San Francisco Guidebook: A 1920s Sourcebook For Call Of Cthulhu

194 Pages·2003·51.055 MB·English

by  Cody Goodfellow, Brian M. Sammons

A 1920s Sour r the City by the BP
I

H. P. lovfcmm
1890-1937
A 1920s Sourcebook for the City by the Bay
bY
CODY GOODffLLOUJ
FlDDlTlOnFll mATfhlAl
David Conyers, Brian M. Sammons, Elizabeth A. Wolcott,
Hilary Ayer, Janice Sellers, Badger McInnes
COUfh AhTWOhK
Paul Carrick
rnTfhioh wsThfinons
Earl Geier, Paul Carrick, Badger McInnes, Tom Sullivan
m m
David Conyers, Janice Sellers
fDlTOhlAL AnD LAYOUT
Badger McInnes, Janice Sellers
CONh LFYlOUT
Charlie Krank
hf FlDfh
Hilary Ayer
cnfiowrn
is:
Charlie Krank, Lynn Willis, Dustin Wright, Fergie,
and a few odd others
2006
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Content$
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Secrets of San Francisco is published by Chaosium, Inc.
Secrets of San Francisco 0 2006 Chaosium as a whole; all rights reSeNed.
Main text for Secrets of San Francisco is 0 2003 by Cody Goodfellow. Contributions by Hilary Ayer and Janice Sellers are 0 2003 by them,
respectively. Interior illustrations are 0 2003 by Earl Geier. Cover illustration is 0 2003 by Paul Carrick. All rights reSeNed.
Call of Cthulhu @ is the registered trademark of Chaosium, Inc.
Special thanks go to Michael Savage of the Mechanics' Institute and to Gracie of the Winchester Mystery House, who were very helpful with esoteric
information. Similarities between characters in Secrets of San Francisco and persons living or dead are strictly coincidental. The reproductiono f
material from within this book for the purpose of personal or corporate profit, by photographic, electronic, or other methods of retrieval, is prohibned.
Address questions and comments regarding this bwk to Chaosium, Inc., 22568 Mission Blvd. #423, Hayward, CA94541, U.S.A. To see our list of
Chaosium books, games, and supplements, please see our website at www.chaosiurn.com.
Chaosium Publication 23104. Published in 2006. ISBN 1-56882-136-0
I Printed in Canada.
Introduction
The City by the Ray
In all of North America, there is no more perfect and outrt locales for scenarios within its extensive
intersection of climate, culture, and colorful history boundaries, including the largest, oldest American
than San Francisco: the culmination of Manifest enclave of Chinese settlers, the world’s most famous
Destiny, the Golden Gate to the Pacific Ocean, and the haunted house, and two of the most infamous prisons
treasure house of the wealth of the great California ever erected. We have endeavored to provide as com-
Gold Rush. Purged of her wild, anarchic past by a dev- plete a portrait of San Francisco in the 1920’s as is
astating earthquake at the opening of the twentieth possible, with careful attention to the vast body of
century, San Francisco emerged as the most cos- local folklore and unique opportunities for Mythos
mopolitan city on the West Coast, and perhaps the investigation. We think you will find after perusing
most sophisticated metropolis west of Paris. If any city this book’s contents that the Golden Gate rivals any-
could be taken as the antithesis of Lovecraftian eldritch thing to be found in New England and truly deserves
horror, it is San Francisco . . . but look again. to be granted that dubious distinction that is Lovecraft
San Francisco is deceptively ancient, and its
history is likewise shrouded behind a veil of false This resource guide will provide the back-
domesticity. The Bay Area has changed hands ground for a campaign setting in the San
many times, and each caretaker has left a Francisco Bay area of the 1920’s, includ-
distinctive mark upon the land. It was ing urban geography, civic history, and
home to several tribes of Indians for research venues; where San Fran-
thousands of years, and the found- ciscans go when they break the law,
ing of the first European set- go insane, or die; and the
tlement coincided with the sights, sounds, and secrets of
signing of the Declaration of the city that make it unique
American Independence. As San among all the cities of the Earth.
Francisco blossomed into an Amer- In assembling this book, we have
ican boom town, it attracted fugitives ’ tried to separate fact from folklore, des-
and practitioners of unorthodox faiths ignating items not proven as historically
from all across America. Tales of nineteenth- true in scenario hooks, speculations upon the
century San Francisco assumed mythic proportions City’s darker features from which the keeper might
as it became the most ethnically diverse city in create a scenario. Still, much of what you will find
America and the most lawless. To compare it to in this guide will seem stranger than those fictional
Sodom might not be so far from appropriate, as judg- hooks. The City has its own Mythos, and where the
ment came in the form of the most destructive earth- truth parts way with legends like Emperor Norton,
quake and fire yet observed in the West in 1906. The Mammy Pleasant, or Sara Winchester, San Fran-
colorful figures of San Francisco faded into the past- ciscans can always be counted on to take the legend.
or into the shadows, where they linger still. For this reason, the tall tales and hearsay legendry of
To those who live and work in San Francisco, it is San Francisco are placed alongside the truth to evoke
more than a metropolis-it is the City, a living entity the romanticized image of the City’s past that is as
whose unique character and changeable nature shape much a part of it as its true history.
its atmosphere, its institutions, and its leading citi- I give special thanks to Scott Elsesser, J. Adam
zens. The San Francisco Bay Area is an excellent loca- Barnes, Chris Bush, Todd Mullin, and Hailey
tion from which to launch campaigns focusing on the Goodfellow.
Orient, and it possesses abundant research resources - Cody Goodfellow
Dedicated to FIrnbrore Bierce
(1 842-1 91 4)
C L € F I R C R € D I T
The material on New World Incorporated, the Marsden Residence, the Carnby Mansion, the Zebulon Pharr
Collection, Lang Fu‘s Deep One Cult, the Rhon-Paku Temple and the Nestarian Cult of Cthugha were written by
David Conyers, incorporating and expanding upon the works of the original authors. The Marsden Residence
and the Carnby Mansion are based on Clark Ashton Smith’s stories ‘The Venus of Azombeii” and “The Return
of the Sorcerer” respectively. New World Incorporated, Lang-Fu’s Deep One Cult, the Rhon-Paku Temple and
associated locations are the creation of Keith Herber, all of which first appeared in Chaosium’s campaign The
Fungi from Yuggoth and later reprinted as Day of the Beast.
The Zebulon Pharr collection originally appeared in the Call of Cfhulhu Third Edition rulebook and was later
expanded upon by Chris Elliott and Richard Edwards in their scenario “The Statue of the Sorcerer” published by
Games Workshop in The Statue of the Sorcerer and the Vanishing Conjurer, another San Francisco-based Call
of Cfhulhu adventure. The Nestarian Cult of Cthugha first appeared in “This Fire Shall Kill” by Andre Bishop
appearing in Chaosium’s The SfarsAre Right!. Mr. Shiny, resident shoggoth in human clothing, is a creation of
Lynn Willis and first appeared in Chaosium’s campaign “At Your Door”. Mr. Shiny was inspired by Michael
Shea‘s short tale “Fat Face” appearing in Cfhulhu 2000, Jim Turner Editor.
The Scenario “The Colour of His Eyes” was written by Brian M. Sammons.
Background text on the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was written by David Conyers, while the article
on opium, morphine and heroin was written by David Conyers and Richard Watts.
Various bits and pieces, which really aren’t large enough to bother mentioning, were written by Badger
The scenario “Beyond the Edges” is based on the short story “Vanishing Curves” by David
Conyers appearing in the Book of Dark Wisdom issue #3 published by Elder Sign Press and edited
Jones. Thanks to Paul Maclean of Yog-Sothoth.com and Marcus Bone of The Unbound
Book for their assistance and for organizing play-tests for this scenario.
History of San Francisco - 7
Uirtory of $an FranciKo
T he first human inhabitants of the area that would went unresisting into the fold of a new conqueror; this
become San Francisco were two tribes of Indians time it was the United States. In 1847, Yerba Buena offi-
whose ancestors arrived there between five and ten cially became San Francisco.
thousand years ago. The Ohlone lived on the peninsula
and in the East Bay, while the Miwok claimed the north
coast. The Bay Indians were as peaceful as the climate and
lived a pastoral existence that was irrevocably shattered on
November 4, 1769, when an overland expedition led by
Captain Gaspar de Portolh discovered the bay. The region
the Spaniards came to call Yerba Buena was annexed to
Alta California and Spain.
In 1775, Lt. Juan Manuel de Ayala sailed the packet
ship San Carlos into the bay through the Golden Gate,
mapping the bay and naming many of its features. Within
the year, another overland expedition left Mexico to estab-
lish a military garrison and a Franciscan mission. The first
mass on the site of Misi6n San Francisco de Asis was held
on June 29, 1776, five days before the signing of the
Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. Thus was
San Francisco itself christened.
The Franciscans set to bending the natives to
Catholicism, with limited success. While many accepted
the new religion and strict lifestyle in return for food and
clothing, others often fled and the monks found themselves
becoming slave drivers. Legends abounded of the hidden
denizens of the Golden Gate, and it was only through force
of arms that the Spaniards were able to erase them.
Meanwhile, the soldiers erected an earthwork com-
pound near the tip of the peninsula, calling it the Presidio,
and prepared for an invasion which never came. Russian
and British vessels visited the settlement, contributingj et-
Map of I775 San Francisco
tisoned crewmen and runaways from every nation of
Europe. Mexico claimed Alta California in its declaration Less than three years later, gold was discovered on the
of independence from Spain in 1821, although news of American River. Within weeks of the announcement, 80%
this shift in power did not reach San Francisco until 1822. of San Francisco’s male population had lit out for the Sierra
The new government secularized the missions in 1834, Nevada, and within a year the town became a booming city
ejecting the Franciscans and parceling out the Church’s as it flooded with would-be prospectors from all over the
holdings to incoming colonists. Immigrants from the east- globe. Nearly everyone who came looking for gold
ern United States began to arrive from overland in 1840 whether around perilous Cape Horn or over the Rocky
and were welcomed to Alta California. A few motley Mountains, passed through San Francisco, and
dwellings sprouted up around the mission, multiplied and everyone who found gold returned to San
became the town of Yerba Buena. Francisco to squander it. The city erupted
with countless gambling houses,
The tranquil scene was again torn asunder in 1846,
and cribs of prostitution. The law, when
when sailors from the USS Portsmouth landed and raised
enforced at all, as often as not was
the American flag over Yerba Buena. The residents again
8 - Secrets of San Francisco
of the vigilante variety, as prominent businessmen banded together into
Historical Events of
“Vigilance Committees” to deport and lynch arsonists, thugs, and cut-throats
Fame & Notoriety who threatened, robbed, or offended the wrong people. The vast influx of new
c 7000 B.C. Indians migrating across the wealth drove inflation in San Francisco to staggering heights, then into a
Bering ice bridge settle in northern depression in 1854 when property values collapsed, halting the booming devel-
California.
opment. It had been engineered by newly made millionaires such as William C.
12,000-7000 B.C. Costanoans arrive in Ralston, who spent his fortune building the Palace Hotel only to die shortly
San Francisco, establish peaceful hunter- before it opened, and Samuel Brannan, the rogue Mormon leader who turned
gatherer societies.
his flock away from Brigham Young’s sect and fled the United States for
2000 6.C.-A.D. 1000. Rumsen bands
California. He landed in San Francisco a few days after the Bay Area was
arrive in Bay Area, commence worship of
claimed by the United States.
god of the whirlpool; ongoing internecine
warfare results; Rumsen retreat or vanish, The depression lasted until 1859, when the Comstock Silver Lode was dis-
but are never wiped out.
covered in Nevada. A second, smaller, boom swept through San Francisco, cre-
A.D. 1542. Cabrillo maps California coast- ating more millionaires and perpetuating the climate of lawless excess. The Big
line for Spain, fails to spot Golden Gate.
Four, a consortium of tycoons who built the Southern Pacific Railroad and
gained a stranglehold over all of the western United States, made their homes
in San Francisco, as did tens of thousands of Chinese who came to America to
build the railroad and make their own meager fortunes. After the silver rush
June 17: Sir Francis Drake lands at
Drake’s Bay (named for him in 1792 by cooled down, San Francisco settled down and civilized itself, building San
George Vancouver), claims “New Albion” Quentin Prison to house its reprobates and recruiting fairly incorruptible police
for England. to guard the rest. The city had become the crown of California when, in 1906,
San Francisco shook and burned to the ground.
San Francisco quickly rebuilt itself and in 1915 hosted the Panama-Pacific
International Exposition, celebrating its own rebirth as much as the opening of
Small detachment of Franciscan mission-
the Panama Canal. By the 1920’s, San Francisco was a thriving metropolis.
aries and Spanish soldiers establish them-
selves at San Francisco, San Rafael, and Even with the Crash of 1929 come due, it went into the 1930’s intent on bridg-
San Jose and set about the conversion of ing the bay with two monumental structures, the Golden Gate and Bay bridges.
the Costanoan Indians. Indians are driven
from tribal to plantation lifestyle and forcibly
converted to Christianity. Soldiers pastured
The Bay’$ Formation
out on sizable land grants.
San Francisco Bay began as a valley among the Coast Range mountains. For sev-
eral million years the valley was shielded from the ocean by the prominent knob
August 5: Lt. Juan Manuel de Ayala sails of the San Francisco peninsula, and the hills of Oakland to the east blocked any
into San Francisco Bay. runoff from the Sierra mountain range. The waters eventually forced a path into
the valley via the Carquinez Strait, flowing into the Raccoon Strait between
Angel Island and Tiburon in present-day Marin County, into the basin of the
Golden Gate, and finally to the Pacific coast, seventeen miles from the present
San Francisco is born as an inadequately
coastline, at the time marked by the Farallone Islands. The Ice Age drove the tide
defended Catholic concentration camp.
in to fill the bay about 100,000 years ago, then retreated, only to return with the
March 29 (Friday of Sorrows): De Anza last Ice Age, about 10,000 B.C., forming the bay’s present geography.
expedition makes camp on San Francisco
peninsula. Few regions in the bay are deeper than twenty feet, with the notable excep-
tion of the Golden Gate itself, which lies about 350 feet deep. The bay runs as
June 29 (Feast Day of Saints Peter &
far south as Palo Alto, as far east as Fremont, and as far north as Suisun Bay,
Paul): Father Palou celebrates first mass
at Laguna de Nuestra Seiiora de Los where it meets the mouth of the Sacramento River. The shores are lined with
Dolores; official founding of San Francisco. chains of steep hills against which the bay’s omnipresent fogbanks surmount
September 17: Founding of the Presidio. and enfold the coastline, blotting out visibility but conducting sounds over
great distances. The bay itself thrives with hundreds of species of fish, birds,
October 9: Founding of Mision San
Francisco de Asis (Mission Dolores). and marine mammals. Sharks, ranging from soupfins to eight-foot threshers,
hunt in the treacherous currents of the Golden Gate, and whales are sometimes
stranded on the beaches at low tide. The shellfish beds of the north and south
ends of the bay have been largely played out after decades of exploitation.
The Pacific disgorges all manner of strange detritus on the shores of north-
throughout this ern California, but in 1925 the strangest discovery of all washed up on the
chapter)
beach two miles north of Santa Cruz (sixty miles south of San Francisco). The
__
.
History of San Francisco - 9
carcass of a serpentine creature, forty feet long with a tapered, toothless snout
and several pairs of vestigial elephantine legs, was photographed and examined
by experts from the Hopkins Marine Laboratory at Monterey (see Stanford
University, page 63), who debated its origin. While some maintained that the
creature was a specimen of Berardius bairdi, an extremely rare whale, others
insisted that the remains were prehistoric in origin, thawed from a migrating
glacier from the north Pacific. The press linked the carcass with sea serpent
sightings that have plagued the coast from Monterey to Marin’s Stinson Beach
for decades, and seasoned mariners claimed that it was only one of a popula-
tion of throwbacks.
Suiita Ctwz Sea Serpent
Gertrude Atherton’s Theory
The origin of San Francisco Bay has long been a matter for heated speculation.
A Costanoan Indian legend maintains that the bay was formed by a catastroph-
ic crash when a god stumbled with the body of a mortal whom he thought to
marry. The god’s arm crushed the ridge connecting the peninsula with the
August 28: Founder of mission system
Marin headlands, and the water of the ocean rushed in to fill the valley, form-
Father Juniper0 Serra, 71, dies at Mision
ing the bay. San Francisco novelist and historian Gertrude Atherton also San Carlos.
believes that the bay was formed in a single geological event and that it
occurred within the last 500 years. She writes, “Why had Drake and the
Spanish explorers sailed along the coast in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries and anchored as close as Point Reyes and the Farallones without ever November 14: Capt. George Vancouver
sails into San Francisco Bay, and surveys
seeing this auspicious portal to the Bay?” (See “Drake’s Treasure”, page 99.)
defenses.
The logical answer to her question could have been simple fog, which often
totally obscures the mile-wide passage today. But Atherton insists that where
the gate now provides a break through the Coast Range, there was only a solid
wall of mountains in Drake’s time. If this is correct, an earthquake must have
Mexico wins independence from Spain.
occurred between 1609, when Sebastian Vizcaino failed to spot the Golden
independent Mexico neglects Californian
Gate, and 1769, when Gaspar de Port016 stumbled across it after having over- holdings. Huge ranch nation-states pros-
shot his goal of Monterey. There is no support for the Atherton theory except per; civilian colonists arrive from US. and
Mexico. Harbor defenses decay. Mexican
for Indian legends and the suspicions of nineteenth-century geologists that the
government shuts down missions; surviv-
Gate did indeed form in recent history. ing Indians fade away.
In an 1853 survey, geologist W. P. Blake wrote a description of the shore-
line of the bay: “It is a curious fact that the sand beach between Fort Point and
Point San Jose has been thrown up by the surf upon an extensive alluvial
deposit, which has the characteristics of a peat bog or swamp. The sand and Don Augustin de lturbide proclaims himself
Emperor Augustin I of Mexico.
loose boulders rest on a foundation of peat which can easily be examined at low
tide. A continuation of the peat layer is found in the flat meadowland inside the
belt of sand. Traces of the bog can also be found between the sand belt and the
sandstone hills nearby. It is difficult to account for the swamp under conditions
August 9: California missions secularized;
like those at present. The constant action of the surf is destructive and the Franciscans, and Indians expelled.
swamp could not possibly have formed while the Golden Gate was open as we
now find it.”
Geologists since feel they have disproved Atherton’s theory many times
Richard Henry Dana visits on the brig
over, with vast amounts of evidence that the Gate was indeed formed by mil-
Pilgrim.
lions of years of water rushing to the sea.
Natives 1
Jundulv. Series of earthquakes virtually
When the Spanish discovered the bay, they discovered living around it what
destroys Presidio and Monterey.
they thought was a sizable tribe of natives, whom they called the Costanos
(“People of the Coast”). In truth, the Costanoans were made up of two distinct
yet similar tribes. The Miwok inhabited what is now Marin County and the
(continued in
North Bay region; the Ohlone controlled the East and South Bay areas as well on next page.)
as the San Francisco peninsula. The two tribes lived similar lifestyles but had