Mary Alpert's Homepage

From the late 1970s until her mysterious disappearance in mid-2000, Mary Alpert was a leading scientific researcher of the occult, unexplainable phenomena, and other strangeness. A lawyer by training, she was renowned for her ability to use her forceful personality and keenly fashioned questions to pick apart supposed eyewitness reports and other frauds. For quite some time, Alpert made a good living as a lecturer and author.

Needless to say, Alpert acquired quite a few enemies amongst the frauds and occultists she debunked. One of them in particular was a backwater intellectual named Howard Craft who claimed to have uncovered evidence of an ancient aquatic civilization lurking off the New England coast that predated mankind. Craft launched a campaign to ruin Alpert's reputation. He claimed to have compiled a mountain of documentation showing that Alpert systematically destroyed evidence that proved the existence of strange phenomena. Alpert vociferously denied Craft's accusations, labeling him a bitter crank looking for revenge. The two confronted each other on a late night call-in radio talk show. During their heated exchange, Craft accused Alpert of covering up the existence of what he termed the Kulu Codex, an ancient historical text supposedly detailing the rise and fall of Atlantis in enough detail to prove Craft's theory of an aquatic civilization. Craft claimed to be on the verge of a discovery that would blow the lid off modern man's view of the world. Whatever this revelation was to be, the world would never learn of it. Soon after the show, both Alpert and Craft disappeared.

Both left behind few clues to their fates. Craft was known as a hermit with few friends. It was not until 6 months after his last public appearance that a missing person report was filed. Alpert was similarly a loner. She was reported missing one month after her confrontation with Craft. Her apartment was found completely stripped of all her possessions including furniture, an exceptionally odd fact given that her apartment building employed a doorman on staff 24 hours a day. Given her years of work with the occult, Alpert had quite an extensive collection of audio, video, and written records of her investigations. All of it was lost.

Except her web site.

A relative newcomer to the digital age, Alpert built a small, personal site on Geocities in hopes of eventually migrating the content to her own domain. Passing along the URL to a close circle of friends, she intended the site to serve as an easy way to exchange information with correspondents, allies, and fellow researchers. Her site lingered for a time before a cracker somehow infiltrated the account and deleted its contents. However, a few archived copies of her files still float around the Internet.

Mary Alpert's Homepage. In English, by Mary Alpert, A. D. 2000. This collection of anecdotes relating to madmen, conspiracy theorists, and occultists primarily describes the efforts of bunk artists and frauds. However, a careful examination of this material reveals passing references and brief descriptions of names, practices, and rituals that consistently appear in the rambling theories Alpert investigated. During the course of her career, Alpert came perilously close to uncovering evidence of supernatural activity. An investigator who knows what to look for can uncover some interesting leads on cults, otherworldly creatures, and the old ones.

Examination Period: 1d6 days (DC 15).

Contains 1 spell.

Sanity Loss: 1d4 initial and 1d6 upon completion.

Cthulhu Mythos: +2 ranks.

Into the Darkness: Battles against the Unknown!

Jim Fort was a child of the new economy. After dropping out of college in late 1993, he used his rudimentary knowledge of the budding Internet to become a millionaire. Fort started by buying up attractive domain names, such as softdrinks.com, and selling them for several hundred grand each. He then dropped his money into a series of hot start-ups, pushing his fortune into the millions. With his wealth secured, Fort decided that the Internet was almost played out. He next turned to computer games, anticipating that they would soon grow to rival the movie and music industries. Fort founded a small design house and went to work on his first release Into the Darkness: Battles against the Unknown!, a horror game patterned after the popular Resident Evil series. All his life Fort had cultivated an intense interest in the occult and wanted to produce a game that drew upon his personal tastes. He took an active role in developing the game's art and story line. Unfortunately, the game progressed at a glacial pace. Fort had a tendency to disappear for weeks or months at a time, during which work on the game was suspended. After several years of such delays, Fort's money dried up. Desperate for cash, he forced the game's release on a very limited scale. It met with crushingly negative reviews from the few critics who noticed it and only a little more than 100 copies made it into general circulation. Players complained of an incomprehensible graphics, aggravating controls, and a nonsensical plot. Soon after, Fort suffered a severe mental breakdown and was checked into a hospital where he has remained for the past few years.

In truth, Fort dabbled in the worship of otherworldly creatures. Always a bit of a hedonist, he quickly grew bored of mundane narcotics such as cocaine and found little thrill in seducing women who were more than eager to sleep with a millionaire. His search for something to spice up his life put him in contact with a small, orgiastic cult dedicated to the worship of Shub-Niggurath. Attracted to the cult's front as a swingers' club, he gladly embraced its true purpose on a weekend orgy that culminated in a ritual sacriface to the Black Goat of the Wood with a Thousand Young.

Fort envisioned his computer game as a reflection of his newly found faith and a tool to attract others to the cult. The game plays as a third-person investigative horror game. The main character is a bored socialite who slowly uncovers evidence of a demonic conspiracy in charge of the US government. Easter eggs built into the game reveal previously hidden levels that incorporate mythos imagery, game levels that mimic the layout of real-life temples and other Mythos-related locations, and game characters named after and drawn to match cultists, sorcerers, and other real-life acquaintances of Fort. Furthermore, at one point in the game the main character discovers a sprawling subterranean library. Hidden within the library as an easter egg are files containing digital copies of fragments from several blasphemous tomes.

Into the Darkness: Battles against the Unknown! In English, by Jim Fort, 2001 A.D. This tome is a computer game that the reader must play through in order to discover easter eggs that reveal Mythos lore. Easter eggs are hidden features in games that activate when the player completes some obscure task such as keying in a specific set of commands on a particular screen or using a game item in some nonsensical manner.

Examination Period: 2d4 weeks (DC 20).

Contains 1d4 spells.

Sanity Loss: 1d4 initial and 1d6 upon completion.

Cthulhu Mythos: +1 rank.