You're seeking ancient secrets -
The Black Fan flutters.
A thousand clues masked
By lies and innuendo -
It's not as it seems.
Know this, those seeking
The truth: it lies in madness.
The Black Fan, fallen.
It's an interesting setting to be sure, but my god, did I hate writing the notes for it, and hate trying to figure out its riddles. It was actually the chapter I was dreading running the most, because I wasn't even sure where to start with it. Up to that point while writing up notes for Masks, I was flying through and feeling great. Then I got to Shanghai, and I started wondering how much I really wanted to run the game after all. It only got worse when I started to run it, because the whole time I felt it needed to end, and honestly I'm not really sure why when it has so much great stuff and interesting history to it. Seriously, it's well worth your time to look into this stuff - even my players got into the act. Chance, for example, came to me one night with his new character, Xu Mei-lin, a bit embarrassed. When I asked what was the matter, he said the character was a consort for hire - basically, a glorified prostitute; not a bad idea since at the time Shanghai's more vice-filled side was well known amongst sailors. When I asked why he was so sheepish, he explained that in order to prepare for the role, he had Googled "Prostitution in Shanghai 1928". I'm not going to elaborate on the mark that probably left on the poor lad's browser history, because I'm sure you can all figure it out for yourselves.
I'll admit I was mostly confused by this chapter because it really came across like an info dump. Shanghai is where the players find Brady, meet yet another new cult, and encounter a pretty offbeat Mask of the Crawling Chaos. It also has such a left field Pulp Serial twist in the ending's volcano lair and rocket, when up to this point the campaign's been a lot more typical in its big terrifying Lovecraftian reveals, not to mention that the tone is more in line with a Noir novel or film than a pulp epic. It forces the Keeper to learn not only about Chinese society and concepts like face, but also to explore the history of the area during the 20's after the fall of actual dynasties, daimyo, and other such concepts. Shanghai in the 1920's, especially in a pulpy game, is a place where East meets West, shady deals go down while bohemian white expats live in decadence, and the countless thousands of years of past culture of a nation refuse to let a New Red Order come into play. And your Investigators are right in the middle of it, plus one group of particularly nasty cultists who call it their home turf...
The main Mask du jour in this country is the Bloated Woman, already an offbeat choice for a creature, and very much a being of dualism. Out of all the forms Nyarlathotep takes in this campaign, I couldn't find one major literary reference to the Bloated Woman, nor had I seen this feminine aspect of the Crawling Chaos used anywhere else. She seemed to come out of nowhere and just exist from that point forward, and no matter where I looked I couldn't find much of anything about how the hell she came about or what she had first appeared in. She's oddball because she's a female aspect of a Mythos deity traditionally thought of as masculine, purely because most of his forms verge as being masculine or seem to come off with masculine traits (if they're not ambiguous monsters entirely, but come on - you just know the Bloody Tongue's namesake appendage is compensating for something). I absolutely loved the concept, though - this strangely alluring woman who always holds her fan up like a mask, hiding her true intentions until she drops it and you see her for the horror she really is. It reminded me a lot of the concept of yin and yang in Chinese culture, as well as the idea of face - social rituals done to be honorable and respectful versus how a person is at home - and I just thought it was such a unique and perfect way to show Shanghai's darker side as well as its "exotic", alluring side.
What I didn't like about her however, and what I thought was an incredibly odd choice, was making her essentially just a big ugly fat woman with more eldritch features once the fan dropped. Yes, I know, I get the whole "It ain't over until the fat lady sings" joke that this endpoint for the campaign was supposed to evoke, but it's just so... lame and a little insensitive to boot. I don't know about you, but I really don't find fat people that terrifying or gross, and I think most people these days are in that same boat. What most people do find terrifying and gross, however, is the process of decay and putrefaction. Bloated decaying carcasses are absolutely disgusting, as anyone who's ever smelled one can attest to, and well, her name is the Bloated Woman, isn't it? When I read further and discovered that apparently, the characters for her name also contain a dual meaning of "whore" or "prostitute", of course I also had to work in the sexual horror angle, and that meant some very... interesting design choices for her. Vagina dentata, anyone? The result I got was absolutely hideous and disturbing in every way, really justifying her SAN loss result and making her one hell of an example of dualism and hidden rotten sides, which of course makes her the perfect goddess for the kind of filth and awfulness the Order itself peddles and deals in...
When creating the Order of the Bloated Woman and deciding the way it worked in my game, I therefore built the cult's behaviors and traits around their goddess. This made my take on the Order into this group of people who were staunch traditionalists on one side of the coin and awful monsters on the other. Demons with painted smiles and influence, who knew the ins and outs of Chinese society and could easily use them like poisoned darts on their enemies. They were sneaky ninja types, people who could easily disappear anyone, dealing in toxins and treachery while playing nice - and no one in the cult is as good at this as their leader, Ho Fong. His madness is insidious, subtle, and most importantly, silent. While the other cults, you can see their leaders' insanity for what it was, Ho was chillingly normal. Even Gavigan, for all his cool confidence and smug superiority, couldn't compare. Ho and his ilk could afford to be lax - after all, they have ancient roots like both the Bloody Tongue Cult and the Brotherhood do, but none of the upheaval. This has made the Order, and Ho Fong especially, complacent and smug in their control of the Shanghainese underground. They don't have to do anything to change, because to them, they have already succeeded... and if it's anything a god of chaos and arbiter of change like Nyarlathotep can't stand, it's the idea of stagnation and complacency in the status quo.
My Investigators started off immediately investigating leads in Shanghai, hitting everywhere I wanted them to. I gave them the newspaper leads, reminded them of the Stumbling Tiger bar lead they had, then let them follow up on these tidbits at their leisure. For the whorehouse scene, I pulled another Fat Maybelle's and took pieces from another Companion side scenario, an interview with the Madame of the brothel that ended up giving extra clues. Those clues were Elias' extra notes, and while they weren't necessary, they helped my group contextualize Shanghai and the plot thus far. This was important especially to orient (pun somewhat intended) their characters, considering almost all of them were new and had no relation to the plot other than knowing Sarah and Clayton, and maybe being involved in some short investigation in Cairo. Speaking of investigation, there was really no one set reason for having Nyarlathotep start to show up and harass the Investigators. The idea in-game was that he was trying to goad the characters into remaining on their toes. The out-of-game explanation, aside from Your Humble Keeper having an unhealthy taste for the paranoia of her players, was to convey that the Investigators were never safe, always being monitored by the Crawling Chaos ever since the Bent Pyramid, little more than pawns in a great cosmic chess game. This idea, that they were being used as pawns by something greater than all of them, became a major theme of the second half of Masks, and really cemented the idea that they had delved too far into the secret world and were now a part of it. That, and I really wanted to have a faceless Nyarlathotep pulling a rickshaw. He's more fun than any Keeper should be allowed to have, I tell ya!
When dealing with the Purple Flower Temple, I wanted to spice things up a bit. While reading the Companion, I came across the absolutely lovely and horrible scenario Bloody Botany, a cold, hard look at the Order's limitless cruelty. If I've not made it clear on this blog before, let me make it clear now: I am a sucker for body horror and I have a very strong love for gory hack-n-slash exploitation-style horror, creative torture methods, and Silent Hill/Hellraiser style grotesqueness in general. I love describing blood and viscera to my players and watching them squirm, and I love describing fucked up and twisted displays of what a sociopathic killer would consider beautiful or amusing, because my heart is as cold and black as midnight during new moon. Aside from having the sick fucks harm children or animals, having the sick fucks do twisted things to corpses is one of my favorite ways to make the players instantly loathe said sickos, and this scenario... My god. This scenario has that in spades, and I immediately drooled over the possibilities of spooking my players with such a nasty piece of work. The gruesome nature of the plot was already enough to convince me to run it, but the real icing on the cake was when I found out there was an option to cut the extraneous side crap about Ho Fong's wife and just kidnap the poor Investigators outright. Getting the PCs shanghaied in Shanghai? That's Keeper catnip of the highest caliber right there. So, I arranged things at the temple to coincide with a (fictitious) festival honoring the dead, had a nifty dragon dance that hid a kidnapping by the Order, and shipped the whole lot of them off on their one-way, all expenses paid trip to Hell.
I was absolutely not disappointed. The look on my players' faces when they found the mushrooms growing on living people and the plants growing through half-living peoples' rib cages was just priceless. Rob even later confided in me that the mushrooms were so disturbing he never wanted me to ever do anything like that again, which is precisely what I consider a job well done as Keeper to be. Besides, I think he deserved it a little - before running the Shanghai chapter, I had a little break from Masks and he had run Forget Me Not from The Things We Leave Behind, which has the horrific twist of the Investigators all being infested with... something terrible, a situation so fucked up I had nightmares about it. We called it even after I used the mushrooms, because mentally scarring and traumatizing your friends with awful situations is what Call of Cthulhu is all about. For that, I give Bloody Botany as a scenario a solid 8/10 armless human corpses. It's dark and awful even though it has a somewhat simple and basic setup with clues about Ho Fong's disgraced wife that's nothing new to the players at this point. But hell, who cares about more investigation when you have parasite mushrooms and monks so insane they can shrug off a broken bone and still keep coming after you? You ask me, I think cutting Ho's wife, then kidnapping and throwing the players to the wolves with this one is the best way to run it, because it's just too perfect and way too much fun, but to each their own and it is certainly a solid little scenario on its own, perfectly transplanted into any other China-based campaign or altered for another campaign entirely if the Keeper so chose.
The other prebuilt scenario, The Demon Cabinet of Mr. Lung, was one I was also amused by - I quite enjoyed the That Darned Cat style antics, and thought it would be fun to throw at my players. It certainly wasn't like any of the other scenarios, which made it a good breather to a point, plus it gave me a good way to get new characters acquainted with the party. It was also part of a means to get around using the creepy old lecher that gives the Investigators the lead to Mu Hsein, by way of connecting Mr. Lung into the action instead, because I thought a more direct connection there would make sense. That and, ew, perverted sexist old dudes, who the hell thought it was a good idea to just randomly throw that into this campaign, anyway? As for Demon Cabinet itself, it's a fine little diversion, but nothing to really write home about - it effectively conveys a little Chinese astrology and mythology without being preachy about it, and though it certainly isn't the most ethnically sensitive piece of work, it's fun for a pulp campaign to use a little mysticism every so often. It certainly can't stand on its own or be easily altered for another campaign, unless said campaign takes place in a Little China or Chinatown like in San Francisco or New York. For what it is, it is fun, but it's just not a strong scenario and for that I can only give it 5/10 tiger scrolls. You can easily skip this one, but when your choices are "sexist lecher stereotype" and "mildly racist Chinese astrologer stereotype", discretion tends to be the better part of valor. I'd save this one as an option of last resort, or throw it on the "in case of player absence" pile for Shanghai.
It should be incredibly obvious, but the segments involving the Elder Thing in the warehouse and the conspicuous Chinese expy of Donald J. Trump were all 100% fabricated by yours truly. I had come up with these scenarios (located here along with other seeds on my Dropbox) after using The Dhole's House's Seeds of Doom generator, and realized that some of them I generated sounded like they would make perfect scenarios for when players were missing or absent, which a lot of them did happen to be during this chapter. Neither were intended to have any bearing on the plot in Shanghai, and in fact the Elder Thing in the warehouse could have been placed in Nairobi or Darwin without too much trouble. The conspicuous Trump expy was more or less an excuse to bring Walter Kimble back in as well as to resolve the story with his ill-fated statue. No blowhard businessmen turned presidents were harmed in the making of said scenario, and my players had a blast with the subtle jab at current events I made, as well as with figuring out what became of Kimble. The one downside is that adding these did make the Shanghai chapter a bit too bloated for its own good, and that began to manifest as player malaise and Keeper fatigue. It was at this point in the campaign we decided a break to play board games for a bit was a good idea, and came back to Masks once people were feeling less tense.
By the time I got them to Ho Fong's home, things went off without a hitch again. Events were rolling along nicely even though I sprung one more kidnapping on them, after of course convincing them that Ho Fong really was offering an olive branch and they had nothing to fear (I told you my heart is as cold and black as midnight during new moon, didn't I?). I definitely took inspiration from Ringu/The Ring, Ju-on/The Grudge, and other such J-Horror classics for the manor, particularly with Ho's poor mad daughter. None of my players knew what to expect of her, and that made them nervous around this harmless piece of psychotic garnish. Finding Ho's shrine to the Bloated Woman also gave me a good excuse to finally have them find my genderbent Brady (shocking the table since they thought she was male the whole time), which as stated before was mostly because I thought pulling that trope would be fun. In this case, Jacquiline 'Jack' Brady was based somewhat on an angrier version of my own foul-mouthed self and somewhat on my stepmother Ellie, down to a similar short haircut and tomboyish demeanor. I also decided to have her still dating Choi, and made Choi the leader of New China, solely because I thought having the two badasses be lesbians would be kind of nifty as well as would explain their connection with each other.
All this led them to the final pieces they needed and to Grey Dragon Island. The incident with Laurent turning ghoul as a response to his insanity was to buy more time for absent players, while the incident with the Deep Ones comes from yet another one of those seeds I linked earlier. The change of the Deep Ones having been enslaved by Penhew, Ho, and the Order was another Strange Bedfellows plot as well as an interesting way to show just how much power the cult had. Hell, if they could subjugate an entire colony of a Mythos race living peacefully with some native islanders, that surely made them formidable. That's even before you consider that my concept for that was that many of the islanders had been forced to convert to worship of the Bloated Woman, or were slaughtered in an act of genocide. Scar the freedom-fighting Deep One came about organically through improv - the Deep One splinter faction needed a spokes-fish and leader after all, didn't they? This organically gave me a way to get them onto Grey Dragon Island without the fighting and possible TPK that would have been associated with direct landfall, plus it was just really damn cool and another way my players surprised me with their actions and reactions in this campaign.
Everything on Grey Dragon Island proceeded as desired - Ho Fong was killed, the rocket was discovered and destroyed, and there was one less point in the Great Gate afterwards. However, one thing did change it and did cause a bit of confusion, mainly because the the player of the character it happened to wanted it to occur. In fact, she specifically asked for it to occur. I was absolutely dumbfounded when she asked, but she was adamant on the decision.
"You want me to do what to Mahmoud?" I asked, incredulous. "You want the Bloated Woman to rape him? You can't be serious, dude..."
"His flaw's in that he's so staunch in his faith as to connect all his self-worth to it," Kat explained. "I wanna see him get fucked by the Bloated Woman, with him enjoying it. That way I have an excuse for him to commit suicide. You don't have to do it if you're not comfortable with it, but it'd be the perfect way for him to go."
I was shocked that she actually wanted me to add in a rape scene, despite the fact that she had been assaulted in the past as well as the fact that I'd been specifically trying not to use Rape as Drama. But she was okay with it and felt it therapeutic, so I conceded since I knew it would shock the other players. Besides, I didn't plan to actually play out the event, because holy shit, my heart might be as black and cold as midnight, but I'm more Nyarlathotep than Y'golonac when it comes down to it. So, it happened, and it was actually the main reason I decided on giving the Thousand Masks Saga something of a trigger warning. Just because Kat and I were alright with the event didn't mean that others reading it would be, and I just didn't feel right not having some sort of caveat emptor about how dark the game was going to get going forward. I do have to admit that she was right about it shocking the hell out of everyone else at the table, though. Good on ya for that one, Kat. Should've bought you a beer for giving me that idea.
All in all Shanghai, despite being the point that brought me the most fatigue and gave me the most headaches to plan for and run, was a fun little chapter. There's some seriously and genuinely great and disturbing stuff in there if you mine the Order and their goddess for all they're worth. The trouble is, its flaws and off-tone nature for a pulp game can be hard to reconcile. Much like the Black Fan itself, it's two-sided - on the one hand, the stuff in it that works really works, but on the other, it's a bit of a confusing mess that doesn't seem to fit into a pulp campaign well until the end. There's definitely a temptation to lengthen it by adding extraneous stuff, just like any other part of this campaign, but if the Keeper can satisfactorily link everything the Investigators need to find together, it can be a thrilling piece to your group's adventures in China. If it were a standalone game, there's no doubt it would keep the players on their toes and would be incredibly fun... just not as pulp as I otherwise would have wanted. I'll be fair here, and give MoN: Shanghai a respectable 7.5/10 Black Fans. It's fun and a good chapter in its own right, just not what I expected, and honestly I should have been more on the ball about that. I wish I could go back and re-run it with the knowledge I have now. I didn't give Shanghai a fair shake, and that was my fault - dishonor on my whole family.
Out with the old and in with the new, however - the Land Down Under beckons, and it has a set of ancient secrets all its own.