If I’d known adventure scenarios like this existed, I would have widened my scope beyond D&D a long time ago. Revelations brings the bible to life in a horridly twisted version of the apocalypse. The PCs will basically live the book of Revelation applied retroactively to the other 65 books of the bible. If that sounds confusing, read on. If it sounds messed up, it is. If it sounds like a nihilistic death scenario, it’s that too: PCs have a 90-99% of dying as the world goes to hell around them, and they can’t do a damn thing about it. Unless they’re really good.
The adventure is set in the small town of Toil, Illinois in 1938. The Dust Bowl setting and the time of the Depression is perfectly suited for what appears to be the biblical end times. Revelations is about the crushing despair triggered by a preacher’s loss of faith, and the devastating consequences of his attempt to make God active in the world as He was in biblical times. Stop reading now if you think you might play this. From this point on, game masters’ eyes only.
How did the end begin?
The backstory is the tragedy of Andrew Yearta. Andrew is a King-James-Bible-only fundamentalist preacher who believes God has deserted humanity. While biblical scholars and theologians speak of “Remnant Theology”, Andrew has formulated a “Deserter Theology”: that humanity’s sins have so offended the Lord that He has entirely given up on creation. God doesn’t even bother punishing the wicked anymore; there is no salvation to be had for anyone, let alone a faithful remnant. The parental love that sent Noah’s flood is dried up; God has washed His hands of humankind.
Andrew, in his insanity, believes that his own recent sin (fornicating with a young woman) was the straw that broke the camel’s back — the final sin that damned humanity. Instead of showing His love through apocalyptic rebuke, God simply wiped Himself from existence, removing his love and forgiveness from the world. Andrew thus believes that he is the slayer of his own God, and must therefore become the prophet of His resurrection. In desperation and despair, he launches an incredibly obscene plan to “bring God back”. He summons a Cthulhu-like god (Noought-Iss), binds it in a hideous ritual, and molds it into a devastating parody of the Judeo-Christian God. In this way, Andrew hopes to piss off Yahweh, make Him jealous, and provoke His return so that Biblical Truth can again hold sway in the world.
“Andrew would infuriate his God back into existence by his blasphemous gall — by worshiping something so abhorrent and base that it escaped the notice of even the most brutal pagans. Thus, in an attempt to save his own soul, Andrew Yearta made Earth a living Hell.”
Andrew does this by sacrificing an innocent farmer and his family (by mutilating and dismembering them), and then casting a spell from an obscure tome found at a college divinity school — nominally a school for biblical studies, but one that also explores the theology of bizarre and heretical texts. The tome in question was written by a certain Klaus von Meinhoff, a German linguist in the early 1800s, who dealt with forbidden knowledge and realized that the god-creature Noought-Iss is the primary catalyst of all existence. Andrew Yearta tapped into this forbidden knowledge, to channel Noought-Iss into a copy of the King James Bible:
“Andrew has used what von Meinhoff called the ‘Objective Tongue’ to bind Noought-Iss to his will. Rather than serving as the bridge between all that IS NOT and all that IS, he has performed a sick, profane ritual that focuses Noought-Iss on a single copy of the King James Bible. His insane hope is that Noought-Iss will then rewrite his ‘Deserter God’ back into existence and save the doomed souls of mankind.”
The problem is that Noought-Iss is not meant for a task like this. The “god’s” intellect, if it has one, is cold and alien. It has no concern for humanity’s survival; no understanding of historical context, subjective interpretation, or inter-textuality. For Noought-Iss to attempt a feat like this would rewrite the laws of reality and result in an explosive apocalyptic nightmare. Reality would become a perversion of everything that happens in the King James Bible:
“Every line of the King James Bible is now being used as the code for a new reality, applied literally and without any regard for possible contradictions. The incongruities are tearing existence apart. Noought-Iss’ chaotic, bloody application of the new reality is causing existence itself to collapse.”
And so the skies are raining hail and fire (Rev 8:7); mobs are slitting people’s throats to perform sin offerings (Lev 10:12-20); people are eating ash as if it were bread and weeping hysterically (Ps 102: 9); other people are eating actual bread, but the loaves are turning to flesh that pulsate with sweaty skin and spurt blood when eaten (I Cor 11:23-32); frenzied worshipers, as they rave about the end of days, clamor to rip chunks from that living bread and guzzle bottles of blood; the weak are becoming slaves on the spot and obeying their new masters (Eph 6:5); the ten plagues of Egypt are decimating life everywhere; and countless other horrors that have been shifted and twisted from every page of the bible.
It’s like living the book of Revelation retroactively applied to the other 65 books of the bible.
Of course, not everything in the bible is bad, and much of what has been translated into existence is harmless, or even beneficial. There is a Tree of Life (Rev 22:2) outside the agricultural supply store, with fruit that magically heals all physical wounds, insanity, or any mental illness. The grocery store has an endless supply of bread and tuna (Mk 6:41): when a loaf is removed from the shelf, another takes its place; a single can of tuna could feed the entire town, as there is always more tuna in the can. But whatever is beneficial or mundane is hardly noticed under all the calamity.
The earth is now flat, thanks to Rev 7:1: “I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth”. When Noought-Iss made reality of those words, the result was a victory for flat-earthers (if they can live to enjoy it).
The PCs run around town in vain, witnessing horrors on every block, unable to do anything beyond helping an occasional victim. Indeed, the module encourages that the PCs (1) embrace their destruction: the scenario is apocalyptic, and so no one will win; at best, a few might survive. And to (2) accept their ignorance: the atmosphere of the module is one of escalating, unstoppable doom; players should expect not a shred of hand-holding from the game master; the apocalypse plays no favorites. And to (3) enjoy their fall: in good, nihilistic Call-of-Cthulhu fashion.
Impossible to stop?
The apocalypse can be stopped, and Noought-Iss banished back to his base state, but it will take an extremely shrewd group of players, and an altruistic PC. The solution is found at the farm at the western edge of town where Andrew sacrificed the innocent family and conducted his obscene ritual. At the farm the PCs will find an altar made of the family’s corpses:
“Disemboweled and dismembered, the farmer’s wife and children have been arranged into concentric circles around what appears at first to be a miniature tornado. In the eye of the storm, somehow contained by the human remains, a single leather bound book appears to float.”
That book is the King James Bible, and removing it from the vortex will stop the apocalypse. But that’s easier said than done:
“The bible appears to swirl in the vortex, but at the same times it blinks into the shimmering text of the word ‘book’ or ‘truth.’ The words written in the wind just as suddenly translate into hundreds of other languages, shriek the sound of those words, expand into verses that whip around, a dizzying flurry of language, sound, and raw meaning. Beholding the thing as it sprawls into every realm of perception simultaneously is maddening, and approaching the bloody nexus just makes things worse. Characters can feel their skin turn into the mere idea of skin. Each outstretched finger becomes the word ‘finger,’ letters curling away and being ripped into the maelstrom surrounding the book. To reach into the circle flays the body and mind at once, and there is no hope for any who dare to physically touch the nothingness that is Noought-Iss.”
To unmake the apocalypse and return Noought-Iss to his base state, one of the PCs must dislodge the bible from the vortex — which will irrevocably destroy the character’s body, mind, and soul. It’s an automatic act of suicide/martyrdom, and if one of the PCs makes this sacrifice, then he or she is unmade before the other PCs’ eyes. But with the book wrenched free, the day is saved: Noought-Iss expands outward to encompass all and everything again, and the events of the last day suddenly never were.
Which means that everyone who died under the perverted biblical apocalypse is completely fine and ignorant. All are alive and safe — except the person who removed the bible from the vortex. All traces of that hero have been erased from the world. There are no records of the character having ever existed; family and friends of the PC don’t recognize his or her name if mentioned. No one remembers the apocalypse happening, except for survivors who witnessed the removal of the King James Bible. They do remember everything, since it was their perception of the book’s removal that allowed normality to be restored. They live on as scarred witnesses (some of them may be insane by the end), and they must decide what to do with preacher Andrew Yearta, who is also alive and well. He could very well try casting the spell again. Since he doesn’t remember ever having done so, that is probably exactly what he will do… to infuriate his God back into existence…
Learning the Solution
I can guess what you’re thinking. Stopping the end of the world sounds rather easy: one of the players must simply become a martyr and remove the bible from the vortex. But why would any of them think to do that? The PCs will have no idea this bible is the source of the apocalypse. (For that matter, they may not know anything about Andrew Yearta, who is dead at home, unless they’ve searched his house.) There’s crazy shit to be seen everywhere in town; a bible floating inside a mini-tornado surrounded by a hacked up family is just par for the course. The question isn’t so much, “Will a PC be willing to sacrifice him or herself to remove the bible from the vortex?”, but rather, “Why would a PC try?”
There are two places where the PCs can learn the nature of what’s going on. The first is in Andrew Yearta’s house. Andrew himself is dead, having drunk the toxic “eucharist” wine appearing in bottles all over town. In his bedroom can be found the German tome (by Klaus von Meinhoff), which takes considerable time to read through and make sense of — and that’s assuming at least one of the PCs knows German. But there are also Andrew’s journals and notes, written in English, which describe Noought-Iss’ powers and what the preacher hoped to accomplish by channeling him through a King James Bible.
The second way to learn the truth is much more easy, though instantly fatal. Just as there is a Tree of Life (Rev 22:2) at the agricultural shop, there is a Tree of Knowledge (Gen 2:17) by the river running through the town. While the Tree of Life is beneficial, the Tree of Knowledge is beneficial and fatally terrifying at once:
“As this is the Tree of Knowledge, anyone eating of the fruit will get just that: Knowledge. Of everything. All at once. The omnipotence provided by the fruit is mind-meltingly powerful and utterly deadly. Characters eating of the fruit are doomed to a writhing, poisonous death on the ground, but they will learn all about preacher Andrew Yearta, the god Noought-Iss, and how to stop what is happening around town. Essentially the player is granted access to all GM information about the plot, and then told that they are very soon to die. What remains to be seen is if eater of the forbidden fruit will be able to convey this information to someone else before dying in agony from internal hemorrhaging and madness.”
If the PC can convey the solution — removing the bible from the vortex at the farmer’s house — before dying (and that’s a mighty big if), then the group may just succeed in stopping the apocalypse.
Verdict
Revelations is everything demented I could ask for in a horror module. It’s perfect for Call of Cthulhu, and a special treat for game masters and players who are familiar with the more dramatic elements of the bible, of which there are plenty.
Rating: 5 stars out of 5.
The Busybody 