Originally Posted by Maugan Ra
I still remember my first Call of Cthulhu game, where I played a smuggler called Johnson who was, perhaps, the most ridiculously amoral individual to walk the planet. He'd survived through the entire campaign this far by putting capitalistic self interest above such things as morality or sanity. Run into a murder cult ritually sacrificing people? Burn their house down from outside, steal their cars. Teammate dabbling in the occult? Fund him and protect him in exchange for a cut of whatever he learned. Ancient lizard-thing manipulating a young naive victim with dosages of a strange otherworldly drug? Strike a deal with it and start your own drugs trade.
He just did not care that he was utterly insignificant in the face of the universe, because he could still make money in the meantime and enjoy himself. By the relevant point, he owned perhaps a quarter of the international smuggling business and was easily a multi-millionaire. Because hey, if strange old men or mysterious figures are going to pay me a lot of money to ship strange artifacts past customs, who am I to say no?
Anyway, eventually, through various shennanigans our group encountered the avatar of Nylarathotep. Who, being the cosmic bastard that he was, declared that he was basically going to ruin the things we cared most for in life, pretty much for giggles. Everyone else is panicking, but Johnson is surprisingly calm - after all, he only cares about money. Did Nylarathotep steal my savings, or collapse my empire? The GM scoffed at this. Please, he said, remember what you're dealing with. Then he reminded us of the in-game date.
It was early 1929, as it turned out. The GM, via Nylarathotep, caused the Great Depression just to screw with me. I have never enjoyed a game quite so much.
Naturally, Johnson eventually decided that screw this, no one robbed him quite like that. So he called on everything he'd ever learned, conducted a great and dark ritual, and bargained for nameless things beyond to turn himself into the preliminary stages of a god-thing. His eventual intended goal was to get a new form of power, and put himself beyond the reach of even the Crawling Chaos' meddlings.
As it turned out, this was exactly what Nylarathotep wanted me to do. He rocks up out of nowhere, reveals that he has actually been the mysterious benefactor behind a few of my better dealings, and enacts a fail safe built into the rituals in order to turn me into his loyal semi-mortal servant. I very nearly doom the entire world before one of my former teammates rallies all my various enemies and has me sealed away in a bottle under Antarctica.
As it turns out, trying to outwit the Crawling Chaos doesn't really work. Fun to try though.
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