Chaosium Digest V13.8 (Teil 2)
Ralf Wagner
until 1787. A young English sculptor named Thomas Basildon bought them
for a few francs, simply becuase he liked the colour of the "glass".
They remained, unworn in his studio in the artists quarter of Paris
until 1788, when drunk and penniless, his hopes destroyed, he decided
to kill himself. Putting them on accidently, just before he was about
to do the deed, he discovered their unique powers and began to sculpt
like never before. He rocketed to fame, making more sculptures in a
week, then most do in a year. He reshaped his mistress, Marie Dupont,
to be the most beguiling beauty of Verailles. In 1789, a few days
after the storming of the Bastilles, a mob broke into Basildon's house
and dragged himself and his mistress out into the street, where they
were hacked to death with knives and axes. The gloves were stolen as
the house was looted and were sold a few days later to a pawnshop for
the sum of 3 francs. It was Basildon that gave the gloves the name
"The Gloves of Pygmalion"*.
The gloves stayed there until the daughter of a merchant, Simone
Boulle, bought them and brought them to England, where she gave them
to an admirer, an Irishman named Steven Kelly. Kelly, the youngest son
of a prosperous Dublin merchant-venturer kept them as a keep sake. A
few years later, disowned by his father, he fled to Chile. After
spending ten years in Chile working for the Spainish, transporting
gold to Spain from the mines in Chile, he left Spainish service and
joined the British navy as a privateer, harrying Napoleon's navy and
helping wipe out his fleet in "The Battle of the Nile". Steven died of
liver failure brought on by the heat and years of heavy drinking. He
was given a decent burial near Alexandria. The gloves were liquidated
to pay one of his creditors, a tavern owner in Alexandria. The gloves
went through several owners in the back streets of that exotic and
ancient city, until the were bought by the wife of a visiting British
naturalist in Eygpt in 1843. She lost them waving to people from the
side of the ship, as it entered London, dropping them into the Thames.
There they remain until in 1889, a mudlark (a young boy who fishes in
the Thames mud at low tide, looking for bits of scrap to sell) found
the gloves and sold them for the sum of four schillings and sixpence
to Lin-Tze, the owner of a opium den in the Limehouse district of
London. What he uses them for, or if he knows of their power, is
unknown.
Keepers can fiddle with the glove's recent history as they wish, for
their own purposes. After covering the last sixty seven and a bit
million years I doubt thirty or a hundred and six will prove much of a
problem.
* For all those going "Eh, what's he on about?": Pygmalion was a
king in ancient Greece who created a beautiful statue of a woman and
fell in love with it. He asked Aphrodite to bring her to life, which
Aphrodite promptly did. Basildon was refering to the fact that
Pygmalion brought dead stone to life, while he made living flesh (it
was his preferred medium) into the deathly counterpart of stone. He
was also trying to butter up his mistress by comparing her to Galetea,
the beautiful statue, Pygmalion created.
PRIMARY SOURCES
The gloves are referred to in several books, both Mythos and
non-Mythos. They represent the only realistic way most investigators
will learn of the gloves. I have included a list of the books and a
brief description of each, including in some cases a brief passage
referring to the gloves.
The Book of Drad
San loss 1d4/2d4
Cthulhu Mythos +3
Atlantean +8
Spell Multiplier X 2
Spells: Consume Likeness
Main Topics: The Serpent People and their nameless evil, Atlantis, the
reign of King Kull.
Description: A scroll of papyrus rolled on two willow rods and bound
with a black ribbon. It is surprisingly fresh despite its age.
The journal of a young Atlantean scholar during the time of King Kull.
It chronicles the period in the King's reign where the extent of the
of the serpent people's hidden presence in his kingdom was realised.
It mentions in passing the discovery of a serpent man who had taken
the form of one of the king's guard and how the king found him out
because of his ophidian shadow. It also describes how the serpentman
disguised himself using sorcery and managed to evade detection for
several years by clever use of sorcery and drugs. It also mentions a
pair of gloves that the creature possessed.
"...once the beast had been slain by the King's guard, it was found
that it wore a pair of gloves of most unusual aspect. They were about
as large as my hand and were covered with strange jewels that seemed
to writhe on the gloves themselves. Gonar, the King's adviser, bade no
man touch them and was quite insistent that they be handed over to
him. It was whispered later, that Gonar was in league with the
monster, but the hushed tones and guarded tongues of those that spoke
such, pointed to the untruth of such a lie. A soldier sent to search
the creatures chambers, lest more of its kind lurk there, returned
white faced and shaking, speaking of blasphemous horrors not men and
yet disturbingly like men that were found there. The King had them all
burned. The stench was unbelievable and the yard stunk for days
afterward."
Location: The book is currently in Carcosa, abandoned in one of the
cities many twisting streets and alleyways. How it came to be there is
a mystery.
The Notebook of Thomas Basildon
San Loss 1d4/1d8
Cthulhu Mythos +2
English +3
No Spells
Main Topics: The Serpent people and the creation of inhuman and
abhorrent sculpture.
Description: A worn brown leather A4 note/sketch book, with the
initials TB embossed on the front.
A well thumbed sketch book filled with pencil and charcoal drawings,
designs for statues, concept drawings, and other similar things. It
also acts as a diary, with pages of pencilled script filling in
between drawings. The first few pages are all fairly normal drawings
of Greek style statues, nymphs and Aphrodite feature prominently.
Later on, the book is filled with pages of frantically scribbled
descriptions of dreams and deeds of a strange and unwholesome nature.
Pictures of snakes and snake men predominate in the last few pages of
the book, with one of the last pictures being a large (two page)
pastel of a gleaming many towered city nestled in a deep jungle
valley. The inhabitants of the city are not present, but the garish
and disturbingly real colours unsettle the observer nonetheless. the
gloves are pictured only once, but the hastily pencilled drawing still
gives a very clear picture of the gloves. There would be no doubt in
the mind of anyone who had seen the original as to whether the two are
one and the same. The last written part of the book (dated two days
before Basildon's death) reads as follows:
"... (obliterated word) Marie, dear God Marie, why did you cry last
night? Why? I made you beautiful! More beautiful then words can say!
You are the darling of Versailles and you cried in my arms, I changed
you beautifully, why aren't you grateful?"
Location: A second-hand book shop on the rue sacre coeur in Paris. It
lies tightly wedged between a book on anatomy and a walking stick in
an elephant's foot hallstand.
SECONDARY SOURCES
The gloves are mentioned indirectly in several books the most
important being mentioned here.
* The Book of Dyzan includes a second-hand report of the incident
described in the Book of Drad.
* An clay tablet by an unknown scribe, from Trace describes the
death of one of the gloves' Thracian owners and how "gem fingered
death plucked his life away".
* The Pnakotic manuscripts contains several mentions of the
sculptures the original owner of the gloves created. It does not name
the owner or reveal anything about him apart from his species. However
the description of the sculptures describe the style so accurately,
that anyone who had studied a recent creation could say with authority
that there were definite similarities between the two pieces.
* My Years as a Clergyman, is a the self published memoirs of the
Austrian priest, Gotfreid Braun, who took over the parish where Von
Bulov lived. An avid amateur historian, he details several local
legends, including one that refers to the demise of the Von Bulov. The
legend labels Michelle's mother a witch and describes how she made a
pact with the devil and how it led to the destruction of the entire
family.
OTHER RESEARCH
Should the investigators think to test the physical composition of the
gloves, they will have to spend a great deal of time and money.
Research in all eras shows that the gloves are not from any known
human culture due to their design and composition. The jewels are
unidentifiable in any era. The nearest anybody can come to a definite
answer is that they bear some resemblance to quartz crystal, but
that's about it.
Tests of the fabric in the 1890s will show high concentrations of
aluminium (aluminum), mercury (which is not liquid for unknown
reasons), silver, thorium (not actually emitting radiation, for some
strange reason) and two unknown elements, one of which is similar to a
known compound*.
In the 1920s, the vaguely identifiable element will be titanium, but
the remaining element will remain as inexplicable as ever.
In the 1990s, the mystery element will remain a mystery, but under a
powerful (very, very powerful) electron microscope, it will be shown
to be incredibly dense and to have a very complex molecular shape like
a sort of lattice. In the 1990s, it will be possible to date the
gloves, but it will be very hard and expensive to do so. The gloves
will need to be bombarded by a high powered molecular stream to
dislodge the remains oldest of the oldest organic material that it has
come into contact with (these of course will be only a few molecules).
Once they have the organic material, they can try and carbon date it,
giving the obviously "impossible" answer. (I am a little uncertain as
to the validity of this method, I saw it on Tomorrow's World and it's
the only way I can think of that dating would be possible, bar the use
of magic.)
* There was one titanium-oxygen compound known in 1824, but pure
titanium was not tracked down until 1910.
SCENARIO IDEAS
I think the gloves should be used as a campaign thread, with little
bits of information being discovered every so often. I would allow the
investigators to find the gloves farely early on in a campaign, with
the various references to them being unearthed as well as the main
plot of the campaign.
My favourite way of introducing the gloves is the "doomed artist"
idea. A penniless, destitute and desperate sculptor finds the gloves
and is suddenly catapulted to fame only to have the effects of the
gloves destroy him. The investigators coming upon the ruins of his
studio find him warped and inhuman on the floor (a nasty idea
involving cats has come to mind, but I think I will save it until a
later date).
Alternatively the investigators could find them in the back of a old
and decrepit pawnshop to be sold them for a suspiciously low price.
Along with the gloves, they could find a book warning of the dire
conseqences of donning the gloves. If they choose not to buy it,
that's their affair...
I hope you enjoy the Gloves of Pygmalion. Feel free to use them as you
wish, and I hope you enjoy using them as much as I enjoyed creating
them.
Till R'lyeh rises,
Eamon Honan
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