Page 19 - World of Darkness

In the world you’re about to enter, the horrors and Anyone who’s gone even a little deeper into
nightmares of legend aren’t just scary bedtime stories — colonial history knows that’s just a fairy tale.
they’re real, even though most people don’t realize it. The Crossing the Atlantic wasn’t an adventure, it was
truth, or at least some of the truth about this world’s hid- a wretched experience, especially for people who
(for the most part) had never been at sea in
den terrors, is revealed in other books. But you don’t need
all the answers to begin exploring. This book gives you their lives. The ship that carried the Jamestown
colonists — the first permanent colony in the
everything you need to create your own collaborative tales. U.S. — lost half its crew and passengers by the
Horror stories, ghost stories, wonder tales, adventures or time she got to Virginia. And though the May-
mysteries. Stories of people who suspect the truth about flower lost only one passenger on its journey —
what lurks in the shadows, perhaps only after getting an and hosted the birth of one — it sustained
unwelcome glimpse of it. terrible damage in storms and swells, leaving the
This chapter brings you the words of some who’ve travelers waterlogged and miserable. At one point
walked the road you’re about to take. After that, the rest the ship was leaking so badly that the group
of this book tells how you and your friends can tell your considered turning back. But they were just over
own stories, with simple but broad rules for doing so. You’ll halfway there, so it made more sense to press on.
find that this game challenges you not just to roll dice The voyage of the Lazarus, the ship carrying the
and keep track of numbers, but to inhabit a character who King’s Crossing colonists, was particularly
is as real and believable as you can make him. The true strange and gruesome. I found several accounts of
measure of success in a Storytelling game is how much an illness or plague that struck the voyagers not
your character interacts with the imaginary world he in- long after they left England, and that continued
habits. right up to their arrival at Plymouth. Excerpts
from diaries and logs say that passengers and
Maybe the character you create will uncover some
secrets of his shadowed world. Maybe he’ll become one of crew were found dead in their bunks, without a
mark on them, their skin “cold and pale as ice.”
those secrets. Time will tell. As the months at sea stretched on — unfortu-
nately, the captain seems to have been a poor
Cold Truth navigator as well as a drunkard — the death
rate rose until at its peak it averaged a new
From a report written by Reverend Lucille Chambers, corpse every few days. Stories circulated that
St. Paul’s Reformed Lutheran Church, King’s Crossing, the angel of death walked the ship at night,
Massachusetts. “cloaked in white sail-cloth,” looking for
sleepers. Frightened crew and passengers forced
themselves to stay awake until dawn, hoping to
If you’ve opened this file, it means they’ve sent avoid being stricken.
you to replace me. Chances are I vanished without History seems to have forgotten this grisly story
explanation, or else I’d be telling you all this
for the most part. I did come across one maga-
in person. This is not my last will and testa- zine article written in 1984 by a doctor and
ment. I’m not going to tell you what happened to
amateur historian. He expressed confusion over
me or who was behind it. I’m just sharing some what type of malady might have been responsible
facts and what I hope will be useful advice for
for the incident, as the disease didn’t seem to
your time here. fit the pattern of any known bacterial or viral
Take some time to look into the history of our infection. There were no symptoms reported, and
church. The people here are proud of the fact all the victims seem to have died in their sleep,
that King’s Crossing can trace its roots to one of going to bed healthy and never waking again.
the first ships to come over from England, and The doctor who wrote the article speculated that
that our church is one of the oldest in New
what happened wasn’t an illness at all. His theory
England. Not long after I was first stationed was that the deaths were, in fact, murders. Perhaps
here, I spent some time reading up on the found-
the work of this country’s earliest serial killer,
ing of our village. My father was a history or the result of a falling out between different
professor and my first paying job was doing
families or factions among the passengers or crew.
research for him, so I know my way around Or perhaps some of the voyagers just went insane
libraries and historical documents. Poking around
from the isolation, discomfort and danger of life
in my spare time over the course of several at sea. Whatever happened, the article goes, a
months, I delved past the superficial accounts
cover story was needed and a plague was the best
found in grade-school history books and tourist they could come up with.
museums. You know the story. Plucky colonists
endure an adventurous passage across the Atlantic, I don’t know that the doctor’s article convinced
find themselves in a strange new land, roll up me. But whatever caused the deaths, as I read the
their sleeves and persevere thanks to a strong ship logs and diaries, I had to marvel at the
work ethic and some help from friendly natives. colonists’ stoicism. They appeared concerned about
the mysterious deaths, but no more concerned than
they were about the weather or running out of
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Chapter 1- THE SECRET HISTORY