Shadows of Yog-Sothoth: Coda

The previous post marks the official ending of my Shadows of Yog-Sothoth campaign. I did, however, write a little something to put a nice little bow on the whole thing. I told my players it was non-canon, but they all loved it, so now it's canon.

Worry not, Occasional Reader, for this is not the end of my Extremely Overwritten Game Night Recap Posts (TM). Since the Call of Cthulhu campaign ended, my group has gained a new player and has started playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e, with a storyline entirely of my own (and, let's be honest, Geoffrey Chaucer's) creation.

Updates on that to come at some future time.

For now, however...

Epilogue

As R’lyeh sinks beneath the waves, a lone figure, nattily dressed and sporting a yellow silk tie, wanders around the hideous, broken peaks of R’lyeh. It is Nathan Torpley, having arrived fashionably late to Ron’s summons. He seems extremely pleased with himself.

“Thought you were so clever, didn’t you, Stanford,” says Mr. Torpley to no one in particular as he smiles ferociously. “Well, you weren’t! Look around you, my boy! This is what you get when you try to cheat me.”

With a final, reality-sundering laugh, Nathan Torpley vanishes, returning at last to the side of his immortal master, the blind idiot Demon Sultan, Azathoth.

Christopher Edwin

Several months after the sinking of R’lyeh, Christopher Edwin passes away peacefully in his mi-go cylinder, his nutrient fluid having deteriorated too much to continue to provide life support for his disembodied brain. He is buried in a small, private ceremony with the entirety of the London Group in attendance.

Dr. Black

He retires to his new property in Upstate New York, where he immediately digs up the lead amulet from under his barn and pisses all over it. Nothing happens, but Dr. Black does have a few sleepless nights worrying if he did the right thing or not.

Dr. Black soon founds his own group of Nodens worshippers and becomes their prophet. When he dies mysteriously in 1943, he is succeeded by his heir apparent, a very charismatic young man named Nick Thomas. Under Nick’s rule, the group is soon transformed from a mystery cult into a regular old cult. Many of its members are killed and arrested in a police raid in 1965, and the old Black property is accidentally destroyed by fire.

Though Nick Thomas is on the FBI’s most wanted list for the next fifteen years, he is never apprehended or seen again.

Mikhail

He returns to New York City and resumes practicing law, winning numerous cases thanks to his rather idiosyncratic examination style. He also rises in the ranks of his Masonic lodge, where he puts his Mythos knowledge to good use in rooting out occult threats to the City of New York. 

He allows Pushok, a purebred Great Dane, to be used to breed a little of seven little puppies, all named after his companions (and Luca). Puppy Kane Eastman goes on to win numerous prestigious dog show awards. Puppy Ron is sold to a pampered socialite and gets fat on caviar. His only exploit of note is biting a mailman for no reason.

Kane Eastman

After a long break, he returns to music and touring—but not before having to audition for a spot in his former band. Things are frosty with the Kane Eastman Quartet, at first, but the group gets back into their old groove rather quickly.  They press three records in between 1927 and 1930, and the band is even filmed while performing their breakout hit, “Sinking Ray’s Ritualistic Boogie.”

A video recording of this old film resurfaces in the mid-2010s and, thanks to Kane’s recreation of the dancing he did during the ritual to sink R’lyeh, becomes an instant meme. It fades again only to resurface on Tik Tok about five years later, with various performers attempting the, “Sinking Ray,” dance challenge.

Vivian

She finds some fame as a celebrated concert violinist. She presses a solo record in 1929 featuring some classical pieces, as well as one in 1932, in which she records her own original work. The 1932 album is haunting and disturbing and is panned by contemporary critics for being far too avant garde. The Dada movement loves it, however, and the album is kept alive and in circulation thanks to careful collectors.

Vivian has another moment of fame in the early 1980s—after her death—when Siouxsie Sioux samples several of her violin solos for “A Kiss in the Nameless City.” The album is very popular, but unfortunately its proximity to several suicides causes it to be much maligned and demonized by the decade’s “Satanic Panic.”

Just like her papa wanted, Vivian stayed far away from the family business. Until his death in 1956. Then she expertly ran the entire Bernouse Syndicate through proxies for the next 22 years.

Judge Putnam and Johnny

Judge Putnam retires from being a judge and takes his servant and best friend on a whirlwind tour of the world, where they continue to hunt down the last remnants of the Order of Silver Twilight and foil other occult- and Mythos-related conspiracies. The judge passes away of natural causes in the Syrian Desert in 1941, as the two men attempt to destroy the gate to the Nameless City before the Nazis can activate it for their own purposes.

Johnny inherits the judge’s property and hires his own servant to live in the carriage house and keep things up. Unfortunately, the memories of the house are too painful for Johnny, and he soon begins to travel again, this time on behalf of the US Government. 

In the latter days of WWII, Johnny is put in charge of Operation: London, a clandestine military organization whose mission is to counteract Hitler’s occult machinations. The operation is hugely successful and saves many lives. Unfortunately, Johnny is lost in an astral rift that briefly opens above Antarctica in early 1945.

Ron Deluca

He retires from “the life,” as much as one can, though he still works for his friend and long-time boss, Vince Bernouse. It takes him a lot of work, but he finally manages to patch things up with Connie just enough for him to move out of the guest house and back into his own Brooklyn brownstone.

A year or so later, Ron and Connie take a trip to Ireland and are never seen again. Foul play is suspected, but never conclusively proven. A cryptic postcard, sent to Vivian about a year later, seems to indicate that the couple have decided to start their lives over in Dublin and see where it takes them. A postscript, which mentions that telling Viv this way is way cheaper than a transcontinental phone call, convinces Vivian it is actually from Ron.

Ron Junior and Liam Grant continue to live in the Deluca Brownstone until their deaths in the early 1980s. They would have been lost to history, had not Martin Scorsese released, “The Astoria,” in 2017. The film is the partially true retelling of the gun battle between the Bonano/Bianco crime family and the rest of New York’s Five Families (starring Tom Hardy as Ron Deluca, Dave Bautista as Luca, and Anne Hathaway as Vivian Bernouse).

A large percentage of the Gen-Z viewers pick up on the obvious subtext between Ron Jr. and Liam and take to the internet to do research. They soon find quite a lot of evidence of the pair’s relationship, and roundly mock contemporary accounts and historians who insist that the two are, “just very close friends who enjoy the bachelor lifestyle.” An unearthed picture of the couple becomes quite iconic, and is used on posters in several 2018 gay pride parades (WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE).

The London Group

During the pandemic, a redditor named Bosox1967 starts a thread where he claims that he saw Vivian Bernouse and, “the Guy from the Kane Dance!!!” He says he saw them with several other people "dressed all old-timey, and stuff," while he was partying in Boston in 2018  after the Red Sox won the World Series.

The post contains six grainy pictures, which do seem to show people dressed in 1920’s attire. Despite Bosox1967’s protestations, and despite the best efforts of Reddit’s photo editors, the people wearing the attire are never been positively identified.