Okay I've got a rough idea that I want to run. On the MUD, a few months back, PCs took out a group of cultists who appeared to be Cthulhu worshippers. There was a ritual knife involved and it disappeared shortly after the run. Any ideas on how to reintroduce the evil knife/cult?

One word.... Sheddim

The easiest way is to have them do a run for or against the cult group, but that isn't much fun.

A couple of ideas. Some concerned parents daughter is missing. If the team has a mage it may work to have them find the daughter dead, perhaps by the ritual knife. It will depend on the mage (and his skills) as to how well this idea will work. The alternative is that she has recently been hanging out with members of the cult and is still alive. Maybe there was a kid who witnessed her with the cultists and mention they helped kill another girl and can describe the ritual knife. (works best if the PCs had a description of the ritual knife beyond "ritual knife". Give the PCs a chance to recall it)

Either way make sure the PCs aren't aware of the connection at first.

Perhaps have an ancient tome of magic having been stolen (Book of shadows?) or another powerful magical artifact, and have the PCs track it to the cult.

You could combine both. Have the daughter with the cult, and have the PCs track her to the musem or house where the artifact was stolen from and from there to the cult.

Very cool ideas thanks. I'll have to put up a report of how it went down.

Well it turned out a bit different than I thought. I had assumed one of the PCs involved had picked the knife up when they took out the cultists.
Nope, they'd left it along with a half dozen bodies for LS to put in the property room of the 17th precinct.
Time to break into LS, I took it super easy on them. The team got in and almost out when a failed Stealth roll with no Karma left triggered an alert. The team scatters, with one person using a grappel gun ala Batman to escape, another already outside the police station's fence hit the shadows and the last guy running into the parking lot figuring LS would hesitate to shoot him if he was among a bunch of parked patrol cars.
They got away clean and delivered the evidence to the Pc involved in the prior run. Now to see if he resists the call or if he's tjhe next to attempt to raise the drowned god.
Seattle 2064.net port 4000 if y'all want to get in on the action

If you think back to Lovecraft, they might find themselves the target of cultists in the future. Remember a lot of people died in accidents, or maybe a Johnson will set them up for a nasty run and he is really a cultist. The deeper in they go, the more trapped they are in the cult.

Also, cults tend to make things "personal" hitting friends, relatives, favourite hangout and the hardest blow of all, contacts.

You might wait a bit before pulling in that nuclear option - mention that Tommy Two0Tone is out visiting his Sick Aunt an awful lot recently, and you're needing a technology fix asap.


We ran a campaign like this a long while ago, I've got the notes somewhere (it was pretty insane) and it involved a bunch of shark shamen, a blood-mage, organleggers and some seriously hard-core pirate types in the Seattle underground. (Using the organlegging as a way to dispose of the sacrifices)

That lead to a mega-plot which then involved Voudoun (Having the good baron inhabit a dessicated corpse and state blandly, "this house is in disarry, chile'. Go forth and clean 'dis house, so that I may punish the interlopers" after chainsawing your way through multiple packs of rabid ghouls and a wendigo or 2 was pretty...atmospheric), bloodspirits, ghosts, vampires and some ugly, ugly human puppets.

And loot, my god, did we make out like bandits.

Hmmm, I've really got to write up that one from start to finish - just for the hell of it.

-Tir.