A year ago, the world burned.
You know – you were there on the night that the living balls of flame descended from the sky to indiscriminately kill and destroy. Everyone on that night seemed so shocked and surprised. But with hindsight, it’s obvious now that the signs were there for months leading up to that terrible moment. It all had to do with that fringe religion — or maybe it’d be more accurately called a ‘cult’ — going by the name of the “Church of Melqart, Lord of the City.”
Where the Church came from, nobody really knew. They just burst onto the world stage – starting with the Internet, but soon after on sensational TV media as well a few months before the world burned. Their message was a hackneyed one used by many doomsday cults before them: “the end of the world is nigh — the wisdom of Melqart is your only chance of surviving the imminent day of purification by flame.”
For some reason, people thought that the Church of Melqart was funny. Some even started looking at their website and reading their messages and predictions. For a few lonely and eccentric people – including you – these messages offered a promise of belonging that was otherwise missing in their lives.
The “Official Guide to the Church of Melqart” portrayed Melqart as an ancient, legitimate faith centered around community, faith and fire as a cleansing force. For only $16.66, one could get this rather well-written guide to the practices of Melqart. It denied the human sacrifice claims as “a vicious rumor spread by early monotheists” but did not shy away from some other tenets of the faith, including the “year of fire” — starting very soon — and the birth of a messiah.
For whatever reason you bought the Official Guide, even if you didn’t completely believe its message that the world was literally about to be purged by fire. Not only did you buy the book, but you forked out the $999.99 “faith pledge” to purchase the whole “Devotion Kit” complete with tickets to an official “End of the World” party and a guaranteed spot in one of the Church bomb shelters.
You performed the rite, maybe as a joke or maybe half-believing it might save you. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. When you carried out the ceremony, nothing much seemed to happen — so you pretty much forgot about it until the day when the Official Guide said the purging fire would descend.
On the night of the predicted firestorm, you were at one of the official “End of the World” parties. The crowd was made up of a weird collection of oddballs, conspiracy theorists, and New Age wackos. You felt a bit out of place.
It was all a bit underwhelming at first. But then, after dark the clouds cleared, and the stars came out. What you saw next is permanently etched on your mind. Everything — the whole sky — was on fire, everywhere, all at once. Millions of tiny, dancing stars, matching the description in the Official Guide of the “Children of Melqart” — the Ba’al’s angels and emissaries — fell from the night sky in a dense, hour-long shower. They were beautiful, angelic balls of shifting light and color … until they started burning almost everyone and everything in sight. According to the tsunami of tweets and Facebook updates that quickly followed, the same miracle turned horror was being witnessed everywhere on Earth.
The sentient balls of flame swarmed into the “End of the World” party — some people they attacked, others they ignored. You were among the latter group; you’d like to think it was down to the ‘Purification Rite’ you performed but who really knows? Faced with imminent immolation you did the only sensible thing you could do … flee.
When you were out in the street, you could see that the same carnage was occurring there. What happened next is muddled and confused in your mind. You remember talking with a few others who had escaped the party — someone mentioned the Church of Melqart bomb shelters. You realized suddenly that everything that had happened was just what they had predicted … and their ‘Official Guide’ had a list of the locations of pre-prepared survival shelters. Not only that, it clearly spelled out that the only people who would survive the “Great Cleansing” were those in the shelters. So, you decided to try to make it to one.
Eventually you managed to make it to the place described in the ‘Official Guide’ – an underground bomb shelter, five miles outside of the city. The ‘Guide’ told you how to access the shelter. Inside you found that provisions had been prepared: food, water, and even a manually crank-powered CB Radio.
The shelter has been your home for the past year. The Devotion Kit told you what to do, how to seal the place up a couple of hours after the Apocalypse had started. It also told you to stay in the shelter at all costs, until the ‘all-clear signal’ was broadcast on the CB to tell everyone that it was safe to leave.
Life has been pretty boring for the past twelve months, stuck in a single room with a half-dozen or so other folks who had likewise bought the Melqart Devotion Kit. There has been tension; there has been friction. But everyone has found a way to live together, despite the total lack of privacy.
It seemed for a long time as though you would just die here in the shelter. Despite the CB Radio being cranked every day (as the ‘Guide’ instructed) there was never any signal, just static.
Until today that is … perhaps today is the day when things fall into place.
Making use of detailed digital props such as photographs, journals, letters, and audio recordings, the survivors will discover the true nature of the evil they face and decipher clues to reveal their ultimate fate or the end the their world.
Our expectation is the scenario will entail 2-3 sessions of gaming time, with a schedule of gathering every other week.
APOCTHULHU is a tabletop game which allows you to play out a broad range of gritty adventures in Post-Apocalyptic versions of our world, as afflicted by the ravages of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. APOCTHULHU is a game which explores what happens when the intrepid Investigators or Agents from those other games fail, and the forces of the Cthulhu Mythos alter the world forever.
Warning: The subject matter of the Kick The Can scenario deals with mature topics and themes. This is largely due to the disturbing nature and activities of the campaign's antagonists. Some discussion of their methods will need to be addressed at the table, but under no circumstances will violence of a sexual nature be directed towards the human players in this campaign, or the characters they represent by any participant. Images of a graphic nature will be marked with a <Spoiler> tag to facilitate optional viewing. Such images will never contain core clues for the scenario, but are presented as an optional visual insight into the nature of the antagonists.
Our scheduled games are Friday evenings 8-11 PM CDT, every other week. Occasionally we need to alter our schedule due to real life conflicts, and we try to work around whatever solution allows for a majority of players being present.
We'll be using Roll20 for character sheet management and dice rolling, Discord is required for voice communications, video is not.
You can find our campaign listing on Roll20
