Christmas for the Art Students of Yellow King Paris

In 1895, the art student player characters of The Yellow King: Paris can’t simply pop home to visit their wealthy American families for the holidays. They can’t take time from their studies at the École des Beaux-Arts for a two-way ocean voyage. Like other temporary residents in someone else’s city, they’ll need to band together to make their own holiday celebration while locals huddle with their families.

Perhaps the muse or another French investigator can squeeze them into the celebrations of a tolerant family. As dedicated Bohemians, however, even the team’s Parisians may keep some distance from relatives, preferring the company of their fellow occult-busters.

A typical YKRPG: Paris group includes a couple of Americans who flaunt their wealth easily and other heirs presently kept on strict allowances. The former may treat the whole party to a feast keyed to foreign visitors. Certainly the famous Grand Hotel can supply an ample festive meal. Depending on how hard they splash out, the investigators may be shunted to a quiet corner of the opulent dining room or exuberantly greeted in the lobby by manager André Million and swept to a center table.

The Christmas meal, Réveillon, occurs on late on December 24th. At the Grand, or any private home of means, these formal affairs challenge diners’ gustatory powers with wave after wave of rich, substantial courses. Gilded Age American characters will be less surprised by the dishes than the players themselves. Seafood still plays a heavy role in a French Christmas meal, a habit we have fallen out of in North America.

The apéritif course begins the extravaganza with smoked salmon, sardines, and pork rilettes. The starter course brings on the obligatory foie gras on toast, chestnut soup, oysters, lagoustines, and scallops in creamy sauce. In the spirit of the season the investigators depart from their customary absinthe to quaff kir royales, champagne cocktails with cassis.

The modern eater is already exhausted but fortunately your characters have a 19^th century capacity for gourmandizing. They clap as the Grand’s faultless waiters haul in platters bearing the third course, the roasts: goose, beef, pork and venison. Catering to Americans like the investigators, Million may be ahead of the times in bringing the roast turkey to the French Christmas table. For sides the investigators are offered gratin potatoes, green beans, and glazed carrots. Now the drink has switched to burgundy.

Palate cleansing follows with the cheese course. A simple frisée salad provides needed fiber. Million might place a fig or two before foreign guests but knows better than to distract French customers with fripperies at this sacred interval.

The dessert course brings echoes of pagan tradition that might excite any followers of Carcosa elsewhere in the dining room. The bûche de Noël, a cake shaped like a yule log, recalls the rite required to get the sun moving again now that it has stopped for the solstice.

As other guests munch absently on the cookies and treats that follow, the art students may stumble into the night to bump into a heavily bearded man seeming pulled out of time. Grabbing the drunkest of them by the lapels, he tells them that the king really has stopped the sun—and according to the omens of the Gauls, it is they who must defeat his minions and set it back in motion.

Image: After the Service at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Jean Béraud

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.