This adventure centers around two of the doors in the Butterfly Halls and a scheme of Joe Lakono and the Autumnal Swarm to bring down a world and weaken the world-tree that holds all worlds together. These doors open into twentieth century America. This is a new world for the characters, and the boundaries of the adventure won’t be as obvious because of this. The players will need clear clues and guidance if they’re to avoid getting lost in this new world.
If you are using Highland as your game world, your players might not know the skin tones of their characters. In Highland no one cares. In Vegas and in San Francisco, skin color matters. In Las Vegas, any characters who can’t pass as white will be stuck on the Westside. In San Francisco, black is beautiful.
In San Francisco in the late sixties there are several cultural issues playing out that may confuse, intrigue, or completely pass by adventurers from Highland. Where in Highland all skin tones share the same culture, in 1968 San Francisco there are default cultures for each skin tone, white, black, brown, yellow, you name it, they have their own culture.
Further, there are cultures according to age. While even in Highland there are some behavioral differences between the old and the young based on experience and energy, this effect is far more pronounced in San Francisco 1968. To Highlanders watching replays of the 1968 Democratic Convention or just paying attention to the interactions between flower children and the town guard in San Francisco, it could easily look as if there’s a full-scale generational war, especially if the police let the Hell’s Angels through a cordon to oppose an anti-war march.
How much you want to play this up will depend on how interesting your players find it. Pay attention to them, and follow their lead. It is perfectly reasonable that they will completely ignore the strange culture; if we happened upon a culture in which hair color was moderately correlated with different (but similar) cultures, how long would it take for us to notice?
Within this adventure, Deanna Carmen is African-American. Joe Lakono is a Pacific Islander.
If they research the history of this world, they’ll realize that it’s like their own world but without the cataclysm of earth. Also, if they’ve been to Dead Rome at the Crossroads, they’ll recognize the buildings and the cars (although they may be surprised to see them moving). Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf may look like home, with bigger ships and buildings. What they won’t likely recognize are the light shows and light show-like posters; silver jets streaking across the sky; and amplified music. Rock music alone is pretty strange. Psychedelic rock while watching a light show the first time you’ve used LSD is a completely new trip.
I’ve also provided sketchy notes on another door that may be used for effect, the Jack the Ripper era of London.
You may also want to design some doors of your own that foreshadow or lead to future adventures.
Finally, Helter Skelter is not a historical reference. While I have researched the events experienced in this adventure, some rumors are taken as fact, some facts are altered to fit the timeline, and other facts are manufactured to fill the needs of the adventure. These worlds are like our own, but they are not our own.
- The Butterfly Halls: The doors
- The door opens upon a long hallway. The wall is covered in butterflies. A flutter shudders down the hall as wings beat in a wave flowing to your right; but the butterflies do not move from their position on the wall.
- Red Jack’s Gambling House
- “Maria makes the mountains sound like folks was out there dyin’.”—Lerner and Lowe
- The Butterfly Halls: London
- “Shall man be given marvels only when he is beyond all wonder? Your days were born in blood and fire! Think not to be inured to history. Its black root succours you. Are you asleep to it, that you cannot feel its breath upon your neck, nor see what soaks its cuffs?”—Alan Moore’s Jack the Ripper
- San Francisco
- “There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”—Hunter S. Thompson
- The Butterfly Halls: Las Vegas
- “So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”—Hunter S. Thompson
