Tag: writing

The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Seven

The Old Ghost

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

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She’s starting to think of it as real, this demon of legend, like a living thing she’s searching for in the dark corners of the city. Isabel sits back on the heels of her well-worn travel boots, letting her skirts fall around her and bringing the arm not holding the lantern in toward her chest. It’s cold, and the wind blows freely through the open aperture of the lighthouse. On the positive side, however, the temperature keeps the body from reeking after what looks like a couple of hours since death. 

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Six

The Lighthouse

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

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Lucian Warder. 

Isabel examines the record. The date beside Warder’s name is today’s, the twenty-first of Isra’s Moon. He must have gone to the library this morning, after word of the murder in the Shell District spread. Nothing unusual about that. Anyone would be curious—Isabel was, after all.

Still, it’s strange that she’s run into him twice in such a short time, and stranger still that he sought her out after everything that had happened last night. What did he say his device did? Banish restless spirits, rather like she does? What she does isn’t banishment, but that’s only the first of many problems she has with the concept of Warder’s device. 

Continue reading “The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Six” →

The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Five

The Device

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

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Berend breathes in the stale, dusty air, ignoring the pervasive scent of decay. His neck aches. He’s a big man, and a proficient fighter; there’s never been an occasion when someone has managed to get their hands around his throat, but he is certain that’s what he felt in that blasted room. If he recalls it, he can still feel the individual fingers squeezing, pressing into his windpipe. He hopes he’ll never have to experience that again.

There is his pistol, his trusty friend through more fights than he can count, lying in the dust on the parlor floor. Berend doesn’t want to leave it behind, for its sentimental value and the fear of what new absurdities might lie upstairs. 

That means he must reenter the parlor. 

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Four

The House

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

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“Did you see that?”

Lucian is already frantically scribbling in his book, a rough approximation of the young woman taking form under his pen. He balances the lantern on the top of his case and rummages in his satchel, producing a glass thermometer wrapped in a handkerchief. 

“Was that the ghost?” asks Berend. With one last look around the stable, and no movement apparent in the body of the horse, he shuts both doors and places the wooden plank across the metal brackets on the outside. 

“Not sure.” Lucian gives the thermometer a shake and frowns at it in the dim lamplight before wrapping it back up and returning it to his bag. “I’ll have to take a few more readings. What did you find in there?”

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Three

Belisia

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

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To place the box in which Mikhail’s corpse currently resides into the temple’s extensive graveyard, Berend will have to pay one hundred silver pennies. 

He is informed of this by Father Reeves, the priest in charge of funerary services, a tall man with a shaved head and an aquiline nose. He is paternally comforting and coldly distant, often at the same time, and it’s an unsettling effect. Long brown fingers make notes with a quill in a yellowing ledger. 

We all end up as numbers. Berend hands over the money. It’s most of what he has. He’ll need more if he’s going to continue sleeping in a bed until his next job. 

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter Two

Warder

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

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Isabel sits at the small table across from Brother Risoven, her tea growing cold and a piece of bloody-colored fungus lying on a scrap of paper beside it. It’s stained the paper a wet reddish brown, and it’s shriveled a bit, but otherwise it hasn’t changed noticeably from when she pulled it off the side of a shack in the Shell District last night. In the thin early morning light from the high, narrow windows of the chapel’s living quarters, it looks rather like a severed finger, dark and twisted from putrefaction. 

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The Book of the New Moon Door: Chapter One

Mikhail

The Book of the New Moon Door cover image: A book with yellowing, wrinkled pages lies open on an old wooden desk, with a sprig of lavender lying in the center.

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The gods weep when a Son of Galaser dies.

Berend would know. It rained for five days straight after the battle on Braenach Hill, when nine Sons out of every ten were slaughtered in the grass, seven years ago. He stood in the mud, afterward, water pouring down on his bandaged head, and listened to the announcement that he and the handful of others still standing would be out of work, as part of the terms of their employer’s surrender. 

Not many walked off that hill. Even fewer are still around. 

And now one of them is lying in six pieces on an embalming table. 

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Singer Lake, part three

Singer Lake cover image: winding road goes through trees silhouetted against a sunset. Mountains are visible in the background, with a sunlit lake at their base. A timelapse of the Milky Way arcs through the sky. Text reads: Singer Lake, a module for the Chronicles of Darkness/NWOD system

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The Hounds of God know who killed Jimmy Thiess: seventeen-year-old Charlie Palmer, who was recently relocated from Portland to Singer Lake. Despite her youth, the Hounds are certain they have their murderer, and are ready to enact their revenge as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Detective Rezai is trying to persuade them not to, and to focus instead on the problem of a huge tear in the fabric of reality and the thing that crawled out of it. We find our player characters in the middle of this mess.

(As usual, this is a fan-made module, and I am in no way associated with Onyx Path Publishing, White Wolf Games, or the creators of World of Darkness or the Chronicles of Darkness storytelling system. Content notes for this chapter: murder, threatened murder, police, moral panic, gun violence, poverty, haunting, child endangerment, hospitals.)

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Singer Lake, part two

Singer Lake cover image: winding road goes through trees silhouetted against a sunset. Mountains are visible in the background, with a sunlit lake at their base. A timelapse of the Milky Way arcs through the sky. Text reads: Singer Lake, a module for the Chronicles of Darkness/NWOD system

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Young Jimmy Thiess, student and member of the Hounds of God, has been murdered, leaving behind few clues to follow. Fortunately, Jimmy’s friends know who killed him, but now they intend to take matters into their own hands. The players will need to work to uncover the secrets behind Jimmy’s death, and beneath Singer Lake itself, if they are to prevent the situation from getting worse.

(As usual, this is a fan-made module, and I am in no way associated with Onyx Path Publishing, White Wolf Games, or the creators of World of Darkness or the Chronicles of Darkness storytelling system. Content notes for this chapter: murder, rather sanitized gang activity, police, child neglect and potential endangerment, proselytizing.)

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Singer Lake, part one

Singer Lake cover image: winding road goes through trees silhouetted against a sunset. Mountains are visible in the background, with a sunlit lake at their base. A timelapse of the Milky Way arcs through the sky. Text reads: Singer Lake, a module for the Chronicles of Darkness/NWOD system

Table of Contents

Singer Lake is a beautiful Colorado college town, situated in the wooded hills surrounding the eponymous lake and surrounded by idyllic countryside. It is the home of a University of Colorado campus, the rapidly growing Legend biotech corp, and the headquarters of Life & Family Ministries, an international Christian organization. 

The town also has secrets—gears are turning unseen beneath the bustling, modern facade of Singer Lake, and a plan centuries in the making is about to come to fruition.

This adventure was originally written to be the start of a campaign with one Storyteller and only one player, playing a human character who starts out with no awareness of the World of Darkness. It should be fairly easy to adapt it to a party of player characters, and with a little tweaking, it will allow for PCs who represent other World of Darkness archetypes. 

(As usual, this is a fan-made module, and I am in no way associated with Onyx Path Publishing, White Wolf Games, or the creators of World of Darkness or the Chronicles of Darkness storytelling system. Content notes for this chapter: murder, occult imagery, horror, police.)

Continue reading “Singer Lake, part one” →