Exhibit Closes Friday
A traveling museum show of Innsmouth artifacts is breaking attendance records — and nobody who bought a season pass has been seen leaving town. A Call of Cthulhu one-shot for 3–5 investigators.
Free — copies it into your campaigns with your session tools.
Premise
The Peabody-Rice Traveling Exhibition — 'Gold of the Forgotten Coast' — has parked its crates in the Arkham Lyceum for a two-week run, showing jewelry recovered from the 1928 federal raid on Innsmouth. Attendance has tripled every day. The exhibit closes Friday, and the investigators are asked to look into it by Lyceum trustee Margaret Osgood, whose nephew visited Monday, bought a season pass, and has answered his door ever since without ever opening it.
Stakes
The gold is doing what Innsmouth gold does: calling. Every season-pass holder is in the second week of a change that finishes in salt water. When the exhibit closes Friday, the Peabody-Rice company will move on to Boston with its crates, its ticket ledger of converted names — and a chartered boat scheduled to take 'members of the appreciation society' on a farewell harbor cruise that has no return leg.
Scenes
- 1
Third Time This Week
The Arkham Lyceum exhibit hall, mid-afternoon crowd
The hall is full and nearly silent. Visitors circle the central case — a tiara of pale gold worked with fish-frog figures — at a slow, uniform walking pace, like water going around a drain. The docent, a Peabody-Rice man named Corwin Slate, encourages 'repeat viewing' and pushes the season pass hard: fifty cents, unlimited entry, and your name and address in the members' ledger. A Psychology roll notices some visitors' third or fourth orbit; a Medicine or Hard Spot Hidden notices two members near the case whose blinking has stopped keeping pace with everyone else's.
Decision point: Someone will have to spend real time near the tiara to learn anything — and time near the tiara is the exact mechanism of the harm. Who looks, and for how long?
If they go sideways: If the players refuse to enter the hall at all, Osgood's nephew Walter finally opens his door that evening — and the state of his hands moves the investigation to his boarding house and the letters he's been writing to an address in Boston harbor.
POW roll — Regular success to break off viewing the tiara after one minute; anyone who fails circles the case again and loses 0/1 Sanity - 2
The Members' Ledger
The Lyceum office and the boarding houses of three season-pass holders
Slate guards the ledger like a strongbox, but it can be copied at night, charmed out of him, or glimpsed during a staged distraction: 214 names in twelve days. Visiting members is worse than the numbers. Walter Osgood speaks through his door in a voice like a wet rope; the widow Pruett on French Hill has filled her bathtub and her kitchen basins and sits between them 'to be comfortable'; young Teddy Marsh — no relation, he'd have said last month — has begun to smile constantly and swim daily at the millpond, in October, and is the only member who feels wonderful.
Decision point: Teddy, still lucid and cheerful, offers to be the investigators' inside man at the members-only 'appreciation society' meeting Thursday night — genuinely wanting to help, and visibly, hourly, becoming less the sort of thing that wants to.
If they go sideways: If the players go straight at Slate with force or law, he folds instantly and honestly — he's a hired showman who has never looked in the crates after dark — and hands them a better target: the exhibition's owner, Mr. Rice, who travels with the gold and never takes rooms above the ground floor.
Fast Talk or Sleight of Hand — Regular success gets ten minutes with the ledger; Hard success gets it copied without Slate knowing - 3
The Appreciation Society
The Lyceum hall, Thursday night, members only, doors locked from inside
No lecture, no chairs. The members stand in rings around the lit case and breathe in unison — the sound of a slow tide on shingle, made by two hundred human chests. Mr. Rice presides: a vast, gloved, muffled figure who speaks briefly about 'the family's gratitude' and 'Friday's reunion,' and then simply lets the gold work. Investigators inside (as fake members or hidden) witness the night's true business: Rice reads names from the ledger, and members answer 'present' in voices that have begun to agree with each other.
Decision point: The tiara sits unguarded in an unlocked case in a room full of the entranced. Stealing it now might break the call — or might snap two hundred half-changed people out of the only trance keeping them calm, with the doors locked from the inside.
If they go sideways: If the players torch or smash the case mid-ceremony, the members don't attack — they grieve, a sound worth 1/1d4+1 Sanity by itself, and Rice calmly announces that the reunion is moved up to tonight and leaves for the harbor with two hundred mourners walking after him.
Sanity roll — 1/1d6 loss hearing two hundred people breathe as one tide - 4
The Farewell Cruise
Arkham wharf, Friday night — the chartered steam launch Cormorant
The Cormorant is rigged to carry two hundred passengers one way: no return coal, life vests still crated, and a hold half-flooded on purpose, 'for the comfort of members.' Rice supervises boarding by ledger name. The members queue on the wharf in their Sunday clothes, some weeping, some serene, a few — the newest — still lucid enough to look back at the town. Whatever the investigators intend, it has to happen between the gangplank and the harbor bar: past that line, an escort is waiting under the water, and no boarding party comes back from it.
Decision point: Sink the launch, take the tiara, or take Rice — the players likely can't manage more than one before the tide turns. And Teddy Marsh is fourth in the queue, holding his season pass like a hymnal, waving at them.
If they go sideways: If everything has gone loud earlier and Rice knows the investigators, he offers a fair trade at the gangplank: the ledger's last page — every name not yet 'present' — in exchange for unopposed departure with those already changed. It is a genuinely good deal, which is the horror of it.
Sanity roll — 1d3/1d10 loss if Rice is unmuffled; Hard POW roll to act at all while he sings the boarding call
NPCs
Corwin Slate
Forty, checked suit a size too bright, a carnival barker's voice sanded down for museum work. Counts the till obsessively and has started wearing cotton gloves 'for the brass.'
Sells first, thinks later, panics honestly. Every fact he has, he'll trade for reassurance that he isn't in trouble.
Mr. Rice
A figure like a chapel draped for winter: broad, layered in coats and a muffler in all weathers, gloved, smoked glasses, a hat too small for the head under it. Smells of cold brine and shop-new leather. Walks with a wide, rolling patience.
Courteous, unhurried, and entirely without malice — a shepherd genuinely fond of the flock. Speaks of the members as 'the family's long-lost' and means every syllable.
Margaret Osgood
Sixty, tweed, chair of every committee worth chairing in Arkham. Carries her nephew's unanswered letters in her handbag like exhibits for a trial she intends to win.
Imperious, generous, and precise about what she's paying for: Walter, whole, and the Lyceum's name kept out of the papers — in that order, she insists, though the order wobbles under pressure.
Teddy Marsh
Nineteen, grocery clerk, cowlick, a new and permanent smile. Swims the millpond every dawn now and has stopped feeling the cold. His collar hides what his cheerfulness can't.
Brave, guileless, and helpful to a degree that breaks the heart — he volunteers for everything because, for the first time in his life, he isn't afraid of anything at all.
Endings
The Cormorant Burns
The launch never clears the harbor bar — scuttled, burned, or seized. Without the crossing, the changed are stranded between shapes: Arkham gains a locked hospital ward, three quiet drownings a month all winter, and a grateful, ruined Margaret Osgood. Rice escapes over the side and does not surface. The tiara, if recovered, goes back into a federal locker, where the paperwork lists it as 'inert.'
The Ledger's Last Page
The investigators take Rice's trade or force its equivalent: the unconverted names are saved, the converted sail. The Cormorant clears the bar at slack tide and goes down her own gangway into the deep off Devil Reef, lights burning underwater for a long time. Teddy waves once. The saved names recover by inches — all but four, who buy tickets to Boston the week the exhibit reopens there.
Gold Goes Home
The tiara is destroyed or carried far inland, and the call snaps like a parted hawser. Two hundred people wake up on a wharf in their Sunday clothes with no memory of the fortnight, which is a mercy, and the beginnings of an ear-ache none of their doctors can cure, which is not. Rice, bereft of his instrument, files suit against the Lyceum for the loss of exhibit property — and wins, and uses the settlement to fund the next expedition inland, toward the investigators' addresses on the court record.
Sequel hook for Call of Cthulhu 7e campaigns
The Peabody-Rice company's route card, found in Slate's till, lists nine more towns — and next to three of them, in Rice's hand, the word 'cousins.'
Need more NPCs for this table? Generate Call of Cthulhu 7e NPCs with stats, secrets, and portraits.
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