Cthulhu Calling: The Arkham Investigation, ft The Apocalypse Players (Part 1)

Arkham, Massachusetts, 1926. Businessman Ezra Whitmarsh has vanished from a locked study. The air smells of ozone. His business partner is sweating through his suit. And someone called "the Syndicate" is already following you from the train station. This is Lovecraft country, and PastMaster has gone full cosmic horror.

The Apocalypse Players bring their Call of Cthulhu expertise to PastMaster. Joseph Chance plays T.G. Fells, an electrical tinkerer with a lighter and a dangerous curiosity. Dan Wheeler plays Gert of the Well, a professional liar who hasn't lied yet but is absolutely planning to. Claude, playing Game Master in the style of Lovecraft himself, delivers prose so atmospheric the players forget they're improvising. When something in a Georgian mansion blinks at them with wet, alien intelligence, Gert's instinct is to hit it with a blackjack, and the situation does not improve.

Set during Prohibition in Lovecraft's fictional Arkham, a New England town where Jazz Age prosperity sits on top of something ancient and deeply wrong. The 1920s period detail is immaculate: working-class Massachusetts accents, the social dynamics of small-town paranoia, and a reality that becomes increasingly unreliable the deeper the investigation goes. Part 1 of 2, and it ends on the kind of cliffhanger that makes Part 2 essential listening.