This Wild West Call of Cthulhu scenario is a great break from your group's typical 1920s adventures. The survivors of this scenario might very well pursue further investigations, leading to a Wild West campaign.

The town of Two Rivers is a silver boom town. Founded a couple of years ago, the town has only recently seen major strikes of silver. This has attracted hordes of miners, and a few merchants. The boom is still in its early stages, yet word has reached far enough to attract the PCs.

Each PC in this game must have a reason for traveling to Two Rivers. This could be as simple as wanting to try their luck at silver mining, or aiming to become the law in the town, or wanting to start a church, etc. Or they could have more secret reasons. That's up to you.

The PCs share a stagecoach with the Arizona Kid, who is the fastest gun in the West. At least they figure he must be, from the number of times he's told them that. Luckily, the Kid has to sleep now and then, and the PCs are able to become acquainted.

Eventually, they arrive at Two Rivers early on a Friday evening. The town sits between two dry river beds, a handful of buildings. It's August, and the sun beats down.

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The Town

The town of Two Rivers is a classic mining boom town.

The miners come to town mostly on Saturdays, to replace equipment, drink, gamble, and turn silver in to the general store.

There's no law in the town, although people have tried before (the general store has a nice selection of used badges to sell, some without bullet holes). The miners are a rough and ready lot, although the biggest problem to establishing law is Clyde, a gorilla of a man. Nearly seven feet tall, with strength to match, Clyde rules the miners with brutal efficiency.

The saloon is where the miners spend most of their time. A gambler has found lucrative trade in fleecing the miners of their silver on Saturday nights, and the bartender sells meals and liquor. The hotel across the street provides clean beds, hot baths, and warm women. The blacksmith is the place to get tools repaired or built, or silver melted into ingots. The general store has everything you might need for mining, along with traveling supplies. An undertaker's shack sits by the northern river bed, next to a small graveyard. Most of the inhabitants of the graveyard are either victims of Clyde, or young punks who have come to challenge the gambler (a retired shootist).

Prices in town are very high.

The Statue

One of the PCs will be carrying a silver statue. The statue is of a humanoid being, almost an abstract form, but vaguely disturbing. They want to convert the statue to cash, and have the strong feeling that Two Rivers is the place to do it.

Pick the character you think will work best for this.

The Professor

There's also a Professor in the area, studying ancient cliff dwellings. One of the characters might be looking for the Professor, or for the Professor's grad student assistant, Barnaby.

The Arizona Kid

The Kid gets off the stage and heads into the saloon. As soon as most of the other PCs are present (he likes an audience), the Kid gets into a game with the gambler and accuses him of cheating. The Kid calls the gambler outside. The gambler reluctantly follows, and a gunfight ensues. The Kid is outclassed, and ends up dead.

The PCs may try to make peace, but the Kid isn't having it. He's here to get a reputation, and won't let anything stand in his way. If other people try to interfere, he'll start making a list of people to challenge after he takes care of the gambler.

At least one of the PCs should offer to carry the Kid to the undertaker, if only to loot the body. The undertaker buries the body, commenting that this isn't the first young punk to get himself killed this way.

The PCs can do whatever they want with the remainder of the evening, getting to know the town and making contacts. Eventually they sleep, and converge on the saloon for breakfast (that's included in the price of a hotel room).

Local News

Bits of news the PCs might pick up.

The general store owner can report that miners have been buying lots of dynamite lately, which is why he doesn't have any to sell right now.

Anyone in town can tell them about Clyde, if they ask. The saloon keeper knows that Saturday night is the big night for miners in town.

Anyone in town might mention, if asked, that the rivers run in the spring with the snow melt.

Anyone in town might mention Professor Kincaid, a Professor from back East studying ancient cliff dwellings south of the city (a bit over half a day's travel). The Professor has a graduate student named Barnaby with him.

If the PC carrying the statue shows it to anyone, she'll get the response, "That's the sort of thing the Professor pays good money for". At which point she'll have a strong urge to see how much the Professor will offer for it.

If the PC is foolish enough to leave the statue with the blacksmith, the blacksmith will cut and run, taking the statue south to the Professor.

Breakfast of the Damned

The first sanity check of the scenario comes during breakfast. The saloon keeper sees them to a table, and says that Billy will bring their food out shortly. When it comes out, it's the Arizona Kid carrying the platter (lose 1 if they make the check, 1d6 if they miss it), right down to the bullet hole in his clothes.

Billy stutters a bit when he talks, and is a bit shaky. The saloon keeper says he's "just a bit slow, if you know what I mean". Billy remembers being the saloon keeper's assistant for years, having come to Two Rivers with him from home. Everyone else in town remembers the same thing. The undertaker does not remember burying the Arizona Kid the day before, nor does the gambler remember killing him.

At this point, the PCs should be ready to head out of town, except that the stage doesn't return for a week.

Saturday Night

The PCs will probably have things planned for Saturday night, and so stick around for the miners to hit town.

Other than what the PCs have planned, the only events of note Saturday night are the gambler fleecing the miners, and Clyde getting drunk and killing another miner in a fight. The dead miner is buried by the undertaker.

Sunday Morning

If they stuck around until Sunday, the PCs get to see the dead miner return as the blacksmith's assistant when they go to rent mules for the trip south. Another 1/1d6 sanity check is appropriate.

Ancient Cliff Dwellings

Eventually they'll end up at the ancient cliff dwellings, looking for the Professor. Along the way, a Spot Hidden check will allow one of the group to notice that there's a trickle of water in the dry river bed.

The cliff dwellings are near a dried up lake bed that the river (now a small stream) empties into. There are a few mules tethered near the bottom of the cliff.

The Professor doesn't come out from the dwellings until dinner time. The PCs don't have much chance of finding him before that, unless they have some excellent tracking rolls. The Professor is willing to buy the statue at a fair price, and will hand over part of the money in exchange for the statue. He promises to wire the University for the rest tomorrow. After talking a bit about what he's been finding, he heads to his camp in one of the cliff dwellings to sleep, taking the statue with him to study.

The Ancient Ones

The people who lived here, according to what the Professor has found, were sea worshippers. Their writings tell of horrible sacrifices and ceremonies, and local Indian tribes tell lgends of the draining away of the sea as punishment for the wicked ones.

What the Professor doesn't tell is his growing fascination with the rituals, and his obsession to successfully complete the ritual known as the "Summoning Of The Deep".

The ritual requires three main parts:

1) A ritual sacrifice (the Professor has already sacrificed Barnaby)
2) The silver statue placed inside a matching stone statue in the caverns
3) The death of the ritual's initiator, by an ignorant outsider

The Caverns

In the morning, the Professor is nowhere to be found (if anyone asks, the lake is about half full and the river is in full flow). The group should be anxious to find him, especially the PC who is owed money. Heading into the caverns behind the cliff dwellings is their best best.

They'll first encounter the site of Barnaby's sacrifice. It's pretty gruesome, good for a 2/1d6 sanity check. There will be some carvings that occult types can interpret that talk about the rituals of the ancients who lived here.

The next encounter is a large cavern shaped a bit like an auditorium, with stepped ledges for seats, all facing a raised stage that cannot quite be seen in lantern light from the entrance. If the blacksmith left town with the statue, he's found here and he attacks with his fists as soon as the group enters.

Anyone who gets far enough to see the stage clearly gets a 1/1d6 sanity check as they see a large stone version of the silver statue, but with what looks like a decapitated human head (the Professor's) in place of the stone head.

As the head opens its eyes and speaks, the sanity check moves to 3/1d10. By this point at least several of the PCs should be more or less insane. Try to tailor their insanities to keep them involved in the action yet to come.

The head says, "You have come, fulfilling your role, Bringers of the Statue. What comes next will be your doom!"

This is a Wild West scenario, so if one of your PCs doesn't quick draw and put a couple of bullets through the head at that statement, you need to get some new players.

At the moment of the head's death, it tumbles off the statue. The PCs can hear what sounds like a thunderclap dimly from outside. Investigating the statue will reveal the silver statue tucked away inside it in a recess. Getting the silver statue out is as easy as a POW save on a d20. Failure means that the PC who tried starts to merge with the stone statue. Let them be rescued with some quick thinking by other players.

The Lake

Back outside, the lake is bubbling furiously in the center. As the PCs watch, or as they are climbing down the cliff, a giant head emerges from the bubbling water. The rest of the body follows, forming a monstrous being thirty feet tall.

Any mules the group brought, and the ones the Professor brought, panic and bolt if they can. Controlling them will require riding rolls if they didn't manage to bolt.

The problem is to escape the being and live.

Solutions

The basic solution is to toss the silver statue into the lake. This seals the connection between the lake and the Great Old Ones who are using it as a conduit to animate the dead and control the minds of the townsfolk, as well as banishing the one who is here now.

Don't make this easy, though, if that's the first thing they think of. The PC who owns the statue isn't anxious to see their investment go in the water. Require throw rolls to actually get it in to the lake. Give the monster a chance to block the toss.

Players will often try to destroy the silver statue. It does not melt down, and trying to do so will heat it to the point where they'll take damage handling it. If you think they're going to go this route, give them all the rope they can use until they discover it isn't working.

The ideal outcome is where the PCs use typical Wild West techniques to get the silver statue into the water. They lasso it out there, or they shoot it in as it's balancing on the edge of the water, etc.

The monster will continue to attack as long as the PCs are in the area. It will allow them to head back to town if they manage to get away, but it won't make it easy on them.

The monster's ideal outcome is that the silver statue ends up as far away from the lake as possible.

Outcomes

If the monster is banished, the townspeople return to normal and the dead drop dead again. Otherwise, the town continues as before, and if the PCs stay eventually they fall under the sway of the Great Old Ones, too.

A typical run of this scenario will have someone survive, but not everyone.

This scenario uses a supplement that appeared in Worlds of Cthulhu, issue #2. I first ran this just on the strength of the downloadable character sheet. Having the actual magazine helps primarily for occupation listings.

The opening for this scenario borrows from a Call of Cthluhu scenario called Tombstone I played in at Origins.