WARNING:
This event (including the opening description) is designed to be disturbing and upsetting. You should expect that some of the images and descriptions of what characters encounter may be unpleasant, unsettling, and possibly squicky for players as well.

We may not always warn for individual images because the event as a whole comes with its own warnings for gore, guro, violence, body horror, and general nightmare fuel.

Please proceed at your own discretion.

The world doesn't fall away from you: you are swept.

The vortex opens like an itch behind your eyes, a pinprick.

Its aperture widens, pulls you into the gap, disintegrating your world inside of you like a rupture. Something is letting the air out.

You fall into the cut: like a glove of skin turning inside out, you drop into a cavernous maelstrom of organs (your own), a spinning chaos of tissue which drags the space around you to its pulsating core.

You would sink into the earth, but there is no ground left. In its absence, you sink into something like flesh, gristle, bone, something screaming--roaring--with blood. When you struggle to find the muscles that will open your eyes, they pull apart with a fibrous resistance, your vision throbbing with the beat of a pulse you can feel: no inside, no outside; only the dreadful certainty of your viscera, now coterminous with you.

There's a nausea of expulsion, spasms of muscles contracting against you, and you find yourself kneeling on the floor as you vomit, arms braced to hold yourself above the pool of living meat and bile you expel.

But your eyesight resolves: what's below you is the pattern of a carpet, the woven wool of a Persian rug, and though your mouth tastes of iron and your throat burns with the traces of acid, there's no trace of the living tissue you know you saw.

You're in some room of a house you've never seen--clean, tidy, antique. A musty smell lingers, like it went too long unoccupied. Once, it might have been grand, but now it looks worn and faded, decades past its prime. And though it's quiet within, you can hear the sound of voices, footsteps, life-signs that you are not alone--maybe there's someone there in the very same room, someone sharing your disorientation, shaking themselves from a nausea of their own.

Can you know for sure what's happened to you? Can there be any doubt it was real? Draw back the curtain if you want to know, and see the familiar view: the miniscule scale of this island on which you stand, adrift in the swirling, spinning, maelstrom of tissue.

● OOC Event Info
Wherever they were before, and whatever they were doing, your characters have been dragged suddenly into a 1920s era mansion, floating adrift in a nebulous vortex, seemingly between dimensions. There is no ground outside, no sun, no sky, no physical way to leave.

What's more, though the house seems solidly built, everything beyond suggests something sinister, organic, and fleshy, and whatever it is appears to be encroaching, gradually threatening to engulf the house itself along with everyone in it, unless characters can find some way to break whatever hold is keeping them trapped there and return to them to the properly corporeal world.

To make matters worse, characters might find that they've not been dragged into this place alone: monsters that they recognize from their home worlds may well have been pulled in too. (Players are invited to puppet these native monsters from their worlds, either battling against them with their own characters or in fight scenes where others' characters face them.)

The event has a set end and will run for approximately 4-6 weeks of real time. (Game time will be flexible, as extra-dimensional time has no days, nights, or reliable clocks to mark it.)

Different rooms in the house will hold different horrors and grotesqueries for characters to encounter, and a dossier with images will describe the setting's particulars.


● How do characters communicate during the event?
Characters do not have communicators, so virtually all interaction will be face-to-face. Occasionally, however, as a side-effect of the seemingly inside-out fleshiness that's dragged them into this place, characters may find themselves hearing each other inside their heads and being able to speak to each other or see each other in flashes even if they are several rooms away.

These posts should go in the mysterium_telecoms comm. Please include the tag: @ punctured torus for all events posts, both on telecoms and on the main comm, mysterium_tremendum.


● What is this game and why are you holding this sort of event?
Mysterium Tremendum is a small, plot-heavy game, based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and inspired by the Call of Cthulhu tabletop game system. You can read more about the game on our premise page.

Though we opened in 2011, we've been largely idle for several months. We're looking to revitalize the game with new energy and to reach out to new players. This event is designed to give players a chance to test-drive characters in the setting and an easy, low overhead, way to get involved. If you enjoy the event, we hope that you will decide to stick around and join us for the long term!


● Sign-up Procedures & Eligible Characters
The event is open to anyone, whether or not they're currently in the game. It can provide an app-free option for joining the game if you'd like to stay once the event concludes. Any character who would normally be appable can be claimed for the event. (See the FAQ for full details on what kinds of characters we accept. As a reminder, we do not accept MSPaint characters. We also do not accept characters from Lovecraft's original works or their AU adaptations.)

The sign-up post will remain open throughout the event, as new characters can enter at any time. However we will be imposing a cap of 50 new characters maximum. If we have more than 50 sign up, we will create a waiting list, and will notify players if others drop and spaces become available.

Please note that we do not accept duplicates (see our taken list), and the sign-up post will be first come, first served. We ask that players be considerate of each other and only claim those characters who they intend to be active with for the whole event.

If you want to drop out of the event with any character, please leave a comment here so that the character can be made available for someone else. Just a reply to your initial comment with "DROP" is all we need.

Also note that, while (AU and OC) characters native to the game world can be introduced via this open event, they are only available to players currently in the game.

OCs coming from their own universes are acceptable, but if you want them to stay in the game once the event is over, please note that we will be asking you to provide more comprehensive background information on them when the event concludes.

To sign up, please reply to this post with the following:
<b>Player name:</b> <b>Player contact:</b> <b>Are you over 18 years old?</b> <b>Character name:</b> <b>Character journal:</b> <b>Canon:</b> <b>Canon point:</b>

NOTE: Characters' powers will be at full strength during the event.

They may not, however, have high tech weapons, mecha, vehicles, or items too big to carry on their person. Equipment that's more technologically advanced than the 1920s era (cell phones, laptops, ipods, etc.) will be non-functional. Non-human pets and sidekicks are acceptable during the event, but will be lost when the event ends.


● What Happens Afterwards?
Players who were active during the event and who would like to keep one of more of their characters in the game long term when the event concludes will be welcome to do so. The event will serve as your character's introduction into the world, and everything that happened to them during it will be part of their in-game history. (The after-effects of the event may, of course, linger long term. Please see our page on insanity in-game for more info.)

While we won't be asking for an application for any of these characters, we will be asking players to provide a list of each character's powers, abilities, and special items/equipment so that we can arrange power reductions for them. As with our usual application process, we will ask you for your suggestions and propose any alterations we think are necessary to keep game dynamics balanced.

OCs will be asked to provide a character background in addition to a list of powers, and are welcome to stay subject to mod review and approval.


Open Event Taken List

1 OPEN SLOT REMAINING