I’ve not found a good opportunity to run a game of Cthulhu Dark for nearly two years. So for North Star this year I’m diving into the Mumbai 2037 setting to offer up some cosmic character-driven horror in cyberpunk India.
Consume is one of those scenarios that builds slowly, benefiting from player input, and has the potential to sweat with tension and atmosphere.
Scenario: Consume
System: Cthulhu Dark
Players: 3-4
Slot: Saturday 11 May, 7:30pm – 11:30pm
Description:
This is Mumbai, 2037.
Concrete towers rise into the sky, shedding dust that chokes the people below. Stockbrokers sell trillions in electronic space. Dreamers drift away their nights and days in the glowing, tempting virtuality of the Otherspace. Street traders sell chai in the underways. Billboards promise wealth and beauty. Behind them, people live in ancient, crumbling tenements.
You are lucky to have found work with other members of your family. You labour hard to build one of those towers, the epic Tanwar Building. Yours is just one family among thousands that toil to see it reach beyond dreams, spiralling into the heavens.
Miles wide it stretches at its base, and seventy storeys high it soars. Seventy storeys above where you live, with your family, in the concrete underbelly of the Tanwar.
Today, as you rise, there’s a silent rumble in the underbelly. It’s barely noticed far beneath the homes of the ultrarich.
But you notice. Someone is missing. And something churns. Consumes. In Mumbai.
Characters: Each character is a members of the Jaswant family, who live below and work on the Tanwar building.
- Pravin (son) – Hardware Engineer
- Narayani (daughter) – Virtual Engineer
- Kanika (youngest daughter) – Crane Operator
- Mandavi (niece) – Secretary
- Tilak (second cousin) – Accountancy Engineer
System Note: Cthulhu Dark drives Lovecraftian horror mysteries from the underdog’s perspective, using a simple d6 system.
Touchstones: Elysium
Tags: lovecraftian, cyberpunk, India
