Priest & Hawthorne Investigations
A Modern Fantasy Adventure
An introduction
The moon was a crescent of hard silver light the night Cameron walked into the aging room of his distillery and found a spider the size of a Volkswagen. There were other shapes nearby - cocoons, smaller than a person but not by so much that he thought he'd stick around and take a closer look. Cameron swallowed hard and backed out of the room, afraid that if he rolled the door shut he might wake the thing up. At the same time, though, if he left the door open, the spider might have an easier time getting out, and out is where it could eat him. Deciding that discretion really was the better part of valor, or at least of not being digested, he walked backwards with slow steps past the threshold, out into the humid Texas night. Overhead, a sodium lamp cast harsh orange shadows over the rust-streaked exterior of the metal-sided warehouse, lending only a little extra color by the watery headlights of Cameron's truck, which had been new sometime before the first time humans set foot on the Moon.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked down at the screen, then back up at the door to the aging room. He called up a dial pad, but...who was he supposed to call? The police? Animal control? An exterminator? He imagined the last conversation and let out the first bite of a barking, hysterical laugh, something that yipped out of his mouth and bounced off the corrugated metal wall in a sharp spray of discordant echoes. In front of him, the huge spider shifted, one giant leg coming uncurled from the apparently-sleeping mass with an almost delicate motion. Cameron took a step back, the phone slipping out of his hand, panic welling up behind his eyes while he watched another leg unfold, opposite the first. No longer caring how much noise he made, Cameron scrambled toward his truck, out of view of the door, and started digging in his jacket for his keys.
He was well into dropping them for the third time when he heard another sound coming up the driveway, this time something more familiar. Tires crunched on the gravel road, along with...something else. Cameron turned away from the slowly-unfurling spider, raising one hand against the glare of another pair of headlights, the sound of John Denver's Country Roads wafting into the night. The lights resolved into another truck, just a little newer than his own, and it came to a sliding, skidding halt a couple of meters from the door, spraying gravel all the way to Cameron's boots.
The truck's doors opened and a handful of people piled out, stepping over one another in no particularly good order. In the headlights' glare, Cameron couldn't quite see who these people were, save for the driver, who stepped out and took the few paces over to the man with long, quick strides. He could just make out her blue-green eyes, the curve of a cheekbone, the edge of a suit jacket. She looked at him, then at the warehouse, then back, and she shoved a hand through sweat-dampened hair.
"Hey, so," she said, sounding almost a little sheepish, "I've got a weird question for you." The words came with the rich enunciation of an English private-school education, which Cameron decided he wasn't going to worry about right now.
He looked past the woman, at the shapes of people behind her, then turned his head back back to the warehouse, neck muscles twanging. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a kind of squeak.
"Right," the woman said, "Look - this probably sounds ridiculous, but..." She took a deep breath and pointed at the building, "Is there a huge spider in there?"
Cameron gawped, a proper gawp, the kind that left his jaw hanging loose for a moment. It took him a long, long moment to get enough of his muscles under control to nod and point.
"Okay, thanks." The woman turned and gave a thumbs-up to the people behind her, and they came forward.
Cameron could make out more about the group now, in the hard shadows of two sets of headlights. They didn't look 'official' - no matching suits, no coordinated gait, not even the same kinds of haircuts. One held a shotgun, another had something wrapped around their arm, three objects pulsing with white light orbiting it with no obvious connection to one another. The woman watched with an expression Cameron couldn't read - a wry pull to a corner of her lips, a small roll of one shoulder. She breathed, and the air smelled like thunder.
"Who...who are you?" Cameron managed, after what felt like an eternity.
"Ah," the woman said, "...I'm Lydia. We're from Priest and Hawthorne Investigations."
Behind her, the spider had finished unfolding. It turned in place, long, delicate legs making the kind of thumping sounds on the ground usually associated with earthmoving equipment. One of the newcomers shouted, and the shotgun boomed. Cameron winced and fell against his truck, hands covering his ears. Morgan, for her part, stood steadfast and turned toward the warehouse. The spider shrieked, the sound almost louder than the shotgun. Morgan turned toward the warehouse, then looked back at Cameron. To her left, the metal wall buckled, and a meter of monstrous hairy leg punched through and started slowly rending a tear in the sheet metal.
"I wouldn't worry," Lydia said, reaching into her jacket, "We have this perfectly under control."
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Hi there!
Welcome to an interest check for Priest & Hawthorne Investigations, a modern-fantasy RP that I think I want to give another run at. I will be looking for a Co-GM on this, at least for the first couple of months, so, you know. No pressure.
In this story, the players will take the part of people working for the titular Priest & Hawthorne Investigations; a small paranormal-detective service operating out of a large American city. You are people from all walks of life, and have come to PHI by various means - maybe you're a police detective who couldn't overlook something that was obviously a monster attack, maybe you're a Real Actual Wizard but still need a way to make rent, maybe you're a park service ranger who's seen one too many Bigfeet. Whatever the reason, you're living in that liminal space between the mundane and the supernatural, and sometimes helping keep people safe from things that they never knew meant them harm.
The tone of this story is going to be along the lines of Hellboy or The Dresden Files, probably with a dose of Supernatural, The Sandman, The Unsleeping City, and The Dirty Streets of Heaven; and because I don't believe in grimdark, Ghostbusters.
I don't mean to scare anyone off, but I tend to have rather high standards for posts and characters. I'd like this to be quite a small group of people (maybe up to five, - I don't plan to have a character at the moment), and it will not be first-come, first-served. I don't have specific roles in mind, but I would ask that you consider what makes a good team dynamic and a good story. I am, for example, generally not looking for silent and distant loners, violence-crazed psychopaths, vengeance-driven walking armories, or children.
The story will be set in 'the present,' or maybe a 'near-future' if that winds up making sense. The office you'll be working out of will be small, but not scraping-for-the-rent, and has been around for a while - that means that there probably are some kind of interesting things sitting in a back room, but that there isn't an Indiana Jones-style bottomless warehouse of deus ex machina. If you convince me it'll make fun storytelling, there's a very high chance I'll let you do it. For example: The Queen of the Winter Sidhe owes you a favor? I want to know everything about that.
I do have several story arcs in mind, but they're deliberately designed to be flexible and to allow the players to push on the world; I will rarely say "no, you can't do that," since the yes-and of collaborative storytelling is my favorite part. That is to say that this is not intended to be a bring-your-own-adventure sandbox, although I am more than happy (and am expecting to) tailor the world for the characters in it, and to work with players to establish plot hooks.
So, that's the pitch. The IC thread will very likely be the continuation of the introductory scene above, or maybe I'll write something new.
Who's interested?
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