Design notes

Notes on how The Five Techniques interacts with Cthulhu Dark

If you're familiar with Cthulhu Dark, the structure and flow of this scenario is probably pretty familiar to you. That said, extra clarity never hurts, so let's take a look at the stages of discovery you can expect to play through. 

Generally speaking, The Five Techniques goes through some or all of the following in roughly this order: 

• The punks arrive in a strange place 
• They read a letter describing how the creature harms people
• The creature acts indirectly against the punks
• They see evidence of the creature 
• They hear folktales of the creature
• They meet people who talk about victims of the creature
• Direct acton against the punks
• Evidence of victims of the creature
• They find a named human harmed by the creature.
• They see the creature itself.  

Two things may be considered to be 'the creature' here: 

1. The Buried Queen and her strange dream-sendings
2. The Troubles

The actual relationship, if any, between these two things remains deliberately nebulous. The Queen's dream-sendings are patterned on a set of torture methods use by the British government in Northern Ireland during the 1970s known as the "five techniques". 

This scenario is designed using the "Montage of Attractions" technique developed in Soviet cinema during the 1920s. In brief, it means that the players (and you as the Keeper) will instinctively intuit connections between things that are presented in proximity to each other. 

For this reason, events and scenarios of the Troubles are presented here, alongside events and scenarios of an ancient, inhuman terror. No explanation or resolution the author could state in the text will ever be as creepy or resonant as the one that begins to form in your mind. Crucially, your imaginations will give you a perception of a 'hazy system' - a sense that if you knew perhaps one more thing it would all make sense. But that will be forever just out of reach, an image that does not snap into focus. 

I do have an opinion about how the Buried Queen, the dreams and the torture of prisoners might be connected, but that's neither here nor there. Death of the author, you know.  

SIX: If in doubt, on a 6 give the punk a glimpse of a forthcoming dream-sending (one or two sentences) and remind them of tales they grew up with of ancient things dwelling beneath the earth in tombs or labyrinths. 

Don't worry about following the sequence of the dreams exactly - the important thing is that the players know that if they're having the dreams, when Mickey disappears it's likely to happen to one of the Punks next.