotte flies low across America, heading for Savannah. Ben guides using a road map as we follow the interstates. Somehow we get there and land.

It's worse and we can feel the Gaze. Lightning, refugees, bodies. Things slipping through the angles of reality. We'd dosed on iodine, and covered with sunglasses and scarves against the radiation. In an old truck we finally reach the burned out Joy Grove Sanatorium. The mathematician is within, the last of the nurses describing him as 'Satan himself' before she died with a mercy killing from Lotte.

We find him in the operating theatre. Insane with understanding what has been done to him. Wanting revenge on the world. We need him beyond it to avert the Gaze and what will follow. He can't be convinced. He is terrified about going to a dark, cold, lonely place. Arguments failing, Lotte offers to go with him because he can only cross the gate willingly. Ben plans to grab her as the other steps though, but fails, left with the ghost of a hand fading away and a cry of "I need her more than you" from the mathematician.

Lotte, mind blasted, finds herself in the landscape of the painting. Cold, desolate, alone with a madman who reveals he cannot die. She will. There is no hope of recovering enough of herself to reopen the hyperspace gate. She can still grasp the theory but her will and resolve are gone.

Ben considers ending it all but realises that Lotte will kill him if he did.

...

A month later, Ben has talked to Jack, who hung up on him. There are food shortages, but perhaps normality will return. He survives day-to-day by himself.

...

A year later, he is still isolated from society, working as a gas-pump attendant. He is staying away, not reconnecting with his past life. He's trying to make sense of the notes so he can publish the story that initially motivated Lotte. Returning to his room, he finds Lotte's compact mirror on his side table. He looks around, calls out for her, but nothing. He opens it, looks at himself and cries, breaking down.

...

A decade later, he is back in New York, running his business again. The story has been published as a piece of genre fiction. He has told Janet Winston-Rodgers what happened. 

Reflections

The ending was bitter-sweet. Paul had to roll a '9' for Ben to grab Lotte on a D6. That may sound crazy, but he had enough adds left to give the roll a +7 modifier, which meant that he could only fail on a '1'.

He rolled a '1'. He later said that for a moment he considered cheating.

I'm glad he didn't. Although this stunned and shocked us, I think that it felt apt. Lotte should have died on the mountain top, but Ben just managed to save her. She followed her drive of Duty to the end. Between them, they both cheated death many times. It was a victory at a cost, a cost that both of them were always willing to pay.

Apparently, we were one argument away from convincing the mathematician to step through the gate on his own, but at the point Lotte made her offer I could see no other way.

This is the best mythos campaign I have ever played or run. The beauty is that the mythos is on the edge, never front and centre. It was easy to separate player and character knowledge. The NPCs and locations felt very real, and very different. It felt lived in and dangerous. There were moments of beauty.

Playing as a duo enhanced this. It probably meant that when Nigel joined us for a while, it was hard for him to break into the game. By the end, we knew how each of our characters would reach. I loved the hint of tension between them; something I doubt that either would act on, but it felt real. 

I'm missing the campaign, but so glad that I played it. Thank you Rich and Paul!

The End?

21 June 2025