January 10, 1977. The temperature hasn’t risen above freezing for a week. Most days drop below zero. Scientists are speculating about a new ice age. Now, cold in Chicago is nothing new. Neither is cold-blooded murder. But what happened in Chicago in January of 1977 was so unprecedented, so outrageous, that even now I fear to reveal the chilling truth.

It’s amazing how much weird shit came out of the seventies, but what’s even more amazing is how much of it was recycled from the twenties. The idea for this adventure came from the April, 1980, Beyond Reality UFO magazine. The article was by “Ramona Cortez” and titled “Ancient Astronauts of Tatunca Nara”.

During the first week in May of 1925, Colonel Sir Percival Fawcett, went into the lush tropical rain forests of northwest Brazil. The determined British explorer was in search of his dream—a city he felt certain was visited by ancient space travelers from a far-away galaxy many centuries ago.

For years, Fawcett heard detailed accounts of houses with stars to light them which never went out. He wrote in Lost Trails, Lost Cities, his classic text on exploration, “There was some secret means of illumination known to the ancients that remain to be discovered by scientists today.”

This is surprisingly true. The only embellishment is that Fawcett may or may not have “felt certain” that the cause was “ancient space travelers from a far-away galaxy”. But Fawcett was a classic archaeologist-adventurer in the style pastiched by the Indiana Jones series. He was in search of Big Things and those Big Things included Things Beyond Human Ken.

That quote about “some secret means of illumination” is far more exact than I expect from a UFO magazine of the era. I’m surprised that “Cortez” didn’t use the full quote and context. It’s possible they didn’t have Exploration Fawcett at hand—the book was published under both that title and Lost Trails, Lost Cities—and, of course, didn’t have the Internet Archive to help them. The Internet Archive was over a decade into the future. Strange to think that the period between this UFO article and the Internet Archive is far smaller than the period between the Internet Archive and today!

Here’s what Colonel Sir Percival Fawcett actually wrote in his book:

The Indians there spoke of houses with ‘stars to light them, which never went out’. This was the first but not the last time I heard of these permanent lights found occasionally in the ancient houses built by that forgotten civilization of old. I knew that certain Indians of Ecuador were reputed to light their huts at night by means of luminous plants, but that, considered, must be a different thing altogether. There was some secret means of illumination known to the ancients that remains to be rediscovered by the scientists of today—some method of harnessing forces unknown to us.

Fawcett’s son Brian, who published these memoirs in 1953, added this footnote:

In view of recent developments in atomic research there is no reason to dismiss the ‘lamps that never go out’ as myth. The world was plunged into a state of barbarism by terrible cataclysms. Continents subsided into the oceans, and others emerged. Peoples were destroyed, and the few survivors who escaped were able to exist only in a state of savagery. The ancient arts were all but forgotten, and it is not for us in our ignorance to say that the science of antediluvial days had not advanced beyond the level we have now reached.

The reality of Fawcett’s memoirs is, in other words, even stranger and cooler than its rendition by Ramona Cortez. You may even be familiar with Fawcett’s story. If you’ve read The Lost City of Z or seen the movie, Fawcett is the basis. I’ve never read or seen either of them, so I don’t know how many liberties they took with the real story. I have to guess, though, that the real story is stranger than fiction can believably handle. Fawcett’s son wrote about his father that:

…any man risks being termed ‘mystic’ who seeks knowledge beyond the material. He made no secret of his interest in the occult, and it has been quoted in his disfavour… he was an explorer—a man of inquiring turn of mind whose desire for knowledge lead him to explore more channels than one… But both dreamer and mystic dissolved into the essence of the explorer, archaeologist and ethnologist when he was on the trail.

A magic statue given to Percy Fawcett by none other than H. Rider Haggard.

In the archive for this adventure (Zip file, 13.0 MB), I’ve included the actual text that I cribbed from Exploration Fawcett. I updated Fawcett’s text to fit into a Chicago Kolchak adventure, so don’t use the adventure itself as canonical—although surprisingly little needed to be changed. Mostly it was just about putting the artifacts in a Chicago museum, or adding a touch more emphasis here and there to otherwise throw-away lines.

I wrote this adventure with a couple of goals in mind. First, the previous adventure had been very cerebral, so this one had to have fighting. Sadly, my desire to add more fighting was partly because Jack Burton hadn’t gotten to use his skills to his full potential in The Wrong Goodbye.

And speaking of the titles of these adventures, I also managed to keep the bad variation on noir detective stories going, this time using Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely as the basis for the adventure’s title. I have to admit, half the reason for using a stereotypical seventies commune in the adventure was to get that title to work! But Farewell also contains such wonderful lines as:

…he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is among the best of the golden age of hardboiled detectives. Unlike many such stories, the physical beatings Marlowe took in Farewell, My Lovely seriously affected his ability to think and move throughout the story. He would fit in well with the Daredevils ruleset. He would also recognize Carl Kolchak as a kindred spirit… so to speak.

Chicago’s cold snap, by the way, is also real. The tie between the cold snap and Fawcett? Also real! I played it up in the fake version of Fawcett’s memoirs, but he did indeed complain of cold when he neared his lost city—before he disappeared completely.

You may also notice as you compare these adventures in order, I’ve been moving more and more toward a situational approach. That is, I present a situation and let Kolchak and his stringers run with it. This works very well in a Daredevils game, and, in fact, it’s how most of the published Daredevils games seem to be designed. I’ve come around to seeing that as a feature, something that makes it easier both to reskin such adventures and to react to the players poking at the world.

The GM should have a good sense of what’s been happening and why. What will happen and how after the game starts will follow from that base and from what the players do in response to it. This is the epitome of Heisenberg roleplaying.

Here is the adventure (PDF File, 4.0 MB) and here the maps and handouts (Zip file, 13.0 MB). Enjoy! I had a blast running this adventure for my local group and then at North Texas last year. If you’ve been running these Kolchak games, I’d love to hear from you. Carl Kolchak and his city is a great use for the Daredevils game rules.

I’m looking forward to getting Kolchak and his stringers together again come Saturday morning!

They don’t make that kind of time in watches anyway.—Philip Marlowe, Farewell, My Lovely