A scenario hook for The Yellow King Roleplaying Game: This Is Normal Now
The investigators step into the path of the rubbery yellow entities called hazmats when they look into the disappearance of an environmental activist. They discover that she had planned to go undercover as an employee of a toxic waste disposal company called TotalSolve, to grab footage for a documentary. Digging into the company, they learn that employees have been disappearing as well.
TotalSolve was on the financial rocks until recently, when CEO Blaine Braxton turned his family firm around. After stumbling onto a copy of the play through a network of like-minded Rolex-wearing degenerates, he received a mysterious gift. One morning he found the headpiece of a hazmat suit sitting on his computer keyboard. Excited by the Yellow Sign patch affixed above the eyeholes, he placed it on his head. The consciousness inside the protective mask showed him how to open a gateway to Carcosa. Its inhabitants hunger for dioxins, phenols and radioactive waste, either to feed their servitor beasts or to poison local rivals.
Now he gets rid of that stuff at next to no cost, unless you count the health code violations his workers expose themselves to as they pour drums of waste into the gateway. Any employee who Braxton fears will break NDA or complain about conditions he transforms into a hazmat, an animated, empty hazmat suit capable of hunting and killing his other adversaries.
When the investigators discover his secret, they can end the threat by capturing and destroying his magic hazmat headpiece. If your players need a forgiving conclusion, this could free the victims who have been transformed into hazmats, restoring them to confused and dazed versions of their former selves. In the full-on horror ending, the hazmats turn on and tear apart Braxton before disintegrating into spirit forms and howling through the gate of Carcosa, which then slams shut. Whether the investigators find their environmental friend still being held prisoner in the plant, or see her suffer the same fate as the other hazmats, is a decision to make in the moment, in response to player expectations.
Hazmats
Numbers: 1 – 4
Difficulty: Superior (Escape 3, Other 4, Kill 6)
Difficulty Adjustments: +1 if you know who the hazmat used to be and care about that person; -1 if you know the secret of the headpiece
Toll: 2
Tags: Alt
Injuries, Minor and Major: Whiff of Cyanide/Radiation Poisoning
Characters taking their Final Injury from a hazmat become hazmats themselves. This demise might be reversible if the other characters then destroy the headpiece, and you find yourself suffused with narrative generosity.
The Yellow King Roleplaying Game takes you on a brain-bending spiral through multiple selves and timelines, pitting characters against the reality-altering horror of The King in Yellow. When read, this suppressed play invites madness, and remolds our world into a colony of the alien planet Carcosa. Four core books, served up together in a beautiful slipcase, confront layers with an epic journey into horror in four alternate-reality settings: Belle Epoque Paris, The Wars, Aftermath, and This Is Normal Now. Purchase The Yellow King Roleplaying Game in print and PDF at the Pelgrane Shop.