The Saint Margaret's Mystery
Campaign: Scooby Cthulhu
Jump to navigation Jump to searchThe Miskatonic gang stops at a rural hospital to get patched up, but something isn't quite right.
Recording of game session (YouTube)
Summary
(Spoiler alert: this summary reveals plot details of the Pelgrane Press adventure, The Dying of St Margaret's.)
While travelling through Colorado in their motorhome, the Miskatonic gang starts to feel the effects of their recent adventures. D.J.'s gunshot wound is starting to hurt and his arm is numb, and both Connie and Hideyori have a nagging cough. They pass a sign for "St. Margaret's Hospital", and decide that a doctor visit is in order.
The road zig-zags up a steep, rocky mountain and down the other side, to the town of St. Margaret's. St. Margaret's is a small town on the rocky shore of a large lake (Grand Lake). The sun is setting as the Miskatonic gang drive into town, casting beautiful red, purple, and yellow hues through the haze over the lake. Still following the signs for St. Margaret's Hospital, they find a long wooden bridge that leads to an island. A sign next to the bridge says "MAX WT 3500 LBS", so they decide to park the motorhome in town and walk across.
St. Margaret's Hospital is a crumbling Gothic building made primarily of stone. Dusty notes that it's unusual for a building this old to be made of stone in this part of Colorado, and Connie notes that the design is reminiscent of Victorian era monasteries.
The Miskatonic gang is greeted at the door by Nurse Happy Codburn, who triages D.J.'s gunshot wound, but soon notices that both Connie and Hideyori have some kind of respiratory infection. This is made even clearer when Hideyori coughs so hard that he passes out. After a quick examination of Hideyori and some questions to Connie, Happy deduces that they have diphtheria! Happy asks the Miskatonic gang to wait in the lobby while she gets a wheelchair for Hideyori.
The gang looks around the lobby and nearby halls while they wait. The entrance hall is enormous, with a 12-foot-tall crucified Jesus looking sadly up to heaven and two wide stairways on either side of it. Dusty notices that the floors are Italian marble, which he finds inexplicable and disturbing. D.J. notices that a page is missing from the hospital register that Happy asked them to sign, and Connie observes that there are photos on the walls of the hospital staff going back almost 100 years, and that the earliest photos show them dressed in nun's habits. They all notice that the hospital is strangely quiet, and has the feel of an abandoned building, or a school after the students have all gone home.
Happy returns, and takes the Miskatonic gang to their rooms. Other patients, all of them old men and most of them in wheelchairs, watch silently. Happy asks questions about where the Miskatonic gang has been. At first, it seems that she is asking for medical reasons, but it becomes apparent that she would like to leave St. Margaret's, and feels trapped there.
After Happy leaves them, the Miskatonic gang explores the hospital, finding a library, a surgical theatre, and the pharmacy. They are all starting to sense that something is something is not right at St. Margaret's. The hospital is mostly empty, and everything from the walls to the paintings to the padlock on the pharmacy door are aged far more than they ought to be. They debate whether to break into the pharmacy, take the drugs they need, and leave, but decide to wait a bit until they see a doctor.
They return to their rooms, and are visited shortly afterward by Dr. Althorp, an elderly man with an English accent. His examinations are competent, but perfunctory. He seems apathetic, and can barely muster the energy or interest to write the prescriptions the Miskatonic gang needs.
Happy brings the medicine and tells the Miskatonic gang that dinner is being served in the cafeteria. Hideyori looks over the pills that Happy brought, and declares that they are all genuine medicine, but points out that one of them is a sedative. The gang takes their medicine, but choose not to take the sedative.
Dinner is bland, and the other patients are eerily quiet as they eat. D.J. engages a couple of them in conversation, and learns that they are all veterans (Korea or World War 2, for the most part). It occurs to the Miskatonic gang that everyone they have spoken with is much too old to have enlisted in the wars they say they are veterans of. They also notice that most of the men here came for fairly minor ailments but have since become weaker and sicker. At least a quarter of them are in wheelchairs. As dinner comes to a close, a man next to D.J. stands, collapses, and his leg audibly shatters.
After dinner, they speak to Mrs. Clegg, the cook. Initially, Mrs. Clegg seems like a vibrant, lively person, but the desperation in her eyes is clear, and the life in her face drains away when she thinks no one is looking. From her they learn that this used to be a nice place to work, but things have gotten worse in the last few months. She mentions that a number of patients disappeared about a month ago, but that the mood of the hospital had started to turn sad a long time before that. Pressed to think whether anything strange had happened, she supposes that things started to change around the time of the meteor shower 18 months ago, but that is probably a coincidence.
The Miskatonic gang wait until the rest of the hospital is asleep, and go exploring. They find a storage room under the library with numerous books about creation myths and physics, and a large circular machine surrounded by round bubble levels screwed to the floor. They decide not to mess with the machine, but they read through the notes left behind and a couple of the oldest books, costing them a few points of Sanity as they learn of gods that fell to Earth at the dawn of time.
They explore the basement next, and find that it leads to limestone caves beneath the hospital and the lake. They find the missing patients, who are each dressed for a spelunking expedition. The bodies crumble at the slightest touch -- even the one who is still alive when they find him. Witnessing this unnerves the Miskatonic gang, but they move deeper into the caves anyway.
They find a large cavern underneath the lake filled with an iridescent, undulating haze. As they watch it, it seems to surge toward them. They flee.
The Miskatonic gang reviews their options. Leave the hospital as quickly as they can? Try to convince the current staff and patients to leave, as well? Try to find some explosives and destroy the cavern?
They decide that they can't leave the staff and patients at St. Margaret's at the mercy of whatever it is that fell from the sky with the meteor. Connie recalls a previous archeological expedition in nearby Utah, when she needed dynamite for an excavation but had difficulty obtaining it through legitimate channels. She contacts an old acquaintance, Karl "Kube" Kubiak, and arranges delivery of some dynamite. Later that evening, several dozen bikers roll into the town of St. Margaret's. After some initial tension, Kube greets Connie warmly, and delivers a crate of Semtex and detonators (he apologizes, but he was unable to find dynamite on short notice). Dusty pays the bill.
The Miskatonic gang carries the explosives back to St. Margaret's Hospital and Connie places them throughout the caverns. They then set off the fire alarms, and evacuate the hospital across the bridge to the town. Finally, they set off the explosives (after some technical difficulties, and a close call with the haze in the cavern), and flee across the bridge.
The hospital, the island, and the bridge all collapse into the lake, replaced by white plumes of smoke and spray.
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