How I wrote Bad Tidings

 “Bad Tidings” is the first Call of Cthulhu scenario I published. To the best of my knowledge, it is, up to this point, the first and only Call of Cthulhu scenario set in Portugal. It recently achieved Gold Bestseller on DriveThruRPG.

Warning: beyond this point the text has many spoilers for Bad Tidings.

Phase One: 1994/95 collaborative writing game

The scenario’s design goes back several decades, to the time I was in my second year at the University of Aveiro in 1994/95. At the time, I had a girlfriend who enjoyed RPGs and collaborative writing. At a certain point, I suggested we write a Cthulhu Mythos story together, taking turns writing chapters until we agreed the story should come to an end.

I decided to start the story in the 1920s (of course) on the coast of Cornwall. There were two reasons for this decision: at the time, I didn’t believe that a Mythos story would fit in my native Portugal, and I was a big fan of Daphne du Maurier’s “JamaicaInn”. I imagined a mansion perched on a high cliff on the windy and rainy Cornwall coast.

I don’t remember why I decided to make the story about an old professor turning into a Deep One, but I liked the abruptness of it—my hero (Raymond) arriving at the house to meet his mentor, who reveals an outlandish theory: that he is a hybrid of an underwater species—a theory that his physical condition seemed to support. Perhaps it had something to do with my interest in Kafka at the time.

I wrote the first chapter, detailing Raymond’s arrival at the house, his meeting with the professor's doctor (who looked like a Deep One but was not German—I remember he was called Sheppard), his encounter with the beautiful daughter of the professor (Marion), the strange old lady in black who left the room when our hero entered (I had no definite idea of who or what she was; I was just dropping a mystery for my girlfriend to solve, although I had possible explanations, none of which involved her being the previous butler in disguise), the first discussion with the professor where he explains his condition and mentions a book called Aquadingen, and the Cthulhu medallion. The chapter ended with a terrible storm breaking and our hero falling asleep, dreaming of underwater cities.

I had the idea that later I would reveal that a Star Spawn was buried under the cliff and that the Deep Ones were trying to awaken it. And that the professor was not really turning into a Deep One, but that Sheppard was giving him some concoction to mimic the transformation.

I wrote this during a weekend at home. My father, who hated the supernatural genre but loved murder mysteries, asked me what I was doing. I explained it to him. He got excited and asked if he could write the second chapter. I was a bit doubtful that he could absorb the Mythos lore in a couple of hours, but I agreed out of curiosity.

He locked himself in the office for hours, with my Call of Cthulhu 5th edition manual, my manuscript, and lots of paper.

I was extremely curious about what would come out of it.

And what came out was quite a treat.

In my father’s chapter, the storm continues. Raymond wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of the front doorbell ringing in the storm. Marion runs to the door, opening it to reveal Dr. Sheppard, tired and wet, asking why she had called him. Was something wrong with the professor? Meanwhile, Raymond wonders why the butler Alfred didn’t answer the door and searches for him, finding him dead in the kitchen, his throat sliced, his body seemingly decomposing much faster than normal. After calling the police, Raymond goes to his room and finds words scribbled on his window from the outside:

SHEPPARD DEEP ONE ALFRED SHOGGOTH FIND AQUADINGEN

Raymond goes to the library of the house but cannot find any book called *Aquadingen*. Then he thinks for a moment, looks again, and sees one book with the spine turned upside down. It is *Leviathan* by Thomas Hobbes. He takes the book, and as he opens it, he discovers it is, in fact, the *Aquadingen*, disguised by a false cover.

This was the end of my father’s chapter.

I gave those first two chapters to my girlfriend and a friend, and I noticed that both of them totally avoided trying to solve the mystery my father had created. Instead, they mostly added scenes that contributed little to the story.

After putting some effort into it, I had come up with a couple of plausible solutions for the mystery my father proposed, but it would be difficult to expect my friends to deal with it. My father had “trained” me since childhood to solve mysteries by giving me books by Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and S.S. van Dine, and telling me by which page I had to know who the murderer was. But most people don’t have this drive to solve mysteries. I decided to write the continuation myself, but eventually, other projects robbed my attention.

And I guess I eventually lost the original manuscript.

Phase Two: 2009/10 Pulp short story for anthology

Now let’s jump from 1994 to 2009. An editor for whom I had already published a translation of a poetry book (“The Kalevala”) and a translation of a fantasy novel (Robin Hobb’s “Assassin’s Apprentice”) was preparing an anthology with a curious idea: write a pulp fiction short story as if it had been written in Portugal during the Golden Age of pulp fiction (1930s).

I immediately started thinking about what I could do. I wanted to create something clearly set in Portugal, that addressed the politics of the time (1930s) in Portugal, and I had to choose one type of pulp fiction: folk horror, cosmic horror, mystery, mystery men (i.e., proto-superheroes and masked avengers), sci-fi, military action, fighting all sorts of Nazi plots, or sword and sorcery.

Incapable of deciding on one sub-genre, I decided to mix them all—okay, I dropped sword and sorcery—in a rhapsody of pulp tropes and subgenres.

So I would have a (Portuguese) masked avenger encountering a folk/cosmic horror situation that turns into a murder mystery, which eventually becomes a fight with a mad scientist who has advanced technology and happens to be a Nazi.

For the setting, I decided to use the area where I lived as a child. Close by, there is a rather isolated peninsula that gets rainy and misty during fall and winter, surrounded on one side by the sea and on the other by a large lagoon (the Ria de Aveiro). I used to drive there often with my parents on weekends, to dine or have a drink. This seemed like a perfect setting for a Deep One story.

I wrote an intro to get a feel for the idea. A fisherman is drinking at night on the beach, grieving for his deceased wife. Suddenly, something emerges from the water. It looks almost human, but not quite—a fishman monstrosity. The fisherman is paralyzed with panic. But the creature passes him by, clearly on the run from something else. Then a light appears in the sky. Minutes later, the fisherman is dead, broken in two, by a man of prodigious strength.

When I wrote this, I realized that the story I wanted to tell could use many plot elements from the one I had started almost 20 years ago. I relocated everything to Portugal, changed the names of the characters—Raymond became Álvaro Alves (who is secretly a masked avenger called Sentinela)—and decided that the main villain would be Dr. Sheppard, who would not be a Deep One (it was nice to misdirect readers familiar with Lovecraft by making him bald with bulging eyes) but a Nazi doctor. I also liked the idea that the villains were the Nazis and that the Mythos creatures (the Deep Ones) were against them, creating the possibility of an unexpected alliance of convenience between the hero and the Deep Ones.

I reused parts of my father's scene (the bell ringing in the night, the murdered butler) but dropped the Aquadingen and the (proto)shoggoth idea.

Given that I now had a superhero/mystery man as the protagonist, I needed an action-oriented finale. So I gave the villain a secret lab and a helicopter to move victims (which had already appeared in my intro scene, the strong lights hovering over the sea) and used the idea of the broken fisherman to concoct a physical adversary for our hero—a Nazi supersoldier (Terminator and Captain Nazi were certainly the references here) called Schweinsteiger, the name being an allusion to both Schwarzenegger and the German football player who had single-handedly defeated the Portuguese football team in a match one or two years before and towards whom I carried a grudge.

I’ve always disliked the idea of portraying all Nazis as just a bunch of fanatical madmen (although many of them were exactly that). Well, I like it in Indiana Jones movies and in many Captain America stories, but we need to go beyond that stereotype. Only by understanding that Nazis were more like real people can we understand that the danger of the same thing happening again anywhere in the world still exists and will always exist. And that is why I added the character of the pilot, who, despite being a German military pilot, felt sickened by the violence at the secret lab. He was “just” obeying orders but didn’t like them, and could actually be turned to the side of the hero.

The story was selected by the editor and published. I don’t think the book was a great commercial success, but it did receive some recognition. It was briefly highlighted by a critic in one of the major newspapers in the country (Público)? who was generally very positive about the whole anthology and mentioned me by name.

I planned to write more stories about the Sentinela, but neither the editor was interested in a book of short stories, nor did I have enough motivation to continue writing them without editorial support.

I sent a copy of the book home, but I don’t know whether my father actually read it before he passed away.

Phase Three: (2014?) Improvised CoC scenario

A couple of years later, my biweekly gaming group was going to meet, and I, the eternal gamemaster, didn’t have a scenario prepared. So, out of necessity, I improvised by using the plot of the story I had written and published years before as a Call of Cthulhu scenario. I dropped the masked avenger angle, made some changes to adapt it to the game, and found that I really enjoyed running it. Not only did the players love it, but it also felt like I was sharing a piece of the history and culture of my own country—especially since I live in the Netherlands and the players were all of different nationalities: German, French, Belgian, and British.

I ran the scenario a few more times for other groups of friends, and it always played very well. Since it was more mystery-oriented than horror, I started running it as a Trail of Cthulhu scenario instead of Call of Cthulhu.

Phase Four: 2021/2022 Trail of Cthulhu Draft 

Eventually, I decided it was good enough to be published. After conferring with the editor of the original story (though I had never transferred copyright to them, so I remained the sole copyright owner of the story), I adapted it and wrote it as scenario for Trail of Cthulhu, especially because Trail uses a scene-based structure for investigative scenarios, which makes this type of scenario easier to write.

Then two things happened: First, I offered to run the scenario at a convention where it had to be Call of Cthulhu, not Trail. Second, I discovered that Trail of Cthulhu does not have a community program for fan-created content.

Phase Five: 2022/2023 Miskatonic Repository

So, I finally converted the whole thing to Call of Cthulhu, though I believe the scene-based structure is still fully recognizable in the final document. If I had written it from scratch, I would probably have made it more sandboxy.

I did a lot of research to gather more information about the area, collected old photographs, and read monographs on the ethnography of the region to try to get as many details right as possible. I also visited the location during my holidays to take some pictures to illustrate the scenario.

I also decided to draw all the characters myself because, even with my limited skills, I could create portraits that conveyed more of how I imagined the characters than random photos taken from the internet.

Finding a catchy name was also a difficulty. I remember the original title was “The Shadow over the Fishing Village”, but several people told me it wasn’t catchy enough. I tried many titles: Dark Tides, Sea Shadows, What the storm brings, What the sea brings, What lies beneath, beneath the waves, Sea of Blood, Curse from the sea, Cursed Waves, Cursed Tides, and nothing seemed right until I thought of Bad Tidings. It just sounded perfect.

Finally, in 2023—almost 30 years after some of the original ideas were conceived—I published Bad Tidings.