Snowy Streets, Icy Hearts

A scenario hook for Yellow King: Paris

 

In late February of 1895, an unusually strong winter blast wallops Paris. The Seine freezes over. Work crews struggle to clear all the snow.

Doubtless those of our art student heroes who hail from the northern US may use this as an opportunity to brag of the vastly more cruel winters they routinely survived.

But then they learn of a demise so strange that it must relate to the strange mystery of Carcosa.

Couturier Sylvia Devarenne has been found dead in her workshop by an assistant. Despite the fire still roaring in its furnace, she died of hypothermia. When the investigators visit the morgue, they discover that her heart still won’t thaw out.

Devarenne was to turn over a wedding dress to a client that morning. Young Denise Dantan, daughter of rubber magnate Charles Dantan, collapses, distraught.

Then another, identically inexplicable death: Laurent Panine, the wine merchant engaged to supply the wedding with champagne, also succumbs to a frozen heart.

Asked who might want to stop the wedding, Charles names Yvan Michelet, “a so-called poet of surpassing uselessness.” The wretch mooned over his daughter from afar, convinced he somehow had a chance to marry her, though his father has not a single factory to his name.

In poetry circles Michelet has earned a reputation as an egotistical pest, with ambitions far exceeding his talent. He has fortunately absented himself from readings and literary salons of late. The last anyone saw of him, he was saying that he had read a copy of the famous banned play, and it had completely changed his perspective on all matters literary and philosophical.

When they track Michelet down, the group prompts him to confess that he has been in contact with a Carcosan noble, the Duchess of Ice. His jealousy and rage summoned her—and with her, the storm that has paralyzed the city.

Moved by the fervency of his desire for vengeance, the Duchess agreed to punish all who dared celebrate the marriage of his beloved to the non-entity son of some industrialist. All he had to pledge in return was an eternity of service.

With a list of potential victims longer than the invitation list for a lavish wedding, the investigators must now figure out who’s next—and how to defeat this particular powerful courtier of the pallid king.

Numbers: 1

Difficulty: Vastly Superior (Escape 3, Other 6, Kill 7)

Difficulty Adjustments: -2 if you carry an item blessed by one of her Carcosan enemies, such as her former husband, the Duke of Fire; -1 if you have severed her psychic link to Michelet

Toll: 2

Tags: Carcosan

Injuries, Minor and Major: Frostbite / Hypothermia

FROSTBITE

Injury

-1 to Physical tests.

Discard after three hours (world time) in a hot environment.

HYPOTHERMIA

Injury

Lose 4 Health. -1 to Physical tests.

Discard as recipient of Difficulty 4 First Aid test, after six hours (world time) in a hot environment.

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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.